‘I have never thought of my domestic life in those terms, I confess. Each day is similar to a skein of wool; I pick up one end and follow it through to the other, trying to wind it as neatly as possible, smoothing out burrs and knots.’

‘You must remember, Frau Collins, that your life is as foreign, exotic even, to me as my life in Salzburg and Vienna would be to you. If you are so inclined, I would be grateful if you would recite the story of that life to me.’

Charlotte was both nonplussed and flattered. ‘But where should I start? You surely cannot wish to hear of my childhood. I assure you that nothing of any import happened in those years.’

‘Why not tell me about life in this village you speak of? Is this where you met your husband? Was he part of your circle, a neighbour, perhaps? Someone you knew in childhood?’

Charlotte was silent for a moment, recalling her courtship – if one could call it that – by Mr Collins. Could she tell this new friend the entire truth – the very ordinary, but by no means edifying circumstances in which an English gentlewoman of straitened means had managed to attain a husband?

‘My husband is cousin to Mrs Darcy, you know. Our families were neighbours in Hertfordshire, and she and I were intimate friends. I met him when he first visited her family.’ She paused, remembering the voluble young man she had first met seven winters ago. She had not had the slightest inkling of what the future might hold then, not even the faintest speculation: she had assumed that as putative heir of the Bennet estate, he was present to establish some conciliatory bond with his cousins.

But did the tale even begin there? Had it not started when Mr Bingley and his party had taken possession of Netherfield Park, a few miles distant from the town of Meryton, that same fateful winter? No dramatic event, and yet a tossed pebble that was to create ever-widening ripples throughout their small society, changing the course of the lives of the Misses Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, and spreading to lap at the edges of her own life.

Could she admit that her oldest and dearest friend, the lively and lovely Elizabeth Bennet, had been her husband’s first matrimonial object? That in a different life, instead of presiding over Pemberley, Lizzy might have been a clergyman’s wife, taking soup to the poor and mending clerical garb? For a moment, a sense of vertigo gripped her, as she imagined Lizzy in her place at Hunsford Parsonage, gliding through the rooms, ordering the pantry, instructing the servants. In her place. And where might she, Charlotte, be then? She would never have given birth to her children, to Tom. It did not bear contemplation.