She had come prepared. That was the first thing. She had not come here on impulse. The stillness she had shown, standing by the gate, was the stillness of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment, which meant she had known the moment was coming, which meant she had known what I was inside doing. How did she know the time had come? I do not claim to know. Perhaps Kitty had come to Lucas Lodge and gossiped with Maria Lucas, or perhaps those who lived in the county long enough could set their clocks by the unfolding of Mrs. Bennet’s schemes.

I started towards the garden gate, but she closed the distance between us before I could reach it, and set herself in front of me with something of the air of a highwayman. I half-expected her to ask me to stand and deliver.

When she stopped, she stood so close that I could feel her breath on my face, when she looked up at me. She was far too close to perform to, partly because any performance would be unconvincing at this range. But also because her closeness made me uncomfortably aware that I was a man and she was a woman of my own age, who did not deserve to be called plain. At Oxford, I had seen many men undone by situations like this, and I had learned to distrust the emotions they roused.

I made a feeble attempt at distracting her. “Miss Lucas, what a delightful —”

“I will be brief,” she said, “because I think you are a man who prefers brevity when there is real business to conduct.”

I looked at her. She looked back at me, steady and patient, waiting to see what I would do.

“Go on,” I said.

Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Chapter 5” →

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” →