She began to weep in earnest, as her friend sat dry-eyed beside her. ‘Fitzwilliam would have been better off wedded to a brood mare. For that is what is required for these great estates, these honourable names. Succession. And my husband is of course too much the gentleman to reproach me for my failure in this regard. So we do not and cannot speak of it. And we speak less and less.’

Charlotte’s mind took a vertiginous leap: she had not yet thought of Tom’s death in these terms – of what it might presage for her daughters. And even as she stumbled through the required assurances that Lizzy would surely indeed soon have issue, the thought occurred to her at the same time as her friend put it into words: ‘But what if I give birth to a girl?’

Charlotte felt an old rage rise up in her. Tom was beyond her help, but this was a new anxiety. With her beloved and damaged son gone, and with him the security of his inheritance of the Longbourn estate, how could she safeguard her daughters? How was she to assure them a home and the respectability this proffered, beyond the lottery of matrimony? If Lizzy had daughters, they would at least have considerable dowries – in which case, Pemberley could go to Bonaparte for all Charlotte cared.

Her mind scoured clear by grief, the reality of her situation came into sharp focus: she and her daughters were at risk of falling into the same trap that had yawned before Elizabeth’s family, the Bennets: their future inheritance entailed away from them because they were mere females.

Why had she never taken Mrs Bennet’s anxiety, the ‘nerves’ they had all mocked, seriously? The business of her life was to find her daughters husbands: what else could it be, given the blind roll of the dice that exposed them all to the kind of poverty perhaps worse than that seen in hovels; that of genteel beggary, of imposing upon distant male relatives who had their own children to set up in life, of being grateful for a roof, no matter how reluctantly or resentfully it was offered.

Elizabeth’s marriage had changed all that; indeed, her sister Jane’s alliance with Mr Bingley alone had offered the remaining unmarried Bennet sisters, Mary and Kitty, a substantial degree of protection. While they might one day lack a home to call their own, they need never fear want as long as they could reside with one or the other of their elder sisters. But on the other hand, Charlotte could see there was no way out for the Darcy line; only males could inherit an estate as profitable, as visible as Pemberley.