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.

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.