Page 9 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

The heat of the room pressed in around her, closer and louder than it had been before, the music and the voices and the warm air all conspiring to make themselves felt in a way she found distinctly unwelcome. She turned away from the ballroom floor and moved toward the back of the room, past a cluster of gentlemen arguing about horses and two young women trading confidences behind their fans, until she found a set of doors that opened onto the side terrace that led to the garden down below. She pushed through them with a sense of relief that was rather more pronounced than she would have liked.

The night air met her immediately, cool and clean against the warmth she'd been carrying in her chest since the moment she'd heard those women speak. She walked to the balustrade and stood there for a moment with her hands resting on the stone and her eyes on the garden, breathing in the dark and the quiet and the faint smell of damp grass that drifted up from somewhere beyond the torchlight.

She could not entirely have said, if pressed, what had possessed her to defend Jane.

She had, of course, defended the occasional person over the years, whenever the circumstances were sufficiently egregious and the target sufficiently obvious, but she had always done it with the deliberate calculation of how it benefited her. Something that she found personally satisfying rather than an urgency that bypassed any calculation whatsoever. Tonight had been something different. Tonight the decision had not felt like a decision so much as a reflex, something that had happened before the thinking part of her mind had been consulted on the matter.

She pressed her fingers against the stone and thought, with the uncomfortable deliberateness of a person who would have preferred not to think about something at all, about why.

She supposed she knew why. It was for a reason similar to why she did not allow hairbrushes in her bedroom.

She had heard those women comment so outrageously about Jane’s size even though they knew her condition. Said it with the satisfied certainty of people who viewed a woman's body as a matter of public commentary, as though Jane's diminished figure in the face of pregnancy were a moral failing rather than a rather standard biological event. As though the appropriate response to a woman carrying a child was to remark that she had become inconveniently larger, instead of celebrating her resilience. And something in Caroline, something old and tired and entirely too familiar with the particular cruelty of being reminded about how inadequate your body was at all hours of the day, had simply–

snapped.

She had been four years old the first time her mother had looked at her across the breakfast table and said that she was getting fat. She had been five the first time food had been removed from her plate before she'd finished it, six the first time she'd been told that no one would ever find her interesting in the condition she was in. That she needed to do something about herself before she embarrassed the family past the point of repair. By twelve, long after her mother had passed, she was still doing sums in her head before every meal, calculating whether what she was about to eat was acceptable, whether it would bring comment even when there was no longer anyone present to comment.

Whether it would be safer eating less or nothing at all.

Her mother had died when Caroline was ten, and the strange and terrible thing about grief was the way it could operate in the complete absence of the feeling that was meant to accompany it. Caroline had not mourned her mother. She had admitted, in the quiet privacy of her own mind, to a feeling that she never shared, nor intended to share, with anyone.

Relief.

She thought she was finally free.

Then she had spent the better part of the next two years discovering that her mother's voice had not died with her. That it had simply relocated somewhere inside her head, where it continued its quiet and relentless work of diminishing her soul each passing day with no external assistance required.

It had been Louisa, in the end, who had finally put a stop to it. Louisa, who had come to her room one night and sat on the edge of her bed and said, in the particular voice she reserved for matters she was genuinely frightened about, that she was worried about her. That she had noticed her getting thinner with each passing day. That she wanted Caroline to eat something, anything, and that she would sit there until she finally did.

Caroline often pondered, around the anniversary of her mother's death, how she might have very well died along with the miserable women if not for her sister.

She was grateful for her sister. She was grateful for her sister every single day.

She turned her face into the garden breeze and let the cool of it settle over her and told herself that she was perfectly well, that it had been a very long time, and that she had largely grown past all of that now. That she ate properly and had for years and that the only real legacy her mother had left her in that particular respect was a tendency, when genuinely distressed, to lose her appetite entirely. Which was not ideal but was considerably better than the alternative.

Still. She was glad she had thrown the punch.

She was possibly, she thought with the faintest hint of dry amusement, slightly more glad about it than was strictly appropriate to be considered virtuous, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t defended Jane out of righteousness, more so self-indulgence, and no one had ever, in their lives, described Caroline Bingley as a virtuous woman.

The doors behind her opened, admitting a brief wave of warmth and sound before closing again. She did not turn around, assuming it was someone else in want of air.

She needed a moment longer. Just a moment. Then she would go back inside and be composed and pleasant and exactly as one was expected to be at a party hosted in celebration of her brother's forthcoming child. She would give no one, not Charles, not Jane, and certainly not herself, any reason to suspect that she had spent any portion of the evening standing in the gardens of Netherfield thinking about things she had been carefully not thinking about for the better part of a decade.

It was so peaceful out here. Caroline admitted feeling strangely sentimental that Netherfield Park did have some form of magnetic charm to it.

That was when she heard the voice call out behind her.

Chapter 5

August 7th

That was when she heard the voice call out behind her.

"Why is it," a distinctly masculine voice called, "that whenever I encounter you, you are always in the middle of some dramatic standoff?"

Caroline turned around in one swift motion.

She had told herself, with great firmness, on approximately eleven separate occasions between the night of the Ashworth ball and this present moment, that she had not been looking for him. That she would not even care if she were to ever see him again. She had been very nearly convincing about it. And yet here he was, standing in the Netherfield Park gardens with the particular expression of a man who found life genuinely amusing, and the part of Caroline that had spent the better part of a week insisting she would never see him again had the profound bad manners to feel something very close to relieved. What happened to not caring?