Lucas Lodge was the house of a man who had made his money and wished you to know it, but not to enquire too closely into the particulars. It stood half a mile from the Longbourn estate on a modest acreage, built in the modern style with large windows and rooms that announced their proportions before one had properly entered them. The drawing room where the gathering assembled had been furnished with the kind of determined good taste that comes from consultations with London tradesmen rather than family inheritance: matching chairs, fashionable wallpaper, a looking glass of sufficient size to suggest prosperity without vulgarity. The fireplace was handsome Portland stone, too new to have acquired the patina of generations, and a fire had been lit against the autumn chill though the evening was not cold enough to strictly require it. The effect was comfortable, welcoming, and carefully calculated to suggest that Sir William Lucas had arrived exactly where he had always belonged.

I did not believe this for a moment, but I appreciated the performance.

Sir William Lucas had the manner of a man who had been important once and had decided, on reflection, that the memory of importance was more comfortable than its continuation. He had been in trade: import, specifically, the kind that requires knowing which ships carry what and who stands to profit by their arrival. He had at some point exchanged this for a knighthood and a modest estate and the role of gentry. He was generous, sociable, and entirely without malice, which combination I generally find more distressing than hostility. Hostility absolves one of any need for gentleness in one’s countermeasures.

Sir William was also, I noted within the first quarter hour of the Lucas Lodge gathering, a man who still thought in the patterns of his former profession. Not obviously. Not in any way that would have mattered to someone who did not know those patterns. But it was there in the way he assessed a room’s exits before settling into it, in the angle at which he positioned himself relative to conversations he was not part of, in the slight rearrangement of his attention when certain subjects arose. Coastal weather. Shipping news. The Revenue’s recent activities in the eastern counties, mentioned in passing by someone who had read something in a newspaper. On these subjects, Sir William’s response was a trifle too smooth and light to be convincingly disinterested.

Most interesting.

Almost as interesting as his daughter, who stood by the window watching the approach to the house for late-arriving guests. Or appearing to. More often than not, I found her watching me.

Charlotte Lucas was perhaps twenty-seven, which in the local matrimonial economy represented a situation her family probably viewed with some anxiety, though she herself showed no signs of sharing it. She was not handsome in the way Jane Bennet was handsome, and Mrs. Bennet had gone so far as to call her plain.

Charlotte was not that. There was nothing immediately arresting about her, but she had the kind of face that repays longer acquaintance. She had regular features arranged with intelligence behind them, and an economy of expression that I recognized as a trained quality rather than a natural one. People do not learn to show less than they feel without having had reasons to learn it.

She had been watching me, as I said, since my arrival. Not with the quality Elizabeth brought to observation. Elizabeth’s attention was active, a little combative. One might say: en garde. Charlotte’s was quieter and more systematic. She was cataloguing, not sparring.

For my part, I was performing again. The Lucas Lodge gathering called for a slightly different register than Longbourn: less family warmth, more general sociability, the Rector of Hunsford among his future neighbors rather than his current relations. I circulated. I said appreciative things about the neighborhood. I was effusive about Lady Catherine in a manner calculated to signal devoted patronage without requiring anyone to actually listen to what I was saying about her, which in my experience no one ever does once the name has been established.

Sir William received these effusions with the benevolent magnanimity of a man who considers himself a fair judge of other men and has provisionally judged me harmless. I encouraged this assessment. We spoke about London. He had been presented at St. James’s, a fact he mentioned with a warmth suggesting it remained among his finer memories. We also spoke about the roads between Hertfordshire and Kent, and about nothing of any consequence for a comfortable quarter hour, during which I learned that he had opinions about tidal patterns in the Channel that were considerably more specific than a retired tradesman of his present circumstances had any reason to hold.

Interesting.

Elizabeth was present, as she was generally present at any gathering within a five-mile radius, and moved through the room with her customary ease, talking with animation to several people and watching me, when she thought I wasn’t attending, with an expression that had shifted since Longbourn. The negligible assessment was holding, but it had acquired a slight addition: I had become, I thought, mildly amusing to her.

This was, as I have said, the desired outcome.

It was also, I found, faintly irritating. There is something galling about being a source of amusement to a clever, pretty woman, even if one has no intentions towards her, matrimonial or otherwise.

Charlotte detached herself from a conversation near the fireplace and crossed the room toward me with unhurried directness. She arrived at my side during a momentary lull in Sir William’s reminiscences, and Sir William, with the instincts of a sociable man, took the opportunity to bear down on a newcomer across the room, leaving us in a pocket of relative quiet.

“Mr. Collins,” she said. “I hope you are finding Hertfordshire agreeable.”

“Most agreeable,” I said. “The neighborhood has received me with a kindness I could not have anticipated, and the society — if I may say so without giving offense to any present — compares most favorably with what one might encounter elsewhere. Lady Catherine herself has remarked — that is, her ladyship has observed on more than one occasion that a clergyman’s character is formed as much by his neighbors as by his vocation, and I find myself —”

“Yes,” said Charlotte Lucas.

It was not interruption, exactly. It was more like a door closing quietly but with finality. I looked at her and found she was looking back at me, not in an unfriendly way, but entirely unimpressed.

“You are recently come from Hunsford,” she said. “How do you find the parish?”

I paused, because she had spoken in the tone of someone asking a real question, not a social one, and the real answer was not the answer Mr. Collins of Hunsford gave at social gatherings in Hertfordshire.

“Hardworking,” I said. “And not always well rewarded for it. The land is good but the circumstances of those who work it are…variable.”

Something shifted in her expression.

“Variable,” she repeated.

“The county has its prosperous families,” I said. “And its less prosperous ones. A conscientious rector makes it his business to know the difference.”

“I imagine he does,” said Charlotte Lucas.

We regarded each other for a moment. Around us the room continued its business. Sir William had found his newcomer. Elizabeth was making someone laugh. Mrs. Bennet was engaged in a conversation at sufficient volume to confirm she was not attending to anyone near the window.

“I understand,” Charlotte said, “that you have been some years at Hunsford. Three, is it?”

“Nearly three,” I said.

“And you find it suits you.”

“Very well. It suits me very well.”

Another small pause. Her expression gave me nothing I could act on. Just that look of assessment and behind it something I could not yet read.

“I am glad to hear it,” she said, pleasantly, and turned to answer a question from her mother, and the conversation was over.

I spent the remainder of the evening boring everyone within reach and thinking about Charlotte Lucas at intervals I considered more frequent than the situation warranted.

She was Elizabeth’s closest friend. I had known this from my informants and confirmed it in the first twenty minutes of the gathering, when I saw the ease between them. Elizabeth trusted her. Elizabeth, who assessed most people with that combative look, moved differently around Charlotte: looser, less watchful.

On the way out, Sir William pressed my hand with great warmth and said he hoped to see much more of me during my stay.

“The pleasure will be entirely mine,” I said, and meant it.

Sir William Lucas had spent twenty years moving goods between the Continent and English shores before retiring to his knighthood and comfortable obscurity. A man does not retain opinions about Channel tidal patterns that specific unless he has continued reasons to care about them. He knew something about the Kent free trade. How much he knew currently, and in what capacity, I could not yet determine. That his daughter had inherited his eye for patterns and applied it to me over the course of an evening was either coincidence or inheritance of a more specific kind.

I intended to find out which.

Not urgently. The Hertfordshire visit had a fixed duration and Charlotte Lucas was not yet a problem requiring immediate resolution. But a man in my position does not leave loose threads simply because they are not yet pulling at anything. Sir William’s history, his daughter’s attention, the question she had asked about the parish in the tone of a real question…I kept these factors all in mind.

In the meantime, I would be a frequent and appreciative guest at Lucas Lodge.

“You are too kind,” I told Sir William, pumping his hand with the enthusiasm of a man deeply grateful for the condescension of his social betters. “Too kind entirely. I shall look forward to it more than I can say.”