Chapter 15
The carriage ride was, by no stretch of imagination, a comfortable one.
London at this hour was an entirely different creature from the one Caroline knew by daylight.
The lampposts cast long, wavering shadows over the cobblestones, as though the city itself could not quite decide where it ended and the darkness began.
Some streets were hushed into an almost reverent silence, while others spilled sound and laughter from taverns she had never noticed before and, she decided with some firmness, would very likely continue to ignore.
The carriage lurched over a particularly stubborn stretch of road, and Caroline found herself gripping the handle with far more determination than any lady of good breeding ought to display.
She could not quite decide whether her pulse was racing because of the uneven wheels or because of what awaited her at the end of the journey. A most inconvenient uncertainty, that.
When at last the carriage drew to a halt, she stepped down without waiting for assistance and pressed a rather generous sum into the driver’s palm.
Far more generous, if she were honest, than the journey had warranted.
The man looked from the coins to her face, clearly reconsidering whatever opinion he had formed, then touched his hat in a manner that suggested he had decided women who tipped in such a way were not to be questioned.
The inn itself was not, by any reasonable standard, a place that encouraged romantic notions.
It smelled faintly of tallow candles and worn leather and something herbal she could not quite place and did not intend to investigate further.
The man behind the front desk had looked at her as though she had appeared from thin air, flushed and unaccompanied at an hour when respectable women were very firmly not meant to be out in public at all.
Caroline, for her part, had met his suspicion with a stare of her own and informed him, in her most composed and unmistakable voice, that she required the room of a Mr. Edward Reinhart, and that the matter was urgent enough to justify any breach of conventional timing he might be tempted to object to.
After a long moment, and what she suspected was a great deal of silent moral debating on his part, he had given her the number.
And so she stood now in the corridor outside it.
She knocked before she could lose her courage.
A pause followed. Then footsteps. Then the door opened.
Edward Reinhart stood there in his shirtsleeves, his cravat conspicuously absent, his expression arranged in the careful, bewildered stillness of a man trying to decide whether he was still asleep and dreaming.
“Caroline,” he breathed.
Yet the way he said it, low and warm and far too familiar, sent something spiraling through her chest, as though some foolish part of her had been listening for exactly that sound without admitting it had been waiting at all.
She knew right then and there this had not been a mistake.
To go the rest of her life without hearing him make sure a sound would truly be a life not lived.
“I will go with you,” she said.
He blinked, still not looking entirely awake or convinced that she was real.
“Come again?” he asked, as though she had spoken in a foreign language, or announced she intended to take up residence on the moon.
“To America.” She lifted her chin, because if she did not, she was in some danger of not managing the next words at all.
“I will go with you to America.”
For a moment he did nothing at all except look at her.
His eyes were doing something she could not yet name, though she had the uncomfortable sense she would spend a very long time learning precisely what it meant.
It was not surprise, not quite. Not hope either, though it stood uncomfortably near it.
It was something more careful, as though he were deciding how much of himself he dared to reveal in case the world proved unkind about it.
Then he stepped back from the doorway.
“Come inside, please,” he said. “Before you catch a cold.”
Caroline obeyed before she had time to consider whether obedience was, in fact, her intention. She crossed the threshold, and the door closed behind her with a soft finality that felt far more significant than it ought.
The room was small and neatly kept, warmed by a low fire in the grate.
His travelling trunks were already stacked with an efficiency that spoke of a man who had been preparing to leave the world behind him in an orderly fashion, as though one might simply arrange one’s departure the way one arranged one’s correspondence.
She looked at them, and something tight in her chest shifted, easing slowly and unmistakably.
“You said no before,” Edward said at last.
His voice was measured, as though he were attempting to hold the moment steady by force of politeness alone, and Caroline understood, with sudden clarity, that he was not entirely certain he wished to hear her answer.
“I did,” she said. “And I was wrong.”
He studied her as he always did. With that steady, unflinching attention that made her feel as though she were not merely being seen, but understood, which was altogether more disarming.
He had always looked at her as though she mattered.
As though what she thought and said and felt held genuine weight in the world.
She had never quite known what to do with that.
But now, standing in his small room with his life already packed into trunks and the future waiting with all the patience of something entirely indifferent to her feelings, she thought she might at last be beginning to understand something about herself.
“The idea frightens me,” she said, because she had decided on the carriage ride over that if she was going to say it at all, she would say it properly, without the careful varnish she usually applied to anything that threatened to reveal her as a creature capable of feeling too much at once.
“Leaving England. Leaving my family. Leaving every street and face I have ever known and crossing an ocean to arrive in a place where I shall be entirely unknown and where, I am told, they have some very alarming opinions about how tea ought to be prepared.”
She paused, drew a breath, and then added, “All of it frightens me rather dreadfully.”
The corner of his mouth shifted as though he might smile, though he did not quite permit it to become one. She pressed on before he could interrupt her, because if she allowed him the chance, she suspected she would lose her nerve entirely.
“But,” she said, and there was something in her voice that surprised even her, something soft and unguarded that she had not intended to let out into the open. Something that had been sitting very quietly beneath her ribs for weeks now, waiting with an infuriating sort of patience.
“The thought of losing you frightens me more.”
He crossed the room to her.
He did not hurry, because Edward Reinhart had never been a man given to haste, and she had come to understand that his unhurried nature was not indifference but a rather infuriating form of masculine pride.
When he reached her, he lifted both hands to her face with a gentleness that felt entirely unfair in its effect upon her composure, and he looked at her in the firelight as though she were the only thing in existence worth looking at.
“You are certain,” he said, though it was not quite a question.
“I am terrified,” she replied at once. “Which, I am told, is not the same thing as uncertainty.”
A small laugh escaped him, soft and brief, as though it had surprised even him in its existence.
“No,” he said. “It is not.”
And then he kissed her.
It was not at all what she had imagined, though she had taken considerable pains to assure herself she had not been imagining it in the first place.
It was not grand or dramatic, not in the least the sort of kiss one might later describe with flourishing language to a sympathetic confidante.
It was simply him. Warm, unhurried, entirely certain of her in a way she was only just beginning to understand she longed to be certain of herself.
One of his hands remained at her jaw, steady as anything, while the other settled at her waist as though it had always known precisely where it belonged.
She discovered, to her quiet astonishment, that her mind offered her absolutely nothing witty or sharp or even faintly clever in response, which struck her as rather alarming and, for reasons she did not care to examine too closely, rather perfect.
When they finally parted, she found she was still holding on to the lapel of his coat, a fact she regarded with mild surprise and no intention whatsoever of correcting. He was smiling down at her in a way that made the fire seem almost decorative rather than necessary.
“You are,” he said softly, “the most extraordinary woman I have ever met.”
“Yes,” Caroline replied, with impeccable dignity and what she hoped passed for composure. “So I am told.”
He laughed again, with his whole body, and the sound did something most wonderful to the tingling sensation down her spine. Then he drew her back in, as if there had never been any question of doing otherwise.
Caroline smiled into the second kiss.