Chapter 16
The chapel had smelled of beeswax and very old wood, and the ceremony had lasted approximately twenty minutes, which Caroline felt was a perfectly sensible length of time for an event of such permanent consequence.
"I will give you a proper wedding," Edward had said with great fervor afterward, taking both of her hands in his and kissing them.
"In New York, with flowers and a cake and however many guests you like and music that does not sound as though it is being produced by a man who learned the instrument this morning. "
"I thought the organist was quite good," Caroline had replied, with a smile in her voice.
"He played one hymn three times."
"He played it with conviction," she had said in a teasing tone. The responding look on his face had made her laugh, and the laugh had made him kiss her, and by the time they had separated again, she had decided the entire affair was, on balance, rather lovely.
She did not tell him this. She thought she would save it for later, when they were somewhere on the Atlantic and she could say it without anyone overhearing.
The port was a very chaotic place to bring one’s family for final farewells, yet here they were.
Jane, eight months round and glowing in the early morning light, stood quite still with both hands pressed to her mouth, as though she might physically contain the astonishment threatening to spill out of her.
Her eyes were wide in a manner that suggested she had not yet decided whether to laugh, cry, or faint, and was considering the merits of all three.
Charles had one arm firmly about his wife and the other pressed flat to his own chest, as if he suspected his heart might attempt a most indecorous escape. The expression on his face suggested he was doing his utmost to remain composed and was, on the whole, failing with admirable sincerity.
And then there was Louisa.
Louisa, who had arrived at the Bingley villa that morning in a state of such breathless indignation that the very air around her seemed to tremble with it.
She had received a letter, Caroline freely admitted, that had been rather direct in its delivery of the facts.
Perhaps even brutally so, though Caroline preferred to think of it as efficient.
“You sent me a letter this morning,” Louisa said at last, and the words carried the weight of accusation, disbelief, and betrayal all at once. “It was only this morning, and now I am to understand you are married and going to America.”
Caroline, who had been bracing herself for precisely this reaction, lifted her chin with what she hoped was calm reassurance.
“I thought it important to inform you,” she replied simply, as though such a sequence of events were entirely reasonable and not at all likely to cause familial collapse.
Louisa stared at her as though she were attempting to decide whether Caroline had taken leave of her senses entirely or merely temporarily.
"You thought," Louisa had begun, and then stopped, and oh no, she was starting to sound choked up.
"My– my baby sister is leaving me."
Caroline had no idea how to handle this situation. Louisa was often the one comforting her, not the other way around.
Louisa was now crying with the sort of thoroughness that suggested she had abandoned all earlier distinctions between sadness and anger and had chosen, instead, to experience both with equal commitment and at full volume.
It was, Caroline reflected in some distant corner of her mind, the most emotional she had ever seen her sister, which was saying quite a great deal, given their shared history.
“You will write to me,” Louisa managed at last, clutching Caroline’s hands so tightly that the gloves were performing a heroic service in their final hours. “Every week. I mean it, Caroline. Every single week.”
“Every week,” Caroline agreed, though she knew perfectly well it took rather more than a month for letters to make their way across the ocean. Her throat, which had been behaving itself with admirable restraint all morning, chose that moment to betray her with a most inconvenient tightness.
“And you will come back,” Charles said, his voice low and altogether too earnest for a man who had been perfectly composed over port not two hours ago.
“You will come back and visit.”
“Of course I will come back,” Caroline said firmly, because she had made a very serious decision not to cry at the docks. She would not do it. She simply refused. “Do not be dramatic. I am crossing the Atlantic, not falling off the edge of the world.”
“The Atlantic is only very wide,” Jane said softly, which, under ordinary circumstances, might have passed for comfort, though at present it sounded rather like an unnecessarily detailed reminder of geography.
“Jane,” Caroline said.
She stopped then, because there were so many things she might have said, and all of them, in that moment, felt far too small to contain what she meant. Instead, she chose the simplest truth she could find and held it out as if it might be enough.
“Thank you for everything. I am sorry I will not be here to see the baby, but I still mean what I said before. I know you will be a wonderful mother.”
Jane stepped forward at once and drew her into an embrace that was careful and warm and entirely without hesitation, as though she had decided that caution was a luxury she could no longer afford.
Caroline did not move away. In fact, she found she did not wish to.
She held on a moment longer than she had intended, and perhaps a moment longer still.
The baby shifted against Jane then, a small, insistent flutter beneath her hands, and Caroline thought, quite suddenly and with a strange, unexpected certainty, that she would be back long before it learned to speak.
And when she returned, it would have, she was quite sure, the most amazing parents in all of London.
She released Jane before she could lose the ability to do so gracefully.
Charles was next. He did not speak at first, merely drew her into his arms in the same manner he had weeks ago in the sitting room, with no flourish and no apology, only certainty.
And pressed against the front of his coat, she felt everything that had passed between them that morning and everything that had never needed to be spoken aloud.
She thought of the girl she had once been.
She thought of the brother she had needed.
She thought of the man he had become anyway, in spite of everything and because of it.
And she was very glad, quietly and completely, that they had found their way to each other at last, even if it had taken twenty-one years to manage it properly.
“Look after them both,” she said at last, and stepped back.
Then she turned.
Edward was waiting at the foot of the gangway.
He stood with one hand in his coat pocket and the other extended toward her, unhurried and entirely certain of her in a manner that had first undone her at a lake strewn with lantern light and had not, in all the days since, managed to undo any less.
His expression was something she had, sometime in the last week, come to think of as hers, though she had not quite worked out how one went about admitting such a thing aloud without sounding thoroughly ridiculous.
She crossed the distance between them without hesitation.
His hand closed around hers, warm and exactly as she remembered from every previous occasion she had held it. She looked back once at the faces on the dock. Charles with his arm around Jane. Louisa still weeping with admirable commitment into her handkerchief.
Then she looked at Edward.
She thought of her mother’s voice and how long it had followed her, and how startling it was to realize she could no longer hear it quite so clearly.
She thought of perfume bottles and a small girl who had once believed the most reasonable course of action was simply to wait for everything painful to pass on its own.
She thought of everything she was leaving behind her, and everything she was, quite deliberately, choosing instead.
She smiled at her husband, knowing she was making the right choice.
She walked up the steps back to him.
The End.