For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude did very well on its first draft. For the redraft, I asked it to rework an incoherent description of what the Dashwoods’ mother was doing with her hands during the cart ride, and have Marianne show more emotion. My instinct is that free women of color in this time and place would not have survived long, if they showed the overwrought behavior that Marianne and her mother do in the Austen novel. But Marianne isn’t Marianne if she isn’t the most emo person in any given room. Then I realized this was the right time to introduce Edward, and that led to two more drafts. I manually removed an em-dash rather than ask for another draft.

Journey to Faubourg Marigny

The morning they left, Éléonore was up before the sun.

There was a great deal to oversee and she had known since the night before that sleep was not going to be a productive use of her time. The carter had arrived early and was loading the last of the trunks by lamplight, his breath visible in the cool October air, the smell of the river hanging over the street as it always did in the mornings, green and faintly mineral, the smell of the city’s foundation. She stood on the banquette and checked items against the list she had made and remade three times over the past week, and tried not to think about the fact that she was standing on this particular banquette for the last time.

She was not entirely successful.

Her mother appeared in the doorway dressed and composed, which Éléonore had expected. What she had not expected was the expression on Céleste’s face, which was not grief exactly but something older and more settled, the look of a woman who has already done whatever private work the occasion required and arrived at the other side of it. She surveyed the carter’s progress, made one quiet suggestion about the placement of the smaller boxes that he received with the respectful attention her manner always commanded, and then came to stand beside Éléonore on the banquette.

“Marianne?” Éléonore asked.

“Still inside.” Céleste’s voice was even. “She will come when she is ready.”

They stood together in the early morning quiet, watching the last of their former life being loaded onto a cart. A mockingbird was singing somewhere down the street, the same extravagant, unsolicited performance as always, and Éléonore thought of her father’s deathbed and felt the echo of it move through her and then recede. She was becoming practiced at that, at letting the echoes move through rather than stopping to examine them. It was a skill she had not known she would need and was not sure she was glad to have developed.

She was still thinking this when she became aware of a figure approaching along the banquette from the direction of the American quarter. He was a young man of perhaps five or six and twenty, plainly but well dressed, and he walked with the slightly uncertain air of someone who is not entirely sure of his welcome but has decided to present himself anyway and trust to the outcome. He was carrying, somewhat incongruously, a crate of what appeared to be preserves.

He stopped before her and removed his hat. “Miss Dashwood? I am Edward Ferrars. Frances Dashwood is my sister.” He said this with the faint, reflexive apology of a man who has spent considerable time being related to Frances and has learned to get ahead of it. “I heard that your family was moving this morning and I thought…that is, I hoped I might be of some assistance. I am afraid the preserves were my housekeeper’s idea. She felt it would be inappropriate to arrive empty-handed.”

Éléonore looked at him. He was sincere, that much was immediately apparent; there was nothing in his manner of the calculated social call, none of the elaborate graciousness that Frances deployed when she wished to appear generous. He simply looked like a man who had heard of a difficulty and come to see if he could help, and was now mildly alarmed by the possibility that he had misjudged the situation entirely.

“Mr. Ferrars,” she said. “That is very good of you.”

“It is very little,” he said, honestly. “I am aware of that.”

Céleste, who had been listening with the still attention she brought to the assessment of strangers, looked at him for a moment and then said, with a warmth that was genuine if measured, “You are welcome, Mr. Ferrars. Please put the preserves with the kitchen things.”

He nodded, looked around at the kitchen boxes already stacked near the cart, and placed the crate with them carefully, fitting it against the others so that it would not shift in transit. It was a small thing, but it was done with the attention of someone who had actually thought about where the crate would end up and what would happen to it on the way.

A moment later he had noticed, without being directed to it, that one of the larger trunks had a latch that was not sitting properly in its catch. He examined it briefly, found a length of rope among the carter’s supplies, and secured the trunk with a neat, practical knot before the carter had noticed the problem himself. The carter observed this on his next pass, tested the knot, and gave Edward a short nod of acknowledgment that constituted, in Éléonore’s estimation, a significant professional endorsement.

Marianne came out at last, wearing her second-best dress and carrying the small leather case she had refused to let the carter touch. Her eyes were dry, which had cost her something; the effort of it was visible in the set of her mouth and the way she did not look at the house as she came down the steps. She reached the banquette and stood for a moment, and then, as though she could not help herself, she turned and looked back at the house after all. She looked at it for a long moment, at the gallery and the shuttered windows and the door standing open behind her, and then she turned away with the determined air of someone who has decided that looking was a mistake and intends to learn from it.

Her gaze moved to Edward Ferrars with the directness of someone who has just noticed a stranger in her home and sees no reason to pretend otherwise.

“Éléonore,” she said pleasantly, “I do not believe I know this gentleman.”

There was nothing in her tone that was precisely rude. There was also nothing in it that was prepared to let the matter rest unaddressed.

“Forgive me,” Éléonore said. “Marianne, this is Mr. Edward Ferrars. He is Mrs. Dashwood’s brother, and he has come to help us this morning.”

“Frances Dashwood’s brother,” Marianne said, receiving this information with a composure that cost her something visibly. She looked at Edward with an expression that was carefully neutral and said, “That is very kind of you, Mr. Ferrars.”

“I wished to be of some use,” Edward said, meeting her gaze steadily and without apology. “I am sorry for your family’s situation. I hope you will allow me to say so plainly, since I suspect you would find elaborate expressions of sympathy more irritating than consoling.”

Marianne looked at him for a moment with an expression that recalibrated itself almost imperceptibly. “You are quite right,” she said. “I would.”

The journey was not long. That was one of the more disorienting things about it. The Faubourg Marigny was not distant; it was simply on the other side of Canal Street, that wide, deliberate boundary the Americans had drawn between their own quarter and the older French and Creole city. They had crossed Canal Street before, of course, many times, for errands and visits and the ordinary business of life in New Orleans. But crossing it now, in a loaded cart with the whole of their household around them, was a different kind of crossing, and all three of them felt it without saying so.

Edward Ferrars had offered to accompany them on foot, and Céleste had accepted with the same measured graciousness with which she had accepted his preserves. He walked alongside the cart with an easy, undemonstrative manner and did not attempt to fill the silence with conversation, which Éléonore thought showed a degree of social intelligence that his sister had not inherited.

Éléonore watched her mother’s face as the cart moved down Canal Street. Céleste was looking straight ahead, her posture unchanged, her expression composed. Only her hands told a different story; they were clasped too tightly in her lap, the knuckles betraying what her face would not.

“It is a good neighborhood,” Éléonore said, for something to say.

“It is our neighborhood,” Céleste said, with a quiet emphasis that made it less a consolation and more a declaration.

Marianne had been silent since they set off, but as the cart crossed Canal Street she made a small, involuntary sound, not quite a word, not quite a sob, something in between that she swallowed almost before it had escaped. Éléonore reached across and took her hand, and Marianne gripped it with a fierceness that said everything she was refusing to put into speech. They rode the rest of Canal Street like that, and Éléonore did not let go until the cart turned into the older quarter and Marianne, by gradual degrees, loosened her grip.

The city changed around them as they moved deeper into the Faubourg. The street signs shifted from English to French, the architecture softened into the long low galleries and iron-laced courtyards of the older Creole style, the gardens thickening on either side with the dense, unhurried greenery of places that had been growing for a hundred years. Marianne had released Éléonore’s hand by now and was watching all of it with an expression that was not quite reconciled and not quite resistant, something suspended between the two.

The cottage appeared at the end of a narrow street, set behind a low wall with a bougainvillea spilling over it in a cascade of deep pink that was, Éléonore had to admit, rather more welcoming than she had steeled herself to expect. The gate stood open. Mrs. Jennings had said she would have it aired and seen to, and she had been as good as her word; the courtyard beyond the gate was swept clean, and there were fresh flowers in a pot by the door, orange and yellow against the white-painted stucco, vivid in the morning light.

The carter pulled up and began unloading with the practiced indifference of a man for whom other people’s significant moments were simply the backdrop to his working day. Éléonore climbed down and stood before the gate, looking at the cottage, committing herself to seeing it plainly rather than through the distorting lens of comparison with what they had left.

It was modest. The rooms would be smaller, the ceilings lower, the garden a fraction of what they were used to. But the ironwork on the gallery was fine, and the bougainvillea was magnificent, and through the open door she could see that the floors were good cypress wood, warm-toned and well-kept, and that the light inside was better than she had anticipated.

She heard Marianne come to stand beside her.

“The bougainvillea is extraordinary,” Marianne said, after a moment, in a tone that conceded something without quite admitting it. Then, more quietly, almost to herself, “Papa would have said it was the most romantic thing in the street.”

Éléonore felt the truth of this settle in her chest without finding an answer. “He would have,” she said.

Edward Ferrars came to stand at a respectful distance and looked at the cottage with what appeared to be genuine appreciation. “It is a fine courtyard,” he said. “The ironwork is particularly good.”

It was not a grand observation. But it was, Éléonore thought, exactly the right thing to say, and she was unexpectedly grateful for it.

Céleste passed them all without pausing, walked through the gate and across the courtyard and through the open door of the cottage, and did not stop until she was inside. Éléonore heard her moving from room to room, her footsteps steady on the cypress floors, taking stock of what was hers now, and what would have to be made of it.

Edward turned to Éléonore. “I can stay and help with the unloading, if that would be useful. Or I can leave you to it, if you would prefer. I am equally happy to do either.”

She looked at him for a moment, this quiet, useful, unostentatious man who had appeared that morning with a crate of preserves and his sister’s unconscious apology in his manner, and had spent the last two hours making a difficult day slightly less difficult without once drawing attention to the fact that he was doing so.

“Please stay,” she said. “We would be glad of the help.”

He nodded, and went to fetch another box, and Éléonore picked up the nearest one and followed her mother in.