Epilogue #4
Lady Jane’s fortune was left to grow under the expert stewardship of Edward ‘King Midas’ Gardiner, not to mention her five percent stake that would be divided among the children, along with profits from Brookfield and the balance of Sir Richard’s fortune also invested with the company.
All five Fitzwilliam children, two boys and three girls, had substantial fortunes.
The girls each had dowries of one hundred fifty thousand pounds.
Tom would one day inherit Brookfield, the title, and with it a fortune in excess of four hundred thousand pounds.
Andy received a fortune equal to his sisters’ dowries.
The Five Fitzwilliam children all made very good love matches, Elly married the son and heir of an Earl, who had a large and very prosperous estate in Wiltshire.
Her sisters too married men they loved, Beth to the son of a baronet whose family were neighbours to her Aunt Lizzy and Uncle William in Derbyshire, and Rosa married an extremely well-off businessman.
The heir, Tom, married the daughter of cousins Anne and Ian Ashby, Elizabeth Anne, known as Beth.
Thomas Fitzwilliam met and fell in love with Beth Ashby one year when the family met at Rosings Park for Easter.
They were very happy together and lived at the estate that one day, many years in the future, Andy would inherit, Bennet Fields.
Lady Jane and Sir Richard lived a very long and happy life together surrounded by family and friends.
Jane helped her daughter-in-law learn how to run Brookfield while Tom learnt how to manage it with the help of his father, his uncles, and the long-time steward.
Once they were sure that Tom and Beth were confident in running the manor and the estate, Richard and Jane turned the running of the estate over to them about ten years after they too had children of their own.
They moved into a suite in a wing that had once been added to expand the manor house and the couple spent time either visiting or being visited by family, especially their children, grandchildren, and eventually great grandchildren.
The Darcys:
The Darcys were blessed with eight children. Next was a son, Alexander, followed by twin girls, Ladies Jane and Amanda, then came the last daughter, Lady Priscilla, who was followed by the baby of the family, the eighth Darcy child and son, Edward.
For all the happiness their children gave them, not all was smooth sailing.
Lady Elizabeth Darcy had a miscarriage between Alex and the twin girls, which caused a depression of some weeks.
It took her mother, Jane, and Aunts Maddie, Rose, Sarah, and Elaine assisting her husband to pull her out of the doldrums she had sunk into.
But it was Mary who had finally stepped in and pointed out that in twisted logic, much like her beloved William used to, Elizabeth was blaming herself.
Mary took her to task with the love only a sister can give.
After weeks of misery, it was a scant two hours at the end of Mary’s tongue-lashing, rivalling the one she had once given her brother William, that had Elizabeth seeing clearly.
After a quip about how she and William made such a perfect pair, that she was forcing this so she could have the same story and now it was her turn to apologise profusely for the next ten months.
It was music to everyone’s ears when Elizabeth’s laugh filled the halls of Pemberley and William sighed in deep relief.
A year after her recovery she birthed her twin girls.
Lady Elizabeth and Lord William Darcy were in the deepest love imaginable.
However, as would be expected with two very strong willed and intelligent people, they did argue from time to time.
No matter how vociferous the argument, they never went to bed without reconciling, which only made the marriage that much stronger.
The servants at Pemberley very quickly learned that if a door was closed, they should walk away or knock, but to never walk in unannounced.
As they got older the Darcy children learned that lesson as well, electing to just walk away if a door was locked.
Lord Ben would one day inherit Pemberley, but when he was one and twenty, he moved to his estate of Rivington that was the seat of the Viscount and heir to the Earldom of Pemberley.
Lord George was Bennet’s heir, Viscount Meryton and would become the Earl of Longbourn when his grandpapa, who he loved dearly, passed many years in the future and would then inherit Longbourn.
Thanks to his mother’s generosity, Bennet Park was the seat of the Viscount and would go to his heir when he eventually had a son of his own.
The other two brothers would each inherit one of the additional three Darcy estates.
Alex the largest in Nottinghamshire and Edward the next largest. The smaller of the estates made more than eight thousand per annum clear, so Edward had nothing for which to repine.
In addition, each of the boys were given a fortune of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds that equalled the dowries of each of their sisters.
As all the money was invested with Gardiner and Associates, each of the Darcy children had incomes of more than ten thousand a year just from their investments, and that was before any estate income the boys earned or pin money the girls received.
This did not include the stake in Gardiner and Associates that the eight would one day split.
As he would inherit Pemberley and the bulk of the remaining Darcy fortune as well as the Earldom, Lord Ben was relieved his siblings too had large fortunes.
Ben, at the age of five and twenty, fell in love with the eldest daughter of the Earl of Holder, Lady Amelia Carrington, who at eighteen was having her first season.
They married a year later, and as it had for his beloved mother, the marriage settlement left Lady Amelia’s dowry of fifty thousand pounds untouched and it was invested with Gardiner and Associates for their future children.
Lord George married Lady Margaret Smythe, the Earl and Countess of Granville’s first daughter. George, upon his marriage, moved into Bennet Park and assumed the mantle of Viscount Meryton.
Lady Franny Darcy would not settle for anything less than the love that she saw in her parents and grandparents’ marriages, so it took her four seasons to fall in love with the son and heir to the Earldom of Wokingham in Berkshire.
Lord Reading, or Christopher Pierce, was the one that finally won her heart, and at the age of three and twenty she was married from the Kympton Church by her Uncle Elliot.
It was a special favour he performed for his best friend’s daughter having retired to his estate Riverdale in Shropshire some years before.
Lady Jane Darcy married the second son of the Duke of York, and when the older brother died in a foolish and ill-advised curricle race, her husband became the Marquess and she Marchioness. Some years later they became the Duke and Duchess of York.
Lady Amanda married Lord Haywood Thomas Rhys-Davis, heir to Birchington and eventually the Dukedom of Bedford.
The Honourable Alexander Darcy who inherited the Earl’s second estate that had an income of just under ten thousand clear per annum, married Lady Henrietta Smythe, the Granville’s second daughter.
Lady Priscilla married the heir to Rosings Park, her Cousin Rudy Ashby, and they had a long and loving marriage with many children, grandchildren, and eventually great grandchildren.
They and their heirs through the ages kept up the tradition of hosting the whole extended family at Rosings Park for Easter.
In his tenth year of marriage to his beloved Priscilla, Rudy added a wing with more guest rooms to Rosings Park to accommodate their ever-growing family.
The baby of the family, Edward Darcy, twelve years younger than the triplets, married the daughter of an associate of Edward Gardiner, his namesake, and they happily settled at his estate in the county of Durham.
Five years after Lord Ben’s marriage, and when he and his wife had been gifted with both a son and a daughter, Darcy started to intensify the training for him to take over the day to day running of Pemberley.
After the Viscount’s five and thirtieth birthday, Darcy turned the running of Pemberley over to him so he would gain experience managing multiple estates, as he managed Rivington as well, just like Uncle Reggie had done with Andrew Fitzwilliam.
Darcy still controlled the investments and was always there for needed advice, but the day-to-day running of the estates were now under the control of his heir.
For at least a month each year, Elizabeth and William Darcy were to be found at Seaview Cottage, now really a misnomer as it had been expanded three times to accommodate the growing family and had as many permanent servants as Longbourn.
The rest of the time they travelled to see their children, and when they came, their grandchildren, and eventually their great grandchildren.
Each year they took between one and three months to travel to some exciting destination like Paris, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, or Cairo to name a few, utilising ‘The Elizabeth’, the family’s personal vessel that had borne them on the wedding trip all those years ago.
Annually they joined the family at one of the homes Elizabeth’s parents had acquired on the continent.
Through all their years, through all their triumphs and trials, they neither of them ever regretted the time that Lord Fitzwilliam Darcy had made the worst proposal in the world and then received a set-down for the ages.
He had been a hypocrite, haughty, proud, disdainful, rude, and a number of other adjectives that could be employed.
He had changed, grown, and learnt—they both had.
As his Lady wife reminded him from time to time, “I could never have loved the man that you were, but the one that you became, the one that attended to all of the reproofs and made himself the best of men, that man I love more than there are words to describe. That man is the only man that I could ever have married.”
One year as they sat on the balcony of the massive master suite on ‘The Elizabeth 2’, a new steam powered ultra-luxurious ship, they toasted to everything that they had built together.
They were taking a trip to the Canadas and then to the Cape of Good Hope with all of their immediate family to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary.
Darcy raised his glass and looked at the woman he loved to distraction, loved as much, if not more than, he had the day he married her.
“Here is to you my love, destroyer of hypocrites, the love of my life, my soul mate, and the only woman I could love with all that I am.” He soaked her in with his eyes.
Elizabeth looked at her handsome husband, fully grey now but no less handsome.
“Here is to you, to us, to a life well lived, with oh so much more yet to come. I love you, William, and always will, and it has been well over forty years since you have been a hypocrite. Me a scant decade or two,” she teased him into a laugh that showed his dimples.
They clinked glasses and she sat in his lap, settling into him while he hugged her as they watched the brilliant sunset in the west and sailed on into the unwritten future, together as they would be for the rest of their lives and beyond.
~~~The End~~~