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.

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.”

Smugglers’ business alert!

Darcy arrived at Rosings with Colonel Fitzwilliam. Fitzwilliam I had encountered once before, briefly, during one of his previous Easter visits to his aunt. He was a pleasant, sociable man with a soldier’s habit of reading terrain, which in his case extended to social terrain.

Darcy’s past visits to Lady Catherine had been very brief, and had occurred at moments in Eastertide when I was too busy to visit Rosings, either due to the free-trade or to parish work. I had met him in Hertfordshire at the Netherfield ball, where I had introduced myself with the full enthusiasm of Mr. Collins paying his respects to the nephew of his patroness.

Darcy had been gracious, after his fashion, but he had received my overtures with the expression of a man being rained on, who has decided that complaining of the rain will only make things worse. We had exchanged perhaps four sentences. He had removed himself from the conversation at the earliest opportunity, and Elizabeth had reproved me for encroaching upon him. It had been the one moment which made me wonder if she disliked him as much as the gossips of Hertfordshire claimed.

The dinner at which things shifted was a Thursday evening, perhaps ten days into Darcy’s stay at Rosings.

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.