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, but then I realized Edward needed to be present, so I asked for a redraft. I deleted a sentence and a half about Marianne that were not justified by her behavior in the story so far, and I deleted a sentence about Henry Dashwood’s judgment of people late in the scene. “He was a better man etc” is something I wrote to replace it.

The New Cottage

Marianne had been assigned the smaller of the two upstairs bedrooms, which looked out over the courtyard rather than the street, and she had gone up to it directly after the last box was carried in without saying much to anyone.

Céleste was occupied in the parlor, directing the arrangement of furniture with the focused attention of a woman who has decided that making a home of something is itself an act of will worth performing seriously. Edward had been conscripted into this effort and was applying himself to it with the same quiet competence he had brought to everything else that day, moving a sideboard here, a chair there, accepting Céleste’s directions without comment and without the faint air of sufferance that most men brought to such tasks. Éléonore, having helped until her mother’s instructions became sufficiently particular that assistance became interference, had removed herself to the courtyard with the stated intention of assessing the garden.

The courtyard was small but well-proportioned, paved in old brick that had settled unevenly over the decades into a surface that was uneven underfoot but pleasant to look at, the gaps between the bricks soft with moss. The bougainvillea they had admired from the street turned out to be even more extravagant from inside the wall, climbing the full height of the gallery posts and sprawling along the upper railing in a riot of deep pink that cast a faint rosy shadow on the white stucco below it. There was a lemon tree in the corner that looked as though it had been there longer than the cottage, gnarled and broad and entirely indifferent to its surroundings, and beside the door a small iron bench of the sort found in a hundred New Orleans courtyards, worn smooth by years of use.

It was, Éléonore thought, genuinely lovely. Not in the way their old house had been lovely, which was the loveliness of space and proportion and the accumulated dignity of a family that had been comfortable for a long time. This was a different kind entirely, more intimate, more particular, the beauty of things that had grown and weathered into their own character without anyone planning it that way.

She was still thinking this when Edward came out through the door, wiping dust from his hands with a handkerchief.

“Your mother has decided on the arrangement of the parlor,” he said. “She is satisfied with it, I think, though she reserves the right to move the writing table again tomorrow.”

“She always reserves that right,” Éléonore said. “She rarely exercises it, but the reservation matters to her.”

He looked around the courtyard with the same unhurried attention he seemed to bring to most things. “It is a good space,” he said. “The lemon tree is remarkable. I have never seen one grown so large.”

“It looks older than the house.”

“It may well be. There were orchards along this part of the Faubourg before the city grew out this far.” He said this without any air of display, simply as something he happened to know and thought she might find interesting. “My father had a correspondent here, a merchant in the old French quarter, who wrote about it once. I read his letters after my father died.”

Éléonore looked at him with mild surprise. “You read your father’s business correspondence?”

“I read everything he left behind,” Edward said, with a simplicity that was not quite wistfulness and not quite something else. “He was a more interesting man than his profession suggested. I wished I had known him better while I had the chance.”

Before Éléonore could find an answer to this, she heard Marianne on the gallery above.

Her sister had come out of her room and was standing at the gallery rail, looking down into the courtyard. She had taken her hair down, which was what Marianne did when she was not expecting company and needed to think, and she was barefoot on the gallery boards, which still held the warmth of the afternoon sun. She took in Éléonore below and Edward beside her with a single glance, and registered Edward’s presence with a brief elevation of her eyebrows that was not quite disapproval and not quite its opposite.

“I did not realize you were still here, Mr. Ferrars,” she said. It was said without hostility, but with the frankness Marianne brought to most observations about the world.

“Your mother required the sideboard moved twice,” Edward said. “I stayed to ensure it did not need to be moved a third time.”

Marianne looked at him for a moment, and then, despite herself, the corner of her mouth moved. “That was prudent of you,” she said.

She turned her gaze to the courtyard, and her expression shifted into something more unguarded. Her eyes moved slowly over the brick and the moss and the bougainvillea and the ancient lemon tree. She reached out and rested her hand on the gallery rail, the old iron warm under her palm, and was quiet for a long moment. Below in the street, someone was playing a guitar, distant and unhurried, the notes arriving in fragments through the narrow passage between the buildings, a melody that Éléonore half recognized and could not name.

“The floors are good cypress,” Marianne said, to no one in particular.

“They are,” Éléonore agreed.

“My room smells of lemon verbena. Someone has hung a bunch of it near the window.”

“Mrs. Jennings, most likely,” Éléonore said. “Or someone she sent.”

“It is a kind thing to do.” Marianne said this in the tone of someone making a concession to evidence. She looked back at the courtyard, at the bougainvillea casting its rosy light on the white wall. “The people in this neighborhood, the gens de couleur, they have made beautiful things here. One can see it even in an hour.”

“They have been making beautiful things here for a very long time,” Éléonore said. “Maman grew up not far from this street.”

This was information Marianne had possessed in the abstract for her entire life and had apparently never quite allowed herself to make concrete. She turned to look at Éléonore. “I did not think of that,” she said.

“I know.”

Edward said nothing, understanding, it seemed, that this was not a conversation that required his contribution.

Marianne was quiet again for a moment, her hand still resting on the warm iron rail. The guitar in the street below had found its melody properly now, something slow and Spanish-inflected that suited the late afternoon perfectly. The bougainvillea moved in a breath of breeze, its shadow shifting across the stucco.

“It is not what I would have chosen,” Marianne said at last. “I want to be honest about that.”

“I would not expect you to be otherwise,” Éléonore said.

“But it is not without grace. This place.” She paused, looking at the courtyard, at the lemon tree and the moss between the bricks and the flowers bright against the white wall. “It is not without its own kind of grace.”

Edward looked up at her then. “No,” he said quietly. “It is not.”

Marianne glanced at him, and there was in her expression a brief moment of reassessment, the particular look of someone who has taken a provisional view of a person and found it requiring adjustment. She said nothing further, but she remained at the rail a little longer than she might otherwise have done, looking down at the courtyard and the two people in it, before she straightened and turned back toward her room.

“I am going to unpack my books,” she said. “I want them where I can see them.”

“I will bring up the boxes,” Éléonore said.

Marianne nodded and went inside. The guitar in the street below played on, unhurried, indifferent, and very beautiful. Edward looked at the lemon tree for a moment longer and then turned to Éléonore with the air of a man recollecting practical matters.

“The boxes from the second cart are still in the passage,” he said. “Shall I bring them through to the courtyard?”

“Please,” said Éléonore.

He went to fetch them, and Éléonore stood for a moment in the settling quiet of the courtyard, the late light golden on the old brick, and felt, with a cautious and deliberate gratitude, that this place might yet become home. That this day, which had asked so much of all of them, had not been without its small mercies. She was not certain yet what to make of Edward Ferrars. He was certainly a better man than the brother of Frances Dashwood had any right to be.

She went inside to find the book boxes.