Eventually, her grip on her husband slackened. She wriggled in his arms until he rolled alongside her, and then she hugged him again, less forcefully. He cradled her head against his chest, and she began to weep, but quietly. She cried for a long time before detaching herself and sitting up to search for a handkerchief. Stretching brought new awareness of how the wires in her body had uncoiled and loosened, and she took and kissed Mr Collins’s hand gratefully.

He in turn sat up preparatory to leaving, and began to thank her, as was their usual pattern. Again, she tugged him back down. ‘Stay.’ And at his perplexity, she recited, ‘Ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.’

She sensed him smiling at that, as he should, the words coming from the vows in the Book of Common Prayer he read whenever joining in matrimony members of his congregation.

‘Perhaps we may be blessed with another child. I had hoped – I did not want to intrude on your grief – is it too soon to speak of such matters, my dear?’ But Charlotte, on the verge of voluptuous sleep, did not answer.

After that, things were a little better. Whenever she was having an especially bad night, Charlotte would call her husband, and he would hasten into her chamber, making ritual enquiries as to her health. She would reach out to him, they would couple both frantically and slightly furtively, then lie heaving in each other’s arms. Sometimes one or the other would shed tears. Occasionally Mr Collins would express the tentative hope that their nocturnal activities would result in another child. Charlotte understood that this arose from his slight discomfort at the shamelessness of their marital incontinence. Their conjugal relations had indeed become first sporadic, and then rare following Tom’s birth, something Charlotte had not particularly regretted. She did not know if this had arisen from reticence on the part of her husband – perhaps in response to her deep preoccupation with her youngest child – or the fact that regardless of his frailty, Tom, as the future heir of Longbourn, provided them all with the semblance of a secure future.