Page 29 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

"Then what on earth—"

"It is the baby," Jane said at last, pressing her fingers more firmly to her mouth as though this might assist matters, which it did not appear to be doing in any meaningful way. "I have cried at four separate occasions this week. Three of them were at mealtimes. Charles wept along with me on two of those, which I found more endearing than I can possibly express, but which did not help either of us very much."

Caroline stared at her.

And then, to her own considerable astonishment, she herself also began to laugh.

It escaped her before she could do anything about it, rather more genuinely than her usual laughter. Jane laughed alongside her, still half-crying in the manner of a woman completely at the mercy of her own biology and finding it seemingly at least partially funny. The two of them sat together on the settee with a plate of ginger snaps between them and the London afternoon pressing softly against the windows.

"Charles," Caroline said at last, "wept at dinner."

"Twice," Jane confirmed, wiping her eyes, her whole face luminous with it. "He told me afterward that he found it very clarifying as an experience for his nerves and now understood why women partook in it so often."

Caroline pressed her lips together and lost the battle to contain herself yet again.

For once, she was completely unconcerned about how the present company might judge her for her actions. She just allowed herself to exist in the moment of lightheartedness.

When she was finally done laughing, Caroline picked up a biscuit, and this time she actually ate it.

The taste of ginger was sweeter on her tongue than it had ever been before.

Chapter 13

August 29th

The letter had arrived on the twenty-eighth, and Caroline had read it so many times that she no longer needed to unfold it to know its contents. She knew precisely how many lines it contained, knew the particular slant of his handwriting on the word evening, knew the way his signature curled at the end with the careless confidence of a man who had never once doubted his own name.

She also knew that she had approximately thirty-six hours remaining in England before Edward Reinhart ceased to be in it.

This knowledge had done nothing whatsoever to improve her sleep.

She came down to breakfast looking, she was quite certain, like a woman who had spent the entire night arguing with herself and had lost. Charles took one look at her and opened his mouth. Jane, with the quiet mastery she had acquired over the past year, laid a hand on his arm. It was the sort of gesture that saved lives, marriages, and Caroline’s patience. Charles shut his mouth again. Caroline ate her toast in silence and was grateful to them both in a way she judged far too heartfelt to mention aloud.

The afternoon crept forward with the particular stubborn slowness of hours that knew they were being observed. She sat down to answer her correspondence. She abandoned it within minutes. She picked up a book. The words skittered away like frightened mice. She moved to the window and remained there for a length of time she refused to quantify, even privately. She would have denied, to her last breath, that she was looking for anything at all in the street below.

His carriage arrived before sundown, exactly as his letter had promised.

Caroline had dressed herself head to toe for a completely flawless appearance. She wore her pretty beige silk, the one that never failed to lend her complexion a most becoming air, and she had arranged her hair with her own hands because the ritual steadied her and because she had, over time, become quite skillful at it. She descended the front steps with her customary composure, which held beautifully until the moment Edward stepped down from the carriage and looked at her.

He looked, she thought, as though the past twelve days had treated him with the same lack of courtesy they had shown her. There were shadows beneath his eyes that she had not seen there before, and the determined set of his jaw suggested a man carrying far more than he ought to have been carrying alone. She was aware, in a distant and mildly embarrassed way, that she should not feel comforted by this. It was hardly gracious to find solace in another person's sleepless nights.

"Caroline," he said, and his voice held all its usual warmth, even if the rest of him did not look as lively as usual.

"Mr. Reinhart," she replied, because they were standing in the street and good habits were stubborn things.

Something in his expression shifted for the briefest moment, a flicker of amusement that came and went too quickly to name. He offered his hand to help her into the carriage. She accepted it, and neither spoke again until they were seated inside, the door had shut behind them, and London began its slow, steady retreat through the windows.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"You will see," he said, with a mysterious sparkle in his eyes.

Caroline decided, just for this occasion, to allow it.

They reached the lake just as the last of the daylight slipped away. It lay a little beyond the city, tucked behind a quiet stand of elms, and in the softening dark it seemed entirely content with its own undisturbed solitude. Yet it was not the peace of the place that stole her breath.

It was the lanterns.

Dozens of them, perhaps even more, drifted across the water's surface in idle clusters, their paper shells glowing a warm amber that shimmered in wavering reflections below. The sight hovered somewhere between a dream and a painting, and Caroline found herself standing at the water’s edge completely without the ability to speak.