Neither had she cared to enquire. Having had three children in under five years, while not in the first flush of youth, she had welcomed the respite from pregnancy and child-bearing, the weariness that bit deep to the bone, the combination of hunger and nausea in the early months of carrying a child, the indigestion of the later months, the softening and swelling and leaking of her body. She did not begrudge the physical tax of bringing her beloved children into the world, and had refused the services of a wet nurse for each one, preferring to nourish her infants herself, even as Lady Catherine tutted and scolded; but she had enjoyed having her body to herself once Tom had been weaned. All the satisfaction she needed, she found in the affection of her three children, the physicality of their small bodies, the unselfconsciousness of their caresses.

While she welcomed the re-entry of Mr Collins to her boudoir, and the embraces that undid the knots in her body, she also knew that Tom could not be replaced, no matter how beloved a new infant would no doubt be. She was not yet ready for there to be another occupant of the cot in the nursery. So after another discreet visit to Mrs Talbot, Charlotte made certain to drink pennyroyal tea for a week each month, an ancient remedy against conception, according to the midwife. Meanwhile, ever-practical, she learned to lay out cloths to protect the bedsheets from undue amounts of laundering. And after these marital encounters, she would sleep.

She still startled awake with a cry of alarm from dreams of a child calling her, she still woke before dawn, fretting over her daughters, but those few hours of deep physical relaxation and slumber made it possible to taste the toasted bread and bramble jam served at breakfast, to calculate her accounts with her usual accuracy, to adjust the amount of corn fed to the hens to encourage better laying, to smile more widely and curtsey more deeply when Lady Catherine came to call.

CHAPTER IV

ONE DAY CHARLOTTE HAD A package, which had been misdirected to the Parsonage, to deliver to Rosings. She took no pleasurable anticipation in the task the way her husband would have done, and might have left it to his return from parish business to ask him to carry it over the lane and through the park. But it was a clear day with a sharp edge to the distant blue sky, frost still holding bare trees and plant stalks in its crystalline grip, and she relished the chance to escape her routine for half an hour.