The Lucas carriage came through the Hunsford gate at half past three on a Wednesday afternoon. I was at the door. We had a small audience of curious parishioners at a respectful distance, as there always is when anything of note arrives in a village lane. I composed my features into the expression of a man receiving distinguished guests and sensible of the honor.

Sir William descended first, with his usual expansive energy and shook my hand. He looked over the parsonage and its church, at the lane and the village and the general disposition of things, then to the coast beyond it. He had the eye of a man who had spent twenty years knowing which harbors ran the most goods.

“My dear Mr. Collins,” he said. “A most charming establishment. Most charming entirely. Charlotte’s letters have conveyed a very favorable impression, and I see that the reality is even beyond her account of the place.”

“You are most welcome, Sir William,” I said, with the warmth of a man deeply sensible of the honor. “Most welcome. The parish has been looking forward — that is, Charlotte has spoken so often of the pleasure of —”

“Yes,” said Sir William, and we smiled at each other with great mutual appreciation and said nothing of any significance, which was, I thought, precisely what both of us intended.

Maria came out of the carriage next, pink-cheeked and slightly crumpled from the journey, regarding the Kent landscape with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a young woman for whom everything beyond Hertfordshire constitutes foreign travel.

Elizabeth descended last, straightening her coat and looking about her with the alert, assessing quality I remembered from Hertfordshire. The journey had not diminished it. She took in the parsonage, the church, the lane, with that brief comprehensive attention, and then looked at me with an expression that was pleasant and gave nothing away.

“Mr. Collins,” she said. “What a pretty village.”

“Miss Bennet,” I said, beaming. “You are too kind — that is, I have always thought so myself, though one hesitates to — Lady Catherine herself has remarked on more than one occasion that the situation of Hunsford is —”

“Indeed,” said Elizabeth, and looked past me to where Charlotte had appeared in the doorway.

Charlotte received Elizabeth with a warmth that left no doubt of their friendship. Elizabeth responded in kind, the ease between them reasserting itself after months of separation. Maria met Charlotte with a younger sister’s uncomplicated affection, and Charlotte answered with genuine tenderness. I would do well not to come between Charlotte and either friend or sister; I had done nothing to earn the kind of loyalty she gave to them.

We went inside. Charlotte showed Maria and Elizabeth to the rooms that had been prepared for them on the upper floor, the two smaller bedchambers that faced the garden. I heard their voices drift down as they exclaimed over the view, Maria with enthusiasm, Elizabeth with what sounded like genuine approval. Sir William remained below with me, accepting a glass of something restorative after the journey and settling into the chair nearest the fire in the sitting room with the ease of a man who understood he was welcome.

Sir William stayed four days before returning to Hertfordshire, which was three days more than I would have chosen. He was pleasant at every meal, appreciative of the parsonage, and suitably effusive about Lady Catherine and Rosings. He walked the village with me on his second morning, which I had offered and he had accepted with a promptness suggesting he had been waiting to be offered. We covered the lanes and the church and the farms and the general disposition of the parish with the thoroughness of a proper tour.

We started at the church, where Sir William examined the Norman tower with the eye of a man assessing landmarks rather than architecture, then followed the lane south toward the farms. The coastal road ran visible to the east. He remarked on how well-maintained it was for a parish road, asked about tidal patterns affecting the low-lying fields, asked whether the Revenue kept much of a presence in this part of Kent. Not the questions a man asks to be polite, but the questions a man asks who has formed a picture and wants to know where the edges are. I answered all of it in Mr. Collins’s most informative manner and watched him absorb the answers. He did not seem ill-pleased with them. By the time we returned to the parsonage, Sir William had seen everything a concerned father would want to see about his daughter’s new parish, and everything a former merchant would want to know about the local infrastructure.

On his last evening, after dinner, while Charlotte sat with Elizabeth and Maria in the sitting room, Sir William and I remained at the dining table over the port. He turned his glass in his hands for a moment and looked at the table.

“Charlotte,” he said, “seems very well.”

“She is.”

“She has always had good judgment,” he said. “Better than mine, I sometimes think.” He looked up at me then, with the expression of a man who has arrived at something he has been working toward for four days. “She came to me, you know. Before the engagement.”

“Did she?”

“She had formed an impression of a…certain person, and she wanted to know whether my impression was similar. She is very thorough, always has been.” He set down his glass. “I told her my impressions of this person, and I added that whatever she decided I would support her in it.”

“I am glad to know it,” I said.

He nodded, the nod of a man whose accounting is complete, and refilled his glass, and we talked about the Hertfordshire roads for another twenty minutes until the women rejoined us, and that was the last either of us said about it.

He left the following morning in the Lucas carriage with great warmth and many expressions of the pleasure the visit had given him and the hope that Charlotte would bring her husband back to Lucas Lodge at the earliest opportunity. Maria wept slightly at parting from her father, recovered her composure before the carriage had cleared the gate, and was cheerful again before noon, which was the appropriate scale of feeling for the occasion and did her credit.

Maria gave me no trouble. She was not unintelligent, but she was young enough and sheltered enough that she took things at their presented value. She followed Elizabeth in most things, laughed when Elizabeth laughed, was delighted by Rosings and slightly frightened by Lady Catherine, and spent a considerable portion of each day in Charlotte’s company absorbing Charlotte’s domestic arrangements with the attention of a young woman who understands that she will one day have domestic arrangements of her own and is beginning to take notes. She was nine or ten years younger than Charlotte, and whatever Sir William had told Charlotte of the less respectable side of his business, he had not told Maria.

Charlotte managed her younger sister with affectionate efficiency. I observed this and thought, not for the first time, that Charlotte’s capacities were rather broader than our arrangement required. The parish school and the Gofton children and Maria Lucas trailing after her through the parsonage were perhaps not entirely separate things in Charlotte’s mind. It occurred to me that she was the kind of woman who might want children of her own someday, but I set that idea to one side. She would issue that invitation when and if she was ready for it.

Charlotte took Elizabeth to the Goftons five days after the arrival, on a morning when Maria had elected to stay at the parsonage with a novel. I had not suggested it. Charlotte had decided it as she decided most things, without announcement, as the obvious next step in a sequence she had already mapped. She mentioned it to me the evening before in the matter-of-fact tone she used for parish business, and I agreed with her, which was all her plan required of me.

I did not accompany them. I went instead to see about the drainage on the Hatch farm, which required attention.

Elizabeth said nothing to me about the Gofton visit directly. That evening, however, over dinner in the dining parlor, she asked several questions about the parish school. How long had it been running? How was it funded? What the children were taught?

She listened to my answers with more than polite attention. The dining table was small enough that everyone could hear the conversation, but Charlotte and Maria made no move to redirect it. She asked then about the local farms, and a third about the general condition of the village.

I answered all of them as informatively as I could without dropping my social mask, completing several whole sentences in the process.

Charlotte, across the table, was attending to her dinner with the expression of a woman who has done something she intended to do and is waiting to see what comes of it. Maria was telling a story about a ginger cat she had seen in the village that morning.

The evening was very domestic and entirely unremarkable. I thought: Charlotte has made an investment and time will tell what it returns. In the meantime there is the Hatch drainage and three runs before midsummer. And Annesley has not been at Rosings in the past ten days, which is less than reassuring.

Rosings produced its first dinner with Elizabeth present approximately a week after the arrival, and I watched the evening with the attention it deserved.

Lady Catherine received Elizabeth with a combination of examination and condescension that most people found either intimidating or offensive. Elizabeth seemed to find it mildly entertaining. She answered Lady Catherine’s questions with a directness that was not quite impertinence and not quite deference, threading the needle between them with the ease of long practice. It rather bewildered Lady Catherine.

Maria sat beside Charlotte and was quietly overwhelmed by everything, which was the correct response to Rosings on a first visit and which Lady Catherine received as her due.

Annesley was present. He watched Elizabeth across the table with the assessing quality he brought to new people and arrived, I thought, at a more complicated conclusion than he had reached with Charlotte. Elizabeth was not negligible. She was quick and sharp and she said things that touched him on the quick. Annesley, who fancied himself a judge of people, could not decide what to make of her.

Elizabeth, for her part, had noticed Annesley in the way she noticed everyone: with an initial judgment, a conclusion forming. I could not read the conclusion from across a dinner table, but I could see that she had formed one. It had made her more alert, in the way one is when confronted by something that does not quite fit the expected pattern.

She was not wrong to react this way. I would have preferred she had not, but she was not wrong.

The dinner ended without incident and we made our farewells and walked back to the parsonage under a clear March sky, the half mile of lane lit well enough by moonlight that we had no need of lanterns. Maria walked with Charlotte ahead of us. I fell into step with Elizabeth, which had not been arranged and simply happened, the natural consequence of everyone’s position on the path.

She was quiet for a moment, which was not her habit.

“Mr. Annesley,” she said. “Is he often at Rosings?”

“He is a connection of the family,” I said, in Mr. Collins’s most informative tone. “Her ladyship maintains very proper — that is, the ties of family are, as Lady Catherine herself has observed, among the most sacred of —”

“Yes, but is he often there?”

I beamed at the retreating figures of my wife and her sister. “He has been good enough to attend rather frequently of late. Her ladyship values his company, I believe.”

Elizabeth said nothing further on the subject. But I was aware, walking the last hundred yards to the parsonage gate, of her turning something over in her mind with that patient, focused attention.

I could not determine what conclusion she had reached about Annesley, but she had noticed him and found him noteworthy. That alone was a complication I did not need.

I held the gate. She thanked me with the pleasant courtesy of a woman who has decided, for the moment, to take things at face value.

We went inside.