Page 3 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

It did not seem to accomplish its usual work.

"Good evening," she said dismissively with a shallow bow. Each syllable crisp enough to slice straight through the night air.

Then she turned and took her leave. It was the second time in ten minutes she had done so, and she managed it with considerably less haste and more elegance. She did not slow until she had reentered the ballroom, collected her cloak from the visibly startled attendant, and swept herself out to her waiting carriage.

Only when the door shut behind her, sealing her away from the music and laughter and glittering lights, did she sink into the shadows of the carriage and press her hands to her face.

The carriage lurched into motion. Beyond the window, the celebration dwindled into a blur of retreating lamps.

‘Thin and lanky’, Lord Gillsberry had called her. Unlikely to do better.

And the most unforgivable part, the part that twisted in her chest with each turn of the wheels, was not the insults themselves. It was that some quiet and treacherous corner of her own head that had believed him.

That was the part she could not forgive. Not Lord Gillsberry, who was so eminently forgettable that she rather doubted she would spare him a single thought once the sun rose. Not the man on the balcony, who had apparently found her private misery entertaining enough to observe and then remark upon and who possessed, quite unfairly, exceptionally nice hands.

She could not forgive the small and treacherous part of her that had heard those dreadful words and felt, beneath all the righteous indignation, a whisper of something perilously close to agreement.

Maybe.

Maybe he was right. Maybe she had been constructing a fragile illusion and calling it hope. Maybe this was what romance looked like for Caroline Bingley, or rather, what the continued and inescapably humiliating absence of it looked like. She was twenty-one years old, after all, and perhaps it was time to acknowledge that this might indeed be the shape of her life.

The carriage jolted through a rut in the road, and Caroline drew herself upright, directing her gaze to the window instead of turning inward, which had never once yielded a productive result.

She thought then, briefly and most unwisely, of the man on the balcony.

She had not even learned his name.

It did not matter, she informed herself with great firmness. She would in all likelihood never set eyes on him again.

Chapter 2

August 3rd

Ordinarily, Caroline Bingley was not a woman who startled easily.

She had, over the span of her twenty-one well managed years, cultivated a talent for composure so polished it might have been displayed in a glass case at Gunter’s for all the world to admire. It had carried her through Charles’s unending procession of companions who were charming in principle and alarming in practice. Through the various social missteps that had attached themselves to the Bingley name during her trying youth and through the unfortunate incidents at Netherfield Park the previous autumn that she steadfastly refused to revisit. She had, in essence, endured more than any reasonable person ought in her lifetime.

It was therefore especially vexing that her undoing this morning should arrive in the form of something as simple as a hairbrush.

The new maid had entered her dressing room with the eager brightness of a girl who very much wished to impress her mistress, which was far too much enthusiasm for any hour before nine in the morning. Her name began with an M. Martha, perhaps. Or Margaret. Caroline had not troubled herself to remember, having long since discovered that familiarity with one’s household staff made everything unnecessarily complicated. The girl swept into a curtsy, murmured something about Miss Bingley’s hair being lovely today, which it most assuredly was not, as Caroline had slept abominably and knew perfectly well what she looked like, and then produced a hairbrush from the dressing table.

“Is that,” Caroline said, her voice coming out rather more sharply than she would have preferred, “a brush?”

The maid froze. The hairbrush remained suspended in the space between them, a perfectly ordinary object with a silver handle and not a hint of wickedness about it, though one might have thought otherwise from the way the girl’s eyes widened.

“I—yes, miss,” she stammered. “Shall I not—that is—I only thought– for your hair, miss.”

The rational portion of Caroline’s mind, which was nearly always the ruling portion, observed that this was a most sensible explanation. A personal maid, in a dressing room, holding a hairbrush, was not the sort of occurrence to send any reasonable woman into a state. Indeed, it was the very sort of thing dressing rooms were meant to accommodate.

The remainder of Caroline, which was considerably less reasonable on the subject, felt something cold and rigid settle deep within her chest like a jagged stone.

“No hairbrushes,” she said frigidly. “Not in this room. Only combs.” Her clipped voice, she thought with a small flicker of pride, was admirably controlled. Admirably controlled, considering everything. “You are dismissed.”

The girl lowered the brush and retreated with the hurried caution of someone attempting to avoid tripping on ice. Caroline waited until the door clicked shut, then sat on the edge of her bed, pressed her palms flat against her skirts, and breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

After a long moment, she stood, crossed to the dressing table, and arranged her hair herself. It was a modest style, nothing requiring assistance. The result was tidy, if not especially remarkable. Caroline regarded it in the mirror for half a heartbeat, then looked away.