For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” What we have here today is what Bob Ross would call a happy little accident. I looked at the outline, got turned around as to whether the first Edward Ferrars POV scene was ten or twelve, and prompted Claude to write this as an Edward scene. I thought it worked surprisingly well with Edward being on the outside of Eleonore’s conversation with Elise, so I kept it, trimming only the end. The Elise scene POV that was the original scene 10 is now scene 10.5.

Élise’s Distress

The evening at Mrs. Jennings’s house had seemed, to anyone observing it from the outside, a thoroughly successful occasion. Edward Ferrars, observing it from the inside, had found it rather more complicated than that.

He had attended because Éléonore would be there, which was a reason he had not quite admitted to himself in those terms but which had been, nonetheless, the operative one. He had stayed longer than he intended, which was also her fault, in the sense that her presence made time move differently, more purposefully, as though the evening had a center it would otherwise have lacked. He had walked home afterward in the warm New Orleans night telling himself that he was simply glad to have made the acquaintance of Colonel Morin, who was a serious and interesting man, and Miss Élise, who had seemed less unwell by the end of the evening than she had at the beginning, and that this was a perfectly adequate account of why the gathering had been worthwhile.

He was not entirely persuaded by this account, but it was the one he had, and he was working with it.

He was thinking about none of this, or attempting to think about none of this, on the afternoon three days later when he called at the Dashwood cottage in the Faubourg Marigny and found, instead of the quiet domestic scene he had expected, Éléonore in the courtyard speaking in a low and urgent voice to a young woman who was sitting on the iron bench beside the lemon tree and weeping with the concentrated, exhausted misery of someone who has been holding something back for a very long time and has finally run out of the strength to continue.

He stopped in the gateway. Éléonore looked up and saw him, and her expression conveyed, in rapid succession, relief at his presence, a warning about the delicacy of the situation, and a clear request that he use his judgment about what to do next. He had learned, in their brief acquaintance, to read her face with a facility that would have surprised him if he had stopped to think about it.

He stepped back out of the gateway, sat down on the low wall outside, and waited.

The weeping continued for some minutes, punctuated by Éléonore’s voice, too low for him to make out the words but steady and unhurried, the voice of someone who has decided that this situation requires patience above all things and has committed to providing it for as long as necessary. Eventually the sound diminished, became intermittent, and then stopped. There was a longer silence, and then footsteps, and then Éléonore appeared in the gateway.

“Miss Morin,” she said, simply.

“I thought it might be.” He kept his voice low. “Is she all right?”

Éléonore considered the question with her usual honesty. “She will be,” she said, which was a different answer, and they both understood the difference. “She came alone, which concerned me. She walked from her uncle’s house on the Esplanade, which is not a short distance.”

“She did not want to be seen arriving in a carriage,” Edward said.

Éléonore looked at him. “No,” she said. “I don’t think she did.”

He said nothing further, understanding that there was more to this than he was being told and that the more was not his to know, at least not yet. This was one of the things he had come to appreciate about Éléonore in their short acquaintance, that she did not tell him things that were not his to know, but she also did not pretend there was nothing to tell. It was a form of honesty that he found, in a world full of people who managed information as a social currency, unexpectedly refreshing.

“I should go in,” she said.

“Of course.” He rose from the wall. “Is there anything I can do? Practically, I mean. I am not asking to be let in on what is happening. I am asking whether there is something useful that can be done from the outside.”

Éléonore thought about this. “Colonel Morin will need to know that she is here and safe,” she said slowly. “I cannot leave her to send word myself, and I am reluctant to send one of the servants without knowing more than I do at the moment.” She paused. “If you were to call on him, not as a messenger, simply a social call, and mention in passing that Miss Morin had stopped in to visit us this afternoon, it would set his mind at rest without requiring explanation.”

It was, Edward thought, a very precise solution to a delicate problem. “I can do that,” he said. “I will go directly.”

He turned to go, and then turned back. “Éléonore.” It was the first time he had used her name without the prefix, and he heard himself do it a fraction of a second after it was already too late to retrieve it. She did not appear to find it remarkable, or if she did, she was kind enough not to show it. “She is fortunate to have found you.”

Éléonore’s expression shifted into something that was not quite embarrassment and not quite its opposite. “She found her own way here,” she said. “That took more courage than anything I have done.”

He thought about this as he walked to Colonel Morin’s house on the Esplanade, through streets that smelled of jasmine and river water and the beginnings of someone’s supper cooking somewhere nearby. He thought about the precision of Éléonore’s solution, the way she had identified exactly what needed doing and asked for exactly that, nothing more. He thought about Élise Morin walking alone through the Faubourg with whatever she was carrying, finding her way to a woman she had met once and trusted, on some instinct or hope, to receive her without judgment.

He thought about courage, and the different shapes it took. The public kind he had seen in men like Colonel Morin, whose history was written in it. The quieter kind that Éléonore practiced daily, holding her family together with both hands and never once suggesting that it cost her anything. And the desperate, private kind that had brought a frightened young woman to a bench beside a lemon tree on a Wednesday afternoon with nowhere else she felt she could go.

Colonel Morin was at home. He received Edward in his study, a spare and orderly room with a single painting on the wall, a landscape that Edward recognized after a moment as Saint-Domingue, the mountains green and steep above a harbor. He looked up when Edward was shown in, and something in his expression shifted almost imperceptibly, the controlled alertness of a man who has learned to attend very carefully to unexpected callers.

“Mr. Ferrars,” he said. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“I hope I am not interrupting,” Edward said. “I was passing and thought I would call. I have just come from the Dashwood cottage, in fact. Miss Morin stopped in to visit this afternoon. She seemed well.”

He said it conversationally, his eyes on Colonel Morin’s face. The information arrived and was received with a stillness that was not calm exactly but was a very disciplined approximation of it. Something behind the Colonel’s eyes moved, relief and worry in such rapid succession that Edward could not have said which came first.

“I am glad to hear it,” Colonel Morin said, with a steadiness that cost him something. “She enjoys the company of the Dashwood family. As do I.”

“They are very good company,” Edward agreed, and meant it, and left it at that.

They talked for perhaps twenty minutes on other subjects, commerce and the political situation and the uneasy question of the approaching war with Britain, and Colonel Morin was a thoughtful and informed conversationalist who gave his attention to the discussion with every appearance of genuine engagement. But twice, in the pauses between one subject and the next, Edward saw his eyes move to the window that faced in the direction of the Faubourg Marigny, and each time he brought them back with the deliberate effort of a man reminding himself that there was nothing he could do at this moment, and that the best thing he could do was to trust in the judgment of someone who was already there.

Edward recognized that effort. He had been making a version of it himself, lately, for reasons that had nothing to do with Élise Morin.

He took his leave as the light began to fail, walking back through the Faubourg in the long golden dusk, and did not let himself think too carefully about the fact that his route home took him past the Dashwood cottage, or about the light that was visible through the shutters of the downstairs parlor, warm and steady against the coming dark.

He walked past without stopping. It was, he told himself, the correct thing to do.