This was, as always, the busiest time of year for Charlotte. Everything in the garden and orchard seemed to ripen at once, and the tasks of digging potatoes and roots, picking and storing fruits, preserving vegetables in vinegar and currants in syrup, brewing perry from the first green pears, seemed Sisyphean. The tinkers were back in their field on the Rosings estate, and her friends there brought her trugfuls of berries, wild greens, or mushrooms wrapped in leaves almost every other day – much appreciated additions to the table, but also requiring preparation or preservation. Outdoors, Mr Brown and Mr Collins were active in the orchards and nuttery, while she, Mrs Brown, and Katie seemed to be in a permanent state of bustle as they shuttled between garden, kitchen, pantry, and cellar.

The apples were ripening rapidly, and Charlotte had collected a bucket of windfalls for the pigs. Carrying it into the yard, she was suddenly intensely aware of the ordinary stink of animal manure, and had only time to turn to the nearest pile of straw before vomiting neatly onto it.

She stood wiping her mouth, considering the familiar prickling in the skin of her breasts, slowly turning dates over in her head. First motionless as she calculated, she almost staggered as the implications darted about like fish in her mind. The bucket was dropped, the pippins rolled across the stones: she was almost certainly pregnant.

The enormity of it was too much to grasp all at once. She abandoned the bucket, went into the kitchen, and, with unusual peremptoriness, asked the housekeeper to prepare her a tray of tea and some thinly sliced bread and butter, even though she knew this would upset the household’s morning routine. At Mrs Brown’s look of surprise, she blurted out, ‘I feel faint,’ and saw the surmise in the other woman’s face. ‘Say nothing of this to the master,’ she said, and headed for the front parlour, where she knew a fire was burning.

Here she sank down in a chair, and clasped herself, encircling her stomach. A child. Another child. And for the first time since returning home, Charlotte allowed her thoughts to return to that day at Pemberley, the early morning hour she and Jacob had stolen at the hawk house together.

Deliberately, she relived those moments after she had whirled and run back into his arms following their first kiss, clutching onto him like a sailor to wreckage. They had kissed again, and then again, greedily – and somewhere in that frantic clinging to one another, all restraint was swept away and they both knew what would follow.