A/N: I know some of you want faster posting, but editing is very slow work, especially at this stage when the spell-checker cannot find anything. I will try to post 3x a week if at all possible. Thanks for reading and commenting.

Chapter 9: The Ins and Outs of the Entail

The day after the assembly, the Netherfield party arose in time for a late luncheon as the Bingleys liked to keep town hours even in the country. Mr. Bingley, being easily pleased, found everyone pleasant and every girl prettier than all the other girls he had met previously. Miss Bennet in particular was an inconceivably beautiful angel with golden hair and sky-blue eyes.

Miss Bingley continued her abuse on the backward population as if she had not stopped and gone to bed since she started her rant at the assembly. She exclaimed, "This place is at the most savage end of the world!" and looked to Mr. Darcy for confirmation on her assessment.

Mr. Darcy, silent throughout the siblings' rather passionate commentaries, acknowledged off-handedly that Miss Bennet was pretty, but she smiled too much, at which point Miss Bingley and even Mrs. Hurst did allow Miss Bennet to be passable as they would never disagree with Mr. Darcy.

Mr. Darcy's mind had been dwelling on the encounter he had earlier that morning two miles distant at the boundary between Netherfield and Longbourn. He had a night of restless sleep not being able to focus on anything other than the young woman who was nothing out of the ordinary in looks at the beginning of the evening but became incomparably beautiful not half an hour later. Moreover, his insult of her during her debut continued to trouble him deeply.

He rose early and seemingly without conscious effort, steered his horse Perseus toward a rise of the land where he could see Longbourn. He could not explain his action as there could not be anyone to see after such a late night at the assembly. The ladies of the house had to be still abed. While he sat atop his horse gazing at a modest manor house, someone in a blue pelisse walked from a path to the right of the house toward a rig that was waiting just outside the stables. He knew in his heart who she was, but he took out his spyglass to confirm. Indeed, it was his Miss Elizabeth. "His…?" He had indeed become more than a little ridiculous since coming to Hertfordshire, but oddly, he did not care to be returned to being sensible.

He watched Miss Elizabeth get into the rig to drive it herself. A man who must have been the steward accompanied her on horseback. He trained his spyglass on the rig until it was deep into the estate.

He turned his horse toward the path from which Miss Elizabeth came out, and followed it to the top of what his map indicated as Oakham Mount. There he got a bird's eye view of the house. It was quite large with an old, most likely Elizabethan, north wing and a more recently built south wing connected by smaller and lower buildings forming an interior courtyard. He thought that Longbourn, though not a grand estate, seemed steeped in history and good breeding as the building exhibited none of the more pretentious styles such as the neo-Palladian style of Netherfield even though it was likely as large. He saw the rig again, and continued to watch its progress through the farms until it returned to the manor house. It was just now nine o'clock. He rode back to Netherfield where all the inmates were still abed. After the morning ride, he felt more and more drawn to this slip of a girl he had thought to be irrelevant to his life.

At the breakfast table at Longbourn, the conversation topic was, as expected in a household with six ladies, to be focused on the assembly the previous evening. Mr. Bennet presided at the table and watched his two youngest begging their sisters to describe the fashion and the general goings-on of the evening while his middle daughter, Mary, stole glances at the book open on her lap when she thought no one was watching.

Mrs. Bennet was a little apologetic about letting the details of the entail be discussed at such a public place. Mr. Bennet turned to his wife with a twinkle in his eyes, "Don't fret, Mrs. Bennet. I doubt very much that there were many left who do not know of the breaking of the entail."

He turned to his daughters around the table and continued to explain, "When a distant cousin, a Mr. Bartholomew Collins, came to my grandfather's funeral sixteen years ago, thinking that it was either my father or even I who had passed on to the other world, and demanded the acknowledgment of his place as the presumptive heir of Longbourn, my father and I had thought it wise to break the entail if by the fifth babe I had not obtained a male heir as your Uncle Peter in America had three girls. Well, it turned out that it was another girl," Mr. Bennet turned to Lydia and winked before he continued, "And your uncle had not had another child. We simply could not abide the irksome possibility that the estate might fall to the hands of the Collins' branch in the distant future. This Mr. Bartholomew Collins was uncivil to the extreme, and I rather believed that he was illiterate as he vowed to send his own son to university so that we would no longer be able to 'deceive' him with fancy words. When my own father passed on three years ago, Mr. Collins came again for the same ludicrous demand, this time knowing that I had only girls. I showed the end-of-entail document to him with our magistrate at the time, Sir William Lucas, as witness. Mr. Collins was very upset by this turn of event and threatened that once his son had finished university, he, the son, that is, would know how to avenge him of this 'injustice'. In the meantime, Sir William was present for all this drama. I resigned to the fact that once Sir William knew, the entire county would know within a fortnight. As for the girls' portions," he turned back to his wife, "You told me that Jane was a great success with Mr. Bingley at the assembly last evening, dancing twice with her. When the young man comes to ask for her hand, then everyone will know the girls' dowries. It will not be long."

The girls were quite astonished at Mr. Bennet's long monologue. He seldom talked very much at the table, and usually watched with a smirk of amusement. Jane was astounded that her father should tease her so. She was blushing furiously. Mrs. Bennet responded:

"Mr. Bennet, please do not tease us so. You know Jane could have any young man to dance with her twice if she allowed it. Mr. Bingley appears to be an amiable gentleman. With his income of five thousand, it is not likely that he would be a fortune hunter. You must have pity on my nerves - they have been frayed by all the worries about fortune-hunting rakes and scoundrels hounding our girls ever since Jane's come-out."

Mr. Bennet was very amused. 'Mrs. Bennet, your nerves have made an appearance again - in fact, not since Lizzy told you about the entail having been broken from a document her Uncle Phillips asked her to copy. When was it? Lizzy was ten then. I truly miss them sometimes when they had been my friend for several years before that."

Elizabeth decided to rescue her mother from Mr. Bennet's making sport of his own family, for once he had started, he could go on for quite some time. It had become less often, but occasionally he forgot that he was not with his colleagues at Oxford where they did the verbal sparring for entertainment. At home, though, only Elizabeth could give back as good as she took, but Elizabeth had learned that avoiding such fierce though bloodless combat was the best strategy to maintain familial harmony. She asked instead, "Papa, you seem to be in an exceptionally jovial mood this morning. Would you share with us what puts you in such high spirits?"

"Lizzy, as discerning as ever… I got a letter this morning from Mr. William Collins, the son of the aforementioned but now deceased Mr. Collins, that provides a fount of mirth. It appears that Mr. Collins the younger has graduated from university, which is no small feat judging from his heritage. He does not end up a barrister, but rather a vicar. Let me read you some parts of it:

"Dear Sir…so far so good…," winked Mr. Bennet at his family. "The disagreement subsisting between yourself and my late honoured father always gave me much uneasiness…" the letter droned on until at the end, Mr. Bennet put down the five pages and sighed, "If I had any doubts before, they had all been swept away. Mr. Collins simply could not possibly have any Bennet blood in him."

Mary, with a droll sense of humor very like her father's, could hold a straight face while saying the most seemingly ridiculous thing. "In point of composition, the letter does not seem defective. The idea of the olive-branch perhaps is not wholly new, yet I think it is well expressed." If she had not paused and raised both of her eyebrows dramatically at the end of this recitation, a stranger would think her a dour pedantic with a warped sense of piety. Her family, however, knew better and just sighed while smiling:

"Oh Mary!"

Mrs. Bennet, however, was not amused. She exclaimed indignantly," What could he mean by saying that he would be the next heir of the entail? Did his father not tell him that the entail had been broken? Who needs an olive branch from such an arrogant Dummkopf!" Here the remnant of Mrs. Bennet's diminishing German crept in.

"Mrs. Bennet, you are right to be exasperated by this willful disregard of common decency and the attempt to bully his way into our home. I have also concluded that if I deign to receive him as family as a gentleman should, he will probably misconstrue the gesture as acknowledging the entail as extant. I was planning on having some fun with him because he simply sounded too deliciously ridiculous to be real, but on second thoughts, I shall dispatch a note telling him in no uncertain terms that he was mistaken. If he insists on a visit, we shall receive him cordially as a distant cousin, but the Bennet family will not welcome anyone who persists on the falsehood. Now you can let your precious nerves calm down, my dear. Where were we? Ah, Mr. Bingley's attentions to Jane. I had better stop embarrassing our sweet Jane although your blush has made you even more becoming, dear. We shall all wait and see what kind of person Mr. Bingley turns out to be. I hope he is not the kind of dandy who goes around flirting with all the young ladies in the neighbourhood. Asking a young lady he just met for a second set was quite forward."

"Father, Mr. Bingley seems perfectly amiable and a gentleman," Jane uncharacteristically blurted out.

"I see. Mr. Bingley, Mr. Bingley, hmmm... I venture to say that he is the first young man who has extracted any reaction from you since your coming out again these two months. We shall be doubly vigilant to find occasions to prove him true, shall we not, girls?"

Along this vein breakfast was congenially consumed and all at the table went away on their various daily pursuits until Charlotte Lucas came to visit when the whole proceedings of the assembly were rehashed, and Miss Bennet was once again teased for her dancing twice with Mr. Bingley. Miss Lucas, however, heeded Lizzy's warning the night before and never mentioned Mr. Darcy's slight.

Chapter notes:

Longbourn is based on Chawton, the manor house of the estate Jane Austen's brother Edward inherited from a cousin, whose name, Knight, was adopted by Edward Austen as a condition of the inheritance. Jane and her sister Cassandra lived in the bailiff's house of the estate for some years, where she revised P&P.