The connection between Elizabeth and Darcy had begun, as best I could reconstruct, within the first few days of Darcy’s arrival. Probably it had started with all the small interactions that Rosings produced between people staying in the same neighborhood who were expected to call on each other with regularity. I had not been present for all of these, but Charlotte had seen enough of the two in company to have an opinion.

She told me what she thought on a Sunday evening after church. Elizabeth had gone for a walk toward the village in the last of the daylight, watched from a respectful distance by the eldest Gofton boy, who would go running to fetch help at the first sign of trouble. Maria had gone to bed early with a headache. Charlotte and I were alone in the sitting room with the fire, comfortably silent.

The fire had been built up against the evening cold, the room warm enough to be comfortable but not so warm as to waste fuel. Charlotte sat in the chair nearest the better light, her sewing in her lap, the needle moving with the steady rhythm of long practice. I had taken the chair across from her with the correspondence I was reading. The windows showed only darkness now, the garden invisible beyond them. It was the kind of evening that invited confidences, the kind of domestic quiet we had arrived at without planning for it.

Charlotte set down her sewing and said, without preamble: “I think Darcy is in love with Elizabeth.”

I looked up from the correspondence. “Are you sure?”

“He has known her since the Assembly Ball at Meryton,” Charlotte said, “when Bingley first took Netherfield.” She picked up her sewing again. “He looks at her so often, but I am not sure what he means by it. Sometimes I think it is only absence of mind. Other times…I am less sure.”

I had seen enough for myself to know Darcy found Elizabeth worth looking at. I had not paid much attention to the fact, because almost any man would find her worth looking at, and it was none of my business whether Darcy did so or not. Warned by Charlotte’s instincts, I began to wonder if it was my business after all.

“That is,” I said, “an inconvenient development.”

“Is it?” Charlotte’s tone was the tone she used when she considered me mistaken, and was giving me the opportunity to mend the error in my opinions.

“He is Lady Catherine’s nephew,” I said. “Lady Catherine has views about who her nephew should marry, and they do not include the portionless daughter of a Hertfordshire gentleman with an entailed estate. If Darcy’s attention to Elizabeth becomes apparent to Lady Catherine, there will be complications.”

“Complications you would prefer not to deal with on top of the problem of Gerard Annesley,” Charlotte said.

“Indeed.”

She was quiet for a moment, drawing thread through fabric with the small precise movements of a woman who thinks better with her hands occupied. “You are looking at it as a problem to be managed,” she said.

“Is it not?”

“It is also two people who might be good for each other, if they can be brought to see past their own prejudices.” She looked up briefly. “Elizabeth is not indifferent to him.”

I considered this. “What makes you say so?”

“She talks about him more often than she intends. She believes she finds him objectionable. She finds him interesting, which is quite a different thing, and Elizabeth has always valued an interesting mind. And he is considered a handsome man.”

I thought about Elizabeth, easy and laughing with Fitzwilliam. I thought about the way her attention turned to Darcy the moment he said anything. I had read all of this as one keen mind sharpening itself on another. The possibility that there was something else in it I had not considered.

I returned to the correspondence.

“I spoke to Pyke this morning,” I said.

Charlotte waited.

“He tells me that Annesley made a visit to the coast last week. Not a scheduled run. A private visit, early morning, one of the Elham farms. Pyke’s man saw him going in and coming out again two hours later. Nothing carried, as far as could be determined. But the farm belongs to a family who have been with the network since the old Annesley days, before my time.”

“He is building something,” Charlotte said. It was not a question.

“He is at minimum consolidating. Testing where the old loyalties sit. Whether there are men who remember the grandfather and believe the current arrangement can be improved on.”

“And are there such men?”

“Not enough to matter, according to Pyke. He is usually right about these things. But I have learned that the moment one begins to rely on a man’s judgment as a certainty is the moment one should start checking it independently.”

Charlotte nodded. “What do you need me to do?”

This was one of the things about Charlotte that I had not anticipated when I accepted her proposal in the Longbourn garden. I had anticipated competence, discretion, the useful cover of a domestic arrangement that looked ordinary from the outside. I had not anticipated the way she asked: “What do you need me to do?” She did so plainly and practically, without the anxiety that most people bring to difficult situations.

“Talk to Elizabeth,” I said. “If she mentions anything amiss, I will need to know immediately.”

“And Darcy?”

“Darcy is not yet my problem.”

Charlotte looked at me with the expression she used when she considered that I had said something that was going to prove incorrect.

“He will be,” she said, pleasantly, and picked up her sewing.

I returned to the correspondence and did not tell her that I thought she was probably right.

The fire crackled. I finished the correspondence and went to bed and lay awake longer than I intended, thinking about what Annesley was planning in the Elham valley and how much of it I could not yet see, and about the tone of Charlotte’s voice when she told me that Darcy would become my problem.