Page 18 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

He told her about New York in the particular tones of a person describing something they were entirely convinced was better than anything you had yet seen. Which she would have found entirely insufferable from anyone else and instead found herself wanting to ask further questions about him. She told him about her life growing up in London. Not of the horrid, dark times of her childhood, but the gentler days of her youth. How she had actually had a fondness for her schoolgirl days even now.

The afternoon was well along by the time they turned back toward town, and the light had taken on the warm, slantwise quality of late summer beginning its slow retreat into something else. Caroline became aware, walking beside him, that this morning had been considerably more eventful than she had initially anticipated.

"I shall be returning to London tomorrow," she said, as they came back within sight of the main road. "Charles and Jane have finished the business that brought them to Netherfield, and there is no particular reason to remain."

Edward was quiet for a moment. Then he said, with the easy decisiveness of a man who had not had to consider his decision for long, "In that case, I suppose I shall be returning to London as well."

Caroline looked up at him, startled. "Are you sure?"

"There is nothing for me left here," he said, which sounded a lot like he was saying there is nothing for me left here without you. But even she was not arrogant enough to make such an assumption.

Something in her chest loosened in relief. She did not understand it. Was she really so bothered by the idea of being parted with this man? To be this attached already?

"London in late August is rather dull," she said, because something had to be said, and this seemed safer than the alternatives.

"I expect," Edward replied, his voice carrying that warmth she was beginning to recognize as specifically his, "that it will be considerably less dull than it was before I made your acquaintance."

Caroline looked ahead at the road because she found it increasingly difficult to look at his face. She found that this diversion for her eyes did nothing to dissuade the flush crawling up her neck to her cheeks.

Chapter 9

August 10th

The morning after returning to London, Caroline came downstairs to find Charles already in the sitting room.

This was, in itself, unusual enough to arrest her attention. Charles was not, by temperament or habit, a man of early mornings. He existed in a state of cheerful imprecision about the hours before ten, wandering through them in a pleasant fog of half-finished coffee and good-natured incoherence that Caroline had long since ceased to find irritating and had gradually come to accept as simply one of his more immovable characteristics. To find him upright, alert, and apparently waiting for her before nine in the morning constituted a disturbance to the natural order of things serious enough to warrant investigation.

He looked up when she entered. His expression held that particular variety of earnest anticipation she had come to recognize, the sort a man wore when he had spent entirely too long arranging a conversation in his head. It was the careful, hopeful look of someone determined to get something right, and not at all convinced he would succeed.

"Caroline," he said. "I was hoping you would come down."

She crossed to the sideboard with the unhurried deliberateness of a woman who fully intended to pour her own coffee before she so much as considered engaging with whatever this was meant to be. She accomplished this with admirable precision, then took her seat opposite him, settling into the chair as though she had all the time in the world. At last, she regarded him with a composed, impeccably civil attention.

"Well," she said, "here I am."

He did not answer at once. Outside, the London street had already launched into its morning chorus, all wheels and footsteps and the distant cries of a vendor, carrying on with the cheerful indifference of a city entirely uninterested in the dramas of two people at a breakfast table.

"Jane spoke to me," he said at last. "After the ball."

Caroline wrapped her hands around her cup and said nothing.

"She told me," Charles continued, in a tone that had shifted into something more careful, "that the two of you had a conversation. At Netherfield–" He paused. "She was not specific about the details. But she mentioned–" Another pause. He pressed his lips together briefly, and when he spoke again his voice had lost whatever careful arrangement it had arrived with and become something considerably less composed. "She mentioned something about Mother."

The coffee was very good this morning. Caroline fixed her attention upon that one comforting truth with determined precision. She intended to continue contemplating it for as long as necessary, at least until the cold weight that had settled beneath her sternum at the sound of that particular word decided to retreat to some corner of herself that was easier to ignore.

"Did she," Caroline said.

"I should have said this to you a very long time ago," Charles replied. "I have been searching for the right words, and I suspect there are none, so I am simply going to speak plainly."

Caroline looked up then, because something in his voice had shifted in a manner that could not be disregarded. She studied her brother, and what she saw was not the familiar cheer or easy warmth she associated with him. His expression was taut with genuine distress, unguarded and far too earnest. His hands were clasped in his lap as though he had not yet determined what else to do with them, and his eyes were much too bright. Caroline felt, with a sudden and unsteady certainty, that whatever he was about to say was going to be very difficult indeed to hear.

“I knew,” Charles said quietly. “I knew what she was doing to you. After I turned thirteen and went away to school I could excuse myself by saying I did not see it, but before that—” He broke off, his jaw tightening as though the rest of the words had become physically difficult to produce. “I knew, Caroline. And I did not stop it. I was young, and I was frightened, and I was a coward, and I did not stop it.”

The room was dea silent. Even the street noise seemed to have retreated to a respectful distance.

"I want you to know," he said, "that I am sorry. That I have been sorry for a long time, and I simply never found the words, or perhaps never found the courage, which I realize is rather a confirmation of exactly what I have just confessed to." He met her eyes steadily, the way a man does when he knows the thing he is saying does not excuse him and wants to be very clear that he is not asking to be excused. "I should have been braver. I should have been a better brother to you."

Caroline felt, for one rather alarming moment, as though she had been neatly removed from her own life and placed somewhere slightly to the left of it. The only reasonable explanation, as far as she could tell, was that she must be hallucinating.