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.”

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.