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.

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.

Neither of us informed the Bennets of our decision that morning, for custom dictated that the Lucases ought to hear it first. The family at Longbourn learned the news that evening during a dinner at Lucas Lodge. I wondered if Charlotte had timed her proposal to me with that dinner in mind.

The announcement came after we had removed to the drawing room. The fire burned higher than strictly necessary, as if Sir William had ordered it built up for celebration. The room had that quality of determined festivity that comes when a family wishes to mark an occasion they are not entirely certain how to feel about. Mrs. Bennet had positioned herself near enough to one of the other guests to suggest intimate conversation, though her voice normally carried with vigor. Jane sat near her mother with her customary composure, making gentle attempts to redirect the conversation that her mother showed no signs of heeding. Elizabeth had taken a chair by the window, as far from her mother as the room’s dimensions permitted. Charlotte stood near her mother, composed and still, while I positioned myself at what I judged to be an appropriate distance for a newly engaged man: close enough to suggest attachment, far enough to suggest proper restraint.

Sir William made the announcement with the warmth of a man determined to carry the thing off well. There were congratulations. There were the requisite expressions of pleasure and surprise, some more convincing than others. And then Mrs. Bennet began to speak.

Mrs. Bennet’s response to the news occupied approximately forty minutes and covered, in no particular order: her own nerves, the ingratitude of daughters who had been given every opportunity and contrived to waste them, the continuing injustice of the entail which had not been resolved and which remained, she wished everyone to understand, a source of ongoing suffering, Lady Catherine de Bourgh who was by reputation a difficult woman and one hoped Miss Lucas had considered this carefully, and the nerves again. Elizabeth, I gathered, had refused a perfectly good offer that morning and would live to regret it. Mary had sat in the corner and done nothing useful with her opportunities, which was entirely characteristic. Lydia and Kitty were dining with the Phillipses in Meryton, and so managed to escape opprobrium. At least, Mrs. Bennet observed with a volume that had now entirely abandoned any pretense of discretion, Jane would soon be settled at Netherfield, and what a comfort that was to a mother’s nerves. Her voice, which had begun as something approaching a murmur, had achieved its natural volume by the time she reached her second mention of the entail.

She had come prepared. That was the first thing. She had not come here on impulse. The stillness she had shown, standing by the gate, was the stillness of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment, which meant she had known the moment was coming, which meant she had known what I was inside doing. How did she know the time had come? I do not claim to know. Perhaps Kitty had come to Lucas Lodge and gossiped with Maria Lucas, or perhaps those who lived in the county long enough could set their clocks by the unfolding of Mrs. Bennet’s schemes.

I started towards the garden gate, but she closed the distance between us before I could reach it, and set herself in front of me with something of the air of a highwayman. I half-expected her to ask me to stand and deliver.

When she stopped, she stood so close that I could feel her breath on my face, when she looked up at me. She was far too close to perform to, partly because any performance would be unconvincing at this range. But also because her closeness made me uncomfortably aware that I was a man and she was a woman of my own age, who did not deserve to be called plain. At Oxford, I had seen many men undone by situations like this, and I had learned to distrust the emotions they roused.

I made a feeble attempt at distracting her. “Miss Lucas, what a delightful —”

“I will be brief,” she said, “because I think you are a man who prefers brevity when there is real business to conduct.”

I looked at her. She looked back at me, steady and patient, waiting to see what I would do.

“Go on,” I said.

The thing about a bad proposal is that it requires more craft than a good one.

A good proposal needs only sincerity, reasonable timing, and the wit not to say anything that cannot be unsaid. These are modest requirements. Most men of ordinary feeling can meet them without preparation. A bad proposal, one engineered to fail, to produce a clean refusal without injury to either party’s dignity, and without creating the kind of scene that gets retold at dinner tables for the next twenty years…this is a genuinely difficult undertaking, and I approached it as such.

The difficulty was Elizabeth specifically. A woman of less perception could be managed with blunt instruments: excessive condescension, a sufficiently detailed accounting of her family’s deficiencies, the sort of proposal that is really a list of the proposer’s virtues with a question appended. Elizabeth Bennet would see through blunt instruments. She would see through them and she would be amused by them and she would tell Charlotte Lucas about it in precise and entertaining detail, and Charlotte Lucas would notice it alongside everything else she was noticing about me, and I did not need Charlotte Lucas to have more material.

What I needed was a refusal that Elizabeth would find so entirely characteristic that it would confirm rather than complicate everything she thought she knew about me. A refusal she could laugh about with Charlotte and then put down and not think about again.

I had given the matter three days’ careful preparation.