Chapter 13
The letter had arrived on the twenty-eighth, and Caroline had read it so many times that she no longer needed to unfold it to know its contents.
She knew precisely how many lines it contained, knew the particular slant of his handwriting on the word evening, knew the way his signature curled at the end with the careless confidence of a man who had never once doubted his own name.
She also knew that she had approximately thirty-six hours remaining in England before Edward Reinhart ceased to be in it.
This knowledge had done nothing whatsoever to improve her sleep.
She came down to breakfast looking, she was quite certain, like a woman who had spent the entire night arguing with herself and had lost. Charles took one look at her and opened his mouth.
Jane, with the quiet mastery she had acquired over the past year, laid a hand on his arm.
It was the sort of gesture that saved lives, marriages, and Caroline’s patience.
Charles shut his mouth again. Caroline ate her toast in silence and was grateful to them both in a way she judged far too heartfelt to mention aloud.
The afternoon crept forward with the particular stubborn slowness of hours that knew they were being observed.
She sat down to answer her correspondence.
She abandoned it within minutes. She picked up a book.
The words skittered away like frightened mice.
She moved to the window and remained there for a length of time she refused to quantify, even privately.
She would have denied, to her last breath, that she was looking for anything at all in the street below.
His carriage arrived before sundown, exactly as his letter had promised.
Caroline had dressed herself head to toe for a completely flawless appearance.
She wore her pretty beige silk, the one that never failed to lend her complexion a most becoming air, and she had arranged her hair with her own hands because the ritual steadied her and because she had, over time, become quite skillful at it.
She descended the front steps with her customary composure, which held beautifully until the moment Edward stepped down from the carriage and looked at her.
He looked, she thought, as though the past twelve days had treated him with the same lack of courtesy they had shown her.
There were shadows beneath his eyes that she had not seen there before, and the determined set of his jaw suggested a man carrying far more than he ought to have been carrying alone.
She was aware, in a distant and mildly embarrassed way, that she should not feel comforted by this.
It was hardly gracious to find solace in another person's sleepless nights.
"Caroline," he said, and his voice held all its usual warmth, even if the rest of him did not look as lively as usual.
"Mr. Reinhart," she replied, because they were standing in the street and good habits were stubborn things.
Something in his expression shifted for the briefest moment, a flicker of amusement that came and went too quickly to name.
He offered his hand to help her into the carriage.
She accepted it, and neither spoke again until they were seated inside, the door had shut behind them, and London began its slow, steady retreat through the windows.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"You will see," he said, with a mysterious sparkle in his eyes.
Caroline decided, just for this occasion, to allow it.
They reached the lake just as the last of the daylight slipped away. It lay a little beyond the city, tucked behind a quiet stand of elms, and in the softening dark it seemed entirely content with its own undisturbed solitude. Yet it was not the peace of the place that stole her breath.
It was the lanterns.
Dozens of them, perhaps even more, drifted across the water's surface in idle clusters, their paper shells glowing a warm amber that shimmered in wavering reflections below. The sight hovered somewhere between a dream and a painting, and Caroline found herself standing at the water’s edge completely without the ability to speak.
"How on earth did you do all this?" she finally managed.
"I have my ways," Edward replied with a roguishly proud grin. He had the air of a man perfectly aware that he had accomplished something impressive and determined not to spoil it by appearing overly smug.
A small boat rested at the bank. Inside, arranged with a sort of casual elegance that could only have been achieved through considerable effort, were several larger lanterns waiting their turn to be admired by her.
He helped her aboard the boat with a steadiness she appreciated, for the boat behaved with all the bright unpredictability of things designed to float.
Once she was settled, he took the opposite bench and lifted the oars with confidence.
She picked up one of the lanterns from the pile beside her and held it in the light from the water.
The paper was thin and fine, and up close she could see that it had been pressed with small patterns, tiny flowers, and trailing vines that she had not been able to make out from the bank.
She turned it over carefully in her hands.
"They are lovely," she said, and it was not at all the sort of remark she usually made about anything. Yet in that moment it felt like the only word that belonged.
He rowed them toward the center of the lake in slow, easy strokes, as though they had all the time in the world.
When he set the oars aside and allowed the boat to drift, it turned gently in the current until the shore vanished behind them and they were surrounded entirely by lanterns and water and a sky so dark and richly blue that it looked almost unreal.
The stars crowded above them in such numbers that it seemed someone had flung them across the heavens in a fit of enthusiasm.
Caroline tipped her face upward and watched them for a long while without speaking. Edward remained silent as well, and she appreciated that more than she could say, for she felt quite unequal to conversation and profoundly unsure of what words might come out if she attempted any.
"I owe you an apology," she said finally.
He glanced over at her from his seat. "Do you?"
"For the afternoon at the tearoom." She kept her eyes on the sky because it was far easier than looking at him. "I managed to make an absolute muddle of what should have been a perfectly pleasant day, and I have been thinking about it far more than I would like."
"You do not owe me anything for that," Edward said.
"I was antagonizing you," Caroline said, choosing each word with care. "I was asking questions I already knew the answers to because I did not wish to hear them. Then I was upset when I heard them anyway, which is not even remotely your fault."
The boat drifted a little more, turning just enough that a lone lantern floated past, its light sliding softly across the water.
"Don't be," Edward said, so quietly she almost missed it.
"I am glad you said it. I had been very determined not to think about certain matters, and your very deliberate questions gave me far less room to avoid them than I had planned on.
" He paused, and she heard him draw in a slow breath.
"It left me with just enough time to arrange this.
I knew tonight needed to be something worth remembering. "
Caroline lowered her gaze to the lantern resting in her hands. There was something different in his voice, something she had not expected, and she was not at all sure what to do with it.
"Because this is the last day we have together," she said.
The words came out softer than she intended. Less a declaration and more an admission. More sorrow, if she were admitting the truth, than she had ever meant to show.
There was a silence so long that the boat had almost completed a full turn before he spoke again, and when he did, it startled her in spite of herself.
"It does not have to be."
She looked up at once. He was watching her from across the small space between them with an expression she had never seen before, the look of a man who had come to a conclusion only after considerable argument with himself and was not yet entirely certain whether he would be met with approval or disaster.
"I beg your pardon?" she said.
"I told you something that was not entirely accurate the last time we met," he said.
"When I said I had not been thinking about what would happen to us in the future.
I had, in fact, thought about it rather a great deal.
I considered it at length and then dismissed every conclusion I reached, because none of them seemed possible or sensible or anything other than the sort of hope a reasonable man ought not to indulge in for fear of what it might do to him. "
"Edward," she said, because his name was the only thing she could think to offer him.
"I know what I would like," he said. His voice was steady, unadorned, without any of the careful embellishment of a man attempting to soften a woman.
"I would like you to come back to America with me."
The lake remained unnaturally still. Somewhere behind them, a lantern gave a faint, gentle hiss as it drifted across the water. Caroline felt quite similar to that lantern right now.
"I have been acquainted with a great many people in my life," he continued.
"Some genuine, some considerably less so, and rather more of them tedious than I would have preferred.
And in all of that time, I have never encountered anyone who spoke to me the way you do.
Who thought the way you do." Something shifted in his expression, warm and unguarded.
"Who looked at a woman being humiliated across a ballroom, and instead of defending her in an normal manner chose instead to throw her punch at the culprits' faces without a single moment's hesitation. "