Chapter 3
There were, Caroline Bingley had long since concluded, a finite number of ways in which a dinner could be rendered disagreeable, and her brother's household had managed to discover most of them.
It was not that the food was poor. Cook had been with the family long enough to know better than that, and the pheasant this evening was, she admitted privately, very well done.
Nor was it the company in any literal sense, for Charles was her brother and she had been fond of him after a fashion for the entirety of her life, and Jane was, by every reasonable measure, inoffensive.
More than inoffensive. Perfectly, infuriatingly, exhaustingly pleasant.
The kind of pleasant that made one feel vaguely guilty for not being equally pleasant in return, which was, as far as Caroline was concerned, not a matter then concerned her.
No, the true difficulty lay not in the menu, nor the conversation, nor even the arrangement of the table, though Caroline was increasingly convinced that the chairs were set at an angle designed to encourage reflection she did not care to undertake.
The difficulty, rather, was the way Charles looked at his wife.
There was no other description for it that did not feel absurdly inadequate.
He looked at her as though she were the only point of interest in a world otherwise politely tolerated.
As though she were a paragraph of particularly elegant prose in a book otherwise filled with competent but unremarkable sentences.
The room this evening contained, after all, a very respectable mantelpiece and three landscape paintings of considerable artistic ambition, and yet none of them appeared to hold his attention in quite the same devastating manner.
Jane, for her part, appeared to be entirely unaware of this state of affairs, which Caroline found, with growing irritation, to be precisely the sort of innocence that ought to be regulated by law.
It was all very well to be kind, but there was something almost inconsiderate about failing to notice the effect one had on others simply by existing in such an effortless state of contentment.
Caroline cut a precise slice of pheasant, composed her expression into something suitably composed, and thought, not for the first time, that it was a particularly cruel injustice about being forced to witness other people's happiness at close quarters while one's own remained stubbornly elusive.
"You are quiet this evening Caroline," Charles observed, which was rich coming from a man who had spent the last seven minutes silently gazing at his wife's profile with the focused attention of an artist studying a masterpiece.
"I am always quiet at dinner," Caroline replied.
"True…but not usually like this."
"Then perhaps I am making a change." She reached for her wine. "People do occasionally."
Charles looked at her for a moment with the expression he had been perfecting since approximately age eleven, the one that suggested he suspected she was being difficult on purpose but could not quite decide whether to say so or let the matter pass.
After a moment, as was his usual custom, he let it pass.
His gaze drifted back to Jane with the helpless ease of a compass finding north, and Caroline returned her attention back to her plate with a roll of her eyes.
The candles guttered once in a breath of air from somewhere and then steadied again. Silverware clinked softly against porcelain. Outside, the streets of London had finally gone quiet.
It was Jane who broke the silence next, which surprised Caroline somewhat.
Jane did not, as a rule, volunteer herself into conversational territory that held any possibility of conflict, and she had always seemed to approach Caroline's particular brand of silence with the same careful respect one extended to an unfamiliar animal of uncertain temperament.
"The lamb is very good," Jane offered, which was not, admittedly, the most daring conversational gambit Caroline had ever witnessed.
"Yes," Caroline agreed, because she could not in good conscience disagree with that particular statement and because she was, when all was said and done, the daughter of a women who had raised her to have manners even when she would have preferred otherwise. "It is."
Charles smiled at them both in a way that suggested he was choosing to interpret this brief exchange as a profound moment of sisterly warmth, which was, Caroline thought, a testament to his relentlessly optimistic view of human nature.
Or possibly just a testament to the fact that he was not paying very close attention to the state of his own household.
It was sometime between the removal of the fish course and the arrival of whatever was to come after it that Charles set down his fork with the particular deliberateness of a man who had been composing a sentence for some time and had finally decided it was ready.
"Jane and I," he began.
Caroline looked up, already not liking what he was about to say.
"Have been giving considerable thought," he continued, with the careful pace of someone who wished to make clear that this was a prepared announcement and not an improvised one, "to the matter of a celebration."
"Have you," Caroline said in a tone that was carefully not condesending. She wished whatever it was that her brother wanted to say you would just come out with it already. It really was almost comical that the most timid man in all of London seemed to find the most timid women in all of England to marry. What a couple they made. She quietly feared for their children’s future oral capabilities.
"We have." He glanced at Jane, who gave him a small and encouraging nod, and then seemed to draw from that nod the remaining confidence required to proceed.
"Given the news, we felt it only appropriate to mark the occasion in some meaningful way.
Something with friends, and family, and," he paused, clearly pleased with himself, "perhaps a little dancing. "
Caroline looked, without particular subtlety, at Jane's figure, which at seven months along was communicating the relevant information on the matter of the reason for celebration without any assistance from the conversation.
"You wish to host a ball," she said.
"Yes," Charles confirmed, with the particular brightness of a man who had not noticed or had chosen not to notice the subtle dryness of her tone.
This level of obliviousness, she thought, was a remarkable and perhaps even admirable quality in a person.
"In a week. To celebrate the arrival of–.
" He looked somewhere vaguely in his wife's direction. "well."
"Well," Caroline repeated in a deadpan tone.
"The baby, Caroline."
"So I had gathered," Caroline says as she reaches for her glass.
Jane's lips pressed together in a way that might, in another person, have been the suppression of a smile, but Caroline did not examine it too closely.
The idea of what fond thoughts she must be having of her husband in her head right now made her feel physically ill.
It had already been one full year of this.
Must she still be tortured with this constant affection?
"And," Charles added, with the air of a man saving the most significant detail for last, "I had thought to rent Netherfield again for the occasion.
Given that it holds so many happy memories for us.
" He turned to Jane, and here his voice shifted into a register that Caroline felt almost physically ill to be in close proximity to.
Lower and softer and entirely too sincere for the dinner table. "Very many happy memories."
Jane looked back at him with an expression that suggested she was in complete agreement with this assessment. The dreamy smile she exchanged with her husband just added to Caroline’s misery.
Caroline took a long and dignified sip of her wine.
"Netherfield," she said, when she had set the glass down and the moment between her brother and his wife had concluded or at least paused for breath.
"Yes," said Charles.
"You would like to host a ball at Netherfield Park. Next week."
"That is precisely what I would like."
There was a pause. Charles watched her with the expression of a man waiting to hear whether his proposal would be met with outright opposition or merely the kind of mild skepticism that could be managed with enough cheerfulness and persistence.
Jane had gone very still in the particular way of a woman who has long since learned that silence is sometimes the wisest possible contribution to a conversation.
Caroline considered her options. Charles was not a completely unreasonable man, she was sure that he would not be planning to host a party in a property so far away in a week's time if he did not have the means to organize such an event.
There were, she acknowledged to herself, several things she could say.
She could point out that Netherfield had not exactly been the site of exclusively happy memories for the Bingley family, or at least not for all of its members, though she supposed the memories in question were rather more Charles's to evaluate than hers. She could note that a ball in a rented property at seven months along seemed to be asking rather a lot of a woman who was already being asked rather a lot as the head of the household’s wife.
She could remark, with accuracy, that she had never entirely understood why people felt the compulsion to gather large numbers of other people together and subject them all to dancing as a method of celebrating anything, given that dancing was exhausting and other people were frequently unreliable in their steps and had a tendency to sweat.
She could say any number of things. She chose, instead, to pick the simplest escape route.
"Very well then. I suppose we shall all go to Netherfield Park. No doubt Jane will require my help organizing the event in her state," she said.
Charles blinked, surprised it could be so easy. "That is all?"
"Yes." She reached for her fork again. "What else is there for me to say?"
"I had rather expected," he said, sounding genuinely uncertain whether to be relieved or suspicious, "something more."
"You wanted argument?"
"I expected it," unsurprising given that he was not outright asking but implying her help in coordinating this event.
"Then you are welcome to imagine one, if it would make you feel better," Caroline said pleasantly. "I am sure you have a very clear sense of what it would have sounded like. I see no particular reason to provide it in practice when the result would be the same regardless."
Charles stared at her. Jane’s eyes had gone wide as they darted between the two siblings, unsure if she was witnessing an argument or not. The candles continued to burn, but they were dimming. It gave the room an eerie feel.
"Alright," Charles said at last. "It is settled then."
"Apparently," said Caroline sarcastically.
There was a pause, and then Jane gave a smile that was small and careful and, to Caroline's considerable annoyance, rather kind.
It was the sort of smile that seemed to be reaching for human connection.
Feeling out the edges of a space it was not entirely certain would welcome it, and Caroline found she did not know quite what to do with it, which was not an unusual experience for her when it came to Jane.
She looked away fast. She did not particularly mind helping the older women, she did not want her to strain herself.
The rest of dinner passed without incident of any particular note.
Charles returned to the cheerful and well-meaning conversational territory he preferred, speaking at some length about the arrangements he had in mind and which families he intended to invite and whether the east drawing room could be cleared in time to accommodate a proper supper, and Jane listened and contributed and smiled at him, and Caroline ate her pheasant and her lamb and drank her wine in precise and considered amounts and thought about very little of consequence.
Or rather, she tried to think about very little of consequence, which was not quite the same thing.
She was not sure why Charles's proposal had produced in her such an unexpected absence of resistance.
Perhaps it was simply exhaustion. She had been fighting things, small things and large things and everything in between, for long enough that the prospect of fighting this particular thing, a ball, a perfectly ordinary social gathering, a celebration of something that was in every objective sense a happy occasion, had struck her this evening as simply not worth the effort.
Or perhaps, she thought, smoothing the napkin in her lap with unnecessary force, it was something else.
Perhaps there was a part of her, some quiet and embarrassingly hopeful part that she had not yet managed to fully suppress, that remembered the last ball she had attended and had found herself, quite without permission, wondering whether anything so improbable might arrange itself to happen again.
She dismissed this thought immediately and with considerable firmness. The english elite was a large circle, she had encountered several people throughout the course of her life only once and never again. Especially not at a party outside the city.
There was, she reminded herself, absolutely no reason to expect that she would encounter that man twice.
London was a very large city, and the season was full of parties and gatherings and events, and the fact that she did not even know his name made the entire notion perfectly absurd.
The probability was negligible. She was a rational woman, and rational women did not plan their social calendars around strangers who had brushed a tear from their cheek on a balcony and possessed an unreasonably appealing face.
She glanced up and found Jane watching her across the table, just for a moment, with an expression that was quiet and curious and rather too perceptive for comfort.
Caroline straightened her spine and reached for her wine again.
She had never indulged herself more in the substance than after her brother’s marriage.
She said, in a voice of impeccable composure, "Charles, I believe you mentioned the east drawing room.
You will want to speak to the housekeeper about the carpets before anything else if you mean to have dancing.
She will need at least a fortnight's notice. "
Charles blinked, then nodded with the grateful relief of a man who had achieved peace and harmony in his household. "Yes, of course. Excellent point."
Caroline nodded serenely. "Women occasionally tend to have those."
Charles chuckled, "Why sister, do I sense sarcasm in your tone?”
Jane made a small sound from directly across the table from her that she recognized as poorly concealed laughter.
Caroline smiled faintly. Living with these two was not always so bad.