For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” This was a difficult scene because in the original outline, this was Edward’s introduction, and I decided I wanted him in much, much earlier, as in the source novel. Claude also randomly dropped a woman into the party who I decided was going to be important later, so between that and the emdashes and Robert randomly materializing at Mrs. Jennings’s party, and some other issues, the drafts added up. What you see below is like draft four or five.

Edward and Robert

The gathering at Mrs. Jennings’s house on Rue de Chartres was, Edward had quickly learned, a reliable institution: reliably loud, reliably warm, and reliably furnished with at least three women determined to ask him about his intentions. He had arrived early enough to secure a position near the window, where the smell of the river came in over the smell of the candles and the hot wax that dripped from Mrs. Jennings’s rather ambitious chandelier, and where he could observe the room without appearing to do so.

He was, in truth, not very good at appearing to do otherwise. His brother Robert had told him so on multiple occasions, and Robert was not wrong about everything.

His mother had arrived in New Orleans two days prior, having followed him from Baltimore with the quiet inexorability of a legal summons. She had taken rooms at a hotel on Canal Street that cost considerably more than the rooms he had found for himself in the Faubourg Tremé, a fact she had mentioned twice at dinner and intended to mention again. Robert had come with her, which Edward had anticipated. Robert went where their mother went, not from filial devotion but from a conviction that opportunity lay in her wake and that he was best positioned to collect it. Between the two of them, they had already begun discussing the political advantages of a prolonged stay in Louisiana, which was a territory still young enough in its Americanness that a well-connected family from Baltimore might find purchase.

Edward had not been consulted on any of this. He was rarely consulted on things that concerned him most.

Robert was here tonight, in fact, having attached himself to the gathering with the ease of a man who considered every room a room he was meant to occupy. Edward had watched him work his way through Mrs. Jennings’s guests with the sociable fluency that their mother called charm and Edward called something he generally kept to himself. Robert was currently near the fireplace, engaged in conversation with a young woman Edward did not recognize. She was white, fine-featured, dressed in figured silk that was either genuinely expensive or an exceptionally persuasive approximation of it, and she had the composed, watchful quality of someone conducting a careful inventory of the room under the guise of admiring it. Robert had laughed at something she said and glanced toward Edward across the room in a way that Edward had learned to regard as a sign requiring attention.

He had looked away then. He looked away now, toward the chandelier above the mantle, heavy brass, tarnished at the joints, swaying very slightly in the draft from the street door, which no one had yet managed to close entirely. He had been watching it since he arrived, with the detached attention of a man whose mind required occupation when his feelings required containment.

The Dashwood family entered at a quarter past seven.

He had known they would be here. Mrs. Jennings had mentioned it in her invitation, with the particular emphasis of a woman who considered it the relevant portion of the event. Edward had not allowed himself to think too carefully about this, because thinking carefully about Éléonore Dashwood led him to conclusions that were bracing and largely inconvenient.

She came in just behind her mother, with Marianne a step behind her, and she was already looking across the room with that quality of attention she had: alert, unhurried, the kind of looking that suggested she was taking in the room rather than performing for it. He had noticed it the first time they met, at Mrs. Jennings’s other gathering, and the second time, and the moving day, and the afternoon in the bookshop on Rue Royale where they had discussed whether Washington Irving was worth taking seriously and had come, gradually, to opposing but mutually respectful conclusions. She had a small smile for Mrs. Jennings, a composed nod for Charlotte, and then her gaze found him near the window and the small smile became something fractionally different.

He crossed the room. This was not a decision so much as a direction.

“Miss Dashwood.” He greeted Céleste and Marianne as well, with the care that the situation required and that he genuinely felt. Céleste responded with the particular graciousness of a woman who had learned to read intentions quickly and had revised her assessment of him upward at the moving day. Marianne gave him a look that was more evaluation than greeting, which he had also come to expect and did not mind. She was conducting an ongoing inquiry into whether he was worth her sister’s time, and he considered this entirely reasonable.

“Mr. Ferrars,” Éléonore said. “I had not expected to see you this evening. I thought you were engaged to dine with your mother.”

“I was. The engagement concluded.”

“So soon?”

“My mother is efficient when she has made her points sufficiently clear.” He paused. “She made them very clear indeed. I was released before eight o’clock.”

Éléonore received this without pressing it, which he appreciated. She had a quality of knowing when to pursue a subject and when to let it rest, and it was, Edward thought, among the rarer social virtues. They moved toward the window he had vacated, the one with the drift of river air, and Marianne drifted toward Charlotte Palmiere with the clear intention of finding better company than a man she was not yet certain of.

“Has your family settled comfortably into their rooms?” Éléonore asked.

“Robert has settled comfortably into every room he has entered since his arrival. My mother finds the city insufficiently American. They have reached a compromise in which they find it useful.”

“And you?”

He looked out at the street below, where a man was walking a very old dog with considerable patience and no particular destination apparent. “I find it the first place in some time where I have been able to breathe without calculating the cost of it.”

He said it more directly than he had intended. The words were out before he had considered them, which was unusual for him; he was generally a man who considered. He looked back at her, half expecting the kind of polite deflection that such an admission invited, the sympathetic murmur and the change of subject.

Instead she said, “That is a very precise way of describing it. Most people say only that they find it charming.”

“Most people have not had the same conversation with my mother that I had this evening.”

A pause. The chandelier swayed above the mantle. He had, he realized, been talking about himself, which he had not come here to do, and which he generally avoided; the territory of his own circumstances was mapped in inconveniences and the conversation seldom improved it.

“There are to be meetings arranged,” he said. “People cultivated. A seat in Washington is mentioned, eventually, which requires the appropriate alliances established now. Robert has already made a beginning.” He did not look toward the fireplace. “You may have noticed.”

“I noticed your brother,” Éléonore said, with the care of someone who had noticed rather more than that.

“She has plans for us both,” he said. “Robert requires very little in the way of alignment. I have proven more resistant.”

Éléonore was quiet a moment. One of the candles on the windowsill had burned low enough that it guttered in the draft, throwing an uneven light across her face.

“Does she know,” she asked, carefully, “how you spend your time when she is not directing it?”

He knew what she was asking. The bookshop afternoons. The walks in the Vieux Carré. The hour last Tuesday spent at the levee watching the flatboats come in while they discussed, he could not remember now how they had arrived there, the question of whether a person could be genuinely useful without surrendering the parts of themselves that made usefulness worth something.

“She would not be encouraged to learn which connections I have been making,” he said.

He was aware, in the particular way of someone who has grown up in a household where attention is itself a currency, that the young woman in the silk dress had repositioned herself during the past several minutes, and that she now stood at an angle from which the window alcove was clearly visible. Whether this was her own initiative or Robert’s suggestion, he could not say with certainty. He suspected the question was not entirely separable.

Another silence fell, and in it something shifted, something he could not quite name but recognized as the feeling of having arrived at the actual subject of the conversation after the preliminary terrain of lesser things. He was aware of his mother’s expectations like a weight distributed evenly across his shoulders, the familiar management of it. He was aware, with a different and considerably more complicated feeling, of Éléonore three feet away, with her careful attention and her tendency to ask the question that required an honest answer.

“Mr. Ferrars,” she said, and something in her tone was the measured seriousness that meant she had decided to say a thing directly rather than at an angle. “I do not know what your family intends for your time in New Orleans. I know only that your company has been valued. By us. By me.” A further pause, small and precise as a comma. “I would not wish you to feel that the value placed on it by others should be the deciding measure.”

He looked at her. The guttering candle steadied as the draft from the street door ceased; someone had finally pulled it shut. The chandelier above the mantle hung still and heavy and bright.

He said, “It is not.”

He meant more by it than that. She heard the more, he thought, because she was Éléonore Dashwood and she heard most things, and because the small change in her expression, not quite a smile but the quality of ease that comes when a thing long uncertain becomes, for a moment, something else, confirmed it.

The room continued around them. Mrs. Jennings laughed loudly at something Louis Palmiere had said. Marianne, across the room, glanced toward the window with the assessing look she had made her habit, and then looked quickly away. Near the fireplace, the young woman in the silk dress accepted a glass of lemonade from a passing servant and turned, with perfect composure, toward a different part of the room.

Edward did not move from the window. Neither did Éléonore. They stood in the river air and the steadied candlelight, and the evening continued, and the weight on his shoulders did not disappear. It was not the kind of weight that disappeared. But he could feel, for the first time in some days, that it was a weight he was choosing to carry rather than one that had chosen him.

That was not nothing. It was, in fact, quite a great deal.