For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” This is the second draft, which I prompted for because a prior connection between the Edward/Lucy characters didn’t work with what we had so far. Apart from that, I have trimmed some of Claude’s usual excesses, and changed the exit line.

Lucie’s Revelation

It happened in November at one of Mrs. Jennings’s parties. The room was full in the usual way, warm with candlelight and the smell of the coffee Mrs. Jennings served at these evenings in defiance of those who considered it an unsuitable hour for it, and the conversation had the comfortable density of people who had been talking to each other long enough to skip the preliminary stages.

Éléonore had arrived with her mother and Marianne, and Edward had arrived shortly after with Robert. Éléonore had spoken with Edward for perhaps twenty minutes, near the window that had become, she was aware, their window in the unspoken geography of these gatherings. The conversation had been easy and particular and had left her with the quiet sense of having been understood that she was learning to recognize as the feeling that accompanied his company more reliably than any other.

She had not, therefore, been in a receptive frame of mind when Lucie Acier appeared at her elbow.

“Miss Dashwood.” Lucie’s smile was warm and immediate, as it always was, arriving slightly ahead of whatever had occasioned it. She was dressed well this evening, in a gown the color of old ivory that suited her dark eyes and that Éléonore suspected had been chosen with the evening’s specific guest list in mind. “I have been hoping for a moment with you. Come and sit with me, will you? Anne-Marie has entirely abandoned me for your mother, and I find I am in want of company.”

Éléonore glanced across the room, where Anne-Marie was indeed in cheerful conversation with Céleste, and followed Lucie to the small settee near the fireplace that had been vacated by Charlotte and Louis Palmiere some minutes earlier.

“What a pleasant evening,” Lucie said, settling herself with the ease of someone who had decided in advance to be comfortable. “Mrs. Jennings is such a wonderful hostess. One always feels entirely at home.”

“She has a gift for it,” Éléonore agreed.

“She does.” Lucie looked around the room with the pleasant, assessing gaze that Éléonore had come to recognize as her habitual expression in company, the gaze of someone who was always, at some level, taking inventory. It moved across Robert Ferrars, who was holding court near the door, and came to rest briefly on Edward, still near the window, now in conversation with Louis Palmiere.

“Mr. Ferrars looks very well this evening,” she said, with the lightness of someone observing nothing in particular. “The elder Mr. Ferrars, I mean. Robert is always well, it costs him no effort, but Edward looks particularly well when he is at ease. He is always most at ease here, I think.”

Éléonore said, “I believe he finds these evenings agreeable,” and left it at that.

“He does.” A pause, filled with the sound of the fire settling and Mrs. Jennings laughing at something on the other side of the room. “Our fathers knew each other,” Lucie said then, in a tone that was almost casual, almost the tone of someone mentioning a pleasant coincidence. “Did you know that? Acier and Ferrars, the elder Ferrars, they had dealings for years. Papa spoke of him with great respect. When Anne-Marie and I came to New Orleans and found the family here, it felt like, well, like Providence, I suppose. Mrs. Ferrars said exactly the same.”

“What a fortunate coincidence,” Éléonore said.

“Mrs. Ferrars has been so kind to us.” Lucie smoothed a fold in her gown with a gesture that managed to draw attention to its quality without appearing to intend to. “She is a woman who understands connexions, the real kind, the kind that go back years and mean something. She said to me: your father and my husband built something together, and that is not nothing, that is the foundation of something. She is very decided in her views.” A small smile. “I find I agree with her on a great many things.”

Éléonore listened to this and heard, beneath the pleasant surface of it, the shape of what was being constructed. She did not yet know how much of it was Lucie’s own architecture and how much had been provided ready-made by Mrs. Ferrars, but the joints between the two were visible to anyone who looked carefully, and Éléonore had been looking carefully at Lucie Acier since the market on Rue du Levee.

“She speaks of her sons with such feeling,” Lucie continued. “Robert she understands perfectly, they are very alike. But Edward she worries about. She feels he does not always know his own interests. That he wants for, how did she put it, for guidance in certain matters. The right kind of guidance, from the right kind of person.” A pause, precisely weighted. “She feels that a connexion already rooted in the families’ shared history would be a natural thing. A sensible thing.”

“I imagine she has communicated this view to Edward,” Éléonore said.

“Oh, extensively.” Lucie’s smile was warm and rueful in equal measure. “He is not, I think, a man who responds well to being told what he wants. But Mrs. Ferrars is patient. She takes the long view.” She turned to look at Éléonore directly, and her expression shifted into something that wore the costume of frankness with considerable skill. “I tell you this, Miss Dashwood, because I think you are a woman of real sense and I think you would rather understand a situation clearly than discover it later in less comfortable circumstances. I do not say it to distress you.”

“What is it you are telling me, precisely?” Éléonore asked. She kept her voice even, her hands still in her lap, her eyes on Lucie’s face with the patient attention of someone who has decided that the clearest view requires the stillest position.

Lucie received the directness with a small blink, the only sign that she had not entirely anticipated it. “Only that Mrs. Ferrars is a woman of great determination,” she said, “and that her determination in this particular matter is considerable, and that she is not, in my observation, a woman who accepts disappointment without consequences.” A pause. “For anyone involved.”

The fire shifted behind the grate, a log settling with a soft collapse of ash. Éléonore thought about Edward at the levee with his not-simple answer. She thought about things not yet worked out, things that were not about feelings but about what feelings would require. She thought about Mrs. Ferrars’s dinners and introductions and the careful architecture of a woman who built structures first and explained their purpose afterward. She thought about Lucie Acier in old ivory silk, chosen for the evening’s specific guest list, sitting beside her with the expression of someone performing a kindness that also happened to serve a purpose.

“I see,” she said, which was not an agreement and not a contradiction and bought her exactly the moment she needed.

“I hope you do not think ill of me for saying it,” Lucie said, with the gentle insistence of someone who has decided their candor is a gift. “I have a great regard for Edward. A genuine regard, I mean, the kind that wants good things for him. And I think, I truly think, that a man in his position, with his family’s expectations and his mother’s very decided views, needs someone who understands that position fully.” She let this rest for a moment. “Someone for whom it presents no difficulties.”

There it was, finally, the thing the whole conversation had been travelling toward. Not a claim, precisely. Not anything that could be directly contradicted. Only the implication, delicately placed, that Éléonore’s own position presented difficulties that Lucie’s did not, that the Acier family connexion and the Ferrars family connexion and Mrs. Ferrars’s determined view of what constituted a sensible match added up to something that Éléonore, whatever her own feelings on the matter, would do well to take seriously.

It was, Éléonore thought, quite skillfully done.

“Thank you,” she said, with the composure she had learned from her mother and had been grateful for every day since. “For telling me. I understand that it was not easy.”

Lucie looked at her with an expression that was almost, for a moment, something genuine, some flash of real feeling beneath the performance, surprise perhaps, or the specific discomfort of a person who has done something they are not entirely proud of and has been met with grace rather than anger. It lasted only a moment.

“You are very kind,” Lucie said. “I knew you would be.”

Mrs. Jennings arrived then, with coffee and the particular conversational energy of someone who had decided the room required redistribution, and Lucie rose to receive her with the smooth social ease that was her most reliable quality, and the moment closed over itself as moments did, leaving no visible seam.

Éléonore accepted her coffee and smiled at something Mrs. Jennings said and looked, once, across the room toward the window where Edward was still standing. He was listening to Louis Palmiere with the quality of attention he brought to conversations he found genuinely interesting, and he looked entirely at ease. He did not look toward the settee. He did not know what had just happened, or if he did, he gave no sign of it.

She looked away and drank her coffee and thought about what a person implies and what they mean by it, and what a person withholds and why, and whether those two categories of incompleteness were as different as she had, until this evening, been inclined to believe.

The gathering continued around her. The fire burned low and was replenished. Marianne laughed at something across the room, bright and unguarded in the way she was when she had forgotten to be careful, and Éléonore watched her sister and thought that of the two of them, she had always considered herself the one less likely to be taken by surprise.

It seemed that she was mistaken.