The journey from Hertfordshire to Kent takes the better part of a day by carriage, depending on the roads and the weather and the disposition of the horses. The roads were adequate, the weather was dry, and the various changes of horses were Lady Catherine’s, which meant they were better than adequate. We made good time.

Charlotte sat across from me for the first hour with the composed expression she had brought to everything since the garden, the expression of a woman who has made a decision and is not in the habit of reconsidering decisions once made. I sat across from her and thought about the letter I had sent from Hunsford, which she had received and read and had not mentioned in the days before the wedding.

“The letter,” she said, at some point past Sevenoaks.

“Yes,” I said.

“The part about the Gofton children,” she said. “You wrote it more than once.”

I looked at her. “Was it so obvious?”

“It was a guess,” she said. “Apparently a correct one.” She looked out the window for a moment. The hedgerows had grown thinner as we traveled, the land opening toward the coast. The quality of light had changed to that brightness that comes off water even when the sea itself is not yet visible. “It was the right thing to put in.”

I had nothing immediate to say to this, so I said nothing, and she appeared to find this satisfactory, and we continued in a silence that was not uncomfortable for the remainder of the journey.

The parsonage looked small, compared to Lucas Lodge. I was aware of this as we came up the lane. Not that it had changed, but that I was seeing it through the eyes of a married man for the first time. I watched Charlotte look at it through the carriage window with that systematic attention, taking in the gate, the garden, the church beyond, the general disposition of things, and I waited for her assessment.

She descended from the carriage and stood for a moment in the lane looking at the house. Her gaze moved past the building to the garden that ran along its southern side, laid out in the practical rows of a kitchen garden. Even at this season, with most of it cut back for winter, the beds showed signs of competent management.

“The garden,” she said, “is a good size.”

“I have always thought so,” I said.

She had not mentioned the house’s dimensions, which was a choice I recognized and appreciated.

She nodded, the nod of a woman who has completed a first assessment and is ready to proceed, and we went in.

The hall was small but well-proportioned, the floor of good stone flags, the walls paneled in dark wood that had been kept polished. A narrow staircase rose along one wall to the upper floor. The space showed the signs of a household maintained with care: no dust on the sills, the brass fixtures bright, a looking glass positioned to catch the light from the door. It was the hall of a clergyman who could afford to keep a proper housekeeper and did so.

Mrs. Grant received us with the correct degree of warmth and deference for a housekeeper welcoming her employer’s new wife. Charlotte received this with her usual quiet pleasantness. They watched each other for a moment with the mutual assessment of two women who are going to be managing the same household and are each determining what the other is made of.

“Mrs. Collins,” Mrs. Grant said. “I hope the journey was not too tiring.”

“Not at all,” Charlotte said. “I should like to see the kitchen when it is convenient.”

Mrs. Grant’s expression shifted very slightly in a direction that suggested approval. “Of course, ma’am. Whenever you are ready.”

I showed her the house. It was not large: a dining parlor that could seat perhaps eight, a morning room with south-facing windows, the study I had already occupied for three years. She moved through each space with the air of a woman calculating what would need to be done and in what order. The furnishings were adequate without being lavish, the kind that came with a clerical living of this value. The morning room showed the most neglect, being the room I used least. She paused at the cellar door with a slight adjustment of her attention that told me she had noted its existence and was wondering about its uses, and I gave her a slight shake of my head, which she received without comment.

When we had completed the circuit and returned to the sitting room, she looked around it with the expression of a woman making mental alterations she had the tact not to announce immediately. The room faced the garden, its windows letting in the last of the afternoon light. The furniture was serviceable: chairs arranged for conversation, a small writing desk near the window, a carpet that had seen better years but was still sound. It was a room that had been lived in by a man without a wife, maintained well enough but lacking the touches a woman’s management would bring. I could see her cataloguing those absences.

“May I see your study?” she said. “Later, after Mrs. Grant has shown me the kitchen.”

“Of course,” I said.

She went to find Mrs. Grant. I went to the study and found that I had been looking forward to this conversation for longer than I had admitted to myself.

Charlotte came to the study an hour later and sat in the chair across from the desk.

The study was the most lived-in room in the house. The desk dominated the space, positioned to face the door with the window at my back. The view from that window, as I had noted in my letter, showed the line of the coast on clear days, though at present the evening had advanced too far to see it. The bookshelves held the expected theological works alongside a modest collection of classical authors. The correspondence on the desk was arranged with the precision of a man who could not afford confusion. A locked drawer occupied the lower right side of the desk. The room had a fire laid but not yet lit, the air still holding the day’s cold. This was where I worked, where I planned, where I wrote the letters that said one thing on their surface and meant another between the lines. Charlotte took it all in with that systematic attention before she looked at me.

She looked at me with the full, steady attention that had seen through Mr. Collins of Hunsford in a Longbourn garden and had not looked away since.

I told her about the parsonage’s role. Not everything, but enough. The occasional visitor who was not a parishioner. The correspondence that was not about sermons. The pattern of my absences and what they meant. She listened with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on my face, asking a question when she needed clarification and not asking questions she did not need answered.

“Pyke,” she said, when I had finished. “You mentioned him in your letter.”

“My second in command, to the extent that I have one. He manages the day-to-day when I cannot. You will meet him tomorrow. He will come to the church for the morning service and you will be introduced as any new rector’s wife is introduced to the sexton.” I paused. “He already knows about you.”

“What does he know?”

“That you are Sir William Lucas’s daughter. That you came into this with open eyes. That your father was in the trade, in his time, in a different county.” I looked at her. “He has not said anything about this. He won’t.”

She looked at the desk, at the papers, at the carefully organized surface of a life that contained more than it showed. “The man you mentioned,” she said. “Lady Catherine’s connection.”

I had written to her about Gerard Annesley in terms sufficiently oblique that they would have been meaningless to anyone who did not already know what I was speaking of. I presented him as a young gentleman of the neighborhood, a cousin of the late Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose family had long associations in the neighborhood and was visiting at her ladyship’s suggestion. Charlotte of course knew enough to read between those lines.

“He is a problem I am managing,” I said. “His grandfather was a power in this part of Kent, thirty years ago. His father had the misfortune to be present when a Revenue cutter came closer than expected off Dungeness in ninety-eight, and has been on the margins ever since. The son grew up with the grandfather’s legend and the father’s diminishment and has arrived at the conclusion that the present arrangement ought to reflect his family’s history more substantially than it does.”

“And does it not?”

“The present arrangement reflects his actual capabilities,” I said, “which are adequate but not remarkable. He has recently begun to feel ill-used. The last month or two he has been talking rather more than I find comfortable.”

“Talking to whom?”

“The men. About how things ought to be run. Who ought to be running them.” I paused. “Nothing I can formally act on yet. When there is, I will deal with it.”

“And Lady Catherine,” Charlotte said. “She introduced him. Does that constrain you?”

It was the question, and the fact that she had arrived at it without prompting told me the evening had been well spent.

“It complicates things,” I said. “It does not constrain me. If he becomes a genuine threat to the people in this parish, her ladyship’s feelings on the matter cease to be my primary concern.”

She absorbed this. “Good,” she said, simply, and that was that.

I walked her to the foot of the stairs. I saw the faintest flicker of worry on her face, and spoke to it. “Your room is yours,” I told her. “I do not intend to enter it without your express invitation, for any cause less desperate than a fire or the Revenue.”

She smiled at my last words, but the worry continued to flicker around her eyebrows. “You will not expect it tonight?”

“You will issue it when and if you feel equal to it,” I told her. “I do not like to let my impulses, or their…expectations, get the better of me.”

She gave a little sigh of relief, and we said goodnight with the formality appropriate to two people at the beginning of something neither of them had done before.