For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude’s initial draft was okayish, maybe melodramatic in spots but in a way I enjoyed. I had it redraft to add references to the sisters thinking about Edward and the Colonel. I then prompted for a third draft to remove emdashes and reword some awkward sentences. Manually deleted a few establishing details I didn’t care for.

The Ball

The Salle d’Orléans was already full when they arrived, the chandeliers blazing above a room that smelled of the faint sweetness of orange flower water, the musicians in the gallery working their way through a quadrille with the practiced authority of men who have played this room a hundred times and know exactly what it requires of them. Éléonore had been to balls before, of course, but not to this one, and not in this capacity, and she stood for a moment in the doorway taking it in before her mother touched her arm and they moved inside.

The ball was, on its surface, like any other ball in New Orleans. The room was beautiful, the women beautifully dressed, the men attentive in the manner of men at such occasions, which was to say with varying degrees of sincerity and calculation. What was not like other balls was the precise and understood nature of the transaction underlying all of it. Every woman in this room was a femme de couleur libre, and every man was white, and the purpose of the evening, dressed as it was in music and dancing and elaborate social ceremony, was the arrangement of plaçage contracts. Éléonore had understood this in the abstract for her entire life. Understanding it in a room full of candles and music and her mother’s careful posture was a different thing entirely.

Céleste moved through the room with the composed authority of a woman who knows this world and has earned her place in it, greeting acquaintances, accepting introductions, navigating the complex social geography of the evening with the ease of long practice. She was, Éléonore observed, both at home here and subtly apart from it, her status as a widow rather than a prospect giving her a different kind of standing, freed from the transactional scrutiny that the younger women were subject to but also, in some way Éléonore could not quite name, standing slightly outside the purpose of the occasion.

Marianne had gone very quiet.

This was unusual enough to concern Éléonore, who watched her sister take in the room with an expression that moved through several stages of feeling before settling into something unreadable. Marianne was not, as a general rule, a person who found things unreadable, and the effort of withholding her response was visible in the set of her jaw and the way her eyes moved carefully and deliberately rather than with her usual open, curious restlessness.

“Are you all right?” Éléonore asked, low enough not to be overheard.

“I am thinking,” Marianne said, which was not quite an answer but was, for the moment, all she appeared to have.

They found seats along the wall, which gave Éléonore the view of the room she wanted. She had come tonight with the intention of understanding, as clearly as she could, the world that had shaped her mother’s life, and she applied herself to the task with the methodical attention she brought to things that mattered. She watched the introductions being made across the room, the careful assessments being conducted under the cover of conversation and dancing, the mothers and chaperones managing their charges with the focused expertise of women who understand that this evening represents both opportunity and risk in approximately equal measure.

A woman of perhaps fifty settled into the chair beside Céleste, kissed her on both cheeks, and launched into what appeared to be a comprehensive account of the season’s prospects. Céleste listened and responded and smiled, and Éléonore watched her mother inhabit this world and tried to hold two things at once: the genuine grace and intelligence with which Céleste navigated it, and the fundamental reality of what the world was asking of the women in this room.

She found herself thinking of Edward Ferrars. He would find this room deeply uncomfortable, she thought, and not because he would fail to understand it. He would understand it perfectly well, and that was precisely the difficulty. He was a man who had stood on their doorstep on moving day and said plainly that his help was very little, because saying so was more honest than pretending otherwise. A man of that disposition would have no comfortable place in a room where the honest transaction was so carefully dressed as something else.

The thought was there and gone quickly, as such thoughts tend to be when one is not yet prepared to examine them. But it left its mark.

“They are being evaluated,” Marianne said, quietly, from beside her. She had apparently finished thinking and arrived at a conclusion. “All of them. Every woman here. The dancing and the music and the flowers, it is all perfectly lovely, and underneath it they are being evaluated like…” She stopped.

“Yes,” Éléonore said.

“And Maman was evaluated in this room. When she was our age.”

“Or one very like it.”

Marianne was silent for a moment. “She managed it with more dignity than I think I could have,” she said at last, and there was in her voice something that had not been there before, a note of genuine reckoning that Éléonore recognized as the sound of her sister understanding something for the first time rather than simply knowing it.

“She had no alternative but dignity,” Éléonore said, carefully. “That was rather the point.”

A pause stretched between them, filled with music and the movement of the room. The quadrille had given way to a waltz, and the floor had filled with couples turning in the candlelight, the women’s dresses catching the light as they moved.

“And what are we doing here tonight?” Marianne asked. Not combatively, but with genuine curiosity, the question of someone who wants to understand the terms of the situation she is in.

Éléonore considered this with the honesty it deserved. “We are here because Maman wished to attend, and because this is part of the world we now live in, and because understanding it seems preferable to pretending it does not exist.”

“And because we may need to make arrangements of our own, eventually,” Marianne said, with a directness that was not bitterness but was not entirely free of it either.

Éléonore did not answer immediately. Across the room, Céleste was laughing at something her companion had said, a real laugh, unguarded and warm, and for a moment she looked not like a widow managing difficult circumstances but simply like a woman enjoying an evening among friends who knew her well. It was, Éléonore thought, a more complicated thing to witness than she had expected.

“Perhaps,” she said at last. “Though I think we need not be in any hurry about it.”

Marianne nodded slowly, her eyes moving around the room, taking in the men ranged along the opposite wall with the assessing look she brought to most things. “They are all of a type, are they not,” she said, not quite a question. “The men here.” She paused. “Colonel Morin would never attend something like this. It would be entirely contrary to his nature.”

“I imagine it would,” Éléonore agreed.

“There is something to be said for that.” Marianne said it lightly, as though it were a minor observation of no particular consequence, and returned her gaze to the dance floor. She did not appear to notice that she had said anything worth remarking on, and Éléonore saw no reason to point it out.

It was at this moment that a young man entered from the far end of the room, moving through the crowd with the easy confidence of someone entirely accustomed to being the most charming person in any room he entered. He was perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, dark-haired, with the fine clothes and the careless elegance of a family that had been wealthy for a very long time and saw no reason to be anxious about it.

He caught Marianne’s eye across the room and held it for a moment, and the corner of his mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile and was rather more effective for not being one.

Marianne looked away first. “Who is that?” she asked, with a studied casualness that did not deceive Éléonore in the slightest.

“I don’t know,” Éléonore said. “But I suspect we are about to find out.”

She was right. Within ten minutes Mrs. Jennings had materialized at their side with the young man in tow, her expression carrying the brightness she wore when she was about to do something she considered a great favor to everyone involved.

“My dears,” she said, “may I present Señor Alejandro Villarreal. His family have the most beautiful sugar plantation upriver, and he is just returned from two years in Havana, and I have told him that he absolutely must dance with both of you before the evening is out.”

Alejandro Villarreal bowed with the fluid ease of a man who has been bowing to women since he was old enough to understand the effect of it. “Mrs. Jennings flatters me,” he said. His English was excellent, with the music of Spanish underneath it. “Though I hope she has not raised your expectations beyond what I can reasonably satisfy.”

“I imagine,” Marianne said, before Éléonore could speak, “that you are perfectly well aware of what you can satisfy, Señor Villarreal.”

It came out with more edge than she had perhaps intended, or perhaps exactly as much as she had intended; with Marianne it was sometimes difficult to tell. Alejandro looked at her with an expression of delighted surprise, as though he had been offered something more interesting than he had expected, and smiled in earnest this time.

“Miss Dashwood,” he said, “I believe this waltz is mine, if you will permit it.”

Marianne permitted it, and they moved onto the floor, and Éléonore watched them go with the feeling she was increasingly learning to recognize as the unease of someone who can see the shape of a problem clearly but has no means yet of preventing it.

She turned back to find her mother had appeared at her side, the companion of fifty having been temporarily surrendered to another conversation.

“The Villarreal family,” Céleste said, following Éléonore’s gaze to the dance floor, her voice carrying the neutral precision of a woman conveying information without editorializing. “Old Spanish colonial money. The aunt, Doña Isabel, controls the estate and the fortune. She has very decided views about what constitutes a suitable connection for her nephew.”

“And what does she consider suitable?” Éléonore asked, though she suspected she already knew the answer.

“Money,” Céleste said simply. “Preferably Spanish Creole money, and a great deal of it.” She watched Marianne and Alejandro turn through the waltz for a moment, her expression composed and unreadable. “Your sister dances beautifully.”

“She does,” Éléonore agreed.

They stood together and watched, and the music played on, and the candles burned, and Éléonore thought about systems, and necessity, and the ways in which beauty and injustice could occupy the same room so completely that it became almost impossible to see where one ended and the other began.