New Tenants

“Indeed, my dear,” Mrs. Bonnet declared with delight, “Mrs. ____ informs me that That One Place has acquired a new tenant.”

Mr. Bonnet reclined in his armchair, fingers steepled, and murmured, “Pray tell why this concerns me?”

“My sweetest husband, we must attend the forthcoming ball!”

“Dear,” he said with gentle firmness, “I am absolutely disinclined, Mr. ____ and I have long planned to while away the evening on PlayStation™ that day.”

Unbeknownst to his wife, Mr. Bonnet was simply amusing himself and had intended to visit the new tenant the entire time, as the PlayStation™ had no games.

The gathering later that week was a spectacle of suffocating gentility. The air grew thick with the scent of beeswax candles and the heat of too many bodies confined within the grand drawing room. Elizabeth observed the intricate social maneuvering with a detached, sardonic eye.

Young women paraded their polite accomplishments, playing the pianoforte and exhibiting their embroidery, while the gentlemen appraised them with barely concealed economic scrutiny.

The music, a lively country dance, provided a thin veil over the ruthless, transactional nature of the marriage mart. It was a tiring charade, one that demanded endless smiles, careful deference, and an absolute suppression of one’s genuine character.

Elizabeth found a quiet alcove, sipping a glass of negus and watching the procession of desperate nobility, feeling entirely alienated from the proceedings.

Unexpected Guests

Lydia Bonnet looked out the window wistfully. “Oh, that Mr. Lickham would return soon.”

Mrs. Bonnet burst into the room, catching her petticoat on a chair and knocking it off-balance. “I just saw—” (the chair slammed into the floor with a bang) “—Mr. Lickham’s carriage! Everyone, quick, to your best pelisses and hats!”

Mr. Bonnet folded his newspaper, put on his glasses fancifully, uncrossed his legs, and took a fanciful sip of tea from the fanciful china Mrs. Bonnet had put away and forgotten about. As the crumb of a petite madeleine soaked in the warm liquid touched his palate, an exquisite pleasure invaded his senses, momentarily paralyzing him with a vast, unbidden memory of Sunday mornings at his aunt’s house in a provincial town. He blinked it away, stood up, grabbed his fanciful cane, and prepared himself to greet the new visitors.

Elizabeth overheard her father’s courteous greeting—

“I trust you gentlemen endured no discomfort upon the road”

—“Gentlemen?” she thought, “surely not both!”

Mr. Barcy at that moment ducked beneath the doorway and emerged, his fedora barely touching the wood. He was inexplicably flanked by two foreign dignitaries.

The fedora-clad male cast his obsidian orbs across the room. The shorter brunette female watched the taller brooding gentleman with annoyance. Beside the wealthy Alpha, a high-school student with a god complex was intensely writing names in a black notebook, while the raven-haired, insomniac detective next to him simply crouched in an impossibly deep squat, furiously devouring an entire un-sliced strawberry cake.²³ The shorter female ignored the notebook-wielding teen and the cake-consuming sleuth to glare at the hat-wearing male.

Mrs. Bonnet whispered behind folded hands. “Make me proud, girls.”

The sisters swept into the parlour trying to feign tranquil nonchalance, each walking with a different, exaggerated gait.

Mr. Lickham greeted Lydia fancifully with a kiss that started awkwardly but quickly devolved into a ferocious battle for dominance, involving an anatomically impossible amount of tongue. This caused much discomfort to everyone except Mrs. Bonnet, who beamed with pride. “Oh, thank heavens,” she whispered, “I was terrified she would never present as a submissive Omega.”⁴

Mr. Barcy stood in a corner, still wearing his fedora and radiating equal parts wealth, brooding, and virginity. No one dared approach him except Elizabeth.

“Mr. Barcy,” she pronounced, “you are intolerable.”

The corner of his mouth twitched slightly, but he remained otherwise composed. “Nuh uh,” he cooly replied as he adjusted his uncool fedora.

“Mr. Lickham said-so,” she retorted.

Mr. Barcy’s face contorted like a raisin that had witnessed something unspeakable. Several muscles in his jaw activated that had no established medical name. His right eyebrow climbed so high it briefly disappeared into his hairline, where it remained for an uncomfortable amount of time before slowly, reluctantly, returning.

He opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again.

“Regard his character with caution,” he said, at roughly one-third his normal volume, in the tone of a man who had composed a forty-page rebuttal and was choosing, at great personal cost, not to deliver it. He then turned, located the nearest drapery, and stepped behind it to brood and farm aura.

Confession

The morning following Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Barcy broke with a crisp, unforgiving frost that gripped the Hertfordshire countryside.

Elizabeth sought refuge from her mother’s relentless matrimonial plotting by taking to the hedgerows. The air was sharp, biting at her cheeks as she navigated the muddy paths toward Meryton.

It was in these quiet moments, separated from the oppressive necessity of securing a wealthy match, that her mind could freely breathe. She reflected on the bleak fragility of their situation: an entailed estate, a family of modest means, and the looming specter of destitution should her father pass. These were the grim realities that her mother, however vulgar her execution, was desperately attempting to stave off.

By the time Elizabeth returned to the estate, the hem of her gown was severely coated in mud, a fact that would undoubtedly provoke her mother’s ire, yet she felt a restored sense of intellectual clarity.

Elizabeth stared in wonder at That One Place. A bunch of adjectives could have described it wonderfully, but her mind had no time for adjectives, for she was grimacing at the memory of turning down Mr. Barcy’s proposal.

“Wait, doesn’t this make me look like a gold digger?” she muttered, violently tamping espresso grounds into a portafilter and steaming oat milk behind the counter of the fully operational, commercial-grade coffee shop that inexplicably existed within Mr. Barcy’s parlor.⁶⁷

Before she could push away her self-doubt, Mr. Barcy descended the staircase with stately precision.

Their eyes locked.

Both cheeks warmed.

Mr. Barcy drew a deep breath, trying to remember what the fine people on r/Seduction had advised.

“Miss Bonnet,” he began, shifting his pitch downwards awkwardly, “would you like a tour of my—I mean—Your pheromones are… agreeable today.”

He then tried to growl like the Alphas Elizabeth had been reading about on AO3, but only a pathetic “errrrrrrrrrr” came out. He attempted to project a dominating Alpha aura to mask his insecurity, but his inner wolf was little more than a highly anxious Shiba Inu.⁸

Silence reigned, measured by the sweep of the staircase behind him.

Later that eve, /u/PemberleyDaddy made a text post to r/Seduction.