Charlotte opened her eyes to see her husband’s head sunk in his hands and his shoulders shaking. When he finally revealed his face, it was wet. Sarah and Laura, their small fingers still steepled, began to cry as well, more from confusion and distress at seeing their parent stricken than with real grief. Charlotte, herself deeply affected, realised they were but moments away from communal collapse into sorrow, and called out, ‘Let us sing! We shall sing Tom’s favourite hymn to remember him by!’ She raised her voice before it could be overtaken by tears, and Mr Collins’s thin baritone soon quavered along beside:

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;

Praise Him, all creatures here below;

Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host;

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The children joined in with gusto and their parents split their voices on the second verse to sing it in the form of a round. This was what Tom, too young to appreciate the finer theological points, had so loved; it had had him waving his arms enthusiastically whenever they sang it in church, no matter how beadily Lady Catherine might peer at him from her raised pew.

A few days later, Charlotte found the first snowdrops trembling in the woods, proof that the year was tilting timidly back towards the sun at last. Time, both her friend and enemy, was indeed passing.

March marked the ‘hungry gap’, that period of the year when the poor were winter-gaunt, but the first spring crops were still seeded or sprouting in the soil. The old and the infirm were easily carried off, and Mr Collins buried more than the usual numbers of his flock at this time. Charlotte was, as usual during Lent, rationing the bacon, using chunks of smoked and salted fat to season the leeks and kales that formed a staple at table for rich and poor alike at this time.

And yet the hedgerows and gardens were burgeoning with buds and glimpses of green. The lanes, fields, and farms saw not only the return of growth both fresh and familiar, but faces as well: the first showing of the gypsies and other workers on whom the hop-growers and other farmers depended.

One blustery morning soon after the arrival of gypsies in the neighbourhood, Miss de Bourgh drew her phaeton to a halt outside the Parsonage in a spray of mud, Mrs Jenkinson clutching her side of the conveyance for dear life. Charlotte slipped on her pattens and ran down to the gate to discover the purpose of this stop.