For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Well, here we are at what I *think* is the mid-point of the story. Claude’s initial draft got tangled up in its own feet about what Marianne thinks E&E will select in the way of books (correct sentiment, but pronoun trouble), and drifted back into the source novel backstory of Edward having a prior connection with Lucie, in spite of the outline suggesting otherwise. The redraft was to fix these issues. Once I told Claude what I thought was Edward’s issue with declaring himself to Eleonore, Claude did a solid job. But of course the LLMs are all professional championship grade wafflers, and poor Edward is only an amateur at the sport. On an unrelated note, I like the dog on the flatboat.

A Growing Attachment

The bookshop on Rue Royale was narrow and deep and smelled of paper and leather and the particular mustiness of books that had crossed an ocean in the holds of ships and arrived somewhat changed by the experience. The proprietor, a small Frenchman named Mercier who had opinions about everything and shared them without invitation, had acquired a shipment from Philadelphia and stacked the new arrivals on a table near the door with the haphazard confidence of a man who trusted his customers to find what they needed without assistance. Edward had been working through the stack for twenty minutes when Éléonore arrived, slightly out of breath, with a list in her hand and Marianne conspicuously not beside her.

“Marianne has gone with Mrs. Jennings to the dressmaker,” she said, by way of explanation, “and sends her regrets and also her opinion that we will between us select something improving and miss everything enjoyable.”

“She is probably right,” Edward said. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” She looked at the book in his hand. “Is that the new one?”

“It is one of them. Mercier has strong views about which you should read first and has communicated them at some length.”

“What does he recommend?”

“He recommends all of them, in an order he has devised on principles he was unable to fully articulate but holds with great conviction.” Edward set the book back on the stack and picked up another. “I have decided to read them in the order in which they present themselves and trust to Providence.”

“That seems a reasonable approach to most things,” Éléonore said, and moved past him to examine the table with the attentiveness she brought to everything, which was the attentiveness of someone who was genuinely looking rather than appearing to look. He watched her for a moment, sideways and without appearing to, which he was also not very good at.

He had been thinking about her since the concert at Madame Fontenot’s, which was four days ago and which he had attended at Éléonore’s suggestion and found, setting aside the music, which had been exceptional, more complicated than he had anticipated. He had sat two rows behind the Dashwood family and had therefore spent a portion of the evening watching the back of Éléonore’s head, which was not a particularly productive use of an exceptional violinist, and another portion watching Alejandro Villarreal lean toward Marianne in the second movement and say something that made her go very still, which was the kind of observation that lodged itself in the mind and did not easily dislodge.

He had not said anything about this to Éléonore. He was not certain what he would say, or whether saying it would serve any purpose beyond the relief of having said it, which was not, on balance, a sufficient justification.

“This one,” Éléonore said, holding up a volume. “Marianne will complain that I chose it, but she will read it in two days and then complain that it was too short.”

“What will you tell her?”

“That she could have come and chosen for herself.” She set it on the small stack she was assembling and looked at him. “You seem preoccupied.”

“I have been thinking about something.”

“For four days, I would estimate,” she said, with the matter-of-fact precision that always caught him slightly off guard. “Since the concert, or thereabouts.”

He looked at her. She looked back, not pressing it, offering the space of it, and he thought again, as he had thought many times by now, that she had the quality of making honesty feel like the natural available option rather than an effortful one. He was not entirely certain this was comfortable. It was, however, preferable to the alternative.

“Your sister,” he said. “And Villarreal.”

A pause, small and careful. “Yes.”

“The second movement was very long,” he said. “From where I was sitting.”

Éléonore set another book on her stack with the deliberate quiet of someone buying time for a thought. “You were watching.”

“I was sitting behind you. It was difficult to avoid.”

“Yes,” she said again. And then, after a moment: “I know. I have known for some time.” She did not say what she knew, precisely, and he did not ask her to, because they were in Mercier’s bookshop and Mercier himself was ten feet away and affecting not to listen with the transparent effort of a man constitutionally incapable of minding his own affairs.

Edward picked up his own stack of books and carried them to the counter, and Éléonore brought hers, and the transaction with Mercier occupied several minutes and involved his views on the Philadelphia shipment, a digression about a review he had read in a journal he could not immediately locate, and the information that a lady of his acquaintance had found the third volume of one of the novels injurious to her nerves, which he offered as a recommendation rather than a caution. Edward paid for his books and Éléonore paid for hers and they emerged onto Rue Royale into the bright flat light of a November morning with the particular relief of people who have escaped a benevolent captor.

They walked without discussing where they were walking, which had become, Edward had noticed, a habit of these mornings: a direction arrived at by unspoken agreement, generally toward the river, generally at a pace that suggested neither of them was in a hurry to arrive. The street smelled of coffee from an open doorway and the faint mineral edge of the river two blocks away, and the banquette was busy enough that conversation required a certain attention to proximity that he found he did not mind.

“My mother has extended her stay,” he said, after they had walked half a block in silence.

“I had heard,” Éléonore said. “Mrs. Jennings mentioned it.”

“Mrs. Jennings is a reliable source on most subjects.” He shifted his books under his arm. “She has taken a house. On Esplanade. Robert has found it very suitable.”

“And you?”

“I find it exactly what I expected.” He said it without particular feeling, because the feeling he had about it was large and not well-suited to Rue Royale on a November morning. His mother’s decision to take a house rather than remain in hotel rooms meant something, and the something it meant was that the campaign she had arrived to conduct was intended to be longer and more thorough than he had initially calculated. He had spent the four days since the concert being managed, very efficiently, by a woman who had been managing him since birth and had considerable accumulated expertise. There had been dinners. There had been introductions. There had been, at each of these occasions, the careful social architecture of a woman who built structures first and explained their purpose afterward, when it was too late to object to the foundations.

He did not say any of this.

“Robert is in excellent spirits,” he said instead. “He finds New Orleans very congenial.”

“He seems a man who finds most places congenial.”

“He finds most places useful,” Edward said, which was the more precise formulation, and Éléonore received the distinction with a small nod that meant she had understood it. They had reached the levee and stopped by unspoken agreement at the railing, looking out at the river, which was brown and wide and carrying three flatboats downriver with the slow authority of something that had no interest in anyone’s plans.

“Edward,” she said, and then stopped.

It was the first time she had used his given name without the Mister before it, which she had done occasionally in recent weeks and then corrected, with a composure that suggested the correction cost her something. This time she did not correct it, and he was aware of this in the way he was aware of most things she did, attentively and without knowing quite what to do with his attention.

“I want to ask you something,” she said, looking at the river, “and I want you to answer it honestly, which I think you will, because I have not yet known you to do otherwise.”

“I will try,” he said, which was the honest version of yes.

She was quiet for a moment. One of the flatboats had a dog on it, standing at the prow with its ears forward, attending to the river with great seriousness. “Is there anything,” she said carefully, “in your present situation, that would make it wrong of me to think of you as I do?”

He heard the question with complete clarity and felt, simultaneously, the two things that had been occupying opposite sides of his chest for the better part of three months: the thing that wanted very much to say no, there is nothing, and the thing that knew the honest answer was more complicated than no.

The complication was not another attachment, not a prior claim, nothing of that kind. It was something at once simpler and more intractable. He was an American, a Catholic, a man without a fortune of his own and with a family determined to remedy this through means that did not include Éléonore Dashwood. In Louisiana as it now stood, under American governance and its inherited tangle of French and Spanish law, he could not marry her. Not legally. Not in the way that would give her his name and his protection and whatever future he was capable of building. The law did not permit it and his conscience would not permit the alternative, which was to offer her the arrangement her mother had navigated with his own father’s generation and call it love. He had turned this over many times in many configurations and arrived, each time, at the same obstruction.

What he had not yet fully reckoned with was whether the obstruction was permanent. New Orleans was not the only city in the world. His mother’s ambitions notwithstanding, Baltimore was not the only future available to a man willing to leave behind what he had been told he ought to want. He had thought about this in the abstract, at a careful distance, in the way one thinks about things that are too large to approach directly. He had not yet thought about it as a plan. He was not certain this levee on this morning was the moment to begin.

What he knew, standing here, was that Éléonore Dashwood was asking him a question that deserved an honest answer, and that the honest answer was not simple, and that giving her the simple version would be a kindness that was also a harm, and that giving her the complicated version required him to say things he was not yet able to say in the right order.

“There is nothing,” he said, slowly, “in my present situation that reflects on my feelings.” A pause. “There are things I have not yet worked out. That I need to work out before I can speak as I would wish to. That are not about my feelings but about what my feelings would require of me, and of you, if I gave them their full expression.”

She turned from the river and looked at him directly, with the full attention that was, he had come to understand, the thing she gave when she had decided a thing mattered enough to look at it without protection.

“That is not a simple answer,” she said.

“No,” he said. “It is not.”

She held his gaze for a moment and then looked back at the river, where the dog at the prow of the flatboat had sat down and was regarding the far bank with philosophical calm.

“All right,” she said.

He was not entirely certain what she meant by it, whether it was acceptance or suspension of judgment or simply the acknowledgment that she had heard him. He thought, knowing her, that it was probably all three simultaneously, and that she would carry the not-simple answer with the same steadiness she carried everything, and think about it carefully, and wait.

He found he was grateful for the waiting. He also found, with a clarity that was not comfortable and was also not deniable, that the waiting had a natural limit, and that whatever he had not yet resolved would need to be faced before it became something he had chosen to defer rather than something he had not yet found the courage to decide.

The flatboat rounded the bend and disappeared. The river moved south, indifferent and continuous, and beside him Éléonore shifted her books from one arm to the other and said, “Marianne will have finished at the dressmaker by now. She will want to know what we found at Mercier’s.”

“We should head back,” he said.

“We should,” she agreed, and they turned from the river and walked back up the levee toward the city, and he thought about the difference between a thing not yet resolved and a thing abandoned to irresolution, and found the distance between them shorter than he would have preferred.