Longbourn

At the end of Pride and Prejudice, Mary is “the only daughter who remained at home”. Longbourn is still entailed on Mr Collins.

February 1816. Mr Bennet hands Mary the rent-book and the farm book, because she adds better than he does and does not mind it. “I mind it a great deal,” says Mary. “I like it.” A column in his hand stops at a figure carried and never set down; Mary sets it down. On Thursdays Mr Fenn, her uncle Philips’s clerk, comes about the leases, and the parlour door stands open.

It rains, on and off, from Lady Day to harvest. Elizabeth means to come to Longbourn in May; her father writes that he will not be visited, and comes north instead. Darcy abates his rents, and is called a fool, a spendthrift and a Jacobin for it. Elizabeth and Darcy have learned to ask each other; now come the things that asking cannot settle, and money cannot arrange.

In the October dusk, Mary walks Mr Fenn down the sweep to the gate, with a yard of gravel between them and a question of her own.

Longbourn is the fourth and last volume of The Longbourn Years, a continuation of Pride and Prejudice in four volumes.