Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love (Jane Austen Variation Novellas)

Chapter 1

Caroline Bingley had attended something in the vicinity of three hundred and forty-two parties in her life, which was quite enough to render her an authority on the subject of social disasters, both anticipated and otherwise.

It was not that such catastrophes announced themselves in any reliable fashion.

There was no particular expression, no telling gesture.

Rather, it was a sensation. A most inconvenient awareness that crept along the back of her neck and settled, with unwelcome certainty, somewhere beneath her ribs.

Experience, some of it regrettably mortifying, had taught her not to ignore it.

She felt it the instant Lord Gillsberry requested her attention.

“Miss Bingley,” he said, lowering his voice in a manner that suggested he believed himself exceedingly important. “Might I beg a private word?”

And there it was again. That dreadful certainty.

Still, Caroline had not navigated one and twenty years of London society by retreating at the first hint of discomfort.

One did not survive such a world without a sharp smile and a sturdy constitution, carefully concealed until necessity demanded its use.

And so she inclined her head with polite composure and permitted herself to be led away, through the brilliant throng in Lord and Lady Ashworth’s ballroom, past arrangements of flowers so extravagant they bordered on offensive, and out onto the balcony overlooking the darkened garden.

She had, she admitted, expected a proposal.

It was, in her estimation, a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

Lord Gillsberry had called upon her with commendable frequency for the past three weeks.

He had even sent flowers twice. He had danced with her at the Pemberton ball and regarded her over his champagne glass with what she had understood to be significant intent.

Caroline was not in the habit of mistaking such things.

She had been studying the language of society since she was fifteen, and she prided herself on her fluency.

Lord Gillsberry was also, most inconveniently, titled, moderately wealthy, in possession of all of his teeth, and a mere twenty-six years of age.

He was not the most glittering prospect who had ever crossed Caroline’s path, but he was eminently suitable.

More than suitable. He was precisely the sort of gentleman a woman in Caroline’s circumstances ought to greet with quiet satisfaction and perhaps a touch of strategic delight.

She had, she realized with a queasy twist deep in her middle, been rather disgusted with herself when acknowledging that she would have to accept him.

Which somehow made the next few moments all the more ruinous.

“You must know,” Lord Gillsberry began, sounding perilously close to conversational, as though he were commenting on the state of the hedgerows, “that I hold you in the highest regard.”

“Thank you,” Caroline replied. Her tone was smooth, perfectly measured. Maintaining it was one of her finer accomplishments.

“And it is because of that regard,” he continued, “that I wish to make you an offer.”

And then he did.

It was not, most unfortunately, an offer of marriage.

Caroline remained very still upon the balcony of Lord and Lady Ashworth’s home, the soft hum of the party spilling through the open doors behind her while the night air brushed cool fingers along her arms. She listened, without blinking, as Lord Gillsberry explained in a voice brimming with what he clearly believed to be generosity, that he would like her to become his mistress.

“I have always found you quite striking,” he said, as though bestowing a medal. “In your own peculiar way, of course.”

“Is that so,” Caroline murmured. Her voice felt as though it belonged to someone else entirely.

“And while I shall naturally be choosing a wife from among the more traditionally,” he paused, selecting a word with great care, “substantial candidates this season, I see no reason to deny a mutually advantageous understanding in the meantime.”

It should have been the word substantial that struck her the most, but it was not.

It was what followed.

"Come now," Lord Gillsberry said, smiling in the sort of self-satisfied way that suggested he believed his expression charming, "it is not as though someone as thin and lanky as you could do better than me.

And you have just turned twenty and one, have you not?

I am offering you something rather good, all things considered. Before you get much older."

For a moment Caroline simply looked at him, quite unable to summon anything resembling speech.

Twenty and one. He was calling twenty and one old.

He had stood on this balcony in his perfectly pressed coat, with his perfectly ordinary face and his perfectly middling title, and he had implied that Caroline Bingley, who had turned twenty-one exactly eleven days ago, was somehow past her prime and should therefore be grateful for his thoroughly condescending attention.

She thought, in a distant and curiously steady way, that she ought to feel something far louder than what she felt.

Fury, certainly. She did feel fury. But beneath the fury lay something softer and far more troublesome, something she was absolutely not prepared to peer at too closely while standing on a balcony at a party she still needed to escape without dramatic incident.

That above all else would be too devastatingly humiliating.

She focused instead on Lord Gillsberry.

He was waiting, she realized, for gratitude. He was standing there with that insufferable smirk on his face, wearing the patient, indulgent look of a man who fully expected to be thanked for his transgressions.

Caroline smiled back at him. It was not a friendly smile.

"How tremendously kind of you," she said, "to take such an interest in the management of my future.

I confess I had not realized until this very moment what a remarkable gift for self-delusion you possess.

Most men of your particular variety of mediocrity at least have the good manners to keep it hidden in polite company. "

The smile vanished as though it had never been there.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I imagine you do," Caroline replied with impeccable sweetness.

"But I am afraid I cannot give it. What I can offer is this.

I would sooner reside in a ditch than accept any offer from a man whose most striking characteristic is his unwavering certainty that he is worth more than rubbish.

Good evening, Lord Gillsberry. Do take care not to stumble over your own overinflated self-regard on your way back inside. "

Caroline turned and walked briskly away with what little remained of her dignity.

She made it a full six steps before the composure she had stitched together with such admirable determination began, at last, to slip.

It was not the anger that posed the true difficulty.

Anger was simple. Anger was simple and required very little tending.

It was the quiet things beneath the anger, that caused trouble.

The part of her that had heard the word substantial and had recognized it.

That had heard it and understood, beneath all the fury, was hurt.

Caroline rounded the corner of the balcony at a pace that was now almost certainly faster than dignity would ever endorse.

She was not crying. She was absolutely not crying. Her eyes were watering because the night air was cold, and that was the beginning and end of the matter. She dared anyone to imply otherwise.

She did not see the man until she walked directly into him.

The collision was impressive in its force.

Caroline, who was by some regards a very delicate and fragile creature struck something that felt remarkably like an wall and promptly lost her balance.

She had just enough time to contemplate the mortifying inevitability of the ground rushing up to meet her before a pair of strong arms caught her by the waist and steadied her with an ease that was frankly insulting in its effortlessness.

"Careful," a voice said.

It was a decidedly appealing voice. Low, with a rough edge that vibrated somewhere near her sternum in a way she felt was entirely unreasonable.

At the same time she became acutely aware of the large hands holding her waist, and of the fact that the man they belonged to was exceptionally tall and, from her current vantage point, appeared to be exceptionally everything else as well.

Caroline Bingley had encountered a great many handsome men in her life. She had assessed them with her usual cool demeanor and had found, as a rule, that mere handsomeness was not especially interesting to her.

This was not, it seemed, going to be one of those occasions.

"Forgive me," she managed, her voice surprisingly steady, which was rather impressive given the circumstances.

The man looked down at her, and his expression was not at all what she might have expected from someone nearly toppled by a woman careening around a corner. He did not look startled or affronted. He looked, instead, quietly amused.

His eyes were dark and keen, and they regarded her with a level of attention she found herself wholly unprepared to manage.

"A man of that particular ilk," he said, his tone warm with admiration, "is hardly deserving of your tears, my lady. Especially not after you dispatched him with such effortless grace.”

Which meant, of course, that he had just heard every single word of her latest humiliation ritual.

Caroline opened her mouth and discovered, perhaps for the first time in her adult life, that she had nothing whatsoever to say.

He lifted one gloved hand, moving with deliberate gentleness, and brushed away the stray tear from the corner of her eye.

The touch was feather light, almost nothing through the leather of his glove, yet it felt like something far more significant.

Caroline felt her breath falter, felt her thoughts scatter in wild and unreasonable directions, and for one mortifying, bewildering moment she simply stared up at a man she had never met while the party murmured around them and the London night pressed close.

Then her mind, which was typically far more dependable, returned with a rush.

She was standing on a semi-private balcony in a highly improper position with a man whose name she did not even know, who had just borne witness to the single mortifying conversation of her recent memory, and she was allowing him to touch her face.

She had clearly taken leave of her senses somewhere between Lord Gillsberry's wretched proposal and the cold night air, and she very much needed to reclaim them.

The heat that rose in her cheeks was, she insisted to herself, nothing more dramatic than the natural consequence of a thoroughly mortifying evening. It had nothing to do with the good looks of the man that was still holding on to her.

"I-" she began dumbly.

"Miss," the man interrupted, and his voice held a glimmer of something far too close to amusement, which was precisely what she could not endure at that particular moment.

Caroline stepped back. She did so with all the dignity available to a woman who had been discovered crying on a balcony and whose complexion had obligingly transformed into the shade of a particularly vivid peony.

It was not an impressive amount of dignity.

Even so, she gathered it about her like a cloak, lifted her chin, and bestowed upon him an expression she had spent years refining for maximum effect.

It did not seem to accomplish its usual work.

"Good evening," she said dismissively with a shallow bow. Each syllable crisp enough to slice straight through the night air.

Then she turned and took her leave. It was the second time in ten minutes she had done so, and she managed it with considerably less haste and more elegance.

She did not slow until she had reentered the ballroom, collected her cloak from the visibly startled attendant, and swept herself out to her waiting carriage.

Only when the door shut behind her, sealing her away from the music and laughter and glittering lights, did she sink into the shadows of the carriage and press her hands to her face.

The carriage lurched into motion. Beyond the window, the celebration dwindled into a blur of retreating lamps.

‘Thin and lanky’, Lord Gillsberry had called her. Unlikely to do better.

And the most unforgivable part, the part that twisted in her chest with each turn of the wheels, was not the insults themselves. It was that some quiet and treacherous corner of her own head that had believed him.

That was the part she could not forgive.

Not Lord Gillsberry, who was so eminently forgettable that she rather doubted she would spare him a single thought once the sun rose.

Not the man on the balcony, who had apparently found her private misery entertaining enough to observe and then remark upon and who possessed, quite unfairly, exceptionally nice hands.

She could not forgive the small and treacherous part of her that had heard those dreadful words and felt, beneath all the righteous indignation, a whisper of something perilously close to agreement.

Maybe.

Maybe he was right. Maybe she had been constructing a fragile illusion and calling it hope.

Maybe this was what romance looked like for Caroline Bingley, or rather, what the continued and inescapably humiliating absence of it looked like.

She was twenty-one years old, after all, and perhaps it was time to acknowledge that this might indeed be the shape of her life.

The carriage jolted through a rut in the road, and Caroline drew herself upright, directing her gaze to the window instead of turning inward, which had never once yielded a productive result.

She thought then, briefly and most unwisely, of the man on the balcony.

She had not even learned his name.

It did not matter, she informed herself with great firmness. She would in all likelihood never set eyes on him again.