For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” This was the original scene 10 in the outline. But a ‘happy little accident’ produced something that I thought was a nice Edward moment that came before this. Hence, the quirky numbering. In the first draft, Claude ignored the explicit statement in the outline that Elise doesn’t confide her lover’s name to her uncle or anyone else at this point in the plot. Claude also committed em-dashes, for the first time in several scenes. I ordered a redraft, and then trimmed a few bits from the first couple of paragraphs of draft 2. I am really enjoying Claude’s interpretation of Morin (the Brandon analogue). Maybe it’s because Brandon is one of my favorite characters in S&S. Maybe it’s because, at the brainstorming stage, I came up with a background for Morin that I really liked. Whatever. Morin’s a good dude.

Partial Confession

The baby had been making itself known for three weeks now, in the way of things that cannot be concealed indefinitely no matter how many layers one wears. Élise had become expert, in those three weeks, at the particular discipline of existing in company without being seen, of directing attention away from herself. She was good at it. She had always been good at it. It was not, she was discovering, the same thing as being able to bear it.

The afternoon light in Colonel Morin’s study was the amber of late October, falling across the desk where her uncle sat going over his accounts with the focused attention he brought to everything he did. He had not asked her to stay while he worked. She had simply not left, finding reasons to remain in the room, first a book she wanted, then a letter she was writing, then nothing at all, just the armchair by the window and the familiar smell of the room, ink and leather and the dried herbs her uncle kept in a jar on the shelf for reasons of his own.

He knew something was wrong. She was certain of that. He had known for weeks, with the instinct he had for the people he loved, that same instinct that had kept him alive through things she could only half imagine. He had not pressed her, which was either patience or strategy or both, and which she was aware she was exploiting in a way that was not fair to either of them.

She put down her pen and looked at him.

“Mon oncle,” she said.

He looked up immediately, which told her that some part of his attention had been on her all along rather than on the accounts. “Yes,” he said, in a tone that was simply present, making no assumptions, offering no pressure, just the single syllable and everything it held.

She had rehearsed this. She had rehearsed it a dozen times in the dark of her room at night, finding the words and arranging them and then lying awake understanding that the words were not the hard part. The hard part was what came after the words, what they would do to the expression on his face, what they would require of him, what they might cost him. She loved her uncle with the fierce and particular love of someone whose world had been reduced by loss to a very small number of people, and the thought of what she was about to put in his eyes was, she had found, considerably more difficult to manage than the thought of her own ruin.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. “I have needed to tell you for some time and I have not been able to find the way to begin.”

He set down his pen. He folded his hands on the desk with the deliberate calm of a man preparing to receive difficult news without flinching, and looked at her with an expression that was so entirely without judgment that it broke something open in her chest.

“Then begin anywhere,” he said. “I will follow.”

She looked at her hands in her lap, at the slight thickening of her waist that she had been concealing for weeks, and understood that there was no version of this that was not going to hurt him, and that the kindest thing she could do was to say it plainly and let him begin to understand.

“I am with child,” she said. “The father knows, and he has chosen to do nothing, and he will likely married to someone else.”

She had thought, in her rehearsals, that saying it aloud would make it smaller somehow, that the thing would shrink to the size of the words used to describe it. Instead it seemed to expand, to fill the amber-lit room with all of its weight and consequence, and she sat in the armchair and felt it settle around her like something she would have to learn to carry.

The silence lasted perhaps ten seconds. It felt considerably longer.

She made herself look at his face. What she found there was not what she had most feared, which was the cold, shuttered look of a man whose honor has been insulted and who has already begun calculating the response. What she found was something rawer and less controlled than that, a grief that moved across his features and was not for himself at all.

“Élise,” he said, and stopped.

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since July.” She watched him absorb this. “I am sorry. I could not find the way to tell you. I was afraid.” She hesitated, then said the harder thing, the thing she had been circling for weeks in the dark. “I was afraid that if you knew, you would do something, and that whatever you did would cost you more than it cost him, and that I could not bear.”

He was very still for a moment. Then he rose from behind the desk and crossed the room and crouched beside her chair, which brought him to her level, and took both her hands in his, and held them with the steady, encompassing grip of someone who has decided that this is what the moment requires and intends to provide it for as long as it is needed.

“Listen to me,” he said, very quietly. “You are going to tell me everything you are able to tell me. And I am going to listen. And then we will decide together what comes next.” He paused. “But first I want you to understand that there is nothing you can tell me that will change what you are to me. Nothing. Do you understand that?”

She had promised herself she would not weep. She had been very firm about this in her rehearsals, feeling that she had wept enough in private and that her uncle deserved better than to have her fall to pieces in his study. The promise turned out to be one she could not keep, which was perhaps appropriate, as she was learning that there were a great many things she had thought she could manage that turned out to be beyond her.

He did not tell her to stop crying. He simply held her hands and waited, and the amber light moved slowly across the floor as the afternoon went on, and Élise told him what she could, and withheld what she could not. The name of the father she kept to herself, held back not out of any lingering feeling for him, or not only that, but out of the same fear she had named already: that knowing would put her uncle in a position from which honor would permit no retreat, and that the consequences of that position were ones she was not yet ready to bring down on either of them.

“Éléonore Dashwood knows that I am with child,” she said, when she had told him as much as she was able. “She has known for a little while, and she has been very kind, and she has said nothing to anyone at my request. The father she does not know. I have not told her.” She met his eyes steadily. “Please do not be angry with her for her silence. It was my choice, not hers.”

He received this with the same steadiness he had brought to everything else, though she saw the effort it required. “I am not angry with her,” he said, after a moment. “I understand why you asked it and why she agreed.” He looked at her with an expression that was still fierce with the protectiveness that had always frightened the people who did not know him well and comforted the people who did. “The father will answer for this,” he said. “When you are ready to tell me who he is.”

It was not a demand, and it was not a threat. It was simply a fact, stated in the quiet voice of a man who has survived things that would have broken most people and emerged with a very clear understanding of what he is capable of when the people he loves are harmed.

“Not today,” she said.

“Not today,” he agreed. “Today I am here with you. That is enough.” He pressed her hands once more and then released them and sat back on his heels and looked at her with the directness she had loved in him since she was a child, the refusal to look away from difficult things that had always made her feel, in his company, that difficult things were at least not insurmountable. “But when you are ready, you will tell me. And then we will decide together.”

She looked at him for a long moment, this man who had given up everything once already for a principle and would do it again without hesitation, and felt, alongside her fear for him, a gratitude so large she could not find the edges of it.

She had known he would not abandon her. She had known it, in the deepest part of herself, even in the worst of the nights when she had been most afraid. It was the knowing that had finally brought her to his study on this amber October afternoon, to the only person in the world she trusted absolutely, and the relief of being known and held and not let go of was, she found, almost more than she could manage.

Almost. She had her uncle’s example in front of her, after all, and she had learned a great deal from it about the uses of almost.