Page 34 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

“A year ago,” he continued, “I would have told you to be sensible. To wait. To assume that if something was meant to happen it would find its way back to you in its own time. But I do not believe that anymore.”

His gaze held hers with an earnestness that made it quite impossible to dismiss him outright.

“I have learned, recently,” he said, “that the sensible course and the correct course are not always acquainted with one another. And that waiting, more often than not, simply allows time to make its own rather unhelpful decisions for us.”

Caroline thought, without particularly wanting to, of the conversation they had shared in this very house less than three weeks ago. Of the things she had finally said aloud, and the things he had said in return, and the two of them sitting quietly afterward while the coffee went cold.

“You trust my judgment?” she asked, though it was not entirely a question so much as a cautious offering, as though she half expected it to be refused.

“I do,” he said at once. “And if you have decided this man is worthy of your regard, then I trust that as well. You have always been the most clear-sighted person I know, Caroline, when you are not doing your very best to look anywhere except directly at the truth. Which,” he added with a certain dry precision, “you have been doing for the past month with what I can only assume has been rather impressive stamina.”

Caroline opened her mouth, then thought better of it. She closed it again. After a moment, she contented herself with staring very determinedly at her tea, which had, quite unhelpfully, gone cold. It occurred to her that having a brother who occasionally understood one rather too well was an overrated blessing.

“England is full of things that make you unhappy,” Jane said then, her voice softer now, the earlier certainty gentled into something almost tender. “I do not mean that unkindly. I only mean that I have watched you here, and I think you know as well as I do that the life you are living, the one you have made for yourself here, is not making you particularly well.”

“It is what I know,” Caroline said, and immediately wished she had not, because it sounded far too much like surrender.

“Yes,” Jane replied, very gently. “And sometimes what we know is precisely what we must learn to leave behind.”

The clock upon the mantel continued its steady, indifferent ticking, as though it had no interest whatsoever in the rearrangement of a woman’s entire future before breakfast.

Outside, the street continued on with its brisk, cheerful indifference, carts rattling over cobblestones, horses stamping with the sort of patient resignation only horses ever truly mastered, and people hurrying about their business with the entirely enviable confidence of those who had not, at that precise moment, had their entire existence quietly overturned over tea.

Caroline had, over the course of her life, become rather adept at persuading herself that what was sensible must also be what was right. Security, she had told herself often enough, was not fear dressed in respectable clothing but wisdom properly understood. And for the most part she had believed it, or at the very least she had performed belief with sufficient conviction that no one had thought to question her on the matter.

The trouble, she was beginning to suspect, was that she no longer wished to perform anything at all.

Edward’s face came to her then, unbidden, as it had a distressing habit of doing. The lake, the lantern light, the steadiness of his voice when he had said what he meant and had not once looked away as he said it. She thought of mornings in a city she had never seen, of laughter that had never once carried anything cruel within it, and of the remarkable fact that none of it felt like imagination so much as possibility.

It came to her then, with a clarity that was almost unsettling in its simplicity, that she had only two paths before her.

She could remain exactly as she was, in exactly the place she stood, within a life that was orderly, predictable, and entirely without him. She would be safe. She would be composed. She would, no doubt, be quite properly respectable. And she would also, if she were honest with herself, spend the remainder of her days in the quiet company of a question she had never found the courage to ask aloud, wondering what might have become of her if she had been just a little braver.

Or she could go.

It was not, she realized with a sudden and rather disconcerting clarity, truly a choice between England and America at all. It was a choice between the life she had always known and the life she had never quite permitted herself to imagine. Between the woman who had spent years perfecting a composure designed to keep everyone at a polite, safe distance, and the woman who had sat on a bench in a London garden two weeks ago and, for one entirely bewildering moment, had felt as though she might actually be allowed to be loved.

She looked at her brother. She looked at Jane.

And then, because she was Caroline Bingley and had never in her life been capable of doing anything by halves once she had finally decided upon it, she pushed back her chair and stood.

“If I leave now,” she said, with the calm precision of a woman who had walked a great many corridors in her life and had, at last, found the correct door, “I can reach the inn by half past ten.”

Charles was already rising. “I will have the carriage brought round at once.”

“I will need my coat,” she said, “and my gloves, and some approximation of my dignity if any can be found lying about in this mess.”

“The coat and gloves can certainly be managed,” Jane said, and there was a smile in her voice now that Caroline found, to her considerable surprise, entirely bearable. “The dignity, I rather think, has never been in question. You will always be the most dignified person in any room you walk into.”

Caroline smoothed her skirt with one firm, decisive motion and then, because she was not, in truth, made entirely of composure no matter how convincingly she had always behaved as though she were, she looked at Jane and said, very simply, “Thank you.”

Jane reached out and squeezed her hand, and Caroline, who had never quite known what to do with such gestures and had always assumed she would dislike them on principle, did not move away.

Then she turned and went to fetch her coat, because she had somewhere to be.

Chapter 15

August 30th