The dances came to an end, the girls made their curtseys, kissed their parents, and were dispatched upstairs. ‘What about you, my dear Charlotte?’ said Lizzy, flushed from exercise and gaiety. ‘Shall you not also entertain us? Have you not been practising these past weeks?’ Mr Darcy gallantly added his request to hers, and Charlotte was obliged to explain that she did not sing, and was not enough of a performer to play in company.

Jacob came to her rescue: ‘Shall I play on your behalf, Mrs Collins? But you shall choose the piece.’

She smiled back at him. ‘I wish you to play that air – the one with variations – by Herr Mozart, if you please.’ She was proud of pronouncing the composer’s name properly, the way he had spoken it to her the day they first met.

The room settled into quiet, and Herr Rosenstein laid his hands on the keys as tenderly as if he were laying them on her skin. The first pure notes filled the room, as warm and clear as the candles in their sconces. Charlotte leaned back and tried to absorb every note, commit them to perpetual memory, to hold time still. Tears slid down her face unchecked, and she hoped those present would attribute them to her old grief – which assumption would not be far from the truth; that which comforted her for the loss of Tom would also always bring thoughts of him back to her.

Sure enough, her husband reached for and squeezed her hand affectionately, causing her a further storm of feelings and counter-feelings, many of them uncomfortable, some exquisite, but none of them unpleasant. She was among friends, and could speak of her heart to no one; she had two happy, healthy daughters, and her son was dead; she had a devoted husband, and was sitting alongside him in the presence of a man with whom she was deeply in love – a state she had never expected to experience.

The next morning, the entire party gathered to bid Herr Rosenstein adieu. Now that the horses had rested, one of the Pemberley carriages was to take him, his instruments and his tools as far as Dover, where it would await the arrival of Miss Darcy from the Continent.

Charlotte had somehow thought that the two of them might contrive a moment alone together before his departure, but then dismissed this as absurd: what purpose would this serve? They had said all that was necessary two days before, and she was not so brazen as to wish a repetition, not with her husband on the very same property – and indeed, their last day together had already taken on the quality of a particularly vivid and intense dream.