The thing about a bad proposal is that it requires more craft than a good one.

A good proposal needs only sincerity, reasonable timing, and the wit not to say anything that cannot be unsaid. These are modest requirements. Most men of ordinary feeling can meet them without preparation. A bad proposal, one engineered to fail, to produce a clean refusal without injury to either party’s dignity, and without creating the kind of scene that gets retold at dinner tables for the next twenty years…this is a genuinely difficult undertaking, and I approached it as such.

The difficulty was Elizabeth specifically. A woman of less perception could be managed with blunt instruments: excessive condescension, a sufficiently detailed accounting of her family’s deficiencies, the sort of proposal that is really a list of the proposer’s virtues with a question appended. Elizabeth Bennet would see through blunt instruments. She would see through them and she would be amused by them and she would tell Charlotte Lucas about it in precise and entertaining detail, and Charlotte Lucas would notice it alongside everything else she was noticing about me, and I did not need Charlotte Lucas to have more material.

What I needed was a refusal that Elizabeth would find so entirely characteristic that it would confirm rather than complicate everything she thought she knew about me. A refusal she could laugh about with Charlotte and then put down and not think about again.

I had given the matter three days’ careful preparation.

Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Chapter 4” →

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.

Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Chapter 2” →