Charlotte smiled somewhat wryly, remembering her first encounter with that lady, and indeed her relocation as a bride from Hertfordshire to Kent. ‘Well, Herr Rosenstein, if you insist, I shall not demur. As Mrs Darcy likes to say, I shall save my breath to cool my porridge – or in this case, tell my story.’

1812–1813

CHAPTER XXII

THE WEDDING JOURNEY FROM MERYTON to Hunsford, a distance of close to fifty miles, was tiring and awkward: Charlotte had never yet travelled so far from home, and when they alighted at an inn on the outskirts of London, to refresh themselves and change horses, she was conscious of her bridal costume attracting stares and whispers. Modest and practical as her outfit was (it had been created with the double duty of travelling in mind), it was still finer than her usual garb, although she had left the veil she had worn in church behind with her mother, content with the narrow lace trim on her new bonnet of white straw.

Unaccustomed to travel, she was anxious that her trunks might be left behind, and that she might have to begin her new life sans trousseau or the china and linens she had so carefully packed; a further worry was that her new dove-grey reticule, a carefully stitched gift from the housekeeper at Longbourn, might tear as it dangled from her arm. Moreover, she had the bursts of chatter by her nervous husband to manage. It took all her patience to listen with every evidence of attentiveness to prattle on topics long rehearsed. Luckily, unlike her, he was familiar with the route and all its landmarks, and settled to reciting these to her as assiduously as if she were unable to see out the coach window herself.

She was nevertheless disappointed when dusk robbed them of her first views of Kent, and was entirely reliant on Mr Collins’s excited announcements that they were now in the lane to Hunsford – now travelling beside the Rosings park palings – now approaching the Parsonage – now stopping at their very own gate. Charlotte was unable to gain more than swift impressions in the darkness: looming hedges, the crunch underfoot of a short gravel driveway, a respectable-looking building perhaps not quite as generously proportioned as Mr Collins had described.