CHARLOTTE HELD TOM CLOSE, RELISHING the peace brought her by his arms winding around her neck, the weight and warmth of his body. But as she rocked him, he turned to a bundle of red rags, his arms became strangling ropes, and she jerked awake, her heart battering in her throat. She could hear a child crying, she could swear it, and was on her feet, pulses pounding, before she could stop herself.

Slowly, she orientated herself; she was in her handsome chamber at Pemberley, a bar of moonlight lying across the bed and its hangings. All was still; the faint wailing she imagined she had heard was simply a remnant of her dream. She stood, listening, the sweat of alarm cooling on her body, now bracing herself not against fear, but against the wave of grief her dreams of Tom always brought upon waking; those moments when she reached helplessly for the elusive fragments that restored him to her, only to have them run like water through her fingers.

She knew she would not sleep again easily, and flickers of anxiety still nagged at her: perhaps something was amiss with the girls? She would not rest until she had seen for herself that all was well. She fished for her slippers, lit a candle, and found her wrap. Then she set off down the long corridor in the direction of the nursery quarters.

Letting herself quietly into the room where the girls slept, all was peaceful repose. The two slumbering forms, one dark and one light head on the bolster, breathed in untroubled unison. There was nothing to fear here, but Charlotte sank into a chair to watch her daughters nonetheless, and allowed herself that rarest of treats: an indulgence of memory, recalling times when all three of her children had played and romped together, Tom’s sisters treating him with that mixture of affection and exasperated tolerance typical of all elder siblings, as well as that special solicitude they afforded him because of his condition.

She remembered a day, nearly a year ago, when the three of them discovered the pleasures of rolling down the new-turfed slopes between the flower-garden and the orchard, and how at first, anticipating the work of scrubbing at grass stains on clothing, she had wanted to halt their game. But their shrieks of delight and glee had stilled her words of reprimand. And then there were the times they had commandeered Mr Brown’s wheelbarrow, the girls hoisting Tom inside and then pushing him all around the garden, a game that always ended with their tipping him out onto a soft spot of ground, a liberty to which he never took exception, responding rather with peals of laughter.