Chapter 9
The morning after returning to London, Caroline came downstairs to find Charles already in the sitting room.
This was, in itself, unusual enough to arrest her attention.
Charles was not, by temperament or habit, a man of early mornings.
He existed in a state of cheerful imprecision about the hours before ten, wandering through them in a pleasant fog of half-finished coffee and good-natured incoherence that Caroline had long since ceased to find irritating and had gradually come to accept as simply one of his more immovable characteristics.
To find him upright, alert, and apparently waiting for her before nine in the morning constituted a disturbance to the natural order of things serious enough to warrant investigation.
He looked up when she entered. His expression held that particular variety of earnest anticipation she had come to recognize, the sort a man wore when he had spent entirely too long arranging a conversation in his head.
It was the careful, hopeful look of someone determined to get something right, and not at all convinced he would succeed.
"Caroline," he said. "I was hoping you would come down."
She crossed to the sideboard with the unhurried deliberateness of a woman who fully intended to pour her own coffee before she so much as considered engaging with whatever this was meant to be.
She accomplished this with admirable precision, then took her seat opposite him, settling into the chair as though she had all the time in the world.
At last, she regarded him with a composed, impeccably civil attention.
"Well," she said, "here I am."
He did not answer at once. Outside, the London street had already launched into its morning chorus, all wheels and footsteps and the distant cries of a vendor, carrying on with the cheerful indifference of a city entirely uninterested in the dramas of two people at a breakfast table.
"Jane spoke to me," he said at last. "After the ball."
Caroline wrapped her hands around her cup and said nothing.
"She told me," Charles continued, in a tone that had shifted into something more careful, "that the two of you had a conversation.
At Netherfield–" He paused. "She was not specific about the details.
But she mentioned–" Another pause. He pressed his lips together briefly, and when he spoke again his voice had lost whatever careful arrangement it had arrived with and become something considerably less composed. "She mentioned something about Mother."
The coffee was very good this morning. Caroline fixed her attention upon that one comforting truth with determined precision.
She intended to continue contemplating it for as long as necessary, at least until the cold weight that had settled beneath her sternum at the sound of that particular word decided to retreat to some corner of herself that was easier to ignore.
"Did she," Caroline said.
"I should have said this to you a very long time ago," Charles replied. "I have been searching for the right words, and I suspect there are none, so I am simply going to speak plainly."
Caroline looked up then, because something in his voice had shifted in a manner that could not be disregarded.
She studied her brother, and what she saw was not the familiar cheer or easy warmth she associated with him.
His expression was taut with genuine distress, unguarded and far too earnest. His hands were clasped in his lap as though he had not yet determined what else to do with them, and his eyes were much too bright.
Caroline felt, with a sudden and unsteady certainty, that whatever he was about to say was going to be very difficult indeed to hear.
“I knew,” Charles said quietly. “I knew what she was doing to you. After I turned thirteen and went away to school I could excuse myself by saying I did not see it, but before that—” He broke off, his jaw tightening as though the rest of the words had become physically difficult to produce.
“I knew, Caroline. And I did not stop it. I was young, and I was frightened, and I was a coward, and I did not stop it.”
The room was dea silent. Even the street noise seemed to have retreated to a respectful distance.
"I want you to know," he said, "that I am sorry.
That I have been sorry for a long time, and I simply never found the words, or perhaps never found the courage, which I realize is rather a confirmation of exactly what I have just confessed to.
" He met her eyes steadily, the way a man does when he knows the thing he is saying does not excuse him and wants to be very clear that he is not asking to be excused.
"I should have been braver. I should have been a better brother to you. "
Caroline felt, for one rather alarming moment, as though she had been neatly removed from her own life and placed somewhere slightly to the left of it. The only reasonable explanation, as far as she could tell, was that she must be hallucinating.
She opened her mouth to say so and discovered that speech, at least in her current condition, had chosen not to cooperate.
Something tight and hot and entirely unreasonable had settled in her throat, as though it had taken up residence there without the courtesy of an invitation and was now refusing all attempts at eviction.
She pressed her lips together. She looked down at her hands. She breathed in, then out again, with the sort of careful discipline one acquired only after a very long acquaintance with things that did not go as planned.
She was not crying. She was absolutely, categorically, and under no circumstances going to cry.
She had not done so in front of another living soul since she was twelve years old, and she was certainly not about to begin now, in her brother’s London sitting room, with a cup of coffee she had not even finished as witness to her dignity.
Unfortunately, her eyes seemed to have developed opinions of their own.
They grew uncomfortably warm, traitorous things that they were, and then, quite without her permission or consent, two tears slipped down her cheeks as though they had been waiting for precisely this moment to make their escape.
“I needed you,” she said, and the words came out so small she barely recognized them as her own.
Still, there it was. The sound of it, thin and broken and entirely unlike the composed voice she had carefully cultivated for twenty-one years. She heard the crack at its center with a sort of distant horror, as though it belonged to someone standing just behind her rather than to herself.
“I needed you, Charles.”
He made a sound then, something low and pained, and she thought, rather absurdly, that it might have been her name.
She could not be certain. Her vision had gone inconveniently soft at the edges, and her breathing, which had always been such a reliable companion, appeared to have taken the opportunity to abandon all sense of propriety.
“I needed you,” she said again, and this time it did not come out quietly at all.
It came out in pieces.
Something in her chest, which had been held together with nothing more than sheer force of will for rather longer than any sensible mechanism should be expected to endure, finally gave way.
She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, but it was a poor defense.
The sound that escaped anyway was unflattering, and she was suddenly too tired to care.
“Every morning,” she heard someone say, though she could not quite locate the person doing the speaking.
“Every single morning I woke up and I begged. In whatever manner a child can beg when there is no one to hear it. For someone to come. For anyone to notice what was happening in that house and– and to stop it.”
She still could not look at him right now. Looking at him felt impossible, like attempting to stand in the center of a storm and pretend one was unaffected by the wind. Instead, she looked at her hands. They were shaking, which she found irritating but not entirely surprising.
“And when she died–” she continued, and her voice wavered in a way she would have usually found unforgivable in anyone else.
“Charles, when she died, I was so happy. I was ten years old, and I stood at her grave, and I was the happiest I had ever been in my life up until that point. I thought it was finally over. I thought I was finally free of her.”
She pressed her hands flat against her thighs, as though she might physically compel them into stillness if she simply exerted sufficient will, and felt them betray her anyway with a fine, persistent tremor.
“I was wrong,” she said very softly. It did not sound like much. It never did, she thought distantly, when one was admitting to something that had taken years to understand.
“Because it can never truly be over. She was gone, yes, but her voice remained. It was still there, inside me, every single day, and I could not make it stop. I could not outrun it, or argue with it, or correct it into silence. I simply had to live with it. Live with her still inside of me.”
She drew in a breath. It shuddered on the way in, as though it, too, had lost its confidence.
“I was punishing myself for existing. That is what I was doing. It is the only honest way I know to describe it. I had spent the first nine years of my life being told, in every possible manner a person can be told such a thing, that I was a burden. A mistake. A creature so thoroughly unworthy of occupying space in the world that the most acceptable course of action was to for me to not occupy it at all.”
Charles made a wounded noise at her last remark.
Her fingers tightened against her skirts.
“And when she was gone, I continued the work she had started.”
Somewhere across from her, her brother had gone very still. She could feel it rather than see it, that particular kind of silence that meant a person had been struck quite thoroughly speechless.