Elizabeth had cried off the Rosings dinner that evening with a headache, which I accepted at face value and Charlotte accepted with the expression of a woman who has her own opinion about the headache. Maria stayed at the parsonage to keep her company, which left Charlotte and myself to make their excuses to Lady Catherine.

Lady Catherine received the news as a minor personal affront, expressed her hope that Miss Bennet would be recovered sufficiently to attend on Thursday, and led us into dinner. Annesley was not in attendance.

After dinner, we played speculation. Lady Catherine played with the focused intensity she brought to everything, Colonel Fitzwilliam played with the ease of a man who is good at cards and not ashamed to show it, and I played with the cheerful incompetence of Mr. Collins, which required about a tenth of my attention and left the remainder free to observe that Darcy was not at the table.

He had been present at dinner and had excused himself afterward with something murmured about correspondence, which Lady Catherine had received with the slight compression of her lips that indicated she did not believe it and considered it beneath her dignity to say so. Fitzwilliam had watched him go with a smile of quiet amusement.

I played a poor hand badly and said something appreciative about her ladyship’s strategy and thought about Darcy walking the half mile between Rosings and Hunsford in the April dark, and about what he intended to say when he got there, and about Elizabeth sitting alone with a headache that may or may not have been entirely a headache, and hoped this would not become my problem.

The evening concluded at half past ten. Lady Catherine expressed herself satisfied with the cards, with certain reservations about Fitzwilliam’s bidding in the third hand which she outlined at some length, and released us into the night.

The parsonage was lit when we came up the lane. The evening was cold and clear, the kind of April night that promises frost by morning. Light showed from the sitting room windows and from one of the upper rooms where Maria would be. The approach from the gate was perhaps fifteen yards, the gravel path visible enough in the ambient light from the windows. As we came through the gate I became aware of voices from within, from the direction of the sitting room. One of the voices grew louder, and Charlotte’s hand tightened on my arm. We both stopped.

The words were not clear at first. The distance and the walls between us reduced them to tone and rhythm, the rhythm of an argument that has reached its peak and is not coming down. Then the sitting room window, which was not latched, shifted in the evening air and for a moment the words came through.

Elizabeth’s voice spoke with an anger I had not heard before, not even when I had proposed to her. “…the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry…”

Darcy’s voice answered her, more quietly.

I stood in the gate with Charlotte’s hand on my arm and looked at the parsonage and thought several things in rapid succession.

The first was that whatever Darcy had gone to say to Elizabeth had not gone as he intended. The second was that “the last man in the world” was not the controlled refusal of a woman letting a suitor down with appropriate kindness, but the refusal of a woman who means it entirely. The third thing I thought, which arrived a beat after the others and which I set aside immediately but not quite quickly enough: there was something in the rawness of “the last man in the world” that was not simply anger, and that made the whole business tragic. But it was still none of my business.

The front door opened. Darcy came out. He did not see us immediately. He was already three strides into the garden, moving with the contained energy of a man holding something in that wants to be let out. He had the look of a man who has said something he wishes he could unsay.

Then he saw us.

The three of us occupied the garden path for a moment in silence. Darcy’s expression passed from surprise to mortification.

“Mr. Collins,” he said. “Mrs. Collins. Good evening.”

“Mr. Darcy,” I said, with the air of a man delighted to encounter his patroness’s nephew in his own garden at half past ten at night. “What a — that is, we did not expect — I hope Miss Bennet is…”

“Is quite recovered,” Darcy said, in a tone that communicated that he would not be discussing Miss Bennet. “I called to enquire after her health. Good evening.”

He was through the gate before I had finished composing my next sentence, which was probably for the best.

Charlotte and I stood for a moment after the sound of his footsteps had faded into the lane. The parsonage was quiet now. Whatever had been said inside had been said, and the windows were still.

“Well,” said Charlotte.

“Well, indeed.”

She looked at the gate through which Darcy had departed, and then at the parsonage door, and then at me.

“He proposed,” she said.

“It appears so.”

“And she refused him. In those terms.”

“As you say.”

Charlotte was quiet for a moment. She was thinking about Elizabeth, I thought. Not about the situation but about Elizabeth specifically, about what it had cost to say “the last man in the world” to a man of Darcy’s consequence and mean it.

“She’ll be all right,” Charlotte said, more to herself than to me.

“She will,” I said, because it seemed to want answering.

We went inside.

Maria was in the hallway looking wide-eyed and uncertain, with the expression of a young woman who has spent the last half hour in the kitchen with the door closed and is not entirely sure what she has been kept away from. Charlotte went to her immediately and said something quiet and reassuring and steered her toward the stairs.

I looked at the sitting room door, which was closed. Elizabeth had endured quite enough for one evening and whatever she was feeling behind that door she was entitled to feel without an audience. I went to the study instead and sat at the desk and did not light the lamp.

Darcy was going to spend at least one sleepless night in Rosings and emerge from it either resolved or reckless, and Elizabeth was going to spend at least one sleepless night in the parsonage and emerge from it either tearful or furious, and my strong assessment was that Elizabeth would emerge furious because that was the direction her emotions generally traveled when she had been wronged, and a man who proposes badly enough to produce “the last man in the world” has wronged the woman he is proposing to in a way she will not quickly set aside.

Darcy had just been refused with a force that would either extinguish his attachment or drive it somewhere it had not yet been, and I could not determine from thirty yards of garden path and a fragment of overheard sentence which of those two outcomes was more likely.

Charlotte appeared in the study doorway.

The study was cold. I had not lit a fire when we left for Rosings, and the room felt chilly. Charlotte lit the lamp on the table, the flame catching and steadying, casting shadows into the corners the firelight would have reached.

She came in and sat in the chair across from the desk that had become her chair, and looked at me with the steady attention that I had come to rely on in a way I had not anticipated relying on anything.

“Darcy,” she said. “He is not going to leave it there. He is not that kind of man.”

“No, he is not.”

“So he will either write to her or he will find another occasion to speak to her, and either way Elizabeth is going to know more about why he feels as he does, and knowing more is going to change what she feels. In which direction, I cannot say. But it will change.”

I thought about this. I thought about what the change might mean for the management of a situation that was already complicated.

“Whatever comes of it,” I said, “Darcy is going to be in a state tomorrow. A man in a state is a man who makes decisions on impulse, and I cannot afford that on top of everything else.”

As I have said, I do not trust men who cannot control their impulses. I did not think Darcy would do anything that would call for the use of my sword-cane. But it would be inconvenient for my work if he haunted the parsonage trying to prove himself to Elizabeth.

“No. You cannot afford having Darcy underfoot.”

We sat in the study for a while, not saying anything further, which was one of the things about Charlotte I had not anticipated and found, at moments like this, more useful than most things I could have planned for. Then we said goodnight and went to bed.