Showered and ready, Benn made himself a coffee from the machine in the corner – the drink was strong and bitter, and he winced at the first mouthful, taking a deep sigh before finishing the cup and waiting for the call from reception to let him know that his car was waiting. Secretly Benn was hoping that he would be able to speak to the woman he had offended the night before. He didn't mean to be so harsh and, when he thought about it, she had tried to be friendly to him, which was more than anyone else on set had done. Today they were rehearsing on location – Wickham took a very cavalier approach to filming and liked the actors to get a feel for the place and their surroundings before committing to costume, it drove the financiers mad, as despite a very tight production schedule, his films always went over deadline and budget. When pitching the story to him, Wickham had said that essentially Elizabeth and Darcy were very modern characters, that whilst they were very verbose and literary, the heart of their story was one about love and rejection and ego, and he wanted the actors to get a feel for Pemberley in their own clothes before donning costumes and wigs. So today they were improvising scenes and messing about with blocking, before filming the scripted scene tomorrow. He was really trying to get a feel for Fitzwilliam Darcy, get under his skin and understand the man behind the sideburns; his own were now longer than they had been for 'Heights' and they were getting itchy. He was quite looking forward to donning a cravat, although he might need to utilise the elasticated panel in the back of his breeches for another week.

Lizzy clambered out of the minibus and thanked Steve profusely for the lift before grabbing her bag and jacket before run-walking as well as she could in heels. She tottered past the small group of paparazzo who had gathered to try and get shots of Tamsin McLeod with no make-up on, or Benn Williams looking sad and depressed since his pretty wife left him; none of them deemed her of any importance, apart from Harold – who must have been eighty by now- who shouted 'Lady Liz' and took what could only be called a 'pity pap' as she did her most gracious smile before hurrying on her way.

Lizzy was determined that one day she would not be late for work, the small practice of Winchester, Sparrow and Jones in Lambton was only ten minutes away from the estate by bus, but it was arduous when carrying everything that she needed for the day. Blundering through the door, she nearly knocked over Angela's spider plant with what Harriet called her 'Law Bag' – a huge old leather satchel that used to be Winston's and still had a faint whiff of cigars and the British Empire about it.

"Bloody hell, Lizbot, you look a bit flustered this morning," shouted Harris Jones from the large desk at the back of the office. "Stick the kettle on, will you?"

She sighed and threw her bag down on the cluttered desk that was piled with books and papers; the satchel slipped and sent a pile of buff folders ticker taping to the ground. For all she was disorganised on her desk, Lizzy was organised in her head, but it did drive Deb, a feisty Geordie with fifteen years of paralegal experience and a sharp tongue, to distraction – especially when her own desk was laid out with such a perfect symmetry that it nearly bordered on obsessional.

"Liz is not putting the kettle on, Harris!" She yelled down the corridor outside the office they shared. "If you want a bloody coffee, you can make it yourself!" She shut the office door behind her. "Arsehole."

"You do remember that he is your boss, right?"

"He needs to remember that he is perfectly capable of making his own drink! He needs to get up off his arse and do it," she said, obviously irritated. "Don't worry, I got us both a caramel latte from Starbucks, my treat."

Lizzy slouched down in her office chair and began picking up the files off the floor, she had been working on a complicated inheritance case involving multiple heirs across five countries and she was hoping for a resolution before the end of the summer. Probate had not been something she had longed to do when she completed her degree and dragged herself through the LPC, but it seemed apt at the time. She had, after all, helped her Uncle – the honourable Jeremy Darcy QC - wrangle some of the finer points of her grandad's will and he had been more than impressed with her ability, but however much she tried to gloss over it in her head, it was dull. Even the interesting juicy cases weren't particularly appealing, or maybe she had just been doing it for too long – nearly twelve years of dealing with the recently dead was always guaranteed to put a dampener on the working day.

"So," said Deb with a cheeky grin. "What happened at your star-studded party last night, any shenanigans that I should know about. Did they have that prosecco with the gold leaf in it?"

Lizzy, still facing her monitor, swivelled around on her office chair and raised her eyebrow. Deb caught the look and knew full well that something exciting had happened at Pemberley the night before.

"What did you do?" she said excitedly. "Please don't tell me you shagged that bloody Wickham again, because seriously I was mad enough at you a few weeks ago when you finally admitted it"

"God, no, they're like a once in a blue moon occurences!"

"Groped by a grip?" Deb raised her eyebrows suggestively.

"Sod off," she sighed. "If you are going to joke then I don't even think you deserve to know."

"Erm, you spent the evening snapchatting with your new bestie Jenny Graves, and snogged Philip Thomson?" Deb turned back to her screen and took a big gulp of her coffee.

Lizzy blurted out quickly, "I had a proper conversation with Benn Williams."

Deb spat out her latte all over her desk, droplets of Starbucks dribbling down the wall and her new pink file folders from Paperchase.

"Are you jokin'? Benn Williams, the Benn Williams? How did that happen?"

"He's working at my house, so it's like talking to the builder….kinda…"

"No, Lizzy," she chastised. "No, it's not."

"Anyway, it's of no matter…" she stated firmly. "He basically said I was fat and then told me to fuck off."

Deb laughed, as she cleaned up with a pack of antibacterial wipes she kept in her drawer, "trust you to have one of the most beautiful men in the world stood right there and…well… words fail me."

"What?" Lizzy was indignant. "Should I have tried to seduce him?"

"Would you have tried?"

"Of course not! He's a complete arsehole!"

"I would have done," Deb huffed, "regardless of whether he called me fat or not…You need to start seizing the day, Elizabeth Darcy, or maybe a dick – you should start with one of those."

Lizzy laughed louder than a woman up to her eyeballs in wills probably should, Deb turned the radio up and they danced on their chairs to her Abba playlist for the rest of the morning, much to the annoyance of Harris, whose shouts down the corridor were promptly ignored as usual.

Joyce had taken the job of Senior Curator at Pemberley nearly sixteen years ago, shortly after the Historical House Society had acquired it and she could say with absolute certainty that she loved her job. It hadn't been easy – she had worked hard before getting her post, studying part-time for a master's degree in museum studies whilst working as a curator at Dunham House in Cheshire, raising two children and nursing her mum, who had early onset Alzheimer's and a tendency to wander off. She didn't think that she would never cease to be thrilled about working here at Pemberley, even driving there in the morning from her house on the outskirts of Lambton always gave her a little flip in her stomach. Joyce had grown up reading Jane Austen novels and, when she was younger, she always got a little tingle of excitement reading her home town mentioned in the paragraphs where Elizabeth visits the north with her Aunt and Uncle. The Duke of Derbyshire had started opening the house for public visits on a more formal basis, which meant that he was now charging fifty pence for entry and there was a small tea-room and a little shop. She would never forget the smell of the house – the faint whiff of cigars, old books and history pervaded most of the rooms – she would never be able to describe it accurately, it was as if it was less of a smell and more like a feeling. As she had walked through the rooms, wondering at the events that had happened here; Georgiana Darcy's wedding, the birth of Mabel Darcy and the death of her beloved Fitzwilliam Darcy, she truly felt as if she was walking through history.

Joyce was the most serious twelve year-old in existence, her mother thought, and she could see that she had been affected by her visit to the house. She watched as the girl took a seat at the small writing desk by the window, looked at how she touched the inlay, carefully read the sign that said this desk had belonged to Elizabeth Bennet-Darcy and had been brought from the house at Longbourn after the death of her father. Marjorie loved watching Joyce in the house, watched how excited she got walking up the grand staircase, how reverent she was when visiting the rooms that had been lived in by her favourite characters – and watching the realisation that this is where they had existed, that they had been real people. They shared a scone and pot of tea before walking around the gardens, taking pictures with the instamatic camera that Joyce had received for her birthday the week before. On the way out, she bought herself a thin, papery guidebook written by Sybil Darcy with the last of her birthday money, that night she devoured it page by page in one sitting.

Joyce had visited Pemberley at least once a month until she left home at eighteen to go to University in Leeds, she was at the house so often that Winston Darcy, who had three children about the same age, offered her a job as a room guide when she was back from Yorkshire. She had accepted it immediately and spent her summers and half-terms learning the Darcy family history, helping clean tapestries and escorting excited Austen fans around the house. Now she was currently halfway through her PhD, studying part-time whilst working full-time as the Operations and House Manager of Pemberley, as well as standing in for Sam, the senior curator, who was currently on maternity leave. Despite the injection of cash from the production company, it hadn't covered the costs of closing the house and grounds, or the additional security they had needed to pay for to stop photographers getting into the grounds, and even though they would definitely benefit from this next year when the film was released, there was a problem with the roof now and she was having to cut costs elsewhere to maintain the property at its current level. She felt personally responsible for Pemberley – it was her second home, and she needed to do everything she could to ensure that it would be around for the next six hundred years.

Joyce sat down at her desk in the office at the front of the house, the room that had once been the study of Fitzwilliam Darcy and then his son Francis, who had taken over the daily running estate when a tragic accident claimed the life of his older brother – the portrait of the younger gentleman hung over the fireplace, he had the same grey eyes that Lizzy she thought, but from the information in the archives, that was where the likeness ended. Francis Darcy had a hideous temper, and it had only been when his nephew, also called Fitzwilliam, had come of age that his character had mellowed, and he retreated to Longbourn to live out his life. Joyce heard a clash and clatter outside and cringed as she wondered which part of the house the production team had damaged now, she got up, swigged her cup of tea, and made her way outside.

Matthew watched as the dolly grip, Trevor, dropped the track onto the floor and he knew – just knew – that Joyce would be on her way out to ensure that there were no issues. A tree had been accidentally damaged a few days earlier when they had taken some shots with the drone – dramatically sweeping over the peaks and following the carriage with Elizabeth and the Gardiners up the driveway as they made their way to Mr Darcy's house – he loved the way these shots had looked when he watched the rushes, even though the operator, Simon, had fudged the landing and sent it crashing down into the massive old tree near the summit of The Cage. It hadn't done anything really – more damaged was caused to the drone than the tree - but as this was 'Mr Darcy's Conker Tree', the fuss made had been excessive and the financial reparation disproportionate. There had been an article on the Daily Mirror website about how the production team were not respecting the history of the house and again how US funded films were denigrating the cultural heritage of Britain. The tabloids always forgot to mention how they ploughed millions of pounds back into the houses they used for locations, and the upsurge in tourism in the areas of filming. Matthew probably hadn't needed to choose Pemberley as a base for the production, but he loved being in his hometown, back under a familiar sky and where the weather was different each day.

Mr Darcy was sitting on the steps leading up the front door of the house. The main entrance was up a small flight of stone steps, with a cast iron railing on each side before leading into the epic grandeur of the entrance hall that had once formed the medieval banqueting hall. There was a flurry of activity surrounding him as production assistants and crew prepared for the scene, their voices and the noise echoing around the square courtyard at the centre of the house. Lucy finished styling his hair, making sure that each of his curls were regency ready. They had worked together for years and she could confidently state that she knew every pore on his face.

"I'm glad you shaved the beard off," she said, brushing out his sideburns, which tended to puff out when he got hot.

"You are?" He questioned, he had thought he looked good with the beard, even buying a beard comb and some expensive oil from Neal's Yard. "I thought beards were 'in' now."

Lucy looked at him quizzically, the sun was shining from behind casting her bright red hair into some sort of halo. "You thought it looked good?"

Slightly offended, he said adamantly "Yeah, it did look good!"

"Who told you this?"

"Erm, the Daily Mail, people on Twitter?"

Lucy laughed out loud, her perfectly winged eyeliner creasing as she did. Benn looked at her quite indignantly, he looked totally crestfallen. He had been genuinely very proud of his facial hair.

"It's not a good beard, not like a hipster beard or one of those lumberjack beards. It's… well… it's…" She scrunched up her face, not wanting to say any more.

"Go on," he pressed.

"It looks a bit pubey."

Benn looked at her, astonished at her frank defamation of what he personally thought was rather a good beard, "pubey, you say?"

"Yes, like full-on seventies bush pubey," she tried to hold back her laughter. "I'm really sorry that no-one has told you this before. You're lucky I'm married to your sister because I'm being much kinder than a stranger would be." She dabbed his nose with a final dab of powder and then released him on his way

After two weeks on location Benn Williams was feeling remarkably upbeat. He didn't know if it was being out of London, or if it was the positive feedback he had been getting in the papers – Colin Firth and his wet shirt paled in comparison to Benn Williams with his bare-chested muscular physique and tight trousers – it had even made a small segment on a BBC East Midlands segment, before being picked up by the national press. He decided to walk out to the front gate to sign some autographs before filming started, pacing through the entrance porch and out onto the driveway. The new boots were rubbing his heel slightly and he stopped for a moment to adjust them – there was already a sizeable crowd waiting on the front driveway, he smiled broadly and walked out to greet them.