Neither of us informed the Bennets of our decision that morning, for custom dictated that the Lucases ought to hear it first. The family at Longbourn learned the news that evening during a dinner at Lucas Lodge. I wondered if Charlotte had timed her proposal to me with that dinner in mind.

The announcement came after we had removed to the drawing room. The fire burned higher than strictly necessary, as if Sir William had ordered it built up for celebration. The room had that quality of determined festivity that comes when a family wishes to mark an occasion they are not entirely certain how to feel about. Mrs. Bennet had positioned herself near enough to one of the other guests to suggest intimate conversation, though her voice normally carried with vigor. Jane sat near her mother with her customary composure, making gentle attempts to redirect the conversation that her mother showed no signs of heeding. Elizabeth had taken a chair by the window, as far from her mother as the room’s dimensions permitted. Charlotte stood near her mother, composed and still, while I positioned myself at what I judged to be an appropriate distance for a newly engaged man: close enough to suggest attachment, far enough to suggest proper restraint.

Sir William made the announcement with the warmth of a man determined to carry the thing off well. There were congratulations. There were the requisite expressions of pleasure and surprise, some more convincing than others. And then Mrs. Bennet began to speak.

Mrs. Bennet’s response to the news occupied approximately forty minutes and covered, in no particular order: her own nerves, the ingratitude of daughters who had been given every opportunity and contrived to waste them, the continuing injustice of the entail which had not been resolved and which remained, she wished everyone to understand, a source of ongoing suffering, Lady Catherine de Bourgh who was by reputation a difficult woman and one hoped Miss Lucas had considered this carefully, and the nerves again. Elizabeth, I gathered, had refused a perfectly good offer that morning and would live to regret it. Mary had sat in the corner and done nothing useful with her opportunities, which was entirely characteristic. Lydia and Kitty were dining with the Phillipses in Meryton, and so managed to escape opprobrium. At least, Mrs. Bennet observed with a volume that had now entirely abandoned any pretense of discretion, Jane would soon be settled at Netherfield, and what a comfort that was to a mother’s nerves. Her voice, which had begun as something approaching a murmur, had achieved its natural volume by the time she reached her second mention of the entail.

Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Chapter 6” →

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” →

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” →

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.

Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Chapter 1” →