Page 4 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

She needed air.

The morning was cool without being disagreeable, and Netherfield’s gardens still held the damp scent of overnight rain, mingling with wet grass and something faintly floral that Caroline could not quite name and did not particularly care to investigate. She walked until her breathing had settled and the tightness between her shoulders had loosened into something she could at least pretend was not there, which took rather longer than she felt it ought. Eventually she found herself on a bench beside the ornamental pond. The water lay unnaturally still. A wood pigeon contributed an unhelpful and distinctly unmusical commentary from the trees. It was, by any reasonable standard, a tranquil scene.

Caroline sat and stared at the pond, and thought, as one did when one had nothing more immediate to occupy the mind, about her previous maid, who had recently committed the rather selfish act of marrying and leaving her position with an irritating air of satisfaction. That woman had known. Not because Caroline had ever explained it in detail, but because she had possessed the rare good sense to observe. Hairbrushes did not appear in Caroline’s dressing room because hairbrushes were not welcome there, and after four years of service, the maid had understood that without needing it spelled out. She was precisely what good service required. Caroline liked everything to be in a certain way, and she hated the disruption to her daily routine this had caused.

The new girl, of course, did not yet know her ways. That was all it amounted to. A simple matter of instruction and adjustment, nothing more complicated than that.

Caroline was helpless to stop the memory arriving, uninvited and entirely unwelcome as it was.

Caroline had long ago given up on the rather optimistic notion that she might have some influence over such moments. They arrived as they pleased, with all the consideration of a badly behaved guest, and she had learned that the most sensible course of action was simply to endure them until they chose to depart, rather than waste energy attempting to resist something that was, in every meaningful sense, inevitable.

Caroline was six years old, seated before a vanity in a room that smelled of expensive powder and something faintly chemical. She sat very still, as she had already learned stillness was safer, while her mother’s hands worked through her hair with practice and very little gentleness. Caroline suppressed a wince as there was another harsh yank on her scalp.

“Why is it so curly?” her mother said, in the tone of someone who did not actually expect an answer. Caroline had already learned that these were not true questions, but rather the beginning of a familiar performance, and so she wisely remained silent. “It is entirely unbecoming. Your sister does not suffer from this affliction at her age.”

Louisa’s hair, of course, behaved itself. It was straight, obedient, and perfectly suited to a mother who valued order above nearly all else. Caroline had, for a time, considered this quality a personal affront, as though her own hair had chosen to betray her with deliberate malice.

The brush tugged again, a little too sharply, and Caroline’s jaw tightened in reflex. Her mother continued as though nothing of consequence were occurring. Perhaps, Caroline sometimes thought, nothing of consequence was occurring at all. Her mother often commented that she was prone to such fits of melodrama. “And that nose,” her mother added, critically. “So pointed. I cannot imagine where you acquired it. It makes you look dreadfully common, Caroline. You must learn to hold yourself differently.”

The word “common” landed with the practiced weight of an insult that had been used far too often, polished smooth by repetition until it no longer needed emphasis. Caroline’s mother did not raise her voice when she said such things. There was no need. She possessed, instead, the far more efficient cruelty of a woman who considered volume vulgar and contempt unnecessary.

“Your hair,” her mother continued, dragging the brush through another section with brisk determination, “is frankly embarrassing. This coiling, this unfortunate frizzing at the temples. I cannot decide whether it resembles a kitchen maid or a stable hand more. Either way, it reflects very poorly on me, and I would be obliged if you would remember that in future.”

Caroline kept her gaze fixed on the vanity table. It had bottles and brushes and silver tools arranged with meticulous care. All of them far more orderly than she felt. If she did not look at her mother directly, she could sometimes imagine she was merely another piece of furniture in the room, temporarily overlooked rather than actively judged.

“You are too fat as well,” her mother added, with a glance in the mirror that managed to be both assessing and dismissive in the same instant. “Like a rather bloated cow. No one will ever find that appealing, you know. Not that it would make much difference, given the nose.”

The brush snagged again, and Caroline’s fingers curled in her lap. She did not make a sound. Experience had taught her that sound could become consequence, and she had no desire to discover if that consequence might mean another day without meals for her.

Her mother worked at the knot with increasing force, the motion turning less like grooming and more like an argument she was determined to win. Caroline had learned to recognize the change in her. There was the voice that catalogued faults as if reading from a ledger, and then there was the other voice, the one that arrived when her anger was reaching a boiling point.

“Hold still,” her mother said, though the words seemed aimed more at the reflection in the mirror than at the child seated obediently before her. “I do not know why I bother. Every morning I stand here and I try to fix you– and for what? Well grooming can only help such poor features so much.”

Those mornings, as unpleasant as they were, were never the ones that stole Caroline’s sleep in the quiet hours of the night. Unpleasantness, after all, had become a rather familiar companion during her childhood.

No, the mornings that lingered in her mind were the other kind. The ones that began with a door thrown open so violently it seemed determined to come off its hinges, followed by the sharp, unmistakable sound of her mother’s footsteps cutting across the floor with purpose rather than grace.

There would usually be no warning. Only the sudden appearance of her mother, already in possession of a temper so complete it seemed to fill the room ahead of her. The silver-handled brush would be taken from the nightstand before Caroline had even thought to move, let alone flee, and by the time she understood what was happening, her mother would already be upon her.

On those mornings, her mother’s eyes were not merely angry. They were something far more unsettling, rimmed in red as though fury itself had left its mark, making her look almost fevered with it.

The first strike was always too sudden to be properly felt in the moment. It arrived with a flat, decisive impact from the back of the brush against the crown of Caroline’s head. Caroline had learned, quite early and quite thoroughly, not to flinch. Flinching, she had discovered, was not a mercy but an invitation. It altered her mother’s expression in a way that suggested more pain was imminent.

The second blow followed with greater certainty, as though the first had merely been polite.

By the third, Caroline had already taken refuge in disassociation. Her gaze settled upon a small flaw in one of the perfume bottles upon the vanity, a tiny trapped bubble suspended in green glass, and she fixed upon it with the devotion of someone studying a landscape rather than enduring a punishment. She breathed in. She breathed out. She waited, as she always did, for the moment to pass.

The pain itself was never the most dreadful part, though it was certainly real enough. On more than one occasion, it had been enough that the sight of blood at Caroline’s temple had given even her mother pause, as though the reality of the situation had momentarily intruded upon her.

No, what was most painful was not the pain but the words.

They came in a steady stream, low and relentless, delivered with the casual cruelty of habit. Each strike was accompanied by an accusation, each movement by a reminder of deficiency. Worthless. Ungrateful. A burden of the most disgraceful kind.

And always, inevitably, the same final refrain, spoken with particular emphasis, as though it were the one truth that required no refinement at all. She never should have given birth to her.

It had been a very long time since Caroline had thought about the little perfume bottles on her childhood vanity.

When she was a child, Caroline had never understood why, out of her mother’s three children, so much of her bottled wrath only seemed to find its way to her. She was not even the only daughter, after all, and yet Louisa had always been spared the worst of it, as though some invisible line had been drawn between them at birth. It was only later, when she was old enough to listen properly and young enough still to be horrified by what she heard, that she learned all the unpleasant little details. How her father had been the one to suggest the name Caroline, after his mistress at the time. How her mother had agreed, in the faint, desperate hope that it might render him less indifferent toward the child who would bear it. And how, when no such miracle occurred, Caroline had been quietly reassigned in her mother’s mind from daughter to reminder, a living, breathing testament to her husband’s ongoing infidelities.