Up til now, the only writing projects I have let Claude draft are fanfics that I wanted to read but don’t care enough to write myself. This one is a retelling of S&S set in New Orleans in 1813-1814 with the female leads as placées. In this case, I did so partly because I felt uncomfortable with trying to recreate the often downbeat tone of the source novel. Another reason I undertook this was to get a better feel for Claude’s project feature. I will probably do a process post either at the end of this experiment or maybe the midway point. Below the cut is Claude’s third draft of the first. Its first draft elided any discussion of the heroines’ ethnicity and social status, which is pretty important to this retelling. After I had it fix that, I told it to eliminate the em-dashes (which it tried to argue with me about) and rework a labored metaphor about Henry Dashwood’s illness. The result is below the cut.

The Death of Henry Dashwood

The smell of camphor and bayou-damp linen hung over everything in the sickroom, and had for days. Éléonore had stopped noticing it except when she first came through the door each morning, that brief, sharp reminder of where she was and what was happening, before habit reclaimed her senses and she became simply a daughter at a bedside.

Her father’s breathing had changed in the night. She had known it the moment she woke.

“Ma chère.” His voice, when he found it, was barely more than a current of air. Illness had withered his hands and left them shaking, though he was not yet fifty. Éléonore took one in both of hers and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say, and she had made a private resolution some days ago to be useful above all things.

Her mother sat on the far side of the bed, very straight, very still. Céleste was a femme de couleur libre of remarkable beauty, light-skinned, with the fine-boned elegance that New Orleans society had learned to classify with precision and desire in equal measure. She had been, for twenty years, Henry Dashwood’s placée in the eyes of the law and his wife in every way that mattered to either of them. Even now, with her eyes red and her composure doing the hard work of two decades of practice, she was striking. She was also, Éléonore understood, terrified, not of losing Henry, though that grief was real and profound, but of what came after. What always came after, for women in their position. A legal wife had recourse. A placée had only the goodwill of her partner’s family, and goodwill, Éléonore had observed, was among the least reliable of human resources.

“You will look after them,” Henry Dashwood said. It was not quite a question.

“Yes,” said Éléonore.

“Your brother has promised…” He stopped. Down in the courtyard, a mockingbird was singing with lunatic cheer, indifferent to the occasion. Her father’s eyes moved toward the window and then back. “John is a good man. He will do what he has said.”

Éléonore did not look at her mother. “Yes, Papa.”

It was, she reflected, not precisely a lie. John Dashwood was not a bad man. He was simply a man with a wife, and Frances had opinions about what constituted family obligation that stopped, with remarkable consistency, at the threshold of her own comfort. That John’s obligations extended to a placée and her daughters, to women the law did not recognize as his father’s family, would give Frances all the justification she required.

“Marianne…” her father said.

“She is just outside. She will come in a moment.”

“She feels everything so…” He did not finish the thought. He did not need to. They both knew what Marianne felt, and how entirely, and that there was no preparing her for this. Éléonore and her sister had inherited their mother’s coloring and their father’s temperament in unequal measure, Éléonore the steadier portion, Marianne the more vivid one. “You will have to be steady for her.”

“I know.”

“And for your mother.” His grip on her hand tightened, faintly, which cost him something she could see in his face. “Céleste has managed, all these years, with more grace than I deserved. See that John understands what he owes her. What he owes all of you.”

“I will make certain he understands,” Éléonore said, with more confidence than she possessed.

Her father looked at her for a long moment. Outside, the mockingbird cycled through its repertoire, three notes, four, a trill, beginning again. The candle on the nightstand had burned to a stub and was guttering in a draft from somewhere, throwing uncertain light across the ceiling.

“You are the best of them,” he said quietly. “I have not said so enough.”

Éléonore found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she could not speak. She pressed his hand instead, and he seemed to understand, because he closed his eyes, and his breathing steadied into something slower and more deliberate, as though he were concentrating on the work of it.

He died an hour later, with Marianne weeping openly on one side of the bed and Céleste maintaining, until the very last moment, the composure that had been her armor and her gift for twenty years.

Éléonore sat with her hands folded in her lap and understood, with a clarity that felt almost violent in its precision, that the shape of her life had just changed entirely. Her grief was real. It would have its season. But first, before any of it, there were arrangements to be made, and a family to hold together, and a promise to keep to a man who could no longer enforce it.

She rose, and went to find John.