Educating Caroline by Patricia Cabot

straight, his head held unnaturally high.
    After a while, Caroline stopped laughing, and she said, wiping tears from her eyes, “Oh, Emmy. We oughtn’t to have poked such fun at him. He was so sick, after all.”
    “Pshaw,” Emily said. “He’s been healthy as a horse for months now. You and your mother really do have to give up babying him.”
    “Oh, I couldn’t,” Caroline said. “He came so close to dying. . . .”
    “Yes, yes,” Emily said, disgustedly. “I’ve heard about it quite enough, thank you. He was never going to tell you anything, anyway. Even if he had actually had something to divulge, he wouldn’t. They don’t, you know, as a rule.”
    Caroline looked confused. “Who won’t? What are you talking about?”
    “Men. They won’t tell us anything. Us women, that is. That’s how they maintain their power. The only time they tell us anything is when they want something from us. At least, that’s how it works between my mother and father.”
    Suddenly, Caroline didn’t feel in the least like laughing anymore. In fact, she felt a little the way she had the night before, at Dame Ashforth’s party, right before Braden Granville had made her put her head between her knees. She wondered if perhaps she was fainting again.
    “Do you think that’s true, Em?” she asked, breathlessly.
    Emily had found another blade of grass, and was now attempting to form a whistle from it, by holding it between both thumbs and blowing on it energetically. “Do I think what’s true?”
    “What you just said. That a man won’t tell a woman anything, unless he wants something from her.”
    “Certainly.” Emily threw the blade of grass away, and leaned over to select another. “Why do you think the queen’s always in such a foul mood these days? Mr. Gladstone doesn’t keep her informed about what’s going on in the Cabinet. And he’s the prime minister. But I’m sure he’s thinking, ‘Well, why should I tell her anything, when there’s nothing she can do for me in return?’”
    Caroline, however, barely heard her. A different voice entirely was sounding in her head.
    And when I get the name of the fellow, Braden Granville had said, I’ll be only too happy to prove it, in a court of law, if necessary.
    Braden Granville, she realized, wanted something. Wanted something badly enough, Caroline thought, to do just about anything for it.
    An insidious plot was hatching inside her head. It wasn’t something, she was quite certain, she ever would have thought of if she hadn’t been pushed to the brink of desperation by the sight of the love of her life in the arms of another. Or rather, the legs of another. But since she was, after all, so bitterly unhappy, it only seemed natural that these ideas—the sort that never would have occurred to her under normal circumstances—came popping up into her head, the way goldfish came popping up to the surface of the lily pond at Winchilsea Abbey, now and again.
    It was a despicable thing, what she planned to do. But really, had she been given any sort of choice? No. Her mother, her brother, her own fiancé had left her with no other alternative.
    Besides, her mother had told her to fight for the man she loved, and to use her womanly wiles. Wasn’t that precisely what she was doing now?
    Well? Wasn’t it?
    A man’s voice, quite different from Braden Granville’s, startled her from her dark, devious thoughts.
    “Lady Caroline,” the butler said, gravely.
    Caroline started, and squinted up at the tall man, who looked extremely forbidding in the bright sunlight.
    “Oh, hullo, Bennington,” she said. “Is anything the matter?”
    “Indeed, my lady. Her ladyship, your mother the Lady Bartlett, begs me to remind you that earls’ daughters do not, generally, sit upon the grass, and she has sent me to ask you if you require a chair.”
    Caroline looked past the butler’s shoulder, and saw her mother, quite clearly, gesturing frantically to her from an upper-story