A Novel of Colonel Fitzwilliam — Companion to Pride and Prejudice

Colonel John Fitzwilliam has spent fifteen years perfecting the art of being useful — to his regiment, to his cousin Darcy, to a family that expects him to marry money he doesn't have. A younger son's fortune, as he's fond of saying, is measured in rank, not pounds. He's made his peace with it.

Then a woman with no dowry and a fondness for Cicero starts turning up in his letters home from Spain.

Set across the same two years as Pride and Prejudice — the Easter visit to Rosings, the storm that breaks over Longbourn when Lydia Bennet vanishes with George Wickham — this is the story happening just out of frame: the siege lines outside Ciudad Rodrigo, a father's ultimatum over an heiress named Kellett, a wound at Salamanca that finally burns away a year of careful excuses, and a reckoning with an Earl who has never once had to choose between duty and love.

Fitzwilliam always told Elizabeth Bennet that younger sons can't marry where they like. This is the story of what it costs him to find out whether that's actually true.

A tale of war, rank, and the fortune that was never about money at all.