Page 33 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

Not everything, of course, and certainly not in any way that their arrangement could have been called foolish, but enough that the morning room seemed to grow quieter with every sentence. She spoke of the balcony at the Ashworth house and glossed over the conversation she never intended anyone to hear. She spoke of the gardens at Netherfield and the arrangement that had begun there, but not the the days that had somehow become weeks without either of them appearing to notice.

She told them of walks and galleries and tearooms. She did not tell them of the third room at the Royal Academy where, standing beside a rather stern portrait of an admiral, she had looked at him and understood something she could no longer deny herself any longer.

She told them about lanterns on a lake, and a small boat, and a sky full of stars that had seemed entirely too attentive to what was happening beneath it.

She did not tell them of the quiet way he had said her name just before he asked her to come to New York with him.

Instead she told them what she had said in return.

When she finished, the silence that followed was not precisely uncomfortable, though it was undeniably complete, as though the room itself had decided to hold its breath and wait for something more sensible to be said.

Charles regarded her with an expression Caroline could not fully place, though she suspected it hovered somewhere between disbelief and a concern he was attempting, with admirable effort, to disguise as mere thoughtfulness. Jane, by contrast, appeared to have found Caroline’s hands far more absorbing than her face, studying them with the solemn focus of someone convinced that any sudden movement might result in irreparable damage.

“You said no,” Charles said at last.

“I said I was sorry and that I could not,” Caroline replied, because while she was prepared to be generous in most matters, she drew a firm line at misrepresentation. “Which is, I believe, rather more precise, though I will concede the end result is indistinguishable.”

“Why?” he asked.

Caroline looked up at her brother, baffled.

“Because it is America, Charles. Because I do not know a soul there. Because I have never left England, even for a journey to France, and the notion of crossing an ocean to begin a life in a city I have never seen with a man I have known for scarcely a month is, by any reasonable measure, entirely mad.”

“Yes,” Jane agreed quietly.

Finally, she looked up.

“But do you love him?”

The simplicity of the question might almost have been amusing under different circumstances. As it was, Caroline was finding it increasingly difficult to speak coherently.

“Entirely against my better judgment,” Caroline said, “yes.”

Jane lifted her eyes then, and there was something in her expression so steady, so unshakably composed, that Caroline felt it settle rather unceremoniously somewhere inconvenient in her chest.

“Then you should go,” Jane said.

Caroline blinked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“You should go to him,” Jane repeated, as though she were suggesting nothing more alarming than an afternoon stroll and not the complete rearrangement of a life. “You should go today, before his ship leaves, and you should tell him you have changed your mind.”

“Jane,” Caroline said carefully, with the sort of patience one reserved for a dear friend who had very clearly taken leave of her senses, “you cannot possibly be serious. You are suggesting I pursue a man in order to inform him that I have reconsidered his proposal, as though I am the heroine of some wildly improbable novel.”

“You are the heroine of a very improbable novel,” Jane replied, a faint smile touching her mouth. “You are simply the only one who has not realized it yet.”

Caroline turned immediately to her brother, because Charles, at the very least, had always been the voice of reason in their household. Charles, who weighed consequences. Charles, who considered outcomes. Charles, who did not, under any ordinary circumstance, encourage reckless emotional decisions.

Charles, who was now looking at her with a distinct lack of the expected caution.

“Charles,” she said, with rising alarm.

“She is right,” he said.

“Surely you cannot be serious?”

“I am aware that is not what you wanted to hear.”

He leaned forward slightly, forearms on the table in a manner their mother would have considered entirely improper and which Caroline, under present conditions, found almost offensively comforting.