Chapter 9 #2
“I was twelve years old,” Caroline said, and her voice fractured neatly on the words.
She did not try to repair it. There seemed little point.
“I was twelve years old, and I was making myself smaller and smaller because some part of me had genuinely come to believe I deserved to disappear. That I owed it. That everything she had said to me every day of those nine years was simply the truth, and the only honest thing I could do was to act accordingly. To stop eating until I withered away just as she had.”
She made herself look up, though the instant she did so she rather wished she had continued to study anything else in the room, including the grain of the table or the unfortunate arrangement of the curtains.
Charles’s face had gone a most alarming shade, all colour drained away as though someone had opened a window inside him and let the life out.
It did not comfort her. If anything, it only made matters worse, for grief, once it had landed in someone’s heart, tended to soon infect all those around them.
“I needed my brother then,” she said, more softly now, as though raising her voice might somehow make the past more solid and therefore more unbearable.
“I needed my family. I was a child and I required someone to tell me that she was mistaken about me. That I was worthy. That I did deserve to be loved. That I was not ugly. That I deserved to liv-” She stopped then, because the sentence had become too sharp to hold without cutting herself on it.
She swallowed once, carefully, as though that might restore some order to the inside of her throat.
“We all know,” she said at last, her voice steadier by sheer force of will, “that if it had not been for Louisa, that would have been the end of me.”
For a moment, there was nothing further to say that did not feel dangerously close to breaking something that had, up until now, remained just barely intact.
“So tell me,” she said, and though her voice still wavered at the edges, there was a new steadiness beneath it now, something that had clearly been waiting rather a long time for its moment.
“Why now? Why have you come to me after all these years with apologies and remorse, as though they might be of any practical use to me now? What, exactly, do you expect me to do with them?”
Charles did not answer. Indeed, he could not.
He sat very still, his hands clasped so tightly one might have worried for the circulation, his expression bearing the unmistakable burden of a guilt that had not, she suspected, been newly acquired.
It had been with him for some time, settled in as comfortably as any unwelcome guest who had decided he had no intention of leaving.
She could not decide whether that made him more forgivable or less so, only that it made everything rather more real than she had any desire for it to be.
And then, without warning or any apparent decision on his part, Charles reached across the small distance between them and drew her into his arms.
She did not mean to accept it. She had every intention of maintaining what single shred of her dignity remained after laying herself so bare.
But then his arms were around her, warm and familiar in a way that undid something in her she had spent a great many years carefully keeping in place.
Suddenly she found, to her considerable annoyance, that she did not want to, in fact, going to withdraw at all.
Instead, she pressed her forehead against her brother’s shoulder and began to cry. Something unrestrained and altogether undignified and entirely beyond her ability to govern.
Charles did not speak. Of course he did not.
He had always possessed the admirable sense to recognize when words would be an intrusion rather than a comfort.
So he simply held her, without hesitation and without complaint, while she fell apart in his arms in a manner she had taken great care to avoid for the better part of a decade.
She cried for mornings she could not seem to forget, and for the child who had once stared fixedly at a flaw in a perfume bottle and simply waited for the world to stop hurting.
She cried for the twelve-year-old girl who had decided that disappearance was something she deserved, and for the young woman who had stood at her mother’s grave and felt nothing at all except a curious and shameful relief, only to spend years discovering that freedom was not the same thing as escape.
She cried for everything she had never said, for everything she had never permitted herself to feel, and for all those years of perfect composure carefully performed for audiences who, in retrospect, had not deserved so much as a single moment of her time.
She cried because her brother was holding her, and because he was sorry, and because sorry did not undo a single thing that had already happened between them, though she had known that perfectly well from the start. But still, it seemed, she had needed to hear him say these words out loud.
Somewhere in the street below, life proceeded exactly as it always had. The coffee beside her went cold without comment, and Caroline Bingley, remained in her brother’s arms.
She did not let go for a very long time.