Chapter 11 #2
She jolted. It was the first time, she suddenly realized, that he had called her by her name directly.
“I want you to tell me what your intentions are."
The words came out crisp and controlled, which was rather impressive considering the rather undignified commotion occurring beneath her ribs. “I want you to tell me plainly what this has been, what you imagine it will become, and whether you have given any serious thought to either question.”
There was a pause. Not a dramatic one, not the sort of pause one might perform for effect, but a real one.
The tearoom continued its quiet indifference around them, cups clinking, chairs scraping, someone at a distant table laughing over something entirely unrelated to heartbreak or difficult conversations.
The elderly waitress moved with unhurried authority as she refilled a teapot, entirely unimpressed by the notion that anything of consequence might be occurring nearby.
Caroline sat very straight as she looked at Edward and waited for his answer.
“I have to go back,” he said at last, with a stony expression.
He spoke quietly, without hesitation, and, she noted with reluctant respect, without evasion. “My life is in New York, Caroline. My business, my family, my obligations. I was never going to stay indefinitely. You knew that.”
“I did,” she said, and managed, somehow, to keep her voice steady.
“Then I am not certain what answer you are looking for.”
“I am not looking for any particular answer,” Caroline said.
Which was, of course, a lie. A particularly transparent one. Still, she delivered it with such admirable conviction that she felt it ought to count for something. It was all she could do to comfort herself and save face in the wake of this devastating and humiliating answer.
“I simply want to be certain that we both understand the situation clearly. That is all.”
It was not all. It was not even remotely all. It was, in fact, the sort of statement one made when one had several very large, very inconvenient emotions and no socially acceptable place to put them.
But the alternative was saying things that could not be unsaid.
Things about sudden realizations in art galleries and about the entirely unreasonable habit the human heart had of selecting precisely the wrong moment to become involved.
Particularly when the object of said involvement was already, in every practical sense, halfway out the door.
Edward looked at her for a long moment.
His expression held something she had not seen before. Not his warmth, or his usual keen consideration, but something in between those two states that refused to settle into either. It left her feeling uneasy.
She did not ask what he was thinking.
She found she could not afford another emotional blow tonight.
“Of course,” he said quietly. “We both understand it.”
“Good,” said Caroline, clipped.
She lifted her teacup and drank, though the tea had long since lost any claim to warmth.
The carriage ride back to the Bingley villa proceeded in a silence that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the comfortable quiet they had achieved over the preceding two weeks. That silence had been companionable, even easy, the sort that suggested understanding without requiring proof.
This silence had had edges.
Edges that threatened to cut her fatally if she did not move through them carefully.
Caroline sat with her hands folded neatly in her lap and stared out of the window at the passing streets. She thought about nothing in particular with an intensity that required far more effort than thinking about something usually did, which she suspected was rather the point.
Edward said nothing. He looked out his own window as Caroline looked out hers, and the silence between them was the kind that had stopped being comfortable somewhere around the second cup of tea and had not recovered since.
When the carriage rolled to a stop in front of the villa, he was out before she had properly gathered herself, his hand extended to assist her down with the brisk, practiced efficiency of a man discharging an obligation.
She took it. He released it the moment her feet met the pavement, before she had even straightened.
She was instantly hurt by his coldness. He had never acted like this before.
Usually always lingering by her side a second too long to be proper after helping her down.
"Thank you," she said, "for this afternoon."
"Of course." He said tightly as he looked at the carriage. At the horses. At the precise middle distance that constituted everything in the world except her face.
"The Academy was genuinely impressive," Caroline continued, because apparently she was going to do this, apparently some portion of her had decided that what the present situation required was more words from Caroline Bingley, a development that no one in the history of her life had ever once found helpful.
"I had not expected the collection to be so well-arranged. The lighting in the third room in particular was exceptional."
"Mm," replied Edward, noncommittally.
"And the tearoom was very good." She paused a little desperately. "The scones especially."
He said nothing. He was still not looking at her. His jaw was set in a way she had never seen before. Something about the line of his profile in the late afternoon light made her chest feel as though it had been very neatly hollowed out.
"Edward." His name came out of her rather more quietly than she had intended.
He turned then, briefly, and met her eyes for the first time since the tearoom, and what she saw there was not the warmth she had spent the better part of a fortnight entirely taking for granted.
It was something guarded and altogether too composed for a man who had, only this morning, been laughing at a portrait of an admiral.
She felt the cold expression go through her heart like a blade.
"When can I see you again?" she asked.
The question was too bare. She heard it herself, heard the absence of her usual gloss and deflection.
Heard how plainly it said the thing she had not managed to say correctly all afternoon, and could do absolutely nothing about any of it because it was already out in the open air and it was too late.
Edward looked at her for a moment that lasted considerably longer than could be passed off as normal.
"I don't know," he said at last.
He inclined his head, a small, courteous motion, and then he turned and got back into the carriage with the unhurried calm of a man who had somewhere else to be and was simply going there. The door closed. The carriage moved.
Caroline stood on the pavement and watched it go.
She watched it until it had turned the corner and there was nothing left to watch, and then she stood there a little longer anyway, because going inside required a direction and she had, in the past thirty seconds, rather lost her sense of them.
Not even a single day.
She had barely had a single day with the knowledge of affection settled in her chest before she had taken it, and the one person responsible for producing it, and made an absolute ruin of everything.
This was, she thought, with a clarity she would have preferred not to have, precisely the sort of outcome she might have predicted for herself, had she been paying proper attention.
She had once allowed herself to wonder, in that distant, impractical way one considers things that do not yet have the unpleasant habit of being real, whether she was simply not suited to this particular pursuit.
Whether love, for all her intelligence and composure and carefully honed sense of self, was the one field in which none of it mattered in the least. And whether she would always find herself, in the end, standing quite still on some indifferent pavement while something she had not meant to care about at all simply… drove away.
At the time, she had told herself it was only common sense speaking. That she would grow accustomed to it. That a sensible woman could arrange her life quite neatly around the absence of love if she tried hard enough and did not look at it too closely at what was missing.
It seemed she had been wrong.
She turned and went inside.
She climbed the stairs with her back very straight. She did not allow herself to press her fingers to the place on her hand where his had been, however briefly.
There was nothing there now, after all, to press them to.