“I am keeping the attic room for Charlie.”

“Oh! Will he come?”

“Undoubtedly,” said Mary.

It was not custom for women to attend funerals, either in the church or at the graveside, but Fitzwilliam Darcy had decreed that this social rule should be ignored on the occasion of Mrs. Bennet’s obsequies. With no sons among her offspring and five daughters, attendance would be far too thin unless the rule were relaxed. So notification had gone out to the extended family that the ladies would be in attendance at church and graveside, despite the objections of persons like the Reverend Mr. Collins, whose nose was rather out of joint because he would not be officiating. Thus Jane’s sisters-in-law, Mrs. Louisa Hurst and Miss Caroline Bingley, came down from London to be present, while Mrs. Bennet’s cronies, her sister Mrs. Phillips, and her friends Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long, made the shorter journey from Meryton to attend.

And there they are together at last, the five Bennet girls, thought Caroline Bingley after the funeral service was over and before the procession to the grave began.

Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia…Twenty years of living in limbo, thanks to them and their fabled beauty. Of course it had faded, dimmed-but so had her own considerable good looks. Jane and Elizabeth had embarked upon the stormy seas of their forties; but then she, Caroline, had already survived those tempests and looked now at her fearsome fifties. As did Fitz; they were much the same age.

Jane looked as if God had grafted the head of a twenty-two-year-old upon the body of a forty-two-year-old. Her face, with its tranquil honey-coloured eyes, rich unlined skin, exquisitely delicate features, was surrounded by a mass of honey-gold hair. Alas, twelve pregnancies had taken their toll of her sylphlike figure, though she had not grown fat; merely thickened in the waist and dropped in the bosom. In her, the Bennet type was decided; all five of them were some shade of fair, no surprise considering their fair parents.