Lizzy, my dearest sister,
You know that had I not been so close to my lying-in, I would have been at your side when you delivered Ben. It is good that our family name is Bennet so that your son has a name which sounds like a good familiar name. Imagine what you would have done had we been Higgabottoms and not Bennets!
As you just gave birth late at night on Saturday, I beg you to not attempt to attend me. Mother and Charlotte are with me so I will not be alone.
Our poor sister, she thought perhaps she was barren after there was no potential issue with that horrid first husband of hers. Now that she is married to Richard, all that has changed. That also proves once again how nonsensical our late cousin was in blaming her for not falling with child. She was so relieved when she felt the quickening a few days past. (I am sure Charlotte wrote to you already.) Now, we know that if there was any fault, it was not, as our late cousin used to berate her, Charlotte’s.
I read Mama’s paeans that she was the first of the ladies in the extended family to become a grandmother. It seems that even now that they are doubly related, Mama and Lady Lucas still compete, except now it is without malice.
With Mary and Johnny having married only six months ago, at least Charlotte will present the Lucases with their first grandchild. I have not heard anything about Franklin Lucas’s wife, Marjorie, being with child again after her miscarriage. I am certain when her body is healed, Marjorie will be blessed again and this time it will end with joy.
It is good of Kitty to delay her coming out because you and I were so close to the end of our confinements and Mama and Mother had been here with us.
Did you say that you heard Kitty say she would wait until Gigi and Lyddie come out next year?
At least when you and I took our curtsies before Queen Charlotte, we did not have to swim the shark-infested waters of London society’s marriage mart, as we were both married. I must own that the few comments from jealous harpies about you and me securing two of the most eligible bachelors, and their speculation about how we did so, made me feel sorry for them. Just because they would stoop to such dishonourable behaviour themselves, to think we would is beyond the pale.
I look forward to the day that you are able to travel again so I can see you and hopefully meet Ben.
Please kiss my nephew for me, and of course, tell Mama, Papa, Kitty, and Lyddie I miss them. With all my sisterly love and warmest regards to William,
Jane
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Rosings Park Easter 1818
Over the years, new family traditions had been established between those in the extended family. Easter spent at Rosings Park was one of them. Another was Christmastide in Hertfordshire, the members of the family being hosted between Longbourn, Lucas Lodge, and Netherfield Park. The latter had been purchased as a gift by Hilldale for his wife on the occasion of their first anniversary.
Summers were passed in Derbyshire or Staffordshire. In Derbyshire, there were more family estates besides Pemberley and Snowhaven.
Three years previously, Gardiner had fulfilled one of his wife’s dreams and purchased the estate of Willowbrook, which bordered Lambton on one side and Pemberley on the other.
More surprisingly was that two years previously, the Bingleys had taken on an estate in Derbyshire, about equidistant between Pemberley and Hilldale.
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In the years that he had been in Scarborough, Bingley had matured and become his own man. It did not hurt that his younger sister was an ocean apart from him. He had maintained his friendship with Darcy, but it was by then an equal relationship, as Bingley no longer relied on anyone else, least of all Darcy, to make decisions for him. Part of his maturation process was learning that a woman’s outward façade was the least important part of her.
The season after Kitty, Gigi, and Lydia had come out, Bingley returned to London. There, he met and fell in love with the only one of the three not being courted.
By then Kitty, or as she now asked to be called, Kate, was being courted by the son of an extremely wealthy merchant who was about to purchase an estate in Cambridgeshire. Gigi was being courted by Lord James—Jamey—Carrington,Viscount Hadlock, the heir to the Earl of Holder, whose estate was in Staffordshire, very close to Hilldale.
At first, Lydia kept Bingley at arm’s length, however, slowly but surely, she began to allow the wall around her heart to be pulled down.
Once he sensed that Miss Bennet was receptive to him, Bingley requested a courtship. Like Jane had years before her, she risked her happiness and told her respective suitor the truth of her errors when she had been fifteen.
Bingley was angry, but not at her. His ire was directed at the late seducer. He then declared that he could not hold a youthful error against her and asked for, and was granted a courtship. Seeing that Bennet could tell how good of a man Bingley had become, and it was what Lydia desired, he blessed the courtship.
Three months later there had been a wedding at Pemberley for Gigi and her viscount. Three weeks after Gigi’s wedding, Kate and Lydia married their respective betrotheds from Longbourn in a double ceremony.
On their way to Seaview Cottage, which the Darcys had made available to them, Bingley told his new wife of the irony that by marrying a Bennet he had gained all of the connections his social-climbing sister always craved and would have attained had she been a good and patient person.
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Of Miss Caroline Bingley, very little was heard. As she blamed her siblings for her downfall in society, once she left England, she never wrote to them. She refused to own that her fall from grace was all at her own hands.
The reason for that was more than likely the shame she felt at having been cheated out of her fortune, which had meant she had to become a shop girlto subsist. In later years when she passed away from pneumonia, her passing was like her life had been—lonely and bitter.
