Chapter 12 #2
Jane crossed the room and settled herself at the end of the settee with the unhurried care of a woman who was now eight months pregnant and had long ago accepted that every movement required forethought over dignity.
She placed the plate between them as though it were something of importance rather than merely biscuits, then looked at Caroline with those clear, steady eyes that Caroline had once found irritating beyond endurance and had, against her better judgment, come to find rather comforting lately.
“Charles and I agree you have been quiet lately,” Jane said.
"I am frequently quiet."
"You have been a different kind of quiet."
Caroline looked at the biscuits. They were very evenly browned, which suggested Cook had been paying extra attention. She picked one up and held it. "You will be very good at this," she said, which was not what she had intended to say.
Jane blinked, caught off guard. "At what?"
Caroline turned the biscuit over once in her fingers, as though it might offer her some further insight into human nature. “Motherhood,” she said at last, with the brisk certainty she brought to anything she believed to be true, “will suit you. You will be very natural at it.”
She said it as she always said such things, without ornament or hesitation, because she had long ago discovered that too much ceremony only made honesty sound suspicious.
“You notice things,” she continued. “The sort of things most people overlook entirely. You will be insufferable about it, of course, but in a manner that will no doubt serve your children extremely well.”
Jane did not respond at once. When she did, her voice had softened in a way that made Caroline feel inconveniently put upon. She had not wanted to make the women so emotional.
“Thank you, Caroline.”
“Do not thank me,” Caroline replied at once. “I am only stating a fact.”
Jane chuckled to herself for some reason at this comment, muttering back a, “Yes of course. Because Bingley women do not give compliments.”
Caroline felt vaguely like Jane was mocking her in some way, but she could not understand how, as there was no malice behind it.
She set the biscuit down, then picked it up again, as though uncertain what to do with her hands now that they had begun betraying her. Then, because she had been holding the words for weeks, possibly months now and had discovered they did not improve with time, she added, “I owe you an apology.”
Jane went very still across from her. Caroline swallowed. As uncomfortable as this was. She knew it had to be done for her own peace of mind.
“Not only for Netherfield last week,” Caroline continued, keeping her tone steady with considerable effort, “though certainly for that as well. Before you married Charles, I was very… unkind to you. I dismissed you before you had done anything to deserve it, and I said things on more than one occasion that I am not proud of.”
She fixed her gaze on a point somewhere beyond Jane’s shoulder, because looking directly at her while saying any of this would, she suspected, render her entirely incapable of continuing.
She went on. “During your courtship with Charles, I worked rather diligently against you both, and I told myself at the time that I was merely being honest in my assessments.”
A pause.
“I know better now. My eyes were blinded by…prejudice.”
Silence followed the declaration, as though the room itself required a moment to breathe after her words.
"I behaved badly," Caroline said, because sometimes the only appropriate thing to do with a truth was to state it without embellishment and let it stand on its own without the assistance of additional words. "I am sorry for it."
Jane sucked in a breath.
"Thank you, for saying all of this," Jane said gently. "But I have forgiven you for everything in the past."
Caroline turned to look at her then, startled enough that she quite forgot the usual care she took with her expression.
Jane was watching her with that same unnervingly perceptive gaze, and there was not so much as a flicker of resentment in it anywhere.
It was, Caroline thought, a rather extraordinary accomplishment for a woman she had once given every possible reason to resent her to manage so completely.
“You forgave me before I even apologized?” she asked, which was not, strictly speaking, gracious, but did at least have the merit of honesty.
“I had a year to do so,” Jane replied simply. “And in that time I have come to think you are… remarkably misunderstood.”
She tilted her head slightly, regarding Caroline with the same calm attentiveness she brought to everything from conversations to catastrophes.
“You also did not need to apologize for last week. I was the one who spoke out of line. And I was not angry with you for telling me to leave your room after I made you so uncomfortable.”
The sitting room fell very quiet. Somewhere beyond the window, a horse passed over the cobblestones with a sharp clatter, and then the sound was gone, as though it had never been.
“What you said to me,” Caroline began, and rather annoyingly, her voice, which had been behaving itself with admirable discipline until this very moment, chose that precise instant to betray her.
She cleared her throat and tried again.
“When you left my room that morning,” she said. “What you said–”
Jane waited, unhurried and patient, as though she had all the time in the world and no intention of using it against her.
“No one had ever said that to me before,” Caroline said at last. “In my entire life. Not in any form.”
“Then it was long overdue,” Jane replied at once.
Caroline looked down at the biscuit in her hand as though it might offer her some sensible guidance, which, in her experience, biscuits rarely did.
The trouble with kindness, she had begun to suspect, was that it created a very particular sort of difficulty for women who had spent most of their adult lives preparing themselves for unkindness.
A blow, after all, could be met with a counterblow.
It had intent, direction, and a certain honesty about it.
Caroline had always excelled at dealing with things that behaved honestly.
Gentleness, however, had no such courtesy. It came from all directions at once and refused to announce its intentions in advance. She had not yet decided how one was meant to defend oneself against it or whether defense was even the correct word.
“I am glad,” she said at last, “that my brother married you. I know now that I could have never hoped for a more good natured and accepting sister-in-law.”
Jane made a sound that was not, by any reasonable definition, composed.
Caroline’s head shot up immediately.
Jane’s eyes had gone entirely too bright, and her hand was pressed firmly to her mouth, though it did nothing to hide the fact that her shoulders were shaking. It was, Caroline thought with rising alarm, the unmistakable beginning of tears.
“Jane,” she said, a little urgently now. “Are you quite all right? I was attempting to be kind. I understand that I am not familiar with the practice, but surely this is an overreaction to a failed attempt?”
Jane gave a breathless laugh, entirely undermined by the way it caught on something rather fragile in her throat.
“I know,” she managed, still shaking from laughter through her tears. It was a rather disorienting sight. “I know. I am so sorry. It is not you. Your attempt at kindness was actually quite lovely, thank you—"
"Then what on earth—"
"It is the baby," Jane said at last, pressing her fingers more firmly to her mouth as though this might assist matters, which it did not appear to be doing in any meaningful way.
"I have cried at four separate occasions this week.
Three of them were at mealtimes. Charles wept along with me on two of those, which I found more endearing than I can possibly express, but which did not help either of us very much. "
Caroline stared at her.
And then, to her own considerable astonishment, she herself also began to laugh.
It escaped her before she could do anything about it, rather more genuinely than her usual laughter.
Jane laughed alongside her, still half-crying in the manner of a woman completely at the mercy of her own biology and finding it seemingly at least partially funny.
The two of them sat together on the settee with a plate of ginger snaps between them and the London afternoon pressing softly against the windows.
"Charles," Caroline said at last, "wept at dinner."
"Twice," Jane confirmed, wiping her eyes, her whole face luminous with it. "He told me afterward that he found it very clarifying as an experience for his nerves and now understood why women partook in it so often."
Caroline pressed her lips together and lost the battle to contain herself yet again.
For once, she was completely unconcerned about how the present company might judge her for her actions. She just allowed herself to exist in the moment of lightheartedness.
When she was finally done laughing, Caroline picked up a biscuit, and this time she actually ate it.
The taste of ginger was sweeter on her tongue than it had ever been before.