(a service dog named Darcy), and to my dear friend Pat Weston for her assistance in editing and her strong supportive friendship. And, I cannot say thank you enough to Jane Austen for her wonderful characters that have brought so much joy and pleasure for over 200 years. This is a work of fiction and any similarity to any person alive or dead is unintentional. Chapter 1 It was a beautiful August day when Alexander Thomas Bennet was riding across his lands. At only twenty four years of age, he was now the master of his family’s estate of Longbourn, and the guardian of his two younger sisters, Jane who was nineteen, and Elizabeth who was eighteen. Their mother had died during childbirth of her fourth child, a girl, who joined her mother in death. Elizabeth was only three years of age when their mother, Fanny Gardiner Bennet, had died. Their father, Thomas James Bennet, had been grief stricken at the loss of his beloved wife and child, and had withdrawn into his study with all of his books rather than run the risk of loving anyone else and lose them as well. It came as no surprise that he suffered a heart attack and joined his wife and child ten years after his wife. Alex had been only nineteen when he took up the reins, though in honesty, the young man had been in charge of most of the decisions for the estate for several years before his father’s death.
