She reached for the bell alongside her chair and snapped her wrist, clanging its silver tongue once. ‘Let us have Blake fetch the good brandy from the cellar. I believe we should drink to the memory of Mr Bennet, to the future of Pemberley, and to the health of your family, Mrs Collins. Your friends and relations have an asset in you. I commend you for that. And it has not escaped my notice that my daughter – she returns from France next week – relies on your company, too. We shall not lose you to Hertfordshire just yet.’

CHAPTER XXXV

THE NEXT EVENT OF NOTE was the return of Anne and Mrs Jenkinson to Rosings. While the latter was sadly haggard and reduced by her spell abroad, the change in Miss de Bourgh’s appearance was marked. She was pleasingly improved in plumpness, but most startling was the brownness of her face, in which her eyes were much brighter and her teeth flashed like piano keys. She also seemed possessed of new energy, her steps and movements lacking in their habitual languor. Fortunately, her mother cared for nothing beyond her daughter’s improved health, and took full credit for the excursion, now deemed to be her idea. There was talk of such a trip becoming an annual event, and perhaps even finding a companion younger and a better traveller than poor Mrs Jenkinson.

Charlotte’s first encounter with Anne after her return was at dinner at Rosings, on which occasion they could not speak other than in generalities of their respective eventful summers. But soon came an invitation to meet in the hothouses again, ostensibly so that Miss de Bourgh could show Charlotte the new plants she had brought back from the Mediterranean.

It transpired that the heiress had stayed several weeks with the French nuns on their island, before decamping to Nice, then roasting in all the glare of late-summer Provençal heat. Here she had spent the days in a cool stone pension, reading, writing, and trying her hand at sketching: ‘You can scarcely have an idea of how poor my efforts were,’ she assured Charlotte when the latter expressed an interest in seeing these attempts.

Early in the mornings, in her plainest gown and pattens, she would visit the local markets: ‘Such a press of odour and colour and noise!’ Amid the clatter of hooves and boots on cobblestones, and the honking of doomed geese and ducks, she would purchase such delicacies as white peaches and goats’ milk cheese, and make her breakfast as she wandered, sometimes adding a tin cup of rough red wine to her repast.