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Mr. Collins clasps his hands over his heart. "Then I wish you joy! I wish you joy with all my heart! Mr. Darcy! Of Pemberley! The nephew of my patroness! Our families allied!" He stops. A shadow crosses his face. "Only—Thomas says that her ladyship is very much displeased."

"She is."

"Very much displeased."

"Extremely."

"Then I do not wish you joy." He draws himself up. "I cannot. It would be very wrong in me, as her ladyship's clergyman, to rejoice in what her ladyship deplores. I am shocked, cousin. Shocked and grieved." He pauses. "Although Mr. Darcy is her ladyship's nephew, and very nearly as great a man. And it would be very wrong in me to grieve at what Mr. Darcy desires." He looks at me in perfect agony. "Cousin, I hardly know what to feel."

"Mr. Collins," says Charlotte, coming out of the parlor, "you had better feel nothing at all until her ladyship has told you what to feel. I am sure she will not keep you waiting long."

His face clears like a sky after rain. "My dear Charlotte. How wise you are. Of course. I shall wait upon her ladyship tomorrow." He bows to me, half joyful and half grieved, which gives the bow an odd sideways air. "Cousin. I shall pray for you. In general terms."

He goes into his book room. The door shuts.

Charlotte looks at me.

"Upstairs," she says. "Now. And you shall tell me all of it."

***

I tell her all of it.

She sits on the end of my bed in the last of the afternoon light and listens, the way only Charlotte listens, with her hands folded and her face perfectly still. She does not interrupt once. Not at the proposal. Not at the refusal. Not at the letter, or the lane, or we are engaged. Only when I come to Mr. Pettigrew and his fortnight does she draw a long breath through her nose.

"So," she says at last. "Last night you refused ten thousand a year."

"Yes."

"And this morning you found yourself engaged to it anyway."

"Charlotte."

"I only state the case." She regards me. "I told you at Netherfield, you know. I told you not to let your fancy for Wickham make you unpleasant to a man of ten times his consequence."

"You did. And I laughed at you."

"You did." She does not smile, quite. "Well. You are not laughing now."

"No." I look down at my hands. They are clean now; I scrubbed them for a full five minutes in the Rosings scullery, while a kitchen maid watched me as though I were a great curiosity. I can still feel the mud on them. "Charlotte, I was so certain. I was so certain of everything. Of him, and of Mr. Wickham, and of myself. And I was wrong about all three."

"Most of us are wrong about ourselves," says Charlotte. "You are only unusual in finding it out."

"He wrote to me about his sister. He has told no one, and he told me. After everything I said to him." My throat closes. "And then he went out in the wet to give it to me himself, because he would not be called a coward on top of everything else. Because of me. And now he is lying up there with his head broken, so happy he can hardly keep still, and every time he looks at me I want to—"

I stop.

"To what?" Charlotte asks quietly.

"I do not know." I put my hands over my face. "Cry. Run away. Confess. All three, very likely. In that order."

Charlotte is silent a moment. Then she gets up and comes to sit beside me, and puts her arm around my shoulders, which she has not done since we were girls.

"You cannot run away," she says. "Mr. Collins would never recover from the uncertainty. And you cannot confess, or that little apothecary will have a seizure. So you had better cry, and have it over with."

I laugh. Then, rather to my surprise, I do cry, and Charlotte hands me her handkerchief without a word.

"I will help you," she says when I am done. "Of course I will. You will need a chaperone at Rosings, for one thing. You cannot sit in a gentleman's bedchamber alone, engaged or not, and I would not trust Mrs. Jenkinson to chaperone a pair of turtle-doves."