The Engagement
Once Miss Bingley had been sufficiently dealt with, using a combination of Jane and Mr Bingley’s kindness, coupled with Elizabeth and Darcy’s complete indifference to her plight, they called for the carriage.
As it turned out, in the midst of all that, Mr Bingley and Jane decided that they had spent as much time conversing as the happy couple, so the proven idea of just getting on with it had much to recommend it.
He proposed, she accepted, and the return to Longbourn was delayed yet again whilst the two gentlemen worked out the specifics of the fait accompli they would present to Mr Bennet.
Elizabeth and Jane assured them that anything that required little effort or expense would be acceptable.
The engaged couples also decided a double wedding would be just the thing, and it was obviously more efficient to do it quickly, what with the Gardiners being so conveniently available for Christmas.
No great cogitation was required to assert that Mr Darcy was urgently required somewhere else, so a protracted engagement was just not practical.
Mr Collins appeared the day after their return as engaged women, and his esteemed patroness appeared right on schedule a week later. She was dispatched easily, and never quite worked out how Mary Bennet ended up living at Rosings three months later.
Lady Catherine eventually decided the easiest way to manage her later years was to get her daughter married, which as one might expect, was about as easy as any sensible person would surmise given her status of the heir to Rosings.
Mary and Charlotte were similarly disposed in marriage in good time.
The grand lady eventually found herself bored, so she took on Kitty and Lydia as well, and when that proved insufficiently challenging (they were, after all, sisters of Pemberley), she even took up the yoke with a nearly on the shelf Caroline Bingley.
Her later years were spent in far better humour than her earlier, surrounded by happy grandchildren who all believed to the depths of their soul that their parents’ descriptions of an earlier Lady Catherine were like the bogeyman—entirely made up to scare naughty children.
As to the two couples, the Bingleys did exactly as any sensible person would, so their families spent their years happily close to each other, and equally advantageously far away from their more troublesome relations.
Both families grew and did all the usual things, but all their children learned a valuable lesson from their parents. Every Darcy and Bingley for three generations found their spouses at country assemblies, where they arrived early and in disguise. After all, the early bird gets the worm.