With apologies to Jane Austen, I present to you MAGIC & MANNERS, which is what happens when I get it into my head to wonder what PRIDE & PREJUDICE would be like if it was not a lack of wealth that beleaguered the Bennet sisters, but rather an excess of magic…

(ETA: oh, that’s insane, it actually is Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day, wherein people post free fiction. I’d forgotten that was on Shakespeare’s birthday. How clever of me!)

That each and every one of Mrs Dover’s five daughters was afflicted with an inconvenient magic inherited from their father was no barrier to their impending nuptials: on this, Mrs Dover was determined.

“It has not,” she said to that long-suffering man for perhaps the six hundredth time in their marriage, “been the most desireable situation, but one must make do.”

“One must,” he agreed most aimiably, and into that agreement a silence fell, for one had, in fact, made do, both in Mrs Dover’s case and in Mr Dover’s. She, unmarried at the ancient age of twenty-three, had been obliged to accept the suitor who offered, and he, veritably in the grave at thirty-eight, had been equally obliged to request her hand. There was no scandal attached, much to the dismay of the neighboring gossips: Mrs Dover did not do in seven months what took a cow or countess nine, but instead gave birth to the first of many girls a stately and sedate fourteen months after marriage to Mr Dover.

Mr Dover had been, by all intelligence, an entirely suitable match: he had one thousand pounds a year and a quick humor which his wife had never fully learned to appreciate. He was laconic in spirit and gentle with horses, and had a handsome leg and a fine nose. All in all, he ought to have been married long before Mrs Dover was obliged to accept him. It was the unspeakable question of magic that had forced–or permited–him to remain unwed for so long.