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ficinabox revealed the authors, er, several weeks ago. But I was too caught up with yuletide to remember to post what I wrote! So here it is. I had great fun writing this crossover between Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, where Charlotte gets a better life than canon. As I was pondering how to logically get Brandon and Charlotte to meet even though they live so far apart, it occurred to me that Sir John Middleton and Sir William Lucas are very similar people and would probably get along amazingly well. (The other easy way to do it would be to set it earlier in both canons, when William Lucas (not yet Sir William) is a prosperous tradesman, probably with business connections in London, and Colonel Brandon has just been handed custody of his dead beloved's child and is trying to figure out frantically what to do with her, before he has to go back to his regiment in India or wherever. I can easily see him marrying then to give her a mother, and if he somehow became acquainted with the Lucases while in London, might find Charlotte just the ticket.)

( Thoughts on the Lucas finances )

Title: A Summer in Devonshire
Fandom: Sense & Sensibility/Pride & Prejudice
Characters: Colonel Brandon/Charlotte Lucas
Author: Beatrice_Otter
Written for: hiddencait in Fic In A Box 2025
Summary: Sir John Middleton was happy to invite his friend Sir William Lucas and family to stay at Barton for the summer. Charlotte is happy to travel, and to meet new people.


( Author's note: travel distances and clothing details. )
***

Sir William Lucas had never aspired to visit St. James' Court, nor indeed to become a knight; he had been content with his life as a respectable (and prosperous) tradesman. When such an opportunity had been granted him, all unexpectedly, he had been so overcome with all the honor of it that he had not been able to savor the pleasures thereof. Given his humble antecedents and employment, very few in that place took any notice of him, and those who did cared more to practice their superiority than form any connection. It was an experience more pleasurable in the telling, for he spent many congenial hours describing the grandeur of the court and its people to his acquaintances in Meryton, as he and Lady Lucas took their place as one of four-and-twenty families of good breeding in the neighborhood.

It also spurred his desire to trade his business for an estate more suitable to his new dignity, for being Sir William of any estate (however small) would occasion less comment than Sir William, tradesman of a small market town.

( That being accomplished, he settled in quite happily to being a landed gentleman, and would never have stirred from Meryton again if Lady Lucas had not possessed the ambition her husband lacked )


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