Chapter 10
The morning after her cry with Charles, Caroline descended the stairs prepared to be mortified.
Truly, she ought to have been. She had wept in her brother’s arms with all the composure of a child who had taken an unfortunate tumble, and she had spoken aloud sentiments she had spent the better part of ten years locking firmly inside her own chest, where they could not inconvenience anyone, least of all herself.
By every known measure of her personal sensibilities, she should have reached the bottom step draped in mortification from head to toe.
Instead, she felt strangely light.
It was the most curious sensation, as though some thoughtful hand had removed a stone from the space between her shoulder blades while she slept and then neglected to leave a note of explanation.
She paused on the final stair and examined herself most carefully, expecting embarrassment to appear at any moment, much like a misplaced glove that simply must be hiding somewhere close by.
It did not appear.
What she found instead, upon entering the breakfast room and discovering Jane already at the table, was an impulse so foreign to her usual habits that she very nearly glanced behind her to confirm it had been directed at her.
Before she could summon her better judgment to forbid it, she smiled at Jane.
It was a small smile, perfectly measured, with nothing that could be accused of sentiment or softness.
Yet it was undeniably genuine. Jane’s eyes widened for a brief instant before she returned the smile.
She poured her coffee. She ate her breakfast. She announced, to no one in particular, that she was going out.
London in August was supposedly dull, or so declared those who imagined they ought to be elsewhere.
The season was finished, the fashionable world had fled to their country retreats, and the remaining residents moved about with the air of people who had meant to depart but had somehow failed to do so.
Caroline had always found this version of the city oddly pleasant.
London lost none of its charms and quite a few of its most inconvenient inhabitants, which, in her view, made it vastly improved.
It was not, objectively speaking, not a very remarkable scene, but Caroline found it rather lovely all the same.
She had rounded the second turn of the south path and was occupied with admiring a particularly well-behaved spaniel when she very nearly walked straight into Edward Reinhart.
He looked as startled as she felt, which was to say not very.
She had the immediate and rather inconvenient impression that he had not been startled at all and had merely arranged his features to give that impression.
His coat was an excellent charcoal wool, he held his hat in one hand with the careless grace of a man entirely comfortable in his own skin, and his expression upon seeing her shifted with astonishing promptness from polite surprise to something unmistakably pleased.
"Miss Bingley," he said, his voice warm in a way she found far too ready for an accidental meeting.
"Mr. Reinhart," she returned, narrowing her eyes and straightening her posture with practiced elegance. "How extraordinarily convenient."
"Is it?" he asked, falling into step beside her with that effortless manner of his that somehow made it seem as though the encounter had been planned without the slightest element of planning involved.
"You are stalking me," Caroline said in a tone of perfect pleasantness.
"Am I?" He looked at her with a sincerity so earnest she suspected it had to be at least half fabricated. "And if I were to admit it, would that make you run away?"
Caroline considered this with admirable gravity, although she could feel her mouth threatening to betray her with the smallest hint of amusement.
"On the contrary," she said at last. "You ought to be the one who is frightened.
I am not the sort of woman one simply makes disappear without consequences. "
He laughed so suddenly and so completely that the spaniel she had been admiring turned to look at him, which Caroline felt was a perfectly reasonable response.
She had noticed, over the course of their recent acquaintance, that Edward's laugh had a particular quality to it.
The quality of a man who found things genuinely funny and saw no earthly reason to moderate this.
It was, she had decided, simultaneously one of his most appealing and most aggravating characteristics.
"You see," he said, once he had recalled himself enough to produce coherent speech, "this is precisely why I find you so charming. The typical response to someone hinting obliquely that they might be stalking you is not a death threat delivered with such pleasant composure."
"And what," Caroline inquired, raising one unimpressed brow, "is the typical response?"
"Alarm. Blushing. A great deal of rather breathless and uncomfortable laughter." He glanced down at her.
“Would you like me to perform such an exhausting ritual for you?” Caroline asked in a dry tone.
"Not at all," Edward said, and turned back to the path ahead.
They walked on in companionable silence for several moments, and Caroline found herself reflecting that this, too, was something she had not anticipated about Edward Reinhart.
Most men of her acquaintance could not abide silence without feeling compelled to fill it with something endlessly fatiguing.
Edward seemed to harbor no such compulsion, and the quiet between them held a quality she had not yet found a proper word for, comfortable being too small and pleasant being altogether inadequate.
She encountered him the following morning at the lending library, which she attributed to coincidence.
She encountered him again the next afternoon outside the milliner on Bond Street, which was far more difficult to attribute to anything other than deliberate intent, though she chose not to mention it.
By the fifth day she had ceased attempting to explain his frequent appearances through probability and had arrived, with her usual practical efficiency, at the far simpler conclusion that she did not mind them in the least.
It was on the afternoon of the twelfth, while they walked along the Embankment and the river made its perpetual effort to appear romantic despite the unmistakable smell, that Edward turned to her with the expression she had come to associate with thoughtful scrutiny.
"You seem different," he said.
Caroline glanced at him from the corner of her eye. "Different how?"
"Lighter," he said, and he spoke with such unadorned sincerity that she could not dismiss it as flattery. "Since you returned to London. You smile more often, and more freely." He paused only a moment. "It suits you greatly."
Caroline felt warmth climb her throat and settle into her cheeks with the enthusiasm of a phenomenon entirely indifferent to her preferences.
She turned her gaze toward the river and allowed it to rest there, for she was not quite prepared to look directly at him while something so very close to the truth lingered between them.
"London agrees with me," she said at last, which was true in the way all incomplete answers are technically true.
She did not tell him about Charles nor about the long overdue conversation that had finally taken place in the sitting room.
She did not speak of the words that had, after twenty one years, at last been allowed into the open air, where they lingered instead of evaporating beneath the weight of shame.
She kept that tender piece of herself tucked safely away, and he, with the quiet perceptiveness she had come to recognize as entirely his own, did not press her.
Instead, he offered his arm, she accepted it, and when she pointed imperiously at a shop window two doors down that required his notice and his escort, he accompanied her without the slightest protest and with every appearance of genuine willingness.
"I believe," Caroline announced three days later, as they stepped out of an exhibition of inferior watercolors that he had, for reasons she could not fathom, actually wished to see, "that we have now been on something in the vicinity of five outings."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It is an observation," she replied, very prim and very precise. "You specified three dates. You are over your original estimate. I am simply noting the discrepancy for the record."
Edward dismissed this with the airy unconcern of a man entirely untroubled by his own inconsistencies. "These days do not count," he said.
Caroline halted on the pavement and turned to him with the look she reserved for statements that required full and immediate clarification. "I beg your pardon?"
"These days do not count," he repeated, looking thoroughly unrepentant.
"Not as real dates. If this were a real date, I would make it considerably more extraordinary.
Extravagant gifts, unique experiences, the full and undivided expression of my most excellent intentions.
This," he gestured at the street around them, at the perfectly pleasant and completely ordinary London afternoon, "is merely the pleasure of your company.
And I have decided that this must be regarded as its own category entirely. "
Caroline stared at him for a long moment before giving an undignified snort and turning away in disbelief. Edward looked absolutely delighted by the sound.
"That," she said at last, "is the most convenient excuse for reasoning I have heard in recent memory."
"I aim to please," he replied, all cheerful confidence. "Convenient reasoning is something of a national sport in my home."
She made a sound she refused to classify as a laugh, and they walked on together.
The afternoon was warm, the streets pleasantly busy, and somewhere in the midst of passing a small park she found her attention caught by an elderly couple seated on a bench near the iron fence.
They looked to be about seventy, perhaps a bit older, sitting close not out of romance but out of long habit, the way people did when they had spent a lifetime side by side and no longer needed to remark upon it.
The woman was speaking, the man was listening, and nothing about them could be called remarkable.
Caroline watched them, and something in her chest shifted with quiet insistence.
"I have always found that rather more mystifying than any great love story," she said, almost without intending to give the thought voice.
Edward followed her gaze and was silent for a thoughtful moment. "Why would ordinary contentment puzzle you more than the extraordinary?"
Caroline considered this. "Because grand love stories are actually quite easy to believe in," she said slowly.
"If fantastical things were happening to me, if the world were conspiring in improbable and dramatic ways on my behalf, I dare say I might fall in love with the first man to step in an save me under such strange circumstances too.
There is nothing especially unbelievable about it. "
She looked at the couple on the bench a moment longer before turning back to the path.
"But those two people, and the thousands like them, living perfectly ordinary and sometimes rather maddening lives, for decades and decades on end, and still not tiring of each other.
That is what I cannot quite explain. I should like to know what keeps something like that going. "
The question settled between them in a most curious fashion.
"Your parents," Edward said at last, in the quiet tone he used when he already suspected he knew her answer. "Did they never offer you anything of the sort to observe?"
Caroline laughed. It escaped her with a sharper edge than she intended, and she tamed it at once.
"I very much doubt," she said, "that my parents' affection for one another survived even a single afternoon.
How three children resulted from that arrangement remains a biological puzzle I have never felt the slightest urge to unravel. "
She delivered her words lightly, as she always did, with that particular gloss she had perfected, the one that could turn the unpleasant into a mere witticism.
Edward did not laugh. She noticed that. Instead he looked over at her, and his eyes had grown darker, the warmth in them settling into something she found more difficult to meet than she cared to admit.
"And you?" he asked. His voice had dropped.
At some point in the last thirty seconds he had moved closer, or perhaps the afternoon had simply conspired to draw them toward one another without anyone giving it permission to do so.
"Do you imagine a long love life for yourself? Is that something you desire?"
Caroline's heart chose that moment to behave in a most unreasonable manner.
It beat with a lively irregularity she associated with dancing far too vigorously, not with a quiet stroll along a public path.
She swallowed, hoping he did not hear it, and allowed her gaze to drift toward the middle distance, toward the park railings, toward anything that was not the look on his face.
"Of course it is something I want," she said. She was relieved to discover that her voice remained almost perfectly steady, despite her heart's continued theatrics. "Does not everyone wish for such a thing?"
It was not, of course, the full answer. The full answer would have included the second part of his question, the part about whether she believed she would ever have such a thing, and that portion she had chosen, quite purposefully, to leave untouched.
He heard the omission. She could tell by the brief and thoughtful pause that followed, the small silence of a man who had noticed precisely what she had declined to say.
She waited for him to press her.
He did not.
"There is a very fine tea room," he said instead, his tone slipping back into its familiar easy warmth with the confidence of a man who understood his own timing, "two streets from here.
I am told their Battenberg is exceptional, although I must admit I remain entirely unsure what a Battenberg is, and whether the discovery will prove favorable upon acquaintance. "
Caroline released the breath she had not realized she was hoarding and looked at him with something that felt, in the quietest part of herself, very much like relief and something else she was not prepared to examine.
"It is a sponge cake," she said. "Almond flavored, with apricot jam. I find it quite pleasant."
"How delightfully english! Then by all means," he said, and offered his arm.
Caroline took it, and the afternoon carried them forward easily, as though the awkward question between them had never been asked at all.
She thought about it the entire way to the tea room. She was still thinking about it over the Battenberg, which proved to be, as advertised, exceptional.