As with most of the fanfic ideas I outsource to Claude.ai, this was something that I wanted to read but did not strongly want to write. The notes about how this was written and which parts are human versus AI will be posted after the story is finished. My apologies in advance to Riders of Skaith, who is one of the few people who will “get” the core idea, because we have a number of chapters to go before we see the smugglers at work.

The carriage belonging to Lady Catherine de Bourgh was better sprung than anything I could have afforded on a clergyman’s income, which was the point. One does not send one’s rector to negotiate a delicate matter in a vehicle that announces his poverty before he opens his mouth. Lady Catherine understood this. She understood most things that bore on her own interests, which was very nearly her only redeeming trait.

Her other redeeming trait was her discretion. A woman who receives tax-free goods, smuggled in from the Continent through a network of free-traders she is careful to ignore, has strong incentives to keep certain matters private. We had arrived at this understanding within three months of my taking the living at Hunsford. I had never been fool enough to believe she did not know, and she had never been fool enough to pretend she did not know that I knew she knew. It was, as these things go, a functional arrangement.

The Bennet situation was her idea. This is worth stating plainly, because nothing that follows should be attributed to sentiment or ambition on my part. I am the heir to Longbourn through a chain of inheritance I had no hand in designing and find mildly absurd in its particulars. The estate is entailed. Mr. Bennet has five daughters and no son. The mathematics are not complicated. Lady Catherine, who regards uncomplicated mathematics as an opportunity for management, had made a suggestion to me with her customary delicacy. By which I mean that she had stated the idea as a settled fact over the second remove of a dinner at which I had no opportunity to object. The suggestion was that I should call at Longbourn, make myself agreeable to one of the daughters, and secure the succession in a manner that would reflect well on my establishment at Hunsford and cause no inconvenience to anyone.

The daughter in question, she had indicated, should be one of the elder two, both of whom were reportedly handsome, well-behaved, and of an age to manage their own establishment. Beyond that, Lady Catherine had left the selection to my judgment, which was either confidence in my discernment or indifference to the outcome. Possibly both. Lady Catherine’s opinions about marriage tended toward the practical rather than the personal. Where my own case was concerned, I found myself inclined to agree with her.

However, my own requirements were somewhat more specific. I needed a wife who would be an adequate mistress of a parsonage, who would be pleasant company for the sort of people I was obliged to entertain, and most importantly, who would not ask questions about what I did when I was not in view. A curious wife was a liability I had no intention of acquiring. A clever wife was worse. A clever, curious wife with good instincts and nothing better to do than wonder why her husband was occasionally absent between midnight and four in the morning would be catastrophic.

The eldest daughter, Jane Bennet, was described by my informants as the sweetest-tempered girl in the county. Kind. Domestic. Inclined to think well of everyone. Possibly in love with someone already, which was a potential complication, but people fall out of love with remarkable speed when presented with a secure establishment and a mother who wants them married. Elizabeth Bennet, by the same reports, was clever.

I had therefore formed my plan before the carriage left the Hunsford gate. Jane Bennet. A suitable courtship of appropriate duration. A practical marriage that would serve everyone’s interests without requiring anyone to be anything other than what they were. I would be a considerate husband, a decent provider, and entirely absent from my wife’s domestic arrangements between certain hours, about which she would ask no questions because it would not occur to her that there was anything to ask.

It was a good plan. I was pleased with it.

The carriage hit a rut somewhere past Sevenoaks and I revised my estimate of Lady Catherine’s springs downward. Outside, the Kent landscape gave way to Surrey with the usual lack of ceremony. The chalk had gone to clay, the hedgerows grown denser, the roads softer. I had marked this transition a dozen times on my mapping runs, noting where the land changed character and the old drovers’ paths broke off toward the Thames valley. Useful terrain, Surrey, for a man who needed to know which routes the Revenue watched and which they did not. But it lacked the coast, and I was always aware of that absence.

I had made this journey a dozen times, when I was mapping routes for my night business, and found it reliable in its dullness. This suited my present purposes. I had a persona to assemble and preferred to do it without distractions.

The Reverend Mr. Collins: twenty-seven years old, tall and in reasonable health, neither handsome nor markedly otherwise. Heir to Longbourn. Rector of Hunsford, by the gracious patronage of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, to whom he is deeply, audibly, and on occasion exhaustingly grateful. A man of amiable manners and limited perception, prone to rather more speech than the occasion requires, eager to please in ways that suggest he has not always found pleasing people easy. Harmless. The sort of man one stops really listening to about four minutes in, which is precisely when one stops watching as well. A man who carried a walking stick, as many clergymen did, unremarkable in every respect except for the weight of it in the hand. I had checked the mechanism that morning, as I checked it every morning, the blade drawing clean and silent. A clergyman’s stick. Nothing more than that, to anyone who did not look closely.

I have been playing this part for three years. It fit like a second skin, which I mean as neither compliment nor complaint, merely as a statement of fact about well-maintained equipment.

My father had a gift for making people feel small. He had applied this gift to me with particular enthusiasm from approximately my fourth year of life until his death, which occurred when I was nineteen and which I mourned for a period of some weeks before I came to understand that what I felt was in truth relief so profound it had briefly resembled grief. He was a stupid man who had understood early that his son was not, and had treated this as a personal affront requiring ongoing correction. The correction took various forms, none of them pleasant, all of them instructive in ways my father had not intended.

The most important thing that I learned from him was that people see what they expect to see. A son who has been called a bore and a fool to all the neighborhood becomes, in the eyes of the neighborhood, a bore and a fool. The label precedes the person. The man can either become the label, or he can, if one will pardon the mixed metaphor, treat it like a door that he can open and close at will.

I had chosen the latter. It had required some little work.

The university years had been useful in a different way. One learns things at Oxford that one is not supposed to learn. Especially if one is not particularly welcome in the rowdy parties and gatherings where the sons of the rich befriend each other in between drinking, wenching and boxing the watch. Because I was not welcome there, I paid attention to other things. By the time I left, I had a tolerable grasp of which information moved through which channels, how money could travel between England and France without troubling the Revenue, and how a man of no particular consequence could make himself consequential to people who would otherwise not notice he existed.

The living at Hunsford had been the final piece. A clergyman has latitude that a tradesman does not. He moves freely, calls on every family in his parish, knows everyone’s business as a matter of pastoral duty, and is trusted with things people would not tell a magistrate. The church hours structure his visible time in a way that makes certain absences unremarkable. And the right parish, in the right county, with the right proximity to the coast…Well.

The operation had been running for two and a half years. It was well-organized, profitable, and, in the ways that mattered to me, useful to the people of Hunsford in a manner the legal economy had largely declined to be. I was not, on the whole, dissatisfied with my life.

I had told myself I required only a wife who would leave that life undisturbed. Sweet-tempered. Domestic. Inclined to think well of everyone. From the parsonage study window, on a clear day, one could see the line of the coast three miles distant. Not the sea itself, but the quality of light above it, the brightness that came off open water when the wind was from the south. The church stood between the parsonage and the village proper, its square Norman tower a landmark visible from the coastal road. Rosings lay a quarter mile to the north, close enough for Lady Catherine to consider the parsonage within her immediate survey. The village of Hunsford itself ran along the lane toward the coast road: perhaps two dozen cottages, a smithy, the tavern. Modest, unremarkable, and situated with a precision I had not appreciated until I understood what uses it could be put to.

The carriage crossed into Hertfordshire as the light was going. I arranged my expression into something earnest and slightly overwhelmed, the expression of a man arriving somewhere important for the first time, a man sensible of the honor and not entirely sure he deserves it. I have found this expression useful in most social situations. It asks nothing of the observer except mild benevolence, which the observer is usually happy to dispense.

Longbourn, by my information, was a modest estate. The house was comfortable, the grounds adequate. The family was dominated by an expensive and wilfully ignorant mother, and two equally expensive and ignorant daughters, rather too young to be out, but who were out nonetheless. There was also a pompous and resentful middle daughter determined to impose her tastes on the neighborhood, and a lazy, erudite father who put what initiative he possessed into managing his home farm and his estate, and paying off the debts incurred by the three most expensive members of the household. And of course, there were the two eldest daughters, whom Lady Catherine had recommended to my attention.

Jane Bennet: kind, beautiful, possibly in love with someone else. Manageable. Elizabeth Bennet: dangerously clever.

The carriage turned through the Longbourn gate. I was, I reminded myself, delighted to be here. Deeply sensible of the honor. Entirely without ulterior motive. The carriage stopped. I gripped the sword-cane and stepped out.

The door of the house opened and a handsome woman emerged. Her style of dress was so emphatic that I identified her as Mrs. Bennet before she had said a word. I composed my face into its most amiable configuration and prepared to be underestimated.