For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” In the first draft, Claude followed the character sheet on a point I had decided against and forgotten to correct (Anne-Marie Acier/Nancy Steele as seamstress) and ignored the same document on a more important point: that the Acier sisters are pretending to be richer than they really are. The redraft was to address these points, and add the idea that the Aciers had been eavesdropping on Eleonore’s conversation with Edward. The version below has a few rewordings by me and continuity tweaks.

Acier

The introduction happened at the market on Rue du Levee, which was, Éléonore had come to understand, where a great deal happened in New Orleans that could not be arranged in a parlor. Mrs. Jennings moved through the stalls with the authority of a woman who had been doing this for thirty years and had opinions about every vendor on the row, and she introduced people the way she did everything else: with warmth, without ceremony, and with a cheerful disregard for whether the moment was strictly convenient.

“My dear, you must know the Acier sisters. Anne-Marie, Lucie, here is Éléonore Dashwood, Céleste’s eldest. And Marianne just behind.”

The older sister, Anne-Marie, was perhaps thirty, pleasant-faced, with an assured and sociable manner. Her greeting was warm enough, but she was already looking past Éléonore toward the stalls ahead with the expression of a woman who had a list and intended to work through it, and her attention, once given, moved on quickly. Éléonore liked her without quite knowing why and suspected she would be difficult to know well.

The younger sister was another matter.

Lucie Acier was perhaps twenty-two, pretty in a careful way, dressed in figured silk that Éléonore recognized from Mrs. Jennings’s gathering as either expensive or a convincing imitation. She had dark eyes that moved quickly and a smile that arrived slightly ahead of whatever had occasioned it, as though it had been dispatched in advance to prepare the ground. She took Éléonore’s hand with both of hers.

“Miss Dashwood. I have so wanted to be introduced. We have seen you at Mrs. Jennings’s, of course, and at the Palmieres’, and I said to Anne-Marie only last week, there is a family one ought to know.”

“You are very kind,” Éléonore said.

“Not at all, it is only the truth. And your mother, Madame Dashwood, we have admired her for years, she was so well established before your father’s death, everyone says so.” A fractional pause, the pause of someone who has said something that requires a delicate pivot. “It must be a great comfort to have such connections in the city, at a time when circumstances have changed.”

Éléonore received this without visible reaction, which required a small amount of effort. The observation was not quite impertinent; it was positioned just near enough to kindness that impertinence could not be fairly charged. She filed it away and said, “New Orleans has been very welcoming.”

“It is a welcoming city, for those who know how to move in it.” Lucie fell into step beside her as Mrs. Jennings forged ahead toward a stall of early strawberries, Anne-Marie and Marianne drifting in her wake. The market smelled of fish and turned earth and the bruised sweetness of overripe plantains in the heat, and the noise of it, vendors calling in French and Spanish and English and the Creole that threaded between all three, meant that conversation required a certain proximity. Lucie managed this proximity naturally, as though it had not been arranged. “Of course your mother knows it better than most. She has real friends here, not merely acquaintances. That is rarer than people suppose.”

“She has been fortunate in her friends,” Éléonore agreed.

“And you? You are making your own way, I think. I have noticed you at these gatherings, you are always so composed, so attentive. One wonders what you make of everyone.” The dark eyes moved to her briefly and away again, the glance of someone fishing without wishing to appear to fish. “I must confess something, and you must forgive me for it. At the Palmieres’ last week, Anne-Marie and I were just behind the curtain in the alcove when you and Mr. Ferrars were speaking, and we could not help but overhear a little of your conversation. Not enough to follow it, truly, only enough to wish we were following it. It sounded very interesting.”

The confession was delivered with a rueful smile that managed to be both an apology and its own absolution. Éléonore considered it for a moment. The alcove in question was a fair distance from the place where she and Edward had been talking. A little of the conversation, from that distance and in that noise, would have been very little indeed, unless one had made some effort to hear it.

“We were talking about novels,” Éléonore said. “I am afraid it would have disappointed you.”

“Oh, I doubt that very much.” Lucie’s smile warmed by a degree. “Mr. Ferrars seems a man of real conversation. Not like his brother, who is all surface and sparkle. Though Robert Ferrars is perfectly entertaining in his way.” A pause, timed well. “And their mother is a woman of very decided views. Very attentive to her sons’ futures. She has been kind enough to take an interest in Anne-Marie and me.”

“You are acquainted with Mrs. Ferrars?” Éléonore asked.

“She sought us out, which was very flattering. She is the sort of woman who likes to understand a person thoroughly before she decides what to think of them. We had a long conversation at the hotel on Canal Street only last week. She is very well informed about everyone.” Lucie said this with the pleasantly neutral air of someone relaying a fact rather than issuing a warning, and Éléonore could not determine with confidence which it was. Possibly both. People like Lucie Acier generally preferred instruments that served more than one purpose.

“It sounds as though you have found a friend in her,” Éléonore said.

“She has been all kindness.” Lucie turned to her then with the full warmth of the smile, which was, Éléonore noted, genuinely effective. “I hope we may be friends as well, Miss Dashwood. Truly. Our situations are not so very different, when one considers it honestly. We are all of us making our way as best we can, and it seems foolish not to help one another.”

This was said with such apparent sincerity that Éléonore spent a moment considering whether it might be sincere. She could not entirely rule it out. People were rarely only one thing, even people who were being strategic, and Lucie Acier’s situation, what little Éléonore knew of it, was genuinely uncertain. There was money, some said, a merchant father who had left his daughters well provided for; others suggested the provision was less than the silk dresses implied, that the Acier sisters were conducting their social lives on credit extended against expectations not yet realized. Éléonore did not know which version was true and suspected that Lucie intended it that way.

“I hope so too,” Éléonore said, and meant it as precisely as it was possible to mean something that was also a deflection.

Ahead, Marianne had stopped at a flower stall and was holding a spray of something yellow and extravagant to her face with both hands, and Anne-Marie had stopped beside her and was apparently offering an opinion on the color with an authority that Marianne, to Éléonore’s mild surprise, seemed to be receiving with interest. Mrs. Jennings was haggling over strawberries with the cheerful aggression of someone who expected to lose and intended to enjoy the process.

“Your sister is very lovely,” Lucie said, watching Marianne. “Very striking. She must have a great deal of attention.”

“She is admired,” Éléonore said carefully.

“Of course. And she is how old, nineteen? Twenty? It is the right time, is it not, to be thinking seriously about her situation. And yours.” Lucie glanced at her sideways. “Forgive me, I speak very plainly, it is a failing of mine. But we are none of us so differently placed that these things do not need to be thought about. Your mother will understand that better than most. The right arrangement, made at the right moment, with someone of means and genuine feeling, it can make all the difference. Between a life of real comfort and one of, well.” She left the well alone, unfinished, which was more eloquent than finishing it would have been.

Éléonore looked at her steadily. “You are very thoughtful on our behalf.”

“I only say what anyone would think.” Lucie’s smile did not waver. “And I say it because I should like to be useful, if I can. We know a great many people, Anne-Marie and I. We hear things. If there were ever anything we could do to be of service, in any way at all, I hope you would feel you could ask.”

“That is very generous,” Éléonore said.

She said nothing more, and after a moment Lucie accepted this with good grace, which was itself informative. She was not a woman who pushed past a closed door. She noted the door, and she would return to it, but she did not push. That required patience and a certain confidence that time was on her side.

They had reached the flower stall. Marianne pressed the yellow spray on Éléonore with instructions to smell it immediately, and Éléonore smelled it and said something adequate about it, and Mrs. Jennings appeared with a paper cone of strawberries and distributed them with the largesse of a woman who had won her negotiation after all, and the group reassembled around this small abundance in the heat and noise of the market.

Anne-Marie, eating a strawberry with her eyes half closed in appreciation, said to no one in particular that the fruit this year was exceptional and that she had half a mind to make preserves if she could get more at this price, and this observation produced a spirited digression from Mrs. Jennings about preserves and the relative merits of various methods of making them, and the moment dissolved into ordinariness the way moments did when Mrs. Jennings was present and chose to dissolve them.

Lucie said very little for the remainder of the market visit. She was pleasant and easy and laughed at Mrs. Jennings’s stories in the right places, and when they parted at the corner of Rue du Levee she pressed Éléonore’s hand again and said she hoped they would see each other very soon.

Walking home with Marianne, the strawberry paper folded in her pocket and the smell of the yellow flowers still faintly on her hands, Éléonore turned the conversation over in her mind with the methodical attention she brought to things that required understanding before they could be managed. She knew a little more than she had at the beginning of the morning. She was not certain Lucie Acier knew anything more about her than she had before, which was, she supposed, the nearest thing to a satisfactory result the encounter had been likely to produce.

Marianne, who had spent the walk home in the pleasant abstraction she wore when thinking about something she had not yet decided to discuss, said suddenly: “The younger one. Lucie. She is clever, isn’t she.”

It was not quite a question.

“Yes,” Éléonore said. “She is.”

Marianne considered this for another half block. “I did not like her very much.”

“No,” Éléonore said. “I am not sure she desires it.”