Chapter Four
The assembly room in Meryton was teeming with people.
The smells of floor polish and beeswax candles mingled with the musky scent of too many bodies standing closer together.
Caroline tugged at the high neck of her tangerine gown, which had begun to itch against her skin, while the ostrich feathers pinned into her hair pressed painfully against her scalp.
She was exhausted, having slept badly the night before, and the last thing she wanted was to spend the evening in a room filled with people she did not know.
Charles had bounded away at the first opportunity to seek an introduction to a pretty blonde girl on the other side of the room, while Louisa and Hurst had made directly for the refreshments.
This left Caroline beside the taciturn Mr Darcy, who stood stiffly at her side and appeared no more pleased by the arrangement than she was.
She had little appetite for her usual performance that evening, but there was no knowing what eligible gentleman might be lurking in the wilds of Hertfordshire. Caroline straightened her spine and tightened her hold upon Mr Darcy's arm.
"My dear sir," she simpered in the nasal voice she reserved for public occasions, speaking loudly enough for those nearest to hear, "what a chore it is to endure a country assembly. I know you are accustomed to rather more refined society."
She felt his body stiffen beneath her hand and looked up to see his lips press together in a familiar scowl.
Mr Darcy disliked her intensely. Caroline had known it almost from the first moment of their acquaintance, but his disapproval served her purpose beautifully.
Several heads had already turned in her direction, and she gazed imperiously back at the faces regarding her with astonishment and distaste.
Such looks had ceased to wound her years ago, or at least that was what she told herself.
Mr Darcy disengaged his arm with as much restraint as the circumstances allowed, and Caroline moved to stand beside a pillar, where she arranged her features into the expression of lofty disdain that had become almost effortless.
She had grown so skilled at becoming the monstrous Caroline Bingley that she sometimes feared the real Caro had disappeared entirely beneath the gowns and feathers.
The last four years had passed with a strange mixture of speed and sameness.
Louisa had married Mr Hurst before Caroline’s first Season was over and seemed perfectly content with the life she had chosen.
Charles finished at Cambridge soon afterwards and moved easily into the world—and the mould—their father had always wanted for him.
Caroline watched it all from the side, still waiting for the one future she had been forbidden to choose.
A future that now seemed so distant and uncertain that she sometimes wondered why she was still keeping up with her grand plan.
It had been fun at first, turning admiration into alarm with a few well-placed barbs.
She had not considered how lonely it would make her feel.
She could form no real friendships without dropping the mask, and even her siblings seemed to have drifted away from her.
Once, she had overheard Louisa and Charles discussing how different she had become, wondering between themselves when she had grown from a sensitive girl into a spiteful woman.
Caroline had stood on the other side of the door, her gloved hands fisted to her mouth to muffle her sobs.
She wanted to scream, to tell them that the woman they disliked had been created for a purpose and that, somewhere beneath her, Caro was still waiting.
Martha had kept her promise, though not always without complaint.
Over the years, Caroline's gowns had grown brighter and the trimmings more excessive.
What had felt like a rather fun game in those first weeks and months had slowly become an exhausting performance that sapped every ounce of her energy.
Her father had never understood what had changed.
At first he had waited for her to settle into the Season and find someone she liked, but as the years passed his disappointment became harder to hide.
Once, at a ball in London, Caroline saw him watching as she dismissed another hopeful gentleman with a crass remark.
There was such unhappiness in her father's face that she came very close to abandoning the whole thing and telling him everything.
For one terrible moment, she wanted to cross the room, take his hand and explain that she was not ungrateful or determined to wound him.
She was only trying to keep faith with the future he had forbidden her to choose.
Then with awful suddenness, her father had become ill.
Within a fortnight, the broad, forceful man who had always seemed too full of life to be contained by any room lay weak beneath the bedclothes.
His voice had faded until Caroline had to lean close to hear him, and when he reached for her, the hand she had known all her life as strong and certain trembled against her own.
On the final evening, after the physician had withdrawn and the house had fallen quiet, Caroline sat beside him and told him everything.
Her father listened with his eyes closed. When she had finished, he turned his head towards her. "Tha' is prolonging thy own unhappiness, lass," he said. "The lad has been gone too long. Tha' cannot build a life upon scraps of glass and promises made when tha' was seventeen."
Even then, the smallest ember of hope rebelled against his words, refusing to flicker and die. "He will come back," she whispered.
Her father looked at her with such sorrow that she almost wished he had been angry instead. "I have made Charles promise that he will see thee married to a gentleman who can give thee the life tha' deserves. I may not be here to do it myself, but I will not leave thee unprotected."
Caroline drew her hand from his and they spoke little after that.
By morning, he was gone. Charles inherited a fortune he had never expected to receive so young, while Caroline was left with grief tangled so tightly with anger that she could not separate one from the other.
She mourned her father deeply, but the breach between them had remained to the end, and there would never now be any chance to heal it.
He had been buried in Scarborough, and while Charles and Hurst attended the funeral, she and Louisa had wandered the house like wraiths.
Eventually, she had gone to the sheltered rock where Thomas had first taken her hand and waited until the light began to fade.
He did not come. She had not truly expected him to, for he was in Edinburgh—or perhaps somewhere else entirely—but some foolish part of her had hoped that the shore itself might restore what the years had taken from them.
The small pieces of sea glass had continued to arrive, each one beautiful and unlike any of the others.
Caroline came to think of them as fragments of Thomas himself, shaped by the same shore where they had first fallen in love and sent across the distance to remind her that some part of him still belonged to her.
The last had arrived six months ago. Caroline remembered placing it in the box with the others and feeling, for the first time, not comfort but sorrow.
A fear had begun to grow in her that perhaps they had both been foolish, clinging to a promise made upon a beach when they were little more than children.
When the parcels stopped altogether, she had not known what else to do except continue the performance which no longer felt like one.
The Shrew of Grosvenor Square was what she had heard herself called more than once, usually by people who believed her safely out of earshot.
She had worn the name lightly, as though it amused her, but somewhere along the way she had begun to wonder whether it had become true.
Caroline had told herself that Thomas was occupied with his studies.
Later, that he had begun his work, perhaps apprenticing in another city to a more experienced physician, and no longer had time to search the shore.
Or he had simply run out of sea glass altogether.
She invented explanations until the silence stretched too long for any of them to satisfy her.
She still carried the first piece of green glass wherever she went.
Even now, she slipped off one glove beneath the folds of her skirt, reached into her reticule and closed her fingers around it.
The surface had grown familiar beneath her thumb, every curve known to her.
Would she wear it down to nothing by the time she was old and grey, she wondered, left with only a little green dust and the memory of what it had once meant?
Across the crowded assembly room, Charles was smiling down at the pretty blonde girl as though he had never been happier in his life.
For him, Hertfordshire was already becoming an adventure.
For Caroline, it was merely another room in which to perform a part.
The girl beside Charles was lovely in a quiet, gentle way, with fair hair and a sweetness in her expression that reminded Caroline painfully of Louisa.
She listened while Charles spoke, smiling as though his enthusiasm delighted rather than exhausted her, and Caroline knew at once that he was lost.
Beside her stood another young woman, darker and more striking than conventionally pretty.
There was something arresting in the brightness of her eyes.
She was watching Charles and her sister with open amusement when her gaze shifted towards Caroline.
For one uncomfortable moment, Caroline had the strange impression that the woman had seen her hand move beneath her skirts and understood that the haughty Miss Bingley had been clutching something hidden in her reticule like a frightened child.
It was impossible, of course. Caroline straightened and withdrew her hand, replacing her glove with deliberate care.
When she looked up again, the stranger was still watching her.
There was no dislike in her face, nor even the offended astonishment Caroline had learned to expect.
Only curiosity. Caroline found it intolerable though she could not say why.
The girl looked away first, leaning towards her sister to say something which made the fair-haired young woman smile.
Caroline could not hear the words, but she felt certain they concerned her.
She crossed the room on an impulse and stopped beside Charles with her most forbidding expression in place.
"My dear Charles, you have abandoned us entirely," she said. Then, turning towards the two women, she allowed her gaze to travel over their gowns with just enough leisure to be insulting. "Though I see you have found something to keep you… occupied."
Miss Bennet greeted her with perfect civility.
Miss Elizabeth did the same, but there was something in the steadiness of her gaze that made Caroline feel uncomfortably observed.
Before she could decide what she disliked about it, movement beyond Elizabeth's shoulder caught her attention.
Mr Darcy stood a short distance away, his usual reserve nowhere to be seen.
He was looking at Miss Elizabeth with such open admiration that for one astonished moment Caroline scarcely recognised him.
Caroline looked from one to the other. Elizabeth seemed not to have noticed him at all, while Mr Darcy, who ordinarily regarded every woman in the room with the same grave indifference, was staring at her as though he had forgotten what his name was.
That was unexpected. Perhaps the evening would not be quite so dull after all.
"How very pleased I am to meet you, Miss Eliza," Caroline said.