Page 32 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

She was walking, with considerable and entirely purposeful determination, from one end of the upstairs corridor to the other and back again. It was exercise, she told herself firmly. Very dignified exercise. She refused to call it pacing, because pacing implied nerves, and nerves implied vulnerability, and she had already met her full quota of vulnerability for the month, thank you very much.

“You have now passed that door,” Charles observed from the foot of the stairs, “eleven times.”

Caroline stopped at once. “I was not counting.”

“I was.” He leaned against the newel post with his usual air of patient resignation, as though he had been born into the role and had accepted it with weary grace. “Are you going to come down and eat something, or shall I have Cook send a tray into the corridor? It does appear to be where you are taking your meals today.”

Caroline flushed and came downstairs.

Not because Charles had asked, of course, and certainly not because Jane had raised an eyebrow in that quiet, almost imperceptible way that suggested she was already halfway through a conclusion Caroline would very much prefer she did not reach. No, she came downstairs because the corridor had ceased to be instructive somewhere around her seventh pass, and she had exhausted its considerable capacity for offering her nothing but increasingly irritating thoughts.

Breakfast had been set in the morning room, and Jane was already at the table, hands wrapped neatly around her teacup. Her expression had that careful, watchful calm Caroline had come to recognize with growing unease as the sort that preceded a conversation one could not politely avoid.

Caroline poured herself tea, sat, and studied her toast with the kind of attention normally reserved for matters of great importance. She was not thinking about anything at all.

“Are you feeling well, Caroline?” Jane asked cautiously.

She did not look up from her cup, which Caroline found either considerate or cowardly, and she was not at all certain which interpretation she preferred.

“I am fine,” Caroline said flatly.

“Well you must have been feeling very poorly last night,” Charles said, settling into the chair opposite her with his coffee and an expression that suggested he had already decided everything and was merely waiting for the rest of them to catch up. “As you did not come down to dinner.”

“I had a headache.”

“You have never had a headache in your life,” Charles said, not unkindly. “You once told me headaches were a luxury illness invented by women who required an excuse to avoid the company of men they found dull.”

Caroline picked up her toast. “I may have revised my opinion on the matter.”

The room fell into a silence of the very particular sort that occurs when two people are having a silent disagreement using only their eyes in an effort to conceal their true intentions from a third. Caroline found it intolerable.

“All right,” she said at last, setting the toast down with careful precision. “Out with it. Say what you have come to say.”

Charles and Jane exchanged one last swift, glances that communicated entire paragraphs in the time it took most people to clear their throats. Caroline had always found this skill of theirs both impressive and insufferable. "We are not here to say anything," Charles said. "We are here because we also live in this house, and have seen some… alarming behavior from you as of late. And because we are rather worried about you."

“I am perfectly fine,” Caroline said at once, with a degree of speed that rather suggested the opposite.

“You passed the upstairs corridor eleven times before nine in the morning,” Charles replied. “You are not fine, Caroline. And I think you know it.”

She looked down at her tea. Then, as though it might contain answers if she stared hard enough, she looked at the window. After that she considered the ceiling, which proved disappointingly unhelpful. At last she set her cup down with great care, as though sudden movements might cause the entire situation to become worse.

“There is a man,” she said.

Jane’s eyes widened immediately, and Charles made a sound suspiciously like he had forgotten how to breathe.

“He is leaving for New York tomorrow afternoon,” Caroline continued, with the determined calm of someone who had decided that if she must confess something ruinous, she would at least do it properly. “His name is Edward Reinhart. He is American, thirty-one years of age, and he is the single most infuriating man I have ever met in my life. And I cannot stop thinking about him.”

“How long?” Charles asked.

Caroline frowned slightly. “How long have I been unable to stop thinking about him, or how long has he been infuriating?”

“No. How long have you cared for him?”

There was a pause. A rather significant one, during which Caroline considered several answers and reject them all.

“Since approximately the night of your ball at Netherfield,” she said at last. “Though I did not recognize it for what it was until much later.”

She told them then.