Page 8 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

Chapter 4

August 7th

Netherfield Park was precisely as Caroline remembered it, which was to say that it was large, tolerably well-appointed, and absolutely packed with people who were sweating on the furniture.

She stood near the edge of the ballroom with a glass of punch she had not touched and an expression she hoped no one described as approachable. She was cataloguing the assembled company and finding rather little to recommend it. The musicians were competent, the flowers were acceptable, the lighting was perhaps a touch more golden than the occasion strictly required, and approximately two hundred people had been crammed into a space that ought to have accommodated one hundred and fifty with any claim to comfort. It was, by every measure she would have applied a year ago, a perfectly agreeable evening.

She found she could not make herself dance. The idea of submitting herself to the press of the crowd, to the inevitable jostle and the reaching hands and the overheated proximity of strangers, struck her this evening as only marginally less appealing than most other forms of voluntary suffering she could envision. She was aware this was not entirely rational. She had danced at hundreds of events in her life and survived every one of them. Tonight, for reasons she declined to examine too closely, the prospect simply would not resolve itself into anything resembling appealing.

So she stood, and she watched, and she thought that she had attended a great many better parties and a depressingly large number of worse ones, and she sipped her punch with the composure of a woman who’s eyes were most definitely straying.

It was precisely then that she saw Jane. A familiar face, if not the one she was looking for.

The circumstance struck her first as odd, and then, with the experience of a woman who had spent her adult life reading social situations the way a scholar reads Latin, as something considerably more. The Bennett sisters were, under ordinary circumstances, a collective force that operated with the organic efficiency of something only in its natural habitat when united.

They arrived together, they moved together, and they absolutely did not leave one of their number alone in a ballroom, particularly not the one who was seven months along and therefore most in need of a fortified position.

And yet here was Jane, sitting alone at a small table near the far wall, her sisters nowhere to be seen suddenly, with the concentrated expression of a woman who had decided that looking at the tablecloth was infinitely preferable to looking at whatever had caused her to look at something else.

Caroline was not particularly given to nosiness. Or rather, she was given to it constantly, but she preferred to imagine she was in a much more tolerable world. She thought of it as a heightened social awareness and an exceptional eye for the telling detail, which was a far more flattering description and arrived at essentially the same result. She moved through the crowd with unhurried purpose, redirecting around elbows and animated gestures, until she had closed the distance between herself and Jane's table to a range that could perhaps be described as conversational, had she any intention of conversing.

She did not, as it turned out, need to be any closer than that to understand the situation.

Two women stood behind Jane's chair, separated from her by a matter of feet and a complete and utter absence of consideration. They were of an age Caroline associated with women who had resigned themselves to the role of permanent commentators on other people's choices for lack of their own, and they were speaking in the particular register that was not quite a whisper and not quite a normal voice. The one specifically designed to be heard without technically being addressed, a method of cruelty that was, she had always thought, the most cowardly possible variety. She would know, as she had engaged in such shameful behavior quite often before, though at least then she had the excuse of youth.

"Quite extraordinary that she's still attending events in her condition," the first one said, with a tone that implied the truly extraordinary part was how anyone had allowed this to happen at all.

"Mm," said the second, which was not a word so much as the sonic equivalent of pursed lips. "Charles Bingley always was too soft-hearted by half. She's run him right around her finger, and now here she sits on display like some prize sow at a county fair."

"Poor man," said the first, shaking her head with the particular sympathy of someone who felt not a drop of it. "Still, I suppose at his age, with a wife who's already let herself go so thoroughly, it's only a matter of time before he starts looking elsewhere. A man has certain requirements, after all. And she's quite gone off, hasn't she? Very nearly unrecognizable at that size."

Caroline stood very rigidly and thought, with the clarity that occasionally descended on her in moments of pure social outrage, about all of the ways in which this conversation could be made to end without her being court-martialed for unwise decisions.

She reached out, quite calmly she liked to think, and took a fresh glass of punch from the tray of a passing footman. The footman looked up, began to smile, and then correctly interpreted something in her expression and moved on with admirable haste.

Caroline took two precise steps to the left.

There was not a moment of hesitation in the beautifully fluid arch of her wrist as she flung her cup outward, throwing the punch directly at the faces of the two spiteful spinsters.

The gasps that followed were spectacular. The kind that seemed to involve not just the lungs but the entire body, a full physical reckoning with an event the body had not been prepared to process. Both women stood frozen in a tableau of silk, punch, and absolute moral indignation. Their mouths were open and their eyes wide, and their carefully arranged hair was adorned with something that Caroline recognized as a rather fine fruit compote, which she had not anticipated but was willing to accept as a gift from the universe.

"My apologies," Caroline said, in a voice of absolute, unmistakable unapologeticness. "My hand slipped."

The stunned silence that followed was the kind she found deeply satisfying. The two women stared at her with the expressions of people who had just witnessed something that did not fit neatly into their framework of how the world presented itself.

Caroline smiled at them. It was not a warm smile. It was not intended to be.

"And do allow me to put your mind at ease," she continued pleasantly, allowing her gaze to travel from one to the other with the serene unhurriedness of a woman with nowhere pressing to be, "regarding your very generous concern for my brother's marital affairs. You will be relieved to hear, on the authority of someone who shares a roof with both of them and would therefore be the first to know, that Charles Bingley is very much in love with his wife. Quite maddeningly so, if you must know, in the way that one sometimes finds distressing to observe at close quarters. He is, in fact, so thoroughly delighted with her that they share a bedchamber. There is not a doubt in my mind that were she to be horribly disfigured tomorrow, someone like you would still find the competition rather too steep to manage."

The first woman made a sound that was half gasp and half something that defied conventional categorization.

"Good evening to you both," Caroline said, with a shallow inclination of her head that managed to convey something between condescension and a dismissal, then turned and removed herself from the scene at a pace that was rapid enough to constitute a retreat but measured enough to be passed off, to a casual observer, as purposeful movement.

She did not look back.

She did not look at Jane either, which required rather more effort, because she was fairly certain that she had heard a sharp intake of breath from the direction of the table as she'd taken her leave, and she was not especially interested in discovering whether Jane's expression was grateful or horrified or something in between. The probability of it being something overly emotive struck her as quite high, and she had already used up most of her emotional reserves today on the punch.

Instead, she moved through the crowd with her spine very straight and her face arranged into the expression of a woman who had done nothing interesting in particular. Certainly, absolutely nothing interesting to be held accountable for, which was an expression she had always found immensely useful.