Category: Jane Austen

Fanficcing With Claude: A Curious Case, Chapter 3 (Elizabeth)

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The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 3. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"Kitty," said my mother, the moment the breakfast things were cleared, "I want you upstairs. Lydia, go with her. Mary — your father has been asking for you."

My father had asked for nobody, and would have paid handsomely to go on asking for nobody, but Mary went. I had half risen myself when my mother fixed me where I stood.

"Lizzy, you will stay. Mr. Collins has something to say to you."

"Mr. Collins can have nothing to say to me that my sisters may not hear."

"You will stay, Lizzy. I insist upon it." And she was gone, and the door closed on the last of my sisters with the soft click of a thing that has been oiled in advance.

I should have seen it laid. I had grown up inside my mother's campaigns and could generally make out the shape of one before she had finished the first manoeuvre — and this one had been in the field for two days already. An invitation had come from Miss Bingley for Jane to dine at Netherfield, the gentlemen engaged elsewhere; and my mother, consulting the sky with the satisfaction of a woman who had read it correctly, refused Jane the carriage and sent her the three miles on the old riding horse. It came on to rain before she was halfway. Jane was kept the night, and my mother bore her triumph as she bore all her triumphs, aloud and at the table. With Mr. Bingley thus secured to her eldest daughter — for so the arithmetic already stood, in her ledger — Mr. Collins had been quietly transferred from Jane to me, and had accepted the reassignment without a flicker. A man genuinely attached to my sister might have shown some small reluctance to move the attachment overnight; he showed none, and I set it down to feelings shallow enough to be poured from one vessel to another without spilling. I had the explanation entirely backwards, but it served me for a great many months.

All of which is to say that I was alone in the breakfast-room with Mr. Collins, and the door was shut, and he was clearing his throat.

"Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth," he began, "that your modesty, so far from doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections."

"Mr. Collins—"

"You can hardly doubt the purport of my discourse. Almost as soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my future life." He held up a hand against interruption, having evidently rehearsed the interruption as well. "But before I am run away with by my feelings, it may be advisable to state my reasons for marrying. Firstly, that it is the duty of a clergyman in easy circumstances to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Secondly, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness. And thirdly — which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier — that it is the express advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness."

He paused there, as a man pauses at the best prospect on his property.

"'Mr. Collins,'" he said, in what I understood to be an imitation of her ladyship, "'you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly. Choose a gentlewoman, for my sake; and for your own, let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.' Allow me to observe, my fair cousin, that the notice and kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh are not the least of the advantages in my power to offer."

"You are too hasty, sir," I said. "You forget that I have made no answer. Let me make it now. Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than decline them."

"I am not now to learn," said Mr. Collins, with a wave of the hand that forgave me everything, "that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour. I am therefore by no means discouraged, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long."

"Upon my word, sir, your hope is an extraordinary one after my declaration. I am perfectly serious in my refusal."

"You would be refusing a respectable establishment. You may not be aware that it is by no means certain another offer of marriage will ever be made you. I must conclude that you mean to increase my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females."

"Elegant females may plague whom they choose, sir. I am a rational creature, and I have now told you the truth three times. I shall not improve it on a fourth telling."

"You are uniformly charming!" cried Mr. Collins.

I have had occasion since to be argued with by some formidable people, and I have never again met anything so impregnable as Mr. Collins in love. There was no purchase on the man anywhere. Refusal ran off him like rain off new slate, each fresh declaration absorbed into the general proof of my delicacy; and I was driven at last from the room, having achieved nothing in a quarter of an hour but three refusals and the loss of my temper, to find my mother stationed in the hall at the exact distance the door's acoustics would have recommended to her.

What followed was loud, and most of it was addressed to me. I was a headstrong, foolish girl who did not know my own interest; I would be made to know it; she would not be crossed in this, Lizzy, she would not. It was at this point that Mr. Collins emerged from the room behind me, bewildered and embarrassed by the scene in front of him. My mother ran on, telling me that headstrong girls who refused respectable establishments might find their mothers done with them altogether. And gathering herself to deliver the decisive stroke, she flew to the library to fetch the one authority in the house who outranked her.

My father came as far as the library door and surveyed the field — my mother at full sail, Mr. Collins arranging his features into injured dignity, and me, in the middle of it, with my temper gone.

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth," he said. "From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."

It was not kind to my mother, and he knew it, and he said it anyway, because the alternative was to let the thing grind on for a week; and underneath the wit, which the room received as wit, a man had taken my side. He withdrew. The door closed. My mother was left to discover, by degrees, that the matter had been decided against her in eleven seconds, and that she had carried the deciding vote to the wrong tribunal.

Mr. Collins bore his rejection with great dignity for slightly under a minute.

His equanimity restored itself with a speed I had attributed, at the time, to the shallowness of his attachment. He grew formal. He resigned his pretensions in the rounded periods of a man reading the eulogy of a connexion he had not much liked. By the time Charlotte Lucas was shown in — and she arrived, as she so often did, at the exact moment the room most wanted a sensible person in it — he had recovered enough to be gracious about my unworthiness.

Charlotte took the management of the room out of my hands without appearing to take anything at all.

"You bear it wonderfully, Mr. Collins," she said, and had him telling her of Rosings before the tea was poured. Was the park very extensive? It was. And her ladyship took an interest in the parish — in the cottagers, the school? Her ladyship's attention reached everything; Miss Lucas could scarcely conceive the minuteness of it. Charlotte said she was sure she could not, and asked another question, and another, each one a small door held open for him to walk through talking; and I was left free at the window to recover my temper, which wanted the whole of the quarter-hour. She was good at this, I told myself — at smoothing the feathers of foolish men — and I left the observation there, where it sat quietly for a fortnight before it taught me anything.

I had not been at the window long when a horse came up the drive.

It was our own riding horse, led by a Netherfield servant, and the note he carried was from Jane. She was unwell — a sore throat, a fever, a headache; nothing to alarm us, she wrote, in the careful hand of a person trying not to alarm anyone; Miss Bingley would not hear of her leaving. My mother, whose scheme had now answered beyond anything she had dared to hope, received the news with perfect serenity and observed that people did not die of trifling colds, and that Jane could be in no better hands.

I had less faith in colds that made Jane so careful about not alarming us. The carriage was not to be had — my mother wanted it later, and besides, a daughter arriving in a carriage could be sent home in one. I said I would walk. Three miles, and the lanes deep after the rain; behind me, as I went for my boots, Mr. Collins had begun explaining to Charlotte the exact degree of concern it was proper to feel for a young lady's sore throat.

I took the short way, across the south field, and arrived at Netherfield with a petticoat that had a great deal to say about the journey.

I did not know, setting out, how closely it would be read.

Fanficcing With Claude: A Curious Case, Chapter 2 (Elizabeth)

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The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 2. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"And what," said Charlotte Lucas, appearing at my elbow with two cups of punch before the first dance had ended, "is a Mr. Collins? Maria swears your mother has one staying at Longbourn, and my mother is in agonies for want of facts."

"He is my father's cousin," I said, "and heir to Longbourn after him, the estate being entailed away from us girls. He has lately taken orders, and got a living in Kent from a great lady called Lady Catherine de Bourgh, of whom you are to hear a very great deal whether you wish it or not. He has come to look us over."

"To look you over."

"He calls it an olive branch. I believe he means to choose a wife from among us, and feels that the entail entitles him to one, the way it entitles him to the silver."

"That is not the worst arrangement a woman might make."

"You have not heard him on the subject of his patroness."

"I have heard worse men on smaller subjects," said Charlotte, "and known them make easy enough husbands once the courting was done. A clergyman with a living, and an estate to come, is not nothing, Eliza, whatever he sounds like across a supper table."

This was an old argument between us, and I had never once won it, so I directed her attention to the man himself instead.

The assembly rooms at Meryton were never large, and that night they were smaller still, for half the county had crowded in to be disappointed by them. I have been in finer rooms since, and colder ones, and one or two I would give a good deal never to have entered at all; but I remember that room as it stood that evening, low-ceilinged and over-warm and loud, the whole neighbourhood having got hold of a single piece of news and resolved to make a winter of it. The news was that Mr. Bingley had taken Netherfield, was young, was unmarried, and had five thousand a year. My mother had it by heart within an hour of its arrival — five thousand, Mr. Bennet, and very likely more — and had recited it across the breakfast table every morning for a fortnight. My father received these communications as he received most of her communications, from behind a book; and he received the assembly itself by staying home with it.

Mr. Collins had attached himself that evening to Jane, the eldest and the handsomest of us, the entail having furnished him a choice he meant to make from the top down. Charlotte and I drifted near enough to hear him at the work. He had arrived at the chimney-piece in the drawing-room at Rosings Park.

"—eight hundred pounds, Miss Bennet. I have the figure from her ladyship herself. Eight hundred pounds, for the chimney-piece alone."

"It must be very fine," said Jane.

"It is beyond anything I could convey. I despair of conveying it."

He did not, however, despair of attempting it, and was some minutes about the work. Jane bore it with the sweetness she brought to everything, including bores; and I loved her for it, and did not envy her, and drew Charlotte off before I could be caught laughing at my own kin.

Then Mr. Bingley came in, and the chimney-piece ceased to matter, though nobody yet knew it.

He was everything the neighbourhood had ordered and a degree warmer than it had dared hope — easy, open, quick to be pleased, the kind of young man who enters a strange room as though it has been got up entirely for his enjoyment and is delighted to find his friends already in it. He was introduced down the line of us, declared he had never met with pleasanter people or prettier girls in his life, and was believed, because he so plainly believed it himself. He danced every dance. And within the half-hour he had found Jane, and after that he found very little else.

I watched it happen from one dance away: a beloved sister and a likeable stranger discovering one another in public, each convinced they were the soul of discretion. He brought her lemonade she had not asked for — the second man that evening to bring her a drink unasked, and the first to be thanked with a blush. He stood up with her twice, which in Meryton was very nearly a banns-reading. My mother watched the same scene from across the room, and I saw the very moment her eye left Jane and travelled to Mr. Collins, and from Mr. Collins to me; and I understood that I had just been promoted in the order of business.

For the present, however, I was occupied with Mr. Bingley's friend.

He had come in at Mr. Bingley's shoulder and had not warmed by a single degree in the hour since. Mr. Darcy was the taller man and the handsomer, with a keen aquiline face and piercing blue eyes; he had ten thousand a year to Bingley's five; and the room had established all of this and then fallen out of love with him inside ten minutes, on the grounds that he would not dance, would not be pleased, and looked at Meryton as a man looks at weather he must presently go out into. I had given him no great share of my attention once it was clear he considered himself above his company. I record this so that what follows may be understood to have been entirely his own doing.

I was resting between dances, half hidden by the angle of a pillar. The wall of seated women lay in my view — the chaperones, the visiting aunts, the ladies past dancing — and among them a stranger I took for someone's formidable relation up from the country, a widow by her dress, who held her chair as though the room had been set out around it and watched the dancers with an openness no woman of the gentry is taught to allow herself, keeping one face and then another past the moment courtesy returns a look to its owner. Mr. Bingley had come up to his friend a few feet from me, flushed from the dance and bent on sharing his good fortune.

"Come, Darcy. I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner."

"You know how I detest it, unless I am acquainted with my partner."

"I would not be so fastidious as you are for a kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening — and several of them uncommonly pretty."

"You have been dancing with the only handsome girl in the room."

"She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you."

Mr. Darcy looked at me. It was a brief but unhurried look. I have been looked at a great many ways in my life, but never before, that I could remember, as a question someone was working out.

"I think not," he said. "I cannot suppose Miss Elizabeth Bennet would be tolerable company. Her father I take to be a gentleman of a reclusive type, who cannot be bothered with social events. And her mother is clearly the spoiled and ignorant younger daughter of someone in trade. A country attorney, I would guess."

He said it quietly, and not unkindly, and that was the whole of the trouble. There was no spite in it. He was not paying me out for a slight, nor jabbing at his friend for dragging him to the ball. He had looked at me, read off what I came from as another man might read a signpost, and concluded that the destination of our acquaintance would not be worth the journey. And in his guesses as to my family he was unfortunately correct. My father did despise the assembly and was at home with his books. My mother was the younger daughter of a Meryton attorney and was, that very evening and at some volume, both of the other things he had named her.

I had expected, if ever I were to be slighted by such a man, to be told I was plain. Every woman keeps an answer ready for that, and a witty one keeps three. I had no answer ready for being read correctly and found not worth the reading; the sting of it had an edge I had not met before, and I disliked him from that moment with an interest I should have found harder to account for than I cared to try. I gave my attention back to the room and resolved to think no more of him — a resolution I kept for the better part of an hour.

What I did with the hour was tell the story. I told it as a joke against a proud man — the gentleman from town who could name your grandfather's profession at twenty paces and found nothing in the room worth standing up with — and it earned the laugh it was built for, every time, which was the only shape I could bear to give it. Charlotte heard the performance twice before she had it from me plainly, behind the pillar, with the laugh left off.

She did not look surprised.

"He is right about your father, you know," she said.

"Charlotte."

"And about your mother at these things. You have said as much yourself, and worse."

"When I say it, it is filial honesty. When he says it, it is ten thousand a year being clever at a country assembly."

"A man who says only true things and none of them kind is a tiresome guest. I grant you that. But I would rather sit by a man who sees clearly and holds his tongue half the time than by one who flatters and sees nothing at all. You will meet a great many more of the second kind than the first." She took my arm. "Now stop attending to the one man in the room who will not dance with you, and come and watch your sister fall in love. It is by far the better entertainment."

It was, and we watched it together until the musicians were sent home.

The carriage afterward held the seven of us and my mother's happiness, which wanted the greater room. Twice, Jane — he had stood up with her twice, and his sisters so elegant, and five thousand a year, and her father should hear every word of it that night whether he would or no. Jane ventured that Mr. Bingley was just what a young man ought to be, and blushed in the dark where she thought it could not be seen. Mr. Collins pronounced the evening a credit to the neighbourhood, though inferior, he must in honesty observe, to the assemblies at Rosings; that her ladyship attended no assemblies did not appear to weaken the comparison for him.

And then my mother fell silent for the length of a mile, which was so far against her custom that I looked over. She was studying Mr. Collins. Then she turned and looked at me down the length of the carriage, the way she looked at a room before she rearranged the furniture in it.

I knew that look of old, and I knew there was no arguing with what came behind it.

But that kept until morning.

Fanficcing With Claude: A Curious Case, Chapter 1 (J. H.W.)

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The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman is a Pride and Prejudice mystery, serialized here in chapters. This opening chapter is presented in the voice of Dr. John H. Watson; the manuscript that follows is narrated throughout by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"John," said my wife one evening last spring, looking up from a litter of papers that had colonised the whole of the dining table, "what was your grandmother Watson's name before she married?"

I considered the question over my pipe and was obliged to confess I had no idea.

"Your great-grandmother, then."

"My dear Mary, I could not swear to my grandmother's Christian name without notice. I am a doctor and a biographer. I leave the begats to the clergy."

She made a note and went back to her papers, and I thought no more of it. Mary had taken up the study of her own family that winter, in the patient way that women of her temper take up such things, with a deal of correspondence and a great many afternoons given over to parish registers. She had run her own people back as far as the registers would carry her, found them respectable and unremarkable in equal measure, and turned, for want of fresh quarry, to mine.

My people are north-country, and the north does not throw things away: within the fortnight a cousin of mine near Scarborough had sent down two hampers of family papers that nobody had opened since the Regency. Mary worked through them with her registers at her elbow. Somewhere in the second hamper was a journal, kept by some gentleman of the family in a hand like a cavalry charge; she gave an evening to it, reported that it concerned chiefly partridges, and set it aside in favour of the parish registers, which at least were legible. For three weeks the dining table was lost to us. Then one evening she set a single sheet beside my plate and stood watching me with a look of barely suppressed glee.

"Read it through twice," she said. "You will want to."

The line she had traced was mine, not hers; and it ran back, through a marriage in the early part of the century, to a Hertfordshire family of small fortune and considerable wit, and from there, by a turning I shall set out in its proper place, into the maternal ancestry of the two men I knew best in the world.

I read it through twice. Then I put on my coat and went to Baker Street.

Holmes heard me out without interruption, which was itself remarkable. When I had done he sat a moment with his fingertips together in the old attitude.

"You will want my brother," he said. "Mycroft has had the documents for some years."

"You knew of this?"

"I knew that there were papers in the family. Mycroft keeps such things." He reached for his pipe. "Go to the Diogenes, Watson. He will receive you, which you may take as the measure of how little the matter excites him."

I had my hand on the door when he spoke again.

"You understand that I am pleased to own you for a cousin," he said, without looking up from the pipe. "But you must not flatter yourself that the discovery raises you in my estimation. A man could not have been more valuable to me than you have already contrived to be, and the matter was settled long before our kinship was discovered." He struck a match. "Give my regards to Mycroft. He will not return them, but the form should be observed."

It is the nearest thing to a sentiment I ever had from him, and he buried it, as he buried all such things, under a remark about something else. I went down the stairs better pleased than the words alone would account for.

Mycroft Holmes received me in the Stranger's Room of the Diogenes Club the following afternoon, immense and immovable, and confirmed the whole of it before I had got my hat off. "Sit down, Doctor. Sherlock wired me this morning. You will want the manuscript."

"You have known of this — how long?"

"The better part of ten years."

"And it did not strike you as worth mentioning?"

"It struck me as a fact." He looked at me the way he looks at a column of figures that has added up correctly. "An interesting fact. I considered whether it bore upon anything, concluded that it did not, and gave my attention to matters that did. Had the connexion ever become relevant to any business in hand, you would have heard of it within the hour."

"Relevant to business," I said. "My kinship by blood to you and your brother?"

"Just so."

I have known few men who could deliver so extraordinary a thing so flatly, and I did not try to make him feel it more than he did. One does not improve Mycroft by prodding him.

He fetched the manuscript himself, trusting it to no club servant. It was a great square parcel, wrapped against the dust, heavier than it looked.

"What is it?" I asked. "Mary's paper goes no further than the names."

"An account of certain events in Hertfordshire and Kent, a matter of eighty years ago, set down some while afterward by the lady to whom they occurred. She had it privately circulated among the family. I have read it once." He pushed the club's ledger across for my signature. "I shall tell you nothing else about it, and within the week you will thank me for that."

"Is it so dull?"

"It is the other thing," said Mycroft, and rang for my coat.

It was long, and I read it through twice before I understood why I could not put it down. I had gone to it as a curiosity of the blood: a chance to see, as it were, the rough ore from which two such singular intelligences had been refined. I found an account, written by a lady of uncommon penetration, of the man she married; and in that man I met, set down plainly for the first time, a temper I had been studying at close quarters for the better part of twenty years without ever quite getting the measure of it.

The lady, whom I shall call Elizabeth Darcy, was the keenest observer I have encountered on the page, and she missed very little. But the gift the manuscript explained to me was her husband's. In her account of Mr. Darcy I came at last upon the thing that years of watching Sherlock Holmes light a pipe and pronounce upon a stranger's regiment, his griefs, and his bootmaker had never made clear to me: what such a faculty costs the man who carries it, and what it asks of those obliged to live within range of it. Elizabeth Darcy reveals her husband to us. Her husband, in turn, has made my friend legible to me at last. The debt runs in that direction, and I am content to leave it there.

There is one further figure in these pages whom I cannot pass without a word, though I shall be brief, for the comparison does no kindness to anyone. The lady's father, a gentleman of wit and indolence in equal measure, sits among his books while the affairs of his house go forward without his hand. He sees everything and stirs for nothing. I have sat in the Stranger's Room of the Diogenes Club and watched the same economy of effort in a far greater mind, applied to far greater questions, and arriving too often at the same repose. I am fond of Mycroft Holmes. I will say no more than that.

One smaller irony I set down once and then leave alone: that it should fall to me, descended through the elder and gentler of the two sisters, to lay the younger sister's manuscript before the public. Elizabeth Darcy would, I think, have been amused. She was amused by most things, including herself, which is among the reasons one trusts her.

It was Mary who closed the circle. On the evening I finished the manuscript the second time, I told her something of what it contained; and she sat very still through the better part of it, and then went out of the room without a word, and came back carrying the journal with the unfortunate handwriting.

"John," she said. "The partridge gentleman was called Charles Bingley."

We read it together that night, she deciphering and I attending, until the candles wanted replacing. The diarist found in the second hamper was the amiable gentleman mentioned in these pages: the friend at Mr. Darcy's elbow, the husband of the elder sister, my own great-grandfather. He kept his cheerful, blotted, headlong record at the same time that the lady of this manuscript was watching everything he missed.

I will be honest about what I found in it, since the reader will discover it in any case. Mr. Bingley saw a great deal and understood very little of it, and set the whole down with perfect fidelity and no suspicion of what he carried. He records that his friend was grave, and gives three sentences to the covey. He is never once ahead of events. He is kind about everyone, including one or two persons about whom kindness was an error of some magnitude. And I read him with a discomfort that took me several entries to place, until Mary placed it for me by laughing at something I had not thought was a joke. I have passed my life at the elbow of a man who reads a stranger's history in his watch-chain, recording faithfully what I saw, and understanding it afterward, when it was explained to me. I know the office. It appears to be hereditary.

Three practical matters, and I have done.

First, as to discretion. The events the manuscript relates were grave, and some of those concerned left descendants who do not deserve to inherit the knowledge of them. I have altered the names of the guilty and of their nearest kin, and a handful of places besides. I have given away nothing of the resolution, and the reader who hopes I will spare him the lady's own unfolding of the business will be disappointed, and rightly. It is her story. She tells it in her own order.

Second, as to her manner of telling it. Elizabeth Darcy wrote these pages a great many years after the events they describe, from the settled vantage of a long marriage and a changed world. She knew, as she wrote, how every doubt resolved and every danger ended, and she declines, almost entirely, to make use of that knowledge. She keeps herself inside the season she is describing, with every error live and unredeemed, and she does not reach back from safety to comfort her younger self or to warn the reader. It is a discipline I have rarely seen sustained for ten pages together, and she sustains it for four hundred. I have tried to honour it by keeping out of her way.

Third, as to the journal. The lady's account cannot follow the gentlemen into the gun-room, onto the London road, behind the doors where her husband's part of the business was done. At those few points where her page cannot see, I have set in an entry of Mr. Bingley's in its proper place in the chronology. I have corrected nothing beyond what legibility demanded. The hand is dreadful and the spelling original, and Mary, who transcribed the entries, wishes it recorded that she has earned her place on this title page twice over. The reader will be ahead of the diarist on every page of his that follows, which is as it should be. He was ahead of nobody in his life, and was the better loved for it. The reader will always know whose page he is on.

When I had finished the manuscript the first time, I sent a note round to the Diogenes conceding that Mycroft had been right to tell me nothing. His reply was on my breakfast table by nine o'clock: "Of course. You now understand why I read it only once."

I have thought about that sentence a good deal since. The reader who finishes these pages will know what he meant by it — and will know, too, why a man who forgets nothing chose, in this one case, never to look again into the mirror it provided him, reflecting a man much like himself, and another man much like his brother, in the long-ago days of the Prince Regent.

— J. H. W.

The Copernicus Expedition: A Public Briefing 

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From the Parliamentary Record of Albion Space, Educational Broadcast, House of Resources 

[The following is an excerpt from the public educational archives maintained by the House of Resources, recorded for general distribution across Albion Space and for Terra-side audiences. Transcript lightly edited for readability.] 

There are moments in the life of any civilisation when it becomes necessary to return to first principles. The Commonwealth of Albion was founded by people who understood that the circumstances which make a place habitable are not permanent, and that the capacity to move, when moving becomes necessary, is not a failure of commitment but an expression of it. 

This briefing concerns the Copernicus expedition: a proposal, now formally before both chambers of Parliament, to revive and implement the original colony mission for which the marcher-ships of Albion Space were built. 

Continue reading “The Copernicus Expedition: A Public Briefing “ →

Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Notes

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I used a different prompting framework for this fanfic than I did for Sense and Sensibility and Placage. Around the time I started work on this, the Future Fiction Academy open-sourced a set of AI constraints they called the Narrative Physics Engine. (At this link, search for “worksheet” and then for “section_18”. Those are the important parts.) If you’re looking at the stuff at the link and thinking “gee all that seems like overkill just to scratch a fanfic itch,” that’s also more or less what Claude said when I copy-pasted all that stuff in.

We worked together on this set of constraints to build three sets of markdowns. One to use when brainstorming original fiction, to build a source document Claude could refer back to when I fed it bits of WIP for dictation cleanup, etc. One to use at the start of the revision process, to help Claude understand the finished first draft. A third and shorter one for fanfic, which I used for this fanfic. Claude built a usable outline for The Rector’s Other Business in short order, and drafted the whole thing across a handful of sessions. I was not wild about the style Claude used for this, even with an initial discussion about Collins’s voice, and a reference to the film which had initially given me this story idea (Night Creatures, Hammer’s version of Dr. Syn with the serial numbers filed off). If you’ve ever read parodies of Rudyard Kipling by the generation or two of authors immediately after him, Claude sounded kind of like that in this story, with a lot of pseudo-profound, pseudo-snarky tautologies. Because this was a shorter and lighter fanfic than Sense and Sensibility and Placage, I edited it much more heavily at a sentence level. You will note that Claude made very free with the em-dashes for Mr. Collins’s rambling speeches “in character” as the pompous clergyman he is pretending to be. I left them alone because this was a situation where they actually worked and were even period appropriate.

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Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Chapter 17

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The weeks that followed had the quality of an aftermath. It was a period in which the important things had happened and the world was in the process of catching up with them.

April moved toward May and the spring advanced with it. The hedgerows filled in and the fields greened and the light stayed longer each evening. Hunsford returned to its routines with the relief of a place that has weathered something difficult and come through intact. The Sunday congregations were perhaps slightly larger than they had been. Whether this represented renewed piety or a clearer understanding of what their rector was capable of I could not say and did not ask. The runs continued. There were two before the end of April, both clean and unremarkable. The Gofton roof continued to hold. Pyke maintained the churchyard with his customary attention and said nothing about anything.

Darcy and Elizabeth came to an understanding, and informed Lady Catherine while she was still chastened by the fall of Gerard Annesley. I do not think that Darcy reminded her that he and his betrothed knew about his aunt’s dependence on the free-traders. He would not have needed to.

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State of the Author, Summer 2026 Edition

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Fantasy, Holidays, humor, Hunter Healer King, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Mystery, One Weird Trick, Pride & Planetoids, Publishing Plans, science-fiction, Space Opera, Star Wars, Steampunk, The Stars By Degrees, videos, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , 2 Comments

This has been a stressful couple of months, for reasons that I’ve alluded to here and here. The real life stuff mentioned in the second post are still ongoing, so prayers are welcome. In the meantime, here’s what’s happened on the writing front in the meantime:

Three Ladies in Black: done at ~46000 words, except possibly for minor tweaks before formatting, publishing et al. This is the first in a planned series of Ruritanian cozy mysteries with an alt-history angle. Why Ruritanian cozy mysteries with an alt-history angle? Well, if you held a gun to my head, I probably could write something that didn’t sit across three different genres like a disgruntled hippopotamus, but where would be the fun in that? Anyway, the plan is to start a new pen name (possibly implied to be a pseudonym of the femme fatale narrator) and publish the first three together sometime in 2027-2028, then assess how well they do. 

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Hearts & Daggers: Everything You Need To Know Before the New Expansion 

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Transcript of a video by Lydia Bennet, posted to her channel on the occasion of the Midnight Carnival expansion announcement for Hearts and Daggers III 

[Transcript lightly edited for readability. Original video runtime: 10 minutes.] 

Alright so Maria told me that half her friends have never played Hearts and Daggers Two and are jumping straight into Three, and I have been thinking about this for three days and I cannot let it stand. You need context. You need history. You need to understand what you are getting into. So. Here we are. Franchise overview. You’re welcome. 

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Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Chapter 16

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Smugglers’ business alert!

We did it on a Thursday, three days after the abduction of Elizabeth Bennet.

Three days was the right interval: long enough for Darcy’s anger to cool somewhat, long enough for me to have the conversations that needed to be had with Lady Catherine and with the Annesley family’s representative. This was a cousin from Maidstone who arrived on Tuesday. The conversation with him was brief and entirely civil, and it arrived at the conclusion I had intended it to arrive at before he sat down. He left on Wednesday looking no more cheerful than he had arrived, but considerably more clear about what the available options were.

Lady Catherine I dealt with in person, on Wednesday afternoon, in the east garden at Rosings where the topiary provided sufficient privacy and the distance from the house was sufficient to ensure we were not overheard. I told her the minimum necessary and watched her face do the things it did when she was receiving information she found deeply inconvenient. She asked two questions, both precise. I answered them. She was silent for a moment, looking at the topiary.

“The Maidstone cousin,” she said at last.

“Has been spoken to. He understands the situation.”

“And the…resolution,” she said, in the tone she used for things she was not going to name directly.

“Thursday. It will be done cleanly.”

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Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Chapter 15

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As we rode, I thought about what was coming. Darcy had just discovered that his aunt was a client of a smuggling operation run by her own clergyman. He had ridden out with said clergyman and a collection of masked men to rescue the woman he was in love with, and he had agreed to discuss none of this until after. “After” had arrived. The agreement was about to expire and I had perhaps twenty minutes on the road to determine how I was going to handle the expiration.

This was not going to be easy. Darcy had seen too much. He could not be threatened and could not be bought. He was Lady Catherine’s nephew, which meant he had a family claim on the situation that I could not dismiss. He was also a man whose fundamental instinct was toward the correct thing, which was both his best quality and his most dangerous one, because the correct thing from where he was standing might very well be the magistrate.

Against this: he had covered his face when asked. He had kept his end of the bargain on the road. He had hit Annesley with the efficiency of a man who had made a decision and executed it cleanly. These were the actions of a man who valued some things more deeply than law and order. Whether I could work with it was the question I had not yet answered when we came through the Hunsford gate.

The ride back had been slower than the ride out, the cart setting the pace. The morning had advanced toward midday, the April sun climbing and taking some of the chill from the air. Annesley lay silent under the blanket in the cart bed. Pyke and I rode ahead. Behind us, Elizabeth drove with competence, and Darcy rode beside her. The village lane was quiet as we came through, the few people who saw us having the good sense to find business elsewhere. Charlotte was at the door before we had fully stopped.

She looked at Elizabeth first and seemed relieved. She came forward and took Elizabeth’s arm with quiet efficiency. The hall behind her was dim after the brightness outside, the morning light from the window doing little against the dark paneling. Maria stood near the stairs with an expression of wide-eyed alarm.

“Come inside,” Charlotte said, to Elizabeth, and then to Maria: “Put the kettle on, if you please.”

Maria went. Charlotte steered Elizabeth toward the sitting room. Elizabeth went, which told me she was more shaken than she was showing, because Elizabeth did not generally allow herself to be steered.

Halfway down the hall, she stopped and looked back at Darcy, who had followed us in and was standing near the door, unwinding his scarf from about his face. It seemed important to her that she watch him unmask, and Charlotte did not try to hurry her along.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was quieter and more direct than when she had thanked him for untying her.

Darcy said nothing. He gave a brief, tight nod, the nod of a man who does not trust himself to say more than that at present.

Elizabeth went into the sitting room. Charlotte, a step behind her, caught my eye over Elizabeth’s head with an expression that said: “I will find out what she thinks and I will tell you when the time is right.”

Then she was gone too, and the hall was quiet, and it was just Darcy and myself. We went into the study.

The study was warmer than the hall, a fire burning in the grate that someone had laid while we were gone. The room held the ordinary disorder of a morning interrupted: correspondence still on the desk where I had left it when Pyke arrived with his news.

He did not sit when I gestured to the chair. He stood in the middle of the study and looked at me with the expression of a man who has been patient long enough.

“The magistrate,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes. I expected that would be your position.” I sat down, because sitting down when the other man is standing is a choice that costs nothing and communicates something useful. “Sit down, Mr. Darcy.”

This time, after a moment, he did.

“You are running a smuggling operation, out of a living provided by my aunt, with the apparent knowledge and cooperation of my aunt, and a man connected to my aunt’s late husband’s family has used it to abduct a gentlewoman of my acquaintance.” He said it with the flat precision of a man who had been organizing his thoughts on the road. “You will understand that I find this difficult to leave with the parties involved.”

“I understand it entirely. I would find it the same way in your position.” I looked at him steadily. “I am asking you to leave it with me regardless.”

“On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that what happened this morning was not the operation. It was one man acting outside his authority, against my explicit instructions, for reasons that had nothing to do with the operation’s purpose and everything to do with his own judgment, which has been deteriorating for the past two months. He will be dealt with. I give you my word on that.”

“Your word?” Darcy asked sceptically.

“My word,” I said, unoffended. “You may rate its value as you see fit. I would suggest that a man who has stood between you and a knife in the back has some claim to being taken at his word, but I recognize that this is not a conventional basis for trust.”

Darcy was silent for a moment. “Now that I know more of you, you do not seem to me to be either a stupid man, or a dishonorable one. Why are you so determined to protect this criminal enterprise?”

“For the sake of the parish,” I said. I told him of the seven families. The eight beyond them. The Goftons, four children, the youngest not yet two when I arrived, the roof that had held this winter because there was money to repair it. The three years of runs without serious incident, without violence, without anyone killed or imprisoned. The nature of life in Hunsford parish now, compared to the nature of life in Hunsford parish before, which any man who cared to enquire could verify for himself.

Darcy listened. From what he had said of Pemberley during various dinners at Rosings, I think he understood the obligations of the gentry towards those less fortunate better than, say, Lady Catherine did.

“And what of my aunt?” he asked.

“Your aunt has received certain goods from the Continent that the legitimate market could not provide to her satisfaction. She has done so with the care of a woman who understands that there are things it is better not to formally acknowledge.” I met his eyes. “She did not know what Annesley did this morning. She will not be pleased when she finds out.”

Darcy looked unhappy. He had respected his aunt, and perhaps loved her. I think he would have preferred not to know these things about her. Then a new and terrible thought seemed to occur to him. “She introduced him to you,” he said.

“She did. Under family obligation, I believe, rather than genuine enthusiasm. She has been finding him…trying, of late. It was not her fault. The responsibility for what he did this morning is mine. I did not move against him quickly enough.”

Darcy looked at me for a long moment. He was grappling with all that he had learned, which was what I had hoped for and had not been certain of.

“You said Annesley will be dealt with,” he said. “How?”

“In the way these things are dealt with, among the free-traders. Without the magistrate. Without bloodshed.”

“I have only your word for that as well.”

“I have nothing else to offer you at present. The alternative is the magistrate, who will inconvenience a great many people who have done nothing to deserve it. He will almost certainly take no action against Annesley, given the difficulty of getting witnesses to testify and the family connections involved, but he will destroy something that has taken three years to build and that matters to people who have very little else that matters to them.”

I looked at him.

“I am not asking you to approve of what I do, Mr. Darcy. I am asking you to consider the consequences of the alternative before you decide.”

The silence that followed was longer than the previous ones.

The door opened, and Elizabeth came in.

Her hair was put up and she was composed in the way that Charlotte is composed: not the absence of feeling but the complete management of it.

“Charlotte tells me,” she said, “that you are probably discussing whether to go to the magistrate.”

“Charlotte is correct as usual,” I said.

She looked at Darcy. Darcy looked at her in a way which spoke volumes.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Miss Bennet…” Darcy began.

“I have met the Gofton family,” Elizabeth said. “And Charlotte mentioned them again just now, when she explained what would happen if you went to the magistrate.”

Darcy said nothing.

“You have been wronged this morning,” Elizabeth said. “You were almost stabbed in the back. I have been wronged this morning, rather more directly, by being kidnapped. I must tell you that going to the magistrate is not the remedy I want.”

“The man who took you,” Darcy said, with careful precision, “is currently in this building.”

“I am aware of that. But Charlotte believes that Mr. Collins will deal with him as he deserves, and I find that I am inclined to believe her.”

Darcy looked at Elizabeth for a long moment, and then he looked at me. Outside the study window the April morning had become the April afternoon, the light shifting in the way it does in Kent in the spring, clear and not quite warm.

“I will not go to the magistrate,” Darcy said. “On the condition that I may witness Annesley’s fate.”

“Agreed,” I said.

He stood up and produced a letter from his coat.

“Miss Bennet, I wrote this with the idea of giving it to you this morning. Our conversations since then have rather overtaken it, and now I find it…ungraciously expressed. Do you have any objection if I burn it here unread?”

“If our host has no objection, then I have none,” Elizabeth answered.

“Please, burn what you like here, within reason,” I told him pleasantly.

He tossed it onto the fire. I glimpsed only a few words before the letter was destroyed: “Be not alarmed, madam…”

“I will call tomorrow,” he said, to the room generally, and went out.

Elizabeth and I stood in the study for a moment after the door had closed.

“Charlotte,” she said, “told me rather more than the minimum, I think.”

“She was correct to do so,” I said.

She nodded. “You may find it difficult to believe that I am in need of fresh air and exercise after this morning, Mr. Collins, but nonetheless, I feel the need of a walk to clear my thoughts.”

“Certainly,” I said.

We left the study together and found Charlotte in the hall. Elizabeth said a few words to her, and then went out again.

“Is the magistrate coming?” Charlotte asked. She spoke lightly, but there was the same worry I had seen in her face when she asked if I expected a certain invitation from my wife on her first night at the parsonage.

“You convinced Elizabeth that it would be unwise, and she convinced Darcy,” I said. “Thank you.”

Charlotte put her hand on my cheek, which startled me almost as much as if she had drawn a knife, but it was a pleasanter kind of startlement. “Elizabeth tells me you that you cut quite a figure this morning. I would have liked to have seen Annesley with your blade at his throat.”

“I’m sure you would have been quite entertained by this morning’s work. Perhaps I should have asked you to come along, to bear Elizabeth company on the road back.”

Charlotte smiled. “It seems Darcy bore her company, with good results.”

“Indeed.”

Her hand dropped to my chest. “I think tonight would be a good time for you to come to my room,” she said. “After…everything else. I know you still have much to do.”

“I would be honored,” I told her firmly. She left me then, and I went in search of Pyke. As Charlotte had said, I still had much to do.