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This instruction was delivered in much the same tone as a mother might remind her son that “you are not to drop your napkin on the floor during dinner.”
Bingley shot his sister an irritated look. “I jolly well will.”
“No, you will not.”
Bingley felt the same heat rising within him that had burned when he had spoken to Darcy. “I will do as I please for the purposes of securing my own happiness,” he said firmly.
Caroline tossed her head. “Making her an offer will only sink your reputation and hers.”
“Jane Bennet is a thoroughly respectable lady—”
“By now everyone in the ton knows she has been angling for your hand despite the disapproval of your family,” Caroline drawled with a smirk. “If you make her an offer, it will be assumed she entrapped you somehow.”
Dread crawled up Bingley’s spine. “Why would they believe any such thing? Jane does not have a conn
iving bone in her body.”
Caroline’s lips curled into a horrid parody of a smile. “Everyone knows how the Bennet family schemes and plots. Many worry that Jane will conspire to place you in a position where you appear to have compromised her—so you are forced to make her an offer.”
His entire body flushed. “Why would they think that? What have you been saying?”
Caroline shrugged with faux innocence. “I may have mentioned her vulgar, grasping family to a few friends.”
Good Lord! “You have been blackening Jane’s name?” Bingley’s voice squeaked upward with indignation. He massaged his forehead. I should have foreseen this tactic. By disparaging Jane’s character, Caroline rendered it more difficult—and more damaging—for Bingley to propose.
“Everyone knows you have set your cap for Georgiana Darcy.”
“She is barely out of the schoolroom!” Bingley nearly shouted. “And why would ‘everyone’ know that, Caroline?”
Caroline gave an unconcerned shrug and brushed dust from her gown.
A realization burst over him. “You truly care nothing for my happiness.”
Caroline’s eyes blazed with fury. “I care enough to prevent my family’s reputation from being tainted by connection to that country nobody! I will not have my own marital prospects hindered by such associations!”
Bingley strove to keep a reasonable tone in the face of his sister’s vitriol. “Your marital prospects will remain precisely the same. My engagement to Jane Bennet would not affect them.”
“No, it will not. Because you will not make her an offer!”
Bingley had no doubt that Caroline had been quite effective at spreading horrible rumors about Jane. Gossip was her stock in trade, and her lies had spread throughout the ton for at least a fortnight. If he made an offer to Jane, many people would believe the rumors, thinking that she had somehow entrapped him and forced him into proposing.
He could not propose to the woman he loved without damaging her reputation, a miserable beginning to his married life—with his wife subject to speculation and snubs that might not dissipate for years. Caroline had neatly tied his hands.
A quick glance at his sister told him that she was admiring the passing scenery with a little smirk on her face. He tried to marshal the anger he had experienced in Darcy’s study. There was cause; Caroline’s perfidy was far worse than Darcy’s. But Bingley was weighed down by his anxiety, too weary to muster indignation.
His happy visions of proposing in the Gardiners’ drawing room were slipping away. With them went his dreams of Jane resplendent in white satin, Jane presiding as mistress of Netherfield, and Jane with her stomach rounded with his child…
Such a future appeared to be completely beyond his grasp. The weight settled even more heavily onto his chest, making it difficult to breathe…or even move.
I will not relinquish the idea of marrying Jane. But how can I accomplish such a feat without causing her great pain? Again he tried to set a match to the burning embers of indignation. Caroline deserved the full brunt of his anger. But the flames, smothered under a dark blanket of sorrow, failed to ignite.
Still, he experienced a need to hurt her the way she had hurt him. “Caroline, sometimes I do not like you at all,” he said through gritted teeth. It had to have been the cruelest words he had ever uttered to his sister.
Caroline tossed her head. “You can think what you want of me, Charles, as long as you do not marry that country chit.”
***
His sister’s revelation still weighed down Bingley when he alighted from the carriage at dusk on the street before Darcy House. Having deposited Caroline at the Hursts’, he had eschewed a visit to Gracechurch Street until he could devise a plan to neutralize his sister’s gossip mongering. With a few words, Caroline had destroyed the joyous reunion with Jane he had been envisioning for a fortnight.
