So Great a Cost: A Pride and Prejudice variation

My freedom is more attractive to me... I would never pay so great a cost.Elizabeth Bennet was just fourteen years old when she lost everything: her parents, her home, and her place in the world. Ten years later, she has made her own way. She is educated, independent, and quietly building a life on her own terms as a governess. A position at a grand estate, Pemberley in Derbyshire, promises a generous salary, a sweet and shy little charge to win over, and the leisure to write the novel she has been carrying in her head for years.It also promises an absent master she has no intention of ever meeting.When Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, widower of six years, comes home he encounters a great many surprises. He finds a daughter he scarcely knows and learns that his orderly household has been disarranged by a governess who reads too much, walks too far, and answers him too freely. And when he can no longer pretend that what he feels for her is mere goodwill, he offers her the only thing a gentleman in his position can offer a woman in hers and discovers, to his astonishment, that Elizabeth Bennet does not consider his hand a rescue.Her independence has been bought at so great a cost. Elizabeth refuses to surrender it for a man who imagines his love a favour.But Pemberley is not the only place where the past comes calling, and a sister's tragedy, a homecoming long-deferred, and the patient work of a chastened heart may yet ask her to count the cost of pride against the price of love.