Charlotte was familiar with the events that had transpired a few years earlier: Napoleon Bonaparte’s penchant for escaping from imprisonment in exile and belligerently dragging the Continent into repeated wars had produced consequences that extended as far as the Bennet family. Lydia’s husband, a Mr Wickham who had once served in the—regiment, had gone off to fight in the final outbreak of hostilities in France, declaring a calling to honour and patriotic duty not that easily discerned in his character, and likely to stem from disenchantment with his marital state. Here he had disappeared – either killed or deserted, it was impossible to tell – at some point during the Battle of Waterloo. There was no certainty about his fate because his commanding officer, himself mortally injured, had penned a hasty note to say that he feared Mr Wickham was slain in battle, but no reliable reports had yet reached him. No body was ever found, nor any person who could give testimony, and not all the combined powers of Mr Darcy, Mr Bennet, nor even Colonel Fitzwilliam, had been enough to establish the facts of the matter. It had seemed kindest to assume that Mrs Wickham had been rendered a widow, and the doors of Longbourn, Hartscrane (the Bingleys’ establishment near the Derbyshire town of Ashbourne), and Pemberley were all immediately thrown open to her.

Lydia, while piteously declaring that she would never survive without the affection and support of her family, refused to quit the lodging-house where she had taken up residence while her husband was fighting abroad. Her elder sisters assumed, from past experience, that this reluctance to move most likely arose from debts the couple had incurred, which would no doubt have to be discharged before Lydia could change quarters; they prepared their purses accordingly.

Mrs Bennet flew to her bereft daughter’s side, and the pair spent a fortnight indulging in noisy and extensive expressions of grief before the mother reluctantly returned home, where she continued to write letters pressing her youngest daughter to return to the comforting bosom of her family. However, not six weeks passed before the news arrived that Lydia had remarried – the very innkeeper of the hostelry at which she was fixed. She declared herself the luckiest woman alive to have secured such another fine husband and, with her usual lack of tact, boasted of having achieved two husbands, all before the age of twenty-one, while her sisters Kitty and Mary were yet old maids. It did seem a good match, though, with Lydia’s habitual good humour and perennial liveliness in company proving an asset in her unexpected new path in life.