Chapter 14
The ship was scheduled to depart at noon the following day.
Caroline knew this because she had read Edward’s letter more times than was strictly reasonable, and because the departure time had been placed, with infuriating calmness, in the third paragraph.
She had an excellent memory for facts she would very much have preferred not to retain.
She also knew that if one left London at half past eight for the docks, one arrived with what her brother would have called a comfortable margin, and what she herself could only describe as a rather offensive excess of time in which to stand about and feel one’s entire life unravel before a ship carried the only man she had ever truly loved to another continent.
She was not standing about, however. Standing about suggested idleness, and she was quite busy.
She was walking, with considerable and entirely purposeful determination, from one end of the upstairs corridor to the other and back again.
It was exercise, she told herself firmly.
Very dignified exercise. She refused to call it pacing, because pacing implied nerves, and nerves implied vulnerability, and she had already met her full quota of vulnerability for the month, thank you very much.
“You have now passed that door,” Charles observed from the foot of the stairs, “eleven times.”
Caroline stopped at once. “I was not counting.”
“I was.” He leaned against the newel post with his usual air of patient resignation, as though he had been born into the role and had accepted it with weary grace.
“Are you going to come down and eat something, or shall I have Cook send a tray into the corridor? It does appear to be where you are taking your meals today.”
Caroline flushed and came downstairs.
Not because Charles had asked, of course, and certainly not because Jane had raised an eyebrow in that quiet, almost imperceptible way that suggested she was already halfway through a conclusion Caroline would very much prefer she did not reach.
No, she came downstairs because the corridor had ceased to be instructive somewhere around her seventh pass, and she had exhausted its considerable capacity for offering her nothing but increasingly irritating thoughts.
Breakfast had been set in the morning room, and Jane was already at the table, hands wrapped neatly around her teacup. Her expression had that careful, watchful calm Caroline had come to recognize with growing unease as the sort that preceded a conversation one could not politely avoid.
Caroline poured herself tea, sat, and studied her toast with the kind of attention normally reserved for matters of great importance. She was not thinking about anything at all.
“Are you feeling well, Caroline?” Jane asked cautiously.
She did not look up from her cup, which Caroline found either considerate or cowardly, and she was not at all certain which interpretation she preferred.
“I am fine,” Caroline said flatly.
“Well you must have been feeling very poorly last night,” Charles said, settling into the chair opposite her with his coffee and an expression that suggested he had already decided everything and was merely waiting for the rest of them to catch up. “As you did not come down to dinner.”
“I had a headache.”
“You have never had a headache in your life,” Charles said, not unkindly. “You once told me headaches were a luxury illness invented by women who required an excuse to avoid the company of men they found dull.”
Caroline picked up her toast. “I may have revised my opinion on the matter.”
The room fell into a silence of the very particular sort that occurs when two people are having a silent disagreement using only their eyes in an effort to conceal their true intentions from a third. Caroline found it intolerable.
“All right,” she said at last, setting the toast down with careful precision. “Out with it. Say what you have come to say.”
Charles and Jane exchanged one last swift, glances that communicated entire paragraphs in the time it took most people to clear their throats.
Caroline had always found this skill of theirs both impressive and insufferable.
"We are not here to say anything," Charles said.
"We are here because we also live in this house, and have seen some…
alarming behavior from you as of late. And because we are rather worried about you. "
“I am perfectly fine,” Caroline said at once, with a degree of speed that rather suggested the opposite.
“You passed the upstairs corridor eleven times before nine in the morning,” Charles replied. “You are not fine, Caroline. And I think you know it.”
She looked down at her tea. Then, as though it might contain answers if she stared hard enough, she looked at the window.
After that she considered the ceiling, which proved disappointingly unhelpful.
At last she set her cup down with great care, as though sudden movements might cause the entire situation to become worse.
“There is a man,” she said.
Jane’s eyes widened immediately, and Charles made a sound suspiciously like he had forgotten how to breathe.
“He is leaving for New York tomorrow afternoon,” Caroline continued, with the determined calm of someone who had decided that if she must confess something ruinous, she would at least do it properly.
“His name is Edward Reinhart. He is American, thirty-one years of age, and he is the single most infuriating man I have ever met in my life. And I cannot stop thinking about him.”
“How long?” Charles asked.
Caroline frowned slightly. “How long have I been unable to stop thinking about him, or how long has he been infuriating?”
“No. How long have you cared for him?”
There was a pause. A rather significant one, during which Caroline considered several answers and reject them all.
“Since approximately the night of your ball at Netherfield,” she said at last. “Though I did not recognize it for what it was until much later.”
She told them then.
Not everything, of course, and certainly not in any way that their arrangement could have been called foolish, but enough that the morning room seemed to grow quieter with every sentence.
She spoke of the balcony at the Ashworth house and glossed over the conversation she never intended anyone to hear.
She spoke of the gardens at Netherfield and the arrangement that had begun there, but not the the days that had somehow become weeks without either of them appearing to notice.
She told them of walks and galleries and tearooms. She did not tell them of the third room at the Royal Academy where, standing beside a rather stern portrait of an admiral, she had looked at him and understood something she could no longer deny herself any longer.
She told them about lanterns on a lake, and a small boat, and a sky full of stars that had seemed entirely too attentive to what was happening beneath it.
She did not tell them of the quiet way he had said her name just before he asked her to come to New York with him.
Instead she told them what she had said in return.
When she finished, the silence that followed was not precisely uncomfortable, though it was undeniably complete, as though the room itself had decided to hold its breath and wait for something more sensible to be said.
Charles regarded her with an expression Caroline could not fully place, though she suspected it hovered somewhere between disbelief and a concern he was attempting, with admirable effort, to disguise as mere thoughtfulness.
Jane, by contrast, appeared to have found Caroline’s hands far more absorbing than her face, studying them with the solemn focus of someone convinced that any sudden movement might result in irreparable damage.
“You said no,” Charles said at last.
“I said I was sorry and that I could not,” Caroline replied, because while she was prepared to be generous in most matters, she drew a firm line at misrepresentation. “Which is, I believe, rather more precise, though I will concede the end result is indistinguishable.”
“Why?” he asked.
Caroline looked up at her brother, baffled.
“Because it is America, Charles. Because I do not know a soul there. Because I have never left England, even for a journey to France, and the notion of crossing an ocean to begin a life in a city I have never seen with a man I have known for scarcely a month is, by any reasonable measure, entirely mad.”
“Yes,” Jane agreed quietly.
Finally, she looked up.
“But do you love him?”
The simplicity of the question might almost have been amusing under different circumstances. As it was, Caroline was finding it increasingly difficult to speak coherently.
“Entirely against my better judgment,” Caroline said, “yes.”
Jane lifted her eyes then, and there was something in her expression so steady, so unshakably composed, that Caroline felt it settle rather unceremoniously somewhere inconvenient in her chest.
“Then you should go,” Jane said.
Caroline blinked at her. “I beg your pardon?”
“You should go to him,” Jane repeated, as though she were suggesting nothing more alarming than an afternoon stroll and not the complete rearrangement of a life. “You should go today, before his ship leaves, and you should tell him you have changed your mind.”
“Jane,” Caroline said carefully, with the sort of patience one reserved for a dear friend who had very clearly taken leave of her senses, “you cannot possibly be serious. You are suggesting I pursue a man in order to inform him that I have reconsidered his proposal, as though I am the heroine of some wildly improbable novel.”
“You are the heroine of a very improbable novel,” Jane replied, a faint smile touching her mouth. “You are simply the only one who has not realized it yet.”