The Gofton children were called Thomas, Anne, William, and the baby, whose name was Margaret but who had not yet fully grown into it and was referred to by everyone in the household, including her mother, as Meg. Thomas was seven. Anne was five. William was three and regarded strangers with a suspicion I found professionally admirable. Meg was not yet two and was currently engaged in a determined effort to eat a piece of straw.

Mary Gofton took the straw away with the automatic efficiency of a woman who has been removing inedible objects from the mouths of small persons at intervals for more than six years. She offered me tea.

The Gofton cottage was a single large room with a sleeping loft above, the kind of dwelling that housed perhaps half the families in the parish. The floor was beaten earth, clean-swept. The furnishings were sparse but adequate: a table, benches, the chair I occupied near the fire, a cradle in the corner that Meg had outgrown but which had not yet been passed along to anyone who needed it. The thatch had been repaired since my last visit, I noted. Good work, tight and even, the kind that would see them through several winters. The fire burned steadily in a hearth that showed signs of careful maintenance. There was food on the shelf, not abundant but present. The room had the quality of a household managing, not comfortably, but well enough, and doing so with a competence that suggested they had not always managed this well.

Two years ago, when I had first called at this cottage, the roof had leaked, the children had been thin, and Will Gofton had been making the kinds of calculations a man makes when he is deciding whether to turn thief or watch his family starve. The network had given him a third option, one that paid better than theft and carried less risk of the gallows.

I accepted, as I generally did at the Goftons’, and sat in the chair nearest the fire that was tacitly understood to be the rector’s chair when the rector was present, and drank indifferent tea and watched William watch me from behind his mother’s skirt.

“Will’s out,” Mary said. “Back this evening, he said.”

“No matter,” I said. “I wanted to look in. Make sure the last months haven’t been too hard.”

She gave me the look she always gave me when I said things like this. Not gratitude exactly, but the look of a woman who appreciates practical interest and has learned not to mistake it for sentiment.

“We’ve done well enough,” she said. “The roof held. Thomas had a cough last month but it came right.”

“And the others?”

“As you see them.”

Anne had climbed onto the bench nearest the window and was conducting a close examination of something outside with the total absorption of a child. William had advanced approximately six inches from behind his mother’s skirt and was now regarding me with his same suspicious intensity. Meg had found another piece of straw to taste.

“The plough-horse is well,” Mary said, in the tone of someone offering information they know will be received with interest. “Thomas rides him now.”

“Does he?”

“Every morning before his lessons.”

“Mrs. Collins will be taking an interest in the parish school,” I said. “She arrives next month.”

Mary Gofton absorbed this information with the equanimity she brought to most things. “We heard you were married,” she said. “Is she a sensible woman?”

“The most sensible woman I have met,” I said.

Mary nodded, the nod of someone who would form her own opinion in due course and would not require mine to do it.

I finished the tea and took my leave and walked back through the village in the late afternoon light. The lane ran past the smithy, where I could hear the ring of hammer on anvil, then past the row of cottages that housed most of the families I had been tallying in my mind. Smoke rose from chimneys in the orderly progression of households preparing their evening meals. The tavern stood at the far end, its windows already showing lamplight. Two years ago, this same walk would have shown me more empty cottages, more neglected thatch, more of the signs a clergyman learns to read when his parish is struggling. The improvement was modest but real, and it was the kind of improvement that could vanish in a season if the network failed.

I thought about the seven families, and the eight families after them who were doing better than they had been two years ago but not yet well enough for me to call them secure, and the three beyond those whose situations had stabilized entirely and who no longer needed to assist though two of them continued to do so, because once a man has operated outside the law for sufficient time the transition back to pure legality is not as simple as he might wish.

The operation had started small: a single coastal run, four men including myself, goods that Lady Catherine had expressed a desire for through the medium of a pointed conversation about the inadequacy of what the legitimate market could provide. I had seen what she was asking before she had finished asking it, and had spent the following two weeks determining whether the infrastructure existed to do it properly. I had found the remnants of a previous network, which had run for thirty years before its leadership had made certain errors of judgment that I had studied carefully and did not intend to repeat.

The Annesley family had been that leadership. This was information I had assembled before I had ever met Gerard Annesley. His grandfather had run the coastal end competently for the better part of two decades, and this despite having a country seat some ways inland, at Elham. Gerard’s father, a cousin of Lady Catherine’s late husband, had been a capable figure in his own right at first. Then a Revenue confrontation off Dungeness in ninety-eight had left him with a ruined knee and a permanent retreat to the safer margins of the trade, such as the storage of goods and the making of occasional introductions between interested parties. He had been perhaps thirty at the time, with a reputation still building. According to my sources, Gerard had grown up listening to his father’s stories, and also his father’s grievances.

Gerard had arrived in the network eighteen months ago at Lady Catherine’s indirect suggestion, which I had been unable to decline without unnecessary conflict. For the first year and some months Gerard had been, if not exactly an asset, at least a manageable presence. He was competent at the operational level, reliable on the coastal runs, and sufficiently aware that he was being assessed to keep his opinions about the management of things largely to himself.

I had named Gerard the Cornet, when he joined. He had been flattered by the name, which had told me a great deal. A more intelligent man would have understood that being compared to the junior-most rank of cavalryman was not entirely a compliment.

I found Pyke in the churchyard, which was not unusual.

The churchyard showed the neatness Pyke brought to his work: the paths clear of debris, the older graves tended with the same care as the new. It was late winter, the ground still hard, the grass sparse and brown where it grew at all between the stones. The light had changed since my walk through the village, the sky gone heavy with the promise of rain or possibly sleet. The air was growing colder as well.

He was cleaning a grave in the northeast corner with the methodical care he brought to all his work, the sexton’s brush moving in slow, precise strokes across the stone. He did not look up when I approached, which meant he had heard me coming and had already decided no immediate response was required.

I stood beside him for a moment and looked at the stone, which belonged to a “Thomas Barden, 1741 to 1809, beloved husband and father.” The carving was good. Pyke maintained the stones in his care with the same attention he maintained everything else.

“She arrives next month,” I said.

“So I heard.” He moved the brush to the lower inscription. “Hertfordshire woman.”

“Lucas. Sir William’s eldest daughter.”

A pause during which Pyke continued his work. “Lucas. Import trade, wasn’t he, before the knighthood?”

“He was.”

Another pause. The brush moved. “Sensible woman, is she?”

“She knows what she’s coming into. Not the details, but enough.”

Pyke absorbed this in the manner he absorbed most information, which was to say without visible reaction of any kind. After a moment he sat back on his heels and looked at the stone with the critical eye of a craftsman assessing his own work.

“The Cornet’s been restless,” he said. “Enough that Plough mentioned it, and he don’t speak of things unless he thinks they want mentioning.”

This was accurate. Will Gofton, alias Plough, was not a man who raised concerns for the fun of it.

“What form is it taking?”

“Talking. About how things ought to be run. Who ought to be running them.” He picked up the brush again. “Nothing we can move against yet. Started maybe six weeks back.”

Six weeks. Recent enough that it had not been running when I left for Hertfordshire, or had been barely beginning then. This was a change in him that had developed while I was occupied elsewhere, which I noted and did not consider coincidental.

“Keep watching,” I said.

“As you say, Captain.”

He said it the way the men always said it, matter-of-fact, without ceremony, the title that had been given rather than claimed.

I walked back to the parsonage in the long light and let myself in. The study was cold. I had not lit a fire that morning and saw no reason to light one now for the sake of a letter. I sat at my desk. The last of the daylight came through the window at an angle that would be gone in another quarter hour. I lit the lamp and wrote a letter to Charlotte about the parish that was also, in the spaces between what it said, a letter about what she was coming to, and tried to make it accurate without making it alarming, and found, after two drafts, that this was harder than most things I put my hand to.

The third draft was better. I sent that one.