Page 31 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

"I am asking you to be my wife."

Caroline set the lantern down with very great care, because her hands had developed an inconvenient tremor, and she felt strongly that she ought not to be holding anything fragile at the present moment. The water shifted golden light around them, and above, the stars maintained their magnificent indifference to the fact that the inside of her entire chest had just rearranged itself without her permission.

"Your company stopped being merely entertainment for me some time ago," Edward said. "I cannot tell you precisely when it happened, but I suspect it was somewhere around the time you told me that love was a deception while looking as though you rather desperately wished it were not. I find I cannot imagine slow Sunday mornings without you anymore. I cannot imagine any mornings at all without the very high probability of you saying something that surprises me once more."

"I-I don’t know what to say," Caroline said at last, with remarkable evenness.

"Then shall I tell you what I want you to say? There is only one answer that would satisfy me," Edward replied with a sudden fire in his eyes.

She looked at him across the boat, at the familiar lines of his face caught in the lantern light, at that expression of a man who had said the most honest thing he knew how to say and was now waiting, with admirable composure, to learn whether honesty was ever rewarded or merely admired in theory.

She thought of New York. Of the ocean between here and there, which suddenly seemed less like a journey and more like a very decisive kind of ending. She thought of England, with its grey mornings and neatly kept parks and its rather efficient talent for making one feel slightly out of place even when one had lived there long enough to know better. She thought of carriage rides and park benches and still ponds and paper lanterns and laughter that had never once been aimed at her in unkindness.

She thought of all of it and then, most inconveniently of all, she thought of mornings. Of Sunday mornings in a city she had never seen, with a man who looked at her as though she were, quite astonishingly, exactly what he had been looking for all along.

"I am sorry," she heard herself say. "I cannot."

The words settled between them with the sort of finality that made the air feel suddenly smaller. She saw his expression change, saw it accept the blow and then steady itself into something more careful, more contained, the expression of a man doing his very best not to spill what he was feeling all over the deck.

"All right," he said.

Just that. Nothing more.

Then he picked up the oars.

The journey back across the lake took perhaps five minutes, though Caroline would have sworn upon reflection that it occupied something closer to an entire lifetime. She sat with her hands folded most dutifully in her lap and studied the lanterns they passed as though they contained the answers to some great philosophical question, and did her very best not to look at him at all, because looking at him, she suspected, would be the fastest possible route to losing whatever fragile control she still possessed.

He extended a hand to her to help her down from the boat with the same steady care as before. He handed her up into the carriage with the same quiet courtesy. He sat opposite her on the return journey to the city and looked out of his window while she looked out of hers, and neither of them spoke a single word, which would have been perfectly tolerable under almost any other circumstances but was, in this particular instance, rather excruciating.

When the carriage finally drew to a stop before the villa, he descended first and offered her his hand. She took it. Of course she did. And she kept her gaze fixed with remarkable determination upon the pavement, because she knew with absolute certainty that if she allowed herself even the smallest glimpse of his face, she would lose every last remaining fragment of her composure, and she was not at all prepared to do that. Not here. Not in the street. Not anywhere where witnesses might exist.

She should have known, of course, that refusing to look was not nearly enough.

He lifted her hand with a gentleness that was almost worse for being so precise, and she felt the brief, deliberate press of his lips against her gloved knuckles, the sort of farewell one gave when one was not at all certain there would be another. The sensation went through her with infuriating clarity, as though her senses had decided to become traitors at the very worst possible moment.

“Goodbye, my Caroline,” he said.

His voice was low and intimate in a way that made it altogether unbelievable they were just normal acquaintances saying goodbye. Yet that is exactly what they were. What they would always be because she had denied him. It settled over her like something she would be hearing in her mind at the most inconvenient hours for a very long time indeed. “I will always treasure these days I have spent with you.”

Her breath hitched; she continued to stare at the pavement and say nothing.

This was not, strictly speaking, a decision so much as a condition. Her throat had quite given up the attempt at cooperation, closing itself with the efficient finality of a door firmly shut against bad weather, and she remained exactly where she was while he released her hand and stepped away.

She heard his footsteps. She heard the carriage door. She heard the horses shift and the city continue on with its usual indifference, as though nothing at all remarkable had just taken place, and she did not look up.

She did not look up even when the sound of the carriage had softened into the distance and then disappeared altogether.

She stood in the quiet dark and thought about Sunday mornings that had not yet happened and allowed herself to finally understand just what she had given up.

Chapter 14

August 30th

The ship was scheduled to depart at noon the following day.

Caroline knew this because she had read Edward’s letter more times than was strictly reasonable, and because the departure time had been placed, with infuriating calmness, in the third paragraph. She had an excellent memory for facts she would very much have preferred not to retain. She also knew that if one left London at half past eight for the docks, one arrived with what her brother would have called a comfortable margin, and what she herself could only describe as a rather offensive excess of time in which to stand about and feel one’s entire life unravel before a ship carried the only man she had ever truly loved to another continent.

She was not standing about, however. Standing about suggested idleness, and she was quite busy.