Chapter 6 #2
"Your mother," Jane started to say at last, and her voice had gone very gentle, in a way that suggested she was treating something like she believed it to be very delicate and fragile. "When she was teaching you these Bingley values…did she direct them at you herself? When you were a child?"
The room went devastatingly silent. Caroline suddenly realized that she had severely miscalculated.
She had not accounted for Jane’s gentleness in the world of harsh societal reprimands.
She did not know how to win this game when someone refused to play by the set rules.
If they did not only grow increasingly more nasty and agitated in their accusations.
Worse still, Jane’s words had dealt her a real and very painful blow.
Caroline stood perfectly still and felt something cold and hard settle in her chest. She looked at Jane's face and found there the last expression she had any interest in seeing on anyone's face directed at her.
Especially not from Jane. It was the gentle, perceptive sympathy of someone who had asked a question and already, from the answer in her silence, largely understood the answer.
Caroline felt rage boil inside of her. Hot and uncontrollable.
She did not need Jane's understanding. She did not need her pity. It was only the physical reminder of Jane’s delicate condition that held her back in that moment from vocalizing her rage at the women for daring to reduce her to such a lowly state.
And yet still, Jane had stripped her of a shell of outer defense she relied on constantly to be regarded as a respectable member of society.
Without it. With the knowledge of even a sliver of what her mother had put her through for the first ten years of her life out in the open, Caroline suddenly felt so hideously vulnerable she wanted to crawl out of her own skin.
She never wanted to feel like this again.
Never wanted to allow someone to hold this level of power over her again.
Especially not someone she did not fully trust like Jane.
She stood up, crossed to the door in three brisk steps, and pulled it open harshly.
"Get out," she demanded.
"Caroline–"
"I said get out."
Jane’s face fell, then she rose from the bed with the unhurried dignity a woman in her state could manage. Caroline stood at the open door and did not look at her as she crossed the room. Did not look at her as she reached the threshold, and nearly, very nearly, managed not to look at her at all.
But Jane stopped in the doorway. She turned, and she was close enough now that Caroline could see precisely how blue and clear her eyes were.
She wanted to slam the door in her face.
She did not. She just stood there and said nothing.
Waiting with the rigid composure of a woman standing in the middle of high winds, for Jane to leave.
She begged the women in her mind to not say anything more.
Caroline suddenly felt too naked under her gaze and felt she had suffered quite enough for one day.
Jane looked at her for a long, moment with those dreadful, perceptive eyes.
"You know," she said softly, "just because some Bingley women were that way does not mean that all of them must be."
She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was impossibly gentler. She couldn't help but find it haunting. "You do not have to be like her, Caroline."
And then she left.
Caroline shut the door.
She stood with her back against the heavy wood and her hand still flat against it. She breathed.
In. Out. In. Out.
The quality of the morning light through the curtains was the same as it had been five minutes ago, and yet the world was blurry, completely incomprehensible to her now.
You do not have to be like her.
No one had ever said that to her. Not in all her twenty-one years.
She had heard, over the course of those years, a remarkable variety of things said about her, many of them unkind and several of them considerably more creative than necessary, but no one had ever stood in front of her and said that particular sentence.
Not in that particular tone. Not with the particular calm certainty of someone who believed it entirely.
Who said it not as consolation but as a fact.
Caroline was lost.
The part of her that was her mother's daughter told herself that Jane Bennet was a sheltered optimist who had no earthly understanding of the shape of the world, and should therefore be dismissed accordingly.
The other part of her, the part she rarely acknowledged, the part that had been six years old once and staring at perfume bottles to get through the morning. That part wanted to do something she was not entirely prepared for.
It wanted to believe her.
Caroline pressed her fingertips to the bridge of her nose and took one long, careful breath, and then another, and by the third she had composed herself enough to see the world for what it was again.
In. Out. In. Out.
It made no difference whether she wished to believe in Jane. Wishing had never served her well.
The part of her that believed in fairytales had long since withered away. Around the same time she finally acknowledged that no matter how long she waited, no one was ever coming to save her.