I found Mrs. Bennet, on the whole, to be manageable. Loud instruments are not difficult instruments. They simply require a different style of playing than quiet ones.

Mr. Bennet I had not expected. This was a failure of intelligence-gathering on my part. His reputation had prepared me for sardonic withdrawal. What I found, in the first ten minutes of the evening, was sardonic withdrawal deployed with a precision that suggested active engagement rather than mere absence. He was watching everything, including me, from behind an expression of magnificent indifference. The indifference was not quite genuine. I revised my assessment of the Longbourn situation accordingly. He would bear watching.

The daughters were presented in order of age, which gave me time to make my assessments as they came.

Jane Bennet arrived first in more than the literal sense. She was the one the room organized itself around without anyone appearing to notice. Tall and fair, with a beauty even more beautiful at close range, which is rarer than people think.

Her expression when she greeted me was warm and entirely unguarded, which told me several things simultaneously. By nature or upbringing, she was kind to everyone without distinction. She also had not been warned to be suspicious of me specifically, and she was genuinely without calculation. That last trait can sometimes produce unpredictable results, but it is a rare enough quality that one should admire it when one finds it.

I noted, with a small internal reservation, that she glanced toward the door approximately three times in the first quarter hour for reasons unrelated to anyone’s arrival. Someone not present was on her mind. The reports about a prior attachment had been accurate. I could only hope it was of a passing nature.

Elizabeth Bennet came into the room with an easy self-confidence. She was not as immediately striking as Jane. She was more interesting, which was worse. The eyes were the problem. Not their dark color or their fine shape, but the way she used them, with a pointed interest in whatever she was looking at. I have met perhaps four people in my life who look at things the way Elizabeth Bennet did that first evening, and all four of them had turned out to be, in one way or another, inconvenient. She looked at me with that kind of attention for approximately three seconds and then she decided I was not worth more of it, and looked away.

The other three daughters I catalogued efficiently. Mary Bennet: patronizing, pretentious, determined to improve me with her conversation. No threat and no use. Lydia Bennet: sixteen, loud, and possessed of an animal confidence that would either carry her to a successful marriage or to complete disaster, with nothing in between available as an outcome. Thankfully, no concern of mine. Kitty Bennet: an echo of her younger sister, to be assessed primarily through that sister’s influence. Also no concern of mine.

We went into dinner. The dining room was smaller than I had anticipated, but made the most of itself: wallpaper in a fashionable stripe that must have cost more than the room warranted, candlelight generous enough to suggest a household that did not count the candles, a table that seated ten at most but was laid with more silver than the family would have inherited. The sort of room that announced aspiration more loudly than established consequence. Mr. Bennet sat at the head with the stillness of a man who has learned to observe by appearing not to. I had been placed at his right, a position of courtesy that also gave him an excellent vantage point to watch me without seeming to attend. Mrs. Bennet commanded the foot of the table with the energy of a woman who considered dinner conversation a campaign requiring active management. The daughters arranged themselves between, Jane near her father, Elizabeth closer to her mother, the younger three distributed according to some principle I had not yet determined.

I performed.

This is not the place for a full account of the performance, which was tailored to the audience and not especially interesting as a technical exercise. The Bennet dining room required enthusiasm and mild pomposity, not subtlety, and I had been delivering enthusiasm and mild pomposity for long enough that it required only a twelfth of my attention, leaving the remainder free for observation.

I spoke at some length about Hunsford and Lady Catherine’s condescension in the matter of the living. I expressed sensible admiration of the house. I said several things about the entail that were designed to be slightly uncomfortable without being openly insulting, because I wanted to take the measure of how this family responded to mild discomfort. Mrs. Bennet responded with distress. Jane tried to change the subject. Mr. Bennet looked over my head with an air of polite interest. Elizabeth looked at me with attention again, for rather longer than three seconds this time.

The redirection began over the second course. I had been speaking to Jane. She was, I will say, exactly as pleasant to speak to as advertised, asking questions with genuine interest, listening with her whole attention, the sort of conversationalist who makes you feel briefly that what you are saying is more interesting than it actually is. Then Mrs. Bennet inserted herself with the smooth inevitability of a woman who has been waiting for her moment.

“Lizzy is very accomplished,” she said. “She reads, you know. Constantly. And she walks four or five miles sometimes, do you not, Lizzy, though I always say it does your complexion no good, and she is very quick, very lively, I always say Lizzy is the cleverest of them though of course Jane is marvellous.”

Jane smiled with the patience of a woman who has been hearing this said in her presence ever since her coming-out.

Elizabeth, to her credit, looked as though she would prefer to be somewhere else, which was a sentiment I found I shared.

I understood what was happening. Mrs. Bennet had decided. The process by which she had arrived at this decision was opaque to me. Possibly she had looked at Jane’s expression during Jane’s three glances at the door and drawn conclusions, possibly she simply preferred to keep the daughter she found more manageable at home, possibly she operated on a principle of deployment I could not reconstruct from the information at hand. The mechanism did not matter. The outcome was clear.

I was being aimed at Elizabeth Bennet.

I looked at Elizabeth Bennet, who was looking at her plate with an expression that suggested she was reserving judgment on the projectile being so aimed.

I looked at Jane Bennet, who was looking at nothing in particular with an expression of gentle unconcern that told me she had noticed the maneuver and was not going to intervene in it.

I looked at Mr. Bennet, who caught my eye across the table with an expression of such perfect, such refined amusement that I nearly revised my entire plan on the spot out of sheer irritation.

He knew what his wife was doing. He had decided to let her do it. This was either because he agreed with the strategic direction or because he found the situation entertaining and had chosen entertainment over interference, which I considered more likely given everything I had observed about Mr. Bennet in the preceding three hours. In either case, I was on my own.

I said something warmly appreciative about the accomplishments of all the Miss Bennets, distributed with strict impartiality, and returned to my soup. Around me, the evening continued. Lydia said something loud. Kitty agreed with it. Mary quoted someone. Jane listened to everyone with equal kindness. Mr. Bennet watched the proceedings with the expression of a man attending a theatrical performance he has seen before but finds intermittently diverting.

Elizabeth, across the table, looked up from her plate and directly at me. I gave her my best amiable vacancy and held it until she looked away.

This was going to require more careful management than I had initially planned.

The problem was not Mrs. Bennet, whose campaign I could deflect, redirect, or simply outlast through attrition. The problem was not Mr. Bennet, whose amusement was a complication but not a threat. The problem was not even Elizabeth herself, whose opinion of me was in the process of forming as negligible, which was, on balance, the safest opinion she could hold.

The problem was that negligible and unobserved are not the same thing. A person can dismiss you entirely and still notice things they cannot account for. That your eyes tracked the servants’ entrance and the windows before you settled into your performance. That you catalogued the approach routes to the house on your way in with the attention of a man used to planning departures he has not yet made. That you used a word no country clergyman would have ready to hand, or paused fractionally before choosing a safer one. I have built a career on being dismissed. Dismissal is not the same as blindness.

Jane Bennet would have been better. Jane Bennet would have looked at me with warm, uncomplicated kindness and then looked toward the door again, and I would have courted her with appropriate efficiency and she would probably have accepted with appropriate gratitude and we would have arrived at a marriage of mutual convenience with the minimum possible scrutiny applied to either party.

Instead, I was being aimed at the one person in the room whose quality of attention I had cause to find professionally inconvenient.

After dinner, in the drawing room, Elizabeth played and sang. She was competent rather than remarkable, which she appeared to know, and she played with the manner of someone doing something they enjoy rather than someone performing for an audience. This is rarer than it should be and I found it disarming. That was unprofessional of me and I set that reaction aside.

I sat beside Mrs. Bennet and said appreciative things about the performance. Mrs. Bennet agreed with them and added several of her own. Jane sat near her sister and turned pages. Mary waited for her turn with visible impatience.

Mr. Bennet, in his corner, watched me with that expression of refined amusement.

I was going to have to manage this very carefully indeed.