Chapter 12
“Has a letter come for me?” Caroline asked.
“No, miss,” the maid replied, with the sort of careful blankness that only came from being asked the same question four times in three days and discovering that survival in service was largely dependent upon the art of becoming entirely unreadable.
“I see. Thank you,” Caroline said, with brisk dismissal, and turned away before the girl could witness anything so undignified as dwindling hope trying and failing to conceal itself on her face.
She crossed to the window and stood there with admirable stillness, hands neatly clasped, gaze fixed upon the London street below as though she had no particular interest in it whatsoever. A person would have had to be very foolish indeed to suspect she was waiting for anything.
Or anyone.
Outside, the morning went on. The sky was a subdued grey, neither promising nor threatening.
A child was being dragged along the pavement by a small dog that clearly considered itself to be in charge of the entire household.
It was all quite ordinary, the sort of scene that asked nothing of her and gave nothing in return.
Caroline saw none of it.
Instead, she saw a cafe in London. She saw Edward Reinhart’s expression, just before he repeated those same damning words to her over and over again.
“What is it that you want me to say, Caroline?”
She pressed her fingers a little more firmly together.
Say you love me. Say that you’ll never leave me.
She had wanted desperately to let those words escape for her lips at that time.
She wonders if she had if it would have made a difference.
If it would have at least kept that cold, guarded look out of his eyes.
Knowing her luck, it would have most likely have just made everything worse.
Really, she thought, with the calm resignation of a woman arriving at an uncomfortable truth, she was quite hopeless.
This was not, as self-assessments went, her most flattering.
Caroline was not given to self-criticism of the unproductive variety.
She had always found it a deeply inefficient emotion, entirely lacking in practical application, and therefore not worth her time.
She had opinions about herself, certainly, a great many of them and not all of them especially charitable, but she had always managed to hold them at a certain remove, the way one might hold a document one needed to read but found unpleasant.
Necessary, but containable.
Edward Reinhart had apparently dismantled that particular mechanism, which was, she felt, a truly remarkable act of destruction for a man who had never once done anything she could properly call exceptionally theatrical. He had just been himself…
She thought about the tearoom. She thought about his voice when he said, I have to go back, and how he had spoken without hesitation, without evasion, without a single word that might have left her room to hope she had misunderstood him.
She had not misunderstood him.
And then she thought about the carriage ride home. She thought about his jaw, set in that unfamiliar way, and the careful, courteous incline of his head, and the way he had gotten back into the carriage without looking at her face.
She had asked when she would see him again, and he had said, I don't know.
She pressed her fingertips briefly to the bridge of her nose. Forcing herself to breathe.
In Out. In Out. In out.
She wondered if she would ever see him again at all. If that was their last farewell, she would have liked for it to at least be a bit warmer.
What a gift for timing she and her unfortunate mouth had. Truly. It was almost artistic.
Why could she not simply have left it alone and enjoyed the little time she had left with him?
She turned away from the window and picked up the book she had not been reading for the past two hours.
She opened it to a page she was quite certain she had already read at least twice, and read it again with absolutely no idea what any of the words meant.
After a moment she closed it. Then she set it down.
Then she stared at it, as though it might offer some explanation if she simply looked at it long enough.
In all the years she had spent watching other people fall in love, she had never truly understood what they meant when they said they could not stop thinking about someone.
She had understood it in theory, of course.
She was not without imagination. But she had always assumed there was a certain amount of exaggeration involved, perhaps a touch of sentiment added for effect, the way one improved a story in the telling.
She understood it now.
And she found she would very much have preferred not to.
She had never, in all her twenty-one years, cared for anyone the way she currently cared for Edward Reinhart.
There had been Darcy, of course. Darcy, whom she now regarded with the faint, distant mortification one reserved for a youthful mistake that had once seemed perfectly sensible and had since revealed itself to be composed almost entirely of ambition and a rather impressive capacity for self-deception.
She had not held affections for Darcy, not really.
She had wanted the idea of Darcy. She had wanted to be the sort of woman whom a man like him chose.
Which, she could see now with painful clarity, was an entirely different thing altogether.
And also something she might have achieved with considerably less effort had she simply asked for what she wanted instead of spending two years carefully constructing a pursuit that had ended, inevitably, in complete and utter failure.
With Edward, there had been nothing of the sort. No careful words, or tidy little strategy she could later dissect and dismiss as the product of youthful foolishness. No, that would have been far too sensible.
He had simply appeared on a balcony during what could only be described as one of the most horrible evenings of her recent memory, looked at her as though she were something utterly captivating, and then continued to do so with a steadiness that was frankly quite indecent.
It had been so unwavering, so entirely without hesitation, that somewhere between the boutique and the Royal Academy she appeared to have mislaid her better judgment entirely and had not, despite her best efforts, managed to recover it since.
She had told him, quite firmly, on the night of the Netherfield ball that she had decided to be a spinster. She had said it with the sort of composure that suggested the matter was settled, final, and not at all open to interpretation. She had even believed it at the time.
She did not believe it now.
The trouble with her carefully constructed life plan, she had begun to suspect sometime around the third morning of waiting for a letter that refused to arrive, was that it had sounded entirely reasonable when she had been imagining it in the abstract.
One could commit oneself with admirable cheerfulness to a life without something one had never actually experienced.
It was rather more difficult once one knew, with unwelcome clarity, the precise texture of what one was meant to live without–
Without love.
At that point, the absence ceased to feel noble. It ceased to feel dignified. And it began to resemble something far more like punishment.
She was not going to apologize for herself.
She was not going to indulge in the sort of elaborate self-reproach that she had always considered the particular hobby of those with too much leisure and not nearly enough sense of purpose.
She was, however, prepared to admit, in the strictest privacy of her own thoughts, that she had made what could only be described as a catastrophic error of judgment and had not the faintest idea how one went about undoing such a thing.
She was still engaged in a very serious examination of her various elaborate methods of self-flagellation when the door to the sitting room opened.
Caroline did not look up. She was, at present, in the middle of what felt like a rather pointed and deeply private conversation with herself about heartache and regret.
She had no intention of inviting an audience to observe her losing it.
“I am not receiving visitors this afternoon,” she said to the room at large, with the calm certainty of someone who had repeated the same statement so often in recent days that it had ceased to require either emphasis or belief.
“Not even from me?”
There was a pause.
Caroline looked up.
Jane stood in the doorway with the expression of someone who had arrived armed with goodwill, determination, and something she hoped might pass for a bribe. “I have biscuits,” she said.
Jane stood in the doorway with a small plate carefully balanced in one hand.
She wore the expression of someone who had noticed the household had been unusually subdued for the past week and a half and had concluded, after what must have been some careful thought, that biscuits were an appropriate remedy.
That was, Caroline thought with a resigned sort of fondness, exactly like Jane.
Caroline opened her mouth with every intention of informing her that she was neither hungry nor in need of company.
“They are ginger snaps,” Jane said before she could speak, in a tone that suggested she had consulted the cook before settling on them.
Caroline sighed. Of course she had. She supposed there was no denying the woman if she was this determined to be heard.
“Come in,” she said.