For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude, amazingly, got through draft 1 with no em-dashes! I asked for a rephrase of one sentence that felt anachronistic to me, and to break down a loooong sentence that ended this scene in draft 1. Otherwise draft 2, which you see here, is much what draft 1 was. I did realize at the last minute that this needed to come before the first Marianne POV, even though the latter was written first, and adjusted the scheduling accordingly. I haven’t had much reason to quarrel with these early setup scenes, but we will see how Claude does once the romance arcs start.

Letter from Mrs. Jennings

The letter had been sitting on the breakfast table since early morning, and Céleste had not touched it.

This was, in its way, a statement. Céleste Dashwood was not a woman who left correspondence unattended; she had managed the practical affairs of the household for twenty years with a thoroughness that Henry had relied upon entirely and acknowledged only intermittently. But the letter was from Mrs. Jennings, and Mrs. Jennings’s letter could only be about one thing, and Céleste had apparently decided that the thing it was about could wait until she had finished her coffee and arranged her thoughts and achieved whatever internal equilibrium she was working toward.

Éléonore ate her breakfast and waited.

The cottage had acquired a strange double existence in the household over the past several days. Everyone knew about it. No one mentioned it directly. It existed in the gaps between conversations, in the careful way Céleste directed the servants in their packing, in the particular silence that fell whenever someone in the street outside called out an address in the Faubourg Marigny. It was real, and it was coming, and the family had developed a collective habit of treating it as something that would announce itself when it was ready rather than something that required acknowledgment.

The letter, Éléonore suspected, was going to make that habit impossible to maintain.

“You might as well read it,” Céleste said at last, without looking up from her coffee. “You have been looking at it since you sat down.”

“I have been looking at you looking at it,” Éléonore said, “which is a different thing.”

The corner of her mother’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. She picked up the letter, broke the seal, and read it in silence. Her expression did not change, but her posture shifted almost imperceptibly, the particular adjustment of a woman absorbing information she had expected and still finds difficult to receive.

She set it on the table and pushed it toward Éléonore without comment.

Mrs. Jennings wrote as she spoke, which was to say at considerable length and with great warmth and a cheerful disregard for any distinction between the important and the peripheral. She had heard, she said, from John Dashwood, who had called on her two days prior and explained the family’s situation with what she described, with characteristic understatement, as rather less generosity than one might have hoped from a son. She wished them to know that the cottage was available immediately, that she had taken the liberty of having it aired and the garden seen to, that the rent she proposed was named in a figure that Éléonore recognized as being well below the market value for such a property, and that she hoped dear Madame Dashwood would not stand on ceremony, as Mrs. Jennings had been fond of Henry Dashwood these twenty years and considered it a privilege to be useful to his family in this way.

The letter ended with three additional paragraphs about Charlotte’s health, the behavior of Charlotte’s husband Louis, and a digression about a particularly fine shipment of Creole coffee that had recently arrived at the Palmiere warehouse, which Mrs. Jennings recommended unreservedly.

Éléonore set the letter down. “She is very kind.”

“She is,” Céleste said. “She is also very well informed about our circumstances, which John has apparently taken it upon himself to describe in detail to anyone who might be useful.”

“He meant it helpfully, I think.”

“I am sure he did.” Céleste rose and moved to the window, looking out at the courtyard below, the banana trees shifting in the morning breeze, the iron railing casting its familiar patterned shadow across the flagstones. She stood there for a moment in silence, and Éléonore let her have it. “To be an object of Mrs. Jennings’s charity,” she said at last, quietly, and not to anyone in particular.

“Mrs. Jennings does not appear to consider it charity,” Éléonore said. “She appears to consider it a privilege.”

“That is what people say.”

“In this case I believe she means it. She has been fond of our family for a long time, Maman, and she is not a woman who says things she does not mean. She is, if anything, a woman constitutionally incapable of saying things she does not mean.” She paused. “It is occasionally inconvenient but it does make her reliable.”

Céleste turned from the window. There was something in her face that Éléonore recognized as the particular struggle between pride and practicality that her mother had been conducting privately for the better part of two weeks, and which had not yet reached its resolution.

“The figure she names for the rent,” Céleste said.

“Is generous. Yes.”

“It is more than generous. It is an act of deliberate kindness dressed up as a business arrangement so that I need not feel the full weight of accepting it.” She said this without bitterness, but with the precision of a woman who has spent her life reading the social codes of people who held power over her circumstances and has become very good at it. “She is trying to make it easy for me to say yes.”

“Then perhaps,” Éléonore said, carefully, “we might allow her to succeed.”

Céleste looked at her daughter for a long moment. Outside, a vendor was calling his wares in the street, pralines and sweet potato pie, his voice carrying the particular music of the French Quarter morning, unhurried and familiar and entirely indifferent to the conversation taking place above it.

“The Faubourg Marigny,” Céleste said.

“Yes.”

“It is not where I imagined we would be.”

“No,” Éléonore agreed. “But it is where we are, and Mrs. Jennings is offering us the means to be there with some dignity, and I think Papa would have been relieved to know we had such a friend.” She hesitated, then added, more gently, “He would have been relieved that we had somewhere safe to go. That is what he would have wanted to know.”

Céleste was quiet for a moment, and Éléonore could see that this had reached some part of her mother that the practical arguments had not. Her eyes moved back to the courtyard, and something in her expression shifted, not resolve exactly, but the softening that sometimes comes just before it.

She turned fully away from the window and straightened her shoulders with the decisiveness of a woman who has made up her mind and intends to act on it before she can unmake it.

“We will write to her this morning,” she said. “I will write the letter myself.”

“I think that will please her very much,” Éléonore said.

Céleste nodded once, and left the room to find her writing things. Éléonore sat for a moment longer at the breakfast table, the morning light falling warm across the cloth, the vendor’s voice fading down the street. She was not quite relieved, and she was not quite happy. But something had shifted, some small weight had lifted, and she thought that this was perhaps the nearest she had come to hope since her father died. It was not much. It would have to do.