Chapter 7
The trouble with Jane Bennet, Caroline had decided somewhere between the third and fourth time she had replayed their conversation from the previous morning, was that she was entirely too perceptive for a woman who seemed, on the surface, to be nothing more than dull.
A woman that pleasant simply had no business possessing eyes quite that clear, and the particular ability to say five words that split a person straight down the center and then walk away with the serene composure of someone who had done nothing more remarkable than comment on the weather.
She disliked her greatly for it.
Caroline pressed her fingertips to her temple and stared at the ceiling with the resigned expression of a woman who had spent the better part of a night and a morning attempting to locate the precise corner of her mind in which unwanted thoughts might be properly stored and has discovered, to her considerable irritation, that no such corner exists.
She had tried reading. She had abandoned it at page four when she realized she had read the same paragraph six times without absorbing a single word.
She had tried correspondence. Three letters remained half-finished on the writing desk, each of them abandoned at approximately the moment she had found herself writing something other than what she had intended.
She had tried simply sitting in dignified silence, which had lasted approximately four minutes before the silence revealed itself to be not the least bit dignified and a great deal more populated with Jane's voice than she could tolerate.
It was not, she insisted to herself for the eleventh time, as though the words had meant anything in particular to her.
Jane Bingley was a woman of warm dispositions and charitable assumptions and approximately no practical understanding of how the world operated.
She was the sort of woman who looked at a damaged thing and believed, with entirely unjustified confidence, that it might be repaired by the application of sufficient gentleness.
Caroline had met this variety of person before.
They were invariably well-intentioned and invariably exhausting and invariably wrong.
There was absolutely no reason for their well-intentioned wrongness to linger in one's chest for two days as though it had set up residence there without consulting the landlord.
She was on the verge of her twelfth repetition when someone knocked at her door.
"I told the maids I was not to be disturbed this morning," Caroline said once again, to the door, to the ceiling, to anyone in earshot with the basic competence to receive information and act upon it.
"Begging your pardon, Miss Bingley." It was the soft, slightly tentative voice of the youngest of the Netherfield upstairs maids, who had thus far demonstrated a commendable ability to deliver messages with minimum conversational accompaniment.
"There is a gentleman downstairs, miss. A Mr. Edward Reinhart. He is calling for you."
Caroline sat up so quickly she felt the room tilt.
Edward Reinhart.
She had, in the extraordinary emotional upheaval of the past twenty-four hours, managed to forget entirely about Edward Reinhart.
This realization struck her as equal parts mortifying and astonishing, given that he had occupied a rather significant portion of her thoughts for the preceding week and had been, until Jane had arrived at her door yesterday morning and dismantled her from the inside, the primary occupant of her mental landscape.
And yet here she was, entirely unprepared for him, still in her dressing gown, with her hair only half arranged.
They had agreed to meet today hadn’t they? How could she have possibly forgotten?
"Tell him," Caroline said, rising from the bed with the brisk efficiency of a woman coming back to her senses, "that I shall be down shortly.
Offer him refreshments, and apologize for the delay on my behalf.
" She crossed to the door, opened it, and addressed the maid directly.
"And send up Mary to assist me, if you please. Quickly."
The maid curtsied and retreated with admirable haste. Caroline turned back to her dressing table and regarded herself in the mirror with the dispassionate assessment of a general surveying terrain before a campaign.
Ten minutes later, she descended the stairs at a pace that was composed without appearing hurried, which was, she felt, one of her finer accomplishments.
Edward Reinhart was standing near the window of the front sitting room when she entered, one hand resting on the sill, looking out at the garden with a remarkably easy patience for a man that had been inconvenienced so.
He turned at the sound of her entrance, and his expression shifted into something that was warm and rather difficult to look at directly.
Rather like glancing at the sun and discovering it was genuinely pleased to see you again.
"Miss Bingley," he said, and the warmth in his voice did precisely the same thing to her sternum as it had the first two times.
She was beginning to suspect that this was simply a permanent condition in his vicinity.
He crossed the room and took her hand, pressing a brief kiss to her gloved knuckles, and when he straightened he looked down at her with an expression she recognized from the balcony and from the Netherfield garden, the expression of a man who had found something that seemed to greatly interest him.
"I was beginning to think you might have forgotten about me entirely. "
"I did not forget," Caroline said, which was technically true if one permitted a twenty-hour lapse in memory to qualify. "I was merely otherwise engaged."
"Of course." His eyes held that glint of amusement she was learning to expect. "You look particularly well this morning, if you will permit me to say so."
"You may say so," Caroline replied pleasantly, settling into the chair opposite and folding her hands in her lap with the composure of a woman who had just spent a fair bit of effort on her appearance and liked being complimented on it.
"You will excuse me if I do not return the compliment. I find it is terribly bad form to encourage a man who already possesses such an inflated sense of his own charm."
"And yet you are smiling."
"I smile at a great many things. It is not an endorsement." Caroline was smiling, damn him. She had simpered before too many suitors in the past. It was refreshing to be able to speak her mind in front of this man as she already knew there was no chance for their relationship to amount to anything.
Edward laughed, and it was exactly what she remembered.
Warm and entirely at home in his own expression.
He settled into the chair across from her with the same easy carelessness he brought to every room he occupied, as though furniture had been specifically arranged with his comfort in mind and the world had simply neglected to inform everyone else of this fact.
"Then I will accept whatever encouragement is on offer and make no demands of the smile. "
"Very sensible of you," Caroline said. She tilted her head, studying him with the frank assessment she generally reserved for matters of genuine importance, and then said, because it had occurred to her only this moment that she had agreed to this arrangement with very little clarification as to the precise nature of what she had agreed to, "I find I have a question for you. "
"Ask it."
"What, exactly, are we doing?"
He blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"I mean," Caroline said, trying not to roll her eyes with the patience of someone explaining a perfectly reasonable question to another who had simply not yet caught up, "how would you define this?
What we are. What this is." She made a small, precise gesture between them.
"From the outside, I imagine the arrangement you have proposed bears a considerable resemblance to a courtship.
We are spending time together, alone, going to various places, having what I am given to understand are meant to be meaningful conversations.
That is, generally speaking, the architecture of a courtship. "
"I would have to agree," Edward said slowly, watching her with the expression of a man who suspected he knew where this was heading and was not entirely certain what to do about it.
"And yet," Caroline continued, "we have both agreed, with full mutual understanding, that the arrangement in question will not culminate in any offer of marriage, because you will be returning to New York at the end of the month, and therefore the logical conclusion of a courtship is, in our case, not logically available to us.
So I find myself wondering what word one ought to apply to this instead.
" She held his gaze with a calm steadiness.
She had asked a perfectly reasonable question and was waiting, without embarrassment, for a perfectly reasonable answer.
Edward was quiet for a moment. He had the look again, she thought. Of a man who had just been handed something he hadn't expected to be interested in and found it considerably more so than he'd anticipated. Then, very slowly, the corner of his mouth curved upward. "Partners," he said.
Caroline blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Partners," he repeated, with the easy certainty of a man whose ideas always sounded more settled once said aloud.
"Consider the nature of the arrangement itself.
We have both agreed to a deal from which we each stand to gain something.
You seek proof, one way or the other, on the subject of love.
I seek the pleasure of genuinely stimulating company in a country that has proven rather disappointing.
We each bring something to the transaction.
We each hope to come away with something in return. "
He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, watching her with that particular attentiveness that she had noticed he directed at things he found worth attending to. "If this were a business arrangement, the individuals engaged in it would be called partners. Would they not?"
Caroline considered this, with the specific variety of consideration she brought to things that struck her as both outrageous and, in an annoying way, somewhat logical.
"That," she said at last, "is the most transactional description of courtship that I have ever heard in my life."
"You asked for a label," Edward pointed out, leaning back in his chair nonchalantly.
"I asked for a definition. Not a barrister’s analysis."
"In my experience, the two are not so different.
" He smiled at her, and the smile had that quality she had noticed before.
The quality of being aimed very specifically at her rather than in her general direction, which was, she was finding, a rather more unsettling thing to be on the receiving end of than she had previously understood. "Does the term offend you?"
Caroline considered him for a moment longer.
She thought about the word partners and found that it was, despite everything, considerably less objectionable than several of the alternatives she could have named.
It was direct and practical and entirely free of the sort of sentiment that she had spent the better part of her adult life learning to distrust on principle.
It described exactly what they were without making any claims it could not substantiate.
"No," she said finally. "It does not offend me. It does, however, confirm something I have long suspected about you."
"And what is that?"
"That everything about the manner in which you think and speak," she said, with the serene composure of someone delivering a verdict she believed perfectly unassailable, "is so overwhelmingly American that it is very nearly intolerable."
Edward Reinhart regarded her for one uncomprehending heartbeat, and then there it was again. That laugh. Full and unrestrained and entirely too large for the space it inhabited, as though laughter itself had decided to take up residence in the room. Caroline felt breathless just listening to it.
"I shall take that as a compliment," he said, once he had managed to summon enough breath for speech.
"You may take it however you please," Caroline replied with great dignity. "I am hardly responsible for your interpretations."
He rose from the chair with the unhurried grace that seemed woven into every movement he made, and offered her his arm. His coat was a remarkably fine dark wool, and in the morning light his eyes were far warmer than she remembered.
"Shall we?" he asked, and the simple question carried the unmistakable air of a man who had been looking forward to this for quite some time and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Caroline rose and regarded the offered arm for the amount of time necessary to make it clear that she accepted by choice rather than enthusiasm.
Only then did she place her hand in the crook of his elbow.
His arm was solid and warm beneath the fabric, and she found herself aware of it in a way that felt far more intimate than she considered appropriate.
She gave him a single, perfectly composed nod.
The sort of nod that conveyed readiness to proceed while scrupulously avoiding the suggestion of anything more.
He appeared to find even this sincerely amusing, a reaction she would have found insufferable in nearly any other man.
In him, however, it was perilously close to charming.
This, she thought, could only be attributed to the particular focus of his attention and was undoubtedly a troubling development.
She would have to consider it later, in the privacy of her room, where thoughts of this nature could be properly confined and prevented from running riot through an otherwise sensible morning.
Men were, as a general category, an enduring mystery to Caroline Bingley.
This one, she suspected, was destined to be more mysterious than most.