Chapter 6
It was a perfectly fine morning, as mornings went, which was to say that it was too bright, too early, and presently occupied by a woman who was trying not to regret the choices she made last night while slightly inebriated.
Caroline sat at the vanity in her Netherfield bedchamber and drew the comb through her hair with the deliberate care of someone who had learned, long ago, that some tasks were best managed entirely on one's own.
Netherfield housed an entirely different set of maids, and she did not want a repeat of the hairbrush incident from last week.
She divided her hair into sections with methodical care and tried, with rather less success, to divide her thoughts with the same orderly precision.
This proved significantly more difficult, owing in large part to the fact that her thoughts had apparently decided to arrange themselves in a sprawling, chaotic fashion around the subject of one Edward Reinhart.
American, thirty-one, owner of three horses and three brothers, and a laugh that had produced the single most inconvenient sensation she had experienced in recent memory.
She had agreed to his deal, agreed to give a virtual stranger three days to prove to her that love was not, in fact, a monumental exercise in disappointment.
The punch, she decided with great conviction, had clearly been far too strong last night. There was no other reasonable explanation.
She thought about his voice, the low warmth of it, and promptly told herself to stop thinking about his voice.
She thought about the way he had looked at her, with that quiet, assessing attention, as though she were something genuinely interesting rather than merely tolerable, and she told herself to stop thinking about that as well.
She was, she reminded herself firmly, a practical woman.
A woman of considerable intelligence and sound judgment who had simply made a small and entirely reversible social arrangement with a man who would be sailing back to New York before the month was out and who, therefore, posed absolutely no lasting threat to the orderly management of her future.
Why couldn’t she find some entertainment of her own in his company?
She was repeating this reassurance for approximately the fourth time when someone knocked at her door.
Caroline set down the comb. "I specifically told the maids I was not to be disturbed this morning."
"It is I."
Caroline's hands stilled.
The voice from the corridor was quiet and belonged, unmistakably, to the one person she had not anticipated finding on the other side of her door at this or, if she were being honest, any hour.
She sat for a moment and considered the distinct possibility that if she simply did not answer, the corridor would eventually return to its prior state of pleasant emptiness.
Caroline sighed, such delusions were not befitting of her.
Caroline set the comb on the vanity table with a small, precise click and rose to open the door.
Jane Bingley stood in the corridor outside, her chestnut hair neatly pinned and her striking blue eyes characteristically wide open.
Her figure was a state of advancement that Caroline's brother had managed to appear pleasantly surprised by for the full duration of the past seven months despite having been, as far as Caroline was aware, intimately acquainted with the biological processes involved in leading to it.
Being reminded of their antics once again meant she had to force herself not to roll her eyes.
"Can I come in?" Jane asked.
Caroline considered several possible replies, rejected most of them for being either far too revealing or far too impolite for even her current state of being crapulous, and then stepped back from the doorway in a silent gesture of reluctant welcome.
She was fairly certain she could not banish her sister in law, no matter how satisfying the fantasy might have been.
Jane stood above her in consequence now, and even Caroline knew where that particular hierarchy must be respected. Jane entered the room.
She settled on the edge of the bed with a quiet sigh that suggested no small amount of relief for her.
Caroline was not surprised, as Jane had taken to sitting more often the further she progressed in her pregnancy.
Caroline returned to her place at the vanity and regarded her sister-in-law with the wary expression she generally reserved for social mishaps whose purpose had not yet made itself known.
Several seconds passed in a silence that Caroline found neither meaningful nor useful. She was many things, but she was not a woman who confused waiting with peace. If something needed addressing, she preferred it addressed immediately.
"Why are you here?"
Jane, who had been studying her hands with great concentration, lifted her gaze at last. "I wanted to thank you."
Caroline blinked, genuinely startled. "I beg your pardon?"
"For what you did last night." Jane held her eyes with a steadiness that Caroline could not help finding rather admirable given her nature. "At the ball. Those women were speaking so cruelly, and you put a stop to it. I could not manage it myself. I am grateful that you did."
There was a pause. Caroline turned back toward the vanity and picked up the comb again, because the vanity at least provided a surface to look at that was not Jane's earnest blue eyes.
"You are thanking me for the wrong thing entirely. I was not doing it for you. I was doing it because they were irritating me. I find that particular variety of people irritating as a general rule. I had a perfectly good cup of punch in my hand that suddenly seemed better applied elsewhere."
"I see," Jane said, in a tone that suggested she did not, in fact, see.
"You don't need to thank me," Caroline repeated again with a sigh. "You must learn to manage that sort of situation yourself. You are a Bingley now. I would strongly recommend beginning to act like one."
The words came out much harsher than she had quite intended, though not, she thought, inaccurately.
Jane had spent the better part of a year sitting around very quietly and smiling very pleasantly and generally conducting herself in the manner of someone determined to take up as little space as possible.
Caroline had long since accepted that this was simply the disposition her brother had inexplicably chosen to attach himself to, she found it increasingly difficult to pretend she considered it an adequate strategy for navigating the world.
It was comical, really. That the most timid man in London should somehow find and marry the most timid woman in all of England. Caroline feared for their children’s oral capabilities.
Jane was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was softer and slightly more uncertain, but no less direct than before. "Why do you hate me so much?"
Caroline turned to face Jane more fully, even more startled than before. "Why do I what?"
"We have been living under the same roof for nearly a year," Jane said, and there was something in her voice now that was less its usual gentle quality and more bitter.
If she were being honest, it was the sound of a woman who had been holding her words in for quite some time now and suddenly found she could no longer contain them.
"And in that year, you have said perhaps thirty words to me that were not strictly necessary for the management of the household. I am not emotionally obtuse, Caroline. I know what the deliberate silence of someone who dislikes me looks and feels like."
Caroline reconsidered the punch last night for the third time that morning, as she felt the throbbing in her temple growing.
She understood what this was about now. She could admit this is not the first time she had ever been in such a situation, and she thought it was rather prudent to nip this misunderstanding in the bud before it could grow into true resentment.
"I do not hate you," she said at last. "I have behaved with perfect civility towards you. I would think, rather, that you ought to be thanking me for that instead."
Jane stared at her wide-eyed. "You want me to thank you for ignoring me?"
"I want you to acknowledge," Caroline corrected, with the patient clarity of someone explaining something self-evident to an unreasonable audience, "that I have been perfectly civil and have given you no cause for offense.
The manner in which I conduct myself towards you is simply the manner in which I conduct myself towards all.
It is not a reflection of my feelings toward you particularly. I am like this with everyone."
"That is not–" Jane said, with a quiet firmness that was, Caroline thought with a flash of something close to fascination, rather a good deal more pointed than her usual register, "a normal way to treat people. It isn't kind, and it isn't what I imagined having a sister-in-law might feel like."
"Then perhaps–" Caroline bit back without a moment's hesitation. This was her element, and Jane was fooling herself if she thought she could out debate the Caroline Bingley.
"Your imagination requires some adjusting.
Bingley women are not soft, Jane. We are not demonstrative, and we are not given to sentimentality.
We do not manufacture warmth on demand for the convenience of others.
My mother made certain of that." She paused, the words she was speaking were making her ears ring.
They were true yet something about them made her feel more queasy.
It must just be the rising volume of her tone she concluded.
"As you are a Bingley now Jane, I suggest you learn to behave the same."
Jane did not answer back to her pointed comment immediately. Instead, she looked at Caroline for a long moment with an expression that was so thoughtful and so sad that it instantly set Caroline’s teeth on edge.