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9th December 1812, Monday

Jonathan Lucas was a handsome man with features regal enough for a prince.

He was the first child of four and was the heir to Lucas Lodge and all of its assets- of which there really weren't much. Truly, if John wanted to support his siblings, his parents, and any wife he would eventually take, he knew he would need a more lucrative career than just a landowner. Especially if he ever wanted to become worthy enough to propose to Miss Jane Bennet.

Jane Bennet was the most beautiful woman in all of Hertfordshire. It was a fact well known and never argued but John did not fall in love with Jane's beauty.

No, John Lucas had fallen in love with Jane Bennet when she was nine and he twelve, when she was all gangly limbs and a couple of missing teeth and stringy hair falling down past the back of her knees.

He fell in love with her musical laugh and her gummy smile and her half-scared, half-excited screams whenever the Lucas' dog chased after her in search of the meat pies she always hid in her pockets to save for later. He fell in love with her scraped knees and ruddy cheeks that she always sported from having to chase after her sister Lizzy through the woods and the way she always insisted he be her husband whenever they played house with the neighbourhood kids.

He remembers, only very vaguely, but he does remember, during one of those many play-acting games, when Jane had come out of her house with her mother’s fichu over her head like a bride’s veil and a bunch of wild flowers Lizzy had picked for her as a bouquet, they had exchanged vows- or at least promises to marry each other. John also remembered when Mrs. Bennet, who must have been watching them from the porch, had come rushing out of the house with a scowl on her face, and had snatched Jane by the arm and dragged her inside, admonishing them both to stop playing such silly little games. John had just been a boy then, maybe on the verge of fourteen, but he had understood his love for Jane Bennet even then and he had understood that to win her family’s approval, he would have to become better than his inheritance.

It was like Mrs Bennet always said to anybody who would listen- Jane Bennet, with her beauty and her grace and her goodness, was fit for a duke.

John could not be a duke, but he was determined to be better than the son of a shopkeeper granted knighthood.

He would be a couple of years older than his peers and had to apply for a scholarship to afford it, but that year, John Lucas applied for and got accepted into Winchester school for boys. The five years he endured in that place were an aggregation of torment- surrounded as he was everywhere by people who were his betters in every sense of the word- be it intelligence or wealth or connections. Sir Lucas’ knighthood meant little to them. He was a member of the landed gentry but only very technically. Older boys harassed him, and the younger isolated him. Even the teachers could not speak a word in his defence considering the stations of the rest of their students. Still, he persevered and dreamed of coming back home with a gentleman’s education and a better understanding of Estate Management so as to ask Jane Bennet for her hand in a long courtship which would inevitably end in an eventual engagement and marriage.

John Lucas came back to Meryton when he was nineteen only to witness his lady love being courted by an older gentleman at the young age of fifteen. He was shocked to learn that she was even out, but Jane herself seemed to enjoy the attentions of the gentleman well enough. Mrs Bennet cried exuberantly to his own mother of her eldest’s good fortune- and all the sweet little poems and verses the gentleman bestowed upon Jane and what a grand house he possessed in town.

John Lucas endured all he could of their courtship- watched from afar during dinner parties and country assemblies as Jane smiled and blushed at all his effusive attentions, and when he could suffer no longer, he took up one of his school friends on his generous offer and travelled to London to begin his grand tour.

He spent much of his time in Austria, and found himself very much in love with the city of Vienna. His education also took him to France, Amsterdam and Brussels and before John had known it, five years had passed and very little of the person who began this journey on that first day remained inside him. The world was bigger than one could possibly imagine and filled with so much knowledge and culture and art as to quite easily overwhelm him. John Lucas was not naturally an intelligent person, but whatever it was that he lacked in genius, he made it his mission to compensate for with diligence. He learned all that would help him with managing his estate and improving the lands that surrounded it. He invested the majority of the money he owned in percentages and made close friends with gentlemen who increased his notoriety in, if not the Haut Ton , then at least among the wealthy intellectuals of the society.

He had no time for romance, no inclination for love. He thought of nothing and nobody except his books and his growing station in society. To most in London, he was still an outsider, not born into rank or prestige, and while the majority did not welcome him with open arms, his efforts did earn him respect and acknowledgement from some in the first circles. He might not be considered a good match for their daughters, but John Lucas was well known and well sought after by gentlemen for his expertise in investments and his knowledge in all sorts of different fields.

By five and twenty, he had secured a residence in London at Albany, by seven and twenty he was a member of White’s, the gentlemen’s club. He had befriended plenty of powerful people, the most notable of them all being his close friendship with Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley. The man whom he had first assumed to be taciturn and aloof had evolved to become one of his closest confidants, and though most of their interactions consisted of talks of business and politics and investment opportunities, they had also spent plenty an evening commiserating over the common plights in their lives be it Darcy’s shy little sister and John’s older more cynical one or John’s rather unserious and absent parents and Darcy’s lately departed counterparts.

It was only then, after having secured for himself a small fortune that John returned to Hertfordshire for his sister’s wedding. It had almost been a decade since he had walked the paths of Meryton and though he had kept a regular correspondence with the members of his family, especially his father and Charlotte, it was not until he was inside a carriage with his father and little brother, travelling to the church where the ceremony of his sister’s wedding was to take place, did Lucas thought to ask about the Bennets- about Jane Bennet.

He had been sure she would have been married. Early in his leave taking, when he was still a besotted fool and a lovelorn reject, he had made Charlotte promise to not tell him if his beloved were to ever wed. Almost a decade later, he had gained equanimity and thought himself a man capable of hearing of his first love’s good fortune with only a maybe nostalgic ache in his heart.

Only, Jane Bennet was not married.

In fact, she was known in the neighbourhood to have been jilted by a suitor most recently. John Lucas listened in almost incredulous silence as Sir Lucas related to him the particulars of the acquaintance between Jane Bennet and the gentleman by the name of Charles Bingley. How the very amiable, very affluent man had leased Netherfield Park some months ago, how he had very obviously and very demonstrably showered Jane with his particular attentions from the moment they had laid eyes on eachother. How, so very abruptly, he had closed down the estate and taken his leave for town, leaving behind unfulfilled raised expectations from not only Jane Bennet but also the majority of Meryton.

The carriage stopped, and John Lucas stepped out onto the cobblestones paving the way into the churchyard. He lifted his head and his breath caught in his throat, because who should he first lay eyes on after being back home for the first time in a decade but Jane Bennet?

Jane Bennet who was even more beautiful than he had ever seen her, Jane Bennet who held a nosegay of violets and wore a dress in blue and smiled like a goddess as she watched the two young Goulding boys chase each other around the compound. Her blue-blue eyes were bright with merriment, and her golden hair, though it was bound and tucked under a bonnet had a few becoming curls framing her face, caressing her cheeks and the nape of her neck in such a way that every ounce of feeling and affection that John had thought gone from his heart but which had only been repressed deep inside his soul burst forward in so strong a fashion, he found himself struggling to breathe.

As if she could sense his gaze, Jane turned towards him, her eyes widening when she saw him standing only ten or so steps across from her. It was almost time for the ceremony to begin, the grounds were clearing as all the guests made their way inside to witness Charlotte marry William Collins in holy matrimony but Jane and John stood rooted in their spots, their cheeks flushed red and their breaths stuttering in their chests.

“John.” Jane sighed, her bright eyes brightening further with tears. She had not called him Mr Lucas as was proper, but John. Just John.

John Lucas found himself stumbling over to her, erasing the distance between them as easily as he had placed it when he had gone to school when he was fourteen. Jane’s smile was tremulous but genuine and anybody who saw her now would wonder how they had ever mistaken her in love with Mr Bingley when the happiness she felt now was so apparent not only in the wideness of her smile but also in the way her palms itched to touch her friend’s lovely face.

“My dear Jane Bennet,” John spoke shakily, very delicately brushing the backs of his fingers over her soft cheeks as a tear slipped down the side of her face, “how much lovelier you have gotten since I saw you last.”

Jane sniffed, laughed, “I was but fifteen when you saw me last. You were almost full grown at nineteen. Your alteration is much more surprising than mine.”

“Have I? Altered much?” He asked her. He did not think he had. But then again, John Lucas was not the type of man to spend any amount of significant time in front of a mirror.

“Oh yes.” She replied to him, nodding happily even as her eyes took in his features with almost a loving caress.

“Is it a good sort of alteration?”

Jane laughed- a laugh that was very similar to Lizzy’s. One that was but very rarely heard from the older Miss Bennet because of how free and light it was, “You look very handsome, sir.” She told him gaily. With John, Jane felt no need to shy away. This was the man she had never been able to get out of her heart. This was the boy she had wanted to marry since she had learned what marriage meant. “You have always been very good looking, but there is this new intelligence in your expression, I think- which is most becoming.”

John felt blood rush to his cheeks even as he tried to pretend nonchalance. He took a step closer to Jane, and smiled when he smelled rosewater. Jane had always loved roses, “It was not until I saw you just now that I could say it with any confidence, but I have missed you dearly, Miss Bennet. ”

Jane bit her lip, lest her smile turn ridiculous. His voice was so warm, his eyes so soft. She felt the longing in his words just as clearly as she saw the yearning in his gaze. He had missed her. Terribly . He hadn’t forgotten her like she had thought he had. Jane almost cried in her relief,

“Are you back for good, sir?” She asked him, hoping he would say yes and then promptly confess his love for her right in that same breath. John smiled,

“I had not planned to be.” He started and Jane’s heart almost dropped to the floor before he caught it in his hands with his next words, “I thought you surely lost to me. Almost a decade had passed since we were in each other's company, and I was sure in that time that you had married. I was to Town right after my sister’s ceremony, for you see- with the exception of you , Miss Bennet, there is not much incentive for me to stay in Meryton.”

Jane stopped breathing at those words. John tentatively took a hold of one of her hands, pressed it against the lapel of his great coat and even through the fabrics, Jane could feel the racing of his heart, how well it matched the staccato beating inside her own bosom. Her hand trembled then curled, clutching the cloth of his coat, “Tell me, Miss Bennet- Should I stay?”

She had watched him leave once, and then twice. She refused to let him go for the third time.

“I would like it very much if you would, sir.” She whispered and watched as his smile transformed into something so open and soft it reminded her of that thirteen year old boy who had pledged her his heart and his devotion when she was nine and pretending to be his bride,

“Then, I will stay. ”