Page 21 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

"You see," he said, once he had recalled himself enough to produce coherent speech, "this is precisely why I find you so charming. The typical response to someone hinting obliquely that they might be stalking you is not a death threat delivered with such pleasant composure."

"And what," Caroline inquired, raising one unimpressed brow, "is the typical response?"

"Alarm. Blushing. A great deal of rather breathless and uncomfortable laughter." He glanced down at her.

“Would you like me to perform such an exhausting ritual for you?” Caroline asked in a dry tone.

"Not at all," Edward said, and turned back to the path ahead.

They walked on in companionable silence for several moments, and Caroline found herself reflecting that this, too, was something she had not anticipated about Edward Reinhart. Most men of her acquaintance could not abide silence without feeling compelled to fill it with something endlessly fatiguing. Edward seemed to harbor no such compulsion, and the quiet between them held a quality she had not yet found a proper word for, comfortable being too small and pleasant being altogether inadequate.

She encountered him the following morning at the lending library, which she attributed to coincidence. She encountered him again the next afternoon outside the milliner on Bond Street, which was far more difficult to attribute to anything other than deliberate intent, though she chose not to mention it. By the fifth day she had ceased attempting to explain his frequent appearances through probability and had arrived, with her usual practical efficiency, at the far simpler conclusion that she did not mind them in the least.

It was on the afternoon of the twelfth, while they walked along the Embankment and the river made its perpetual effort to appear romantic despite the unmistakable smell, that Edward turned to her with the expression she had come to associate with thoughtful scrutiny.

"You seem different," he said.

Caroline glanced at him from the corner of her eye. "Different how?"

"Lighter," he said, and he spoke with such unadorned sincerity that she could not dismiss it as flattery. "Since you returned to London. You smile more often, and more freely." He paused only a moment. "It suits you greatly."

Caroline felt warmth climb her throat and settle into her cheeks with the enthusiasm of a phenomenon entirely indifferent to her preferences. She turned her gaze toward the river and allowed it to rest there, for she was not quite prepared to look directly at him while something so very close to the truth lingered between them.

"London agrees with me," she said at last, which was true in the way all incomplete answers are technically true.

She did not tell him about Charles nor about the long overdue conversation that had finally taken place in the sitting room. She did not speak of the words that had, after twenty one years, at last been allowed into the open air, where they lingered instead of evaporating beneath the weight of shame. She kept that tender piece of herself tucked safely away, and he, with the quiet perceptiveness she had come to recognize as entirely his own, did not press her. Instead, he offered his arm, she accepted it, and when she pointed imperiously at a shop window two doors down that required his notice and his escort, he accompanied her without the slightest protest and with every appearance of genuine willingness.

"I believe," Caroline announced three days later, as they stepped out of an exhibition of inferior watercolors that he had, for reasons she could not fathom, actually wished to see, "that we have now been on something in the vicinity of five outings."

"Is that a complaint?"

"It is an observation," she replied, very prim and very precise. "You specified three dates. You are over your original estimate. I am simply noting the discrepancy for the record."

Edward dismissed this with the airy unconcern of a man entirely untroubled by his own inconsistencies. "These days do not count," he said.

Caroline halted on the pavement and turned to him with the look she reserved for statements that required full and immediate clarification. "I beg your pardon?"

"These days do not count," he repeated, looking thoroughly unrepentant. "Not as real dates. If this were a real date, I would make it considerably more extraordinary. Extravagant gifts, unique experiences, the full and undivided expression of my most excellent intentions. This," he gestured at the street around them, at the perfectly pleasant and completely ordinary London afternoon, "is merely the pleasure of your company. And I have decided that this must be regarded as its own category entirely."

Caroline stared at him for a long moment before giving an undignified snort and turning away in disbelief. Edward looked absolutely delighted by the sound.

"That," she said at last, "is the most convenient excuse for reasoning I have heard in recent memory."

"I aim to please," he replied, all cheerful confidence. "Convenient reasoning is something of a national sport in my home."

She made a sound she refused to classify as a laugh, and they walked on together. The afternoon was warm, the streets pleasantly busy, and somewhere in the midst of passing a small park she found her attention caught by an elderly couple seated on a bench near the iron fence. They looked to be about seventy, perhaps a bit older, sitting close not out of romance but out of long habit, the way people did when they had spent a lifetime side by side and no longer needed to remark upon it. The woman was speaking, the man was listening, and nothing about them could be called remarkable.

Caroline watched them, and something in her chest shifted with quiet insistence.

"I have always found that rather more mystifying than any great love story," she said, almost without intending to give the thought voice.

Edward followed her gaze and was silent for a thoughtful moment. "Why would ordinary contentment puzzle you more than the extraordinary?"

Caroline considered this. "Because grand love stories are actually quite easy to believe in," she said slowly. "If fantastical things were happening to me, if the world were conspiring in improbable and dramatic ways on my behalf, I dare say I might fall in love with the first man to step in an save me under such strange circumstances too. There is nothing especially unbelievable about it."

She looked at the couple on the bench a moment longer before turning back to the path. "But those two people, and the thousands like them, living perfectly ordinary and sometimes rather maddening lives, for decades and decades on end, and still not tiring of each other. That is what I cannot quite explain. I should like to know what keeps something like that going."

The question settled between them in a most curious fashion.