Page 59 of Some Natural Importance (Pride, Prejudice and Romance #3)

Pemberley was indeed all that Elizabeth had imagined from listening to her husband’s descriptions and from her contemplation of the painting in his London study.

There was no artifice to the house and grounds; their splendour was handsome and natural, akin to what she had found and now cherished in the master of Pemberley.

Under Darcy’s management and Elizabeth’s influence, the estate thrived.

Even more happily, the Darcy family prospered, rising in fortune and reputation and growing in size and contentment as the couple welcomed five children.

As Darcy once had conjectured, he had estates enough for every son and daughter.

Cecilia Fitzwilliam was fortunate as well to gain her own estate when she married the second son of a peer soon after her second Season drew to a close.

Although his hair was thinning and he was nothing to Darcy in his holdings, the cheerful young Albert Stopford was a providential match for the Fitzwilliam family.

With a father well-placed in political circles, a small estate in Sussex, and a gift for picking fast horses, it was an alliance that more than satisfied Lord and Lady Matlock .

When not visiting Derbyshire to see her grandchildren, Mrs Bennet spent the rest of her life living happily in her new home in Meryton and acting as the town’s grande dame.

She did not include the new master of Longbourn in her society nor in the group of four and twenty families with whom she dined until Mr Collins’s marriage to the former Charlotte Lucas—whom she had believed far past marriageable age—softened her feelings.

It was not until the last of the Bennet sisters married—Lydia to a retired ship captain who had taken enough prizes to buy her new bonnets and lemon ices every day—that it was clear none would need to make their home at Copperdale.

The farm remained under the Darcy name, and its rents accrued earnings in a trust shared by the descendants of Mr Bennet.

The search for Roman coins continued there for a year or two after the Darcys wed, but Matthew Wadham’s find proved a singular one; more than two centuries passed before any remaining coins were unearthed at the farm, just north of St Alban’s.

In 2012, fifty-five solidi , or Roman gold coins, were found at Copperdale by a hobbyist using a metal detector.

Archaeologists descended on the property and recovered another one hundred and four coins, found scattered across a nearly fifty-foot area there.

It was presumed such a widespread dispersal was due to quarrying or plough action over the previous two hundred years, perhaps during the Second World War, when the soil was last used to cultivate crops.

The one hundred-fifty nine gold solidi, all dating from the late fourth and early fifth centuries, came from the imperial mints in Milan and Ravenna.

The hoard was valued at nearly one hundred thousand pounds, with each individual solidi estimated to sell for between four hundred and a thousand pounds.

The discovery comprised one of the largest hoards of Roman gold coins ever found in the United Kingdom. It is on public display at Verulamium Museum in St Albans. Another hoard of Roman coin, silver denarii, was found at Beech Bottom Dyke, near St Albans, in 1932.

The coin Matthew gave to a young Elizabeth Bennet remained a treasured Darcy family heirloom and can be viewed in the couple’s shared study during public tours of Pemberley.

The End

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