Page 25 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

"Mm," replied Edward, noncommittally.

"And the tearoom was very good." She paused a little desperately. "The scones especially."

He said nothing. He was still not looking at her. His jaw was set in a way she had never seen before. Something about the line of his profile in the late afternoon light made her chest feel as though it had been very neatly hollowed out.

"Edward." His name came out of her rather more quietly than she had intended.

He turned then, briefly, and met her eyes for the first time since the tearoom, and what she saw there was not the warmth she had spent the better part of a fortnight entirely taking for granted. It was something guarded and altogether too composed for a man who had, only this morning, been laughing at a portrait of an admiral.

She felt the cold expression go through her heart like a blade.

"When can I see you again?" she asked.

The question was too bare. She heard it herself, heard the absence of her usual gloss and deflection. Heard how plainly it said the thing she had not managed to say correctly all afternoon, and could do absolutely nothing about any of it because it was already out in the open air and it was too late.

Edward looked at her for a moment that lasted considerably longer than could be passed off as normal.

"I don't know," he said at last.

He inclined his head, a small, courteous motion, and then he turned and got back into the carriage with the unhurried calm of a man who had somewhere else to be and was simply going there. The door closed. The carriage moved.

Caroline stood on the pavement and watched it go.

She watched it until it had turned the corner and there was nothing left to watch, and then she stood there a little longer anyway, because going inside required a direction and she had, in the past thirty seconds, rather lost her sense of them.

Not even a single day.

She had barely had a single day with the knowledge of affection settled in her chest before she had taken it, and the one person responsible for producing it, and made an absolute ruin of everything. This was, she thought, with a clarity she would have preferred not to have, precisely the sort of outcome she might have predicted for herself, had she been paying proper attention.

She had once allowed herself to wonder, in that distant, impractical way one considers things that do not yet have the unpleasant habit of being real, whether she was simply not suited to this particular pursuit.

Whether love, for all her intelligence and composure and carefully honed sense of self, was the one field in which none of it mattered in the least. And whether she would always find herself, in the end, standing quite still on some indifferent pavement while something she had not meant to care about at all simply… drove away.

At the time, she had told herself it was only common sense speaking. That she would grow accustomed to it. That a sensible woman could arrange her life quite neatly around the absence of love if she tried hard enough and did not look at it too closely at what was missing.

It seemed she had been wrong.

She turned and went inside.

She climbed the stairs with her back very straight. She did not allow herself to press her fingers to the place on her hand where his had been, however briefly.

There was nothing there now, after all, to press them to.

Chapter 12

August 17-28th

“Has a letter come for me?” Caroline asked.

“No, miss,” the maid replied, with the sort of careful blankness that only came from being asked the same question four times in three days and discovering that survival in service was largely dependent upon the art of becoming entirely unreadable.

“I see. Thank you,” Caroline said, with brisk dismissal, and turned away before the girl could witness anything so undignified as dwindling hope trying and failing to conceal itself on her face.

She crossed to the window and stood there with admirable stillness, hands neatly clasped, gaze fixed upon the London street below as though she had no particular interest in it whatsoever. A person would have had to be very foolish indeed to suspect she was waiting for anything.

Or anyone.

Outside, the morning went on. The sky was a subdued grey, neither promising nor threatening. A child was being dragged along the pavement by a small dog that clearly considered itself to be in charge of the entire household. It was all quite ordinary, the sort of scene that asked nothing of her and gave nothing in return.