For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” The original outline used a trip upriver into plantation society to stand in for the the Dashwoods’ visits to London and Cleveland. I became dissatisfied with this. Claude under my guidance reworked the outline so this stretch of scenes about the Alejandro-Marianne subplot took place in New Orleans itself. Below is Claude’s first draft with minor tweaks. I reworked the Anne-Marie Acier reference to make it clear that this character was not a professional seamstress. I added Marianne’s impression of Lucie Acier’s pursuit of Edward, to help justify Marianne’s interpretation of the business between Alejandro and Sofia. I also added the final line. All other changes were me (slightly) trimming down Claude’s general wordiness.

The Villarreal Ball

The Villarreal house on Rue Esplanade was the kind of house that knew what it was. It sat at the edge of the Vieux Carré with the composed authority of old colonial money, its stuccoed facade the color of warm cream in the lamplight, its ironwork galleries draped with something flowering even in December in the way of New Orleans, which did not recognize the northern convention that beauty should take the winter off. Marianne had looked up at it from the street and felt the particular sensation she associated with occasions that were going to matter, a heightening of the air, a sharpening of detail, which she had learned by now to distrust as a reliable guide to outcomes but had not learned to stop feeling.

She had dressed carefully. This was not vanity, or not only vanity; it was the instinct of someone who understood that how one presented oneself to a significant evening was a form of intention, a declaration of what one expected the evening to be. The gown was her best, deep blue, altered at the neckline by Anne-Marie Acier with great skill and an air of doing a favor to a friend. Anne-Marie had said that that her late father had left her well-provided for, and she had no need to earn her living with her needle. Éléonore had dressed Marianne’s hair and said that her sister looked very well.

She had not told Éléonore what she was hoping for. She was not certain she had told herself, precisely, but it had the general shape of resolution: that tonight, in his own family’s house, with whatever constraints had governed his behavior at Madame Fontenot’s and since, she would see something in Alejandro that confirmed what she believed about him. That the concert had meant what she thought it meant. That the second movement was still between them the way it had been between them in that room, and that a man who had looked at her the way he had looked at her in the interval could not have been performing it entirely.

The entrance hall smelled of humidity, and the sound of the musicians reached them from the upper rooms before they had finished giving their wraps to the servant at the door. Mrs. Jennings had come with them, resplendent in wine-colored silk and in excellent spirits, and she moved through the entrance hall with the ease of someone who had been in this house before and expected to be received well, which she was. Doña Isabel Villarreal met them at the top of the stairs, a small dark woman of perhaps sixty with the bearing of someone accustomed to the unconditional acknowledgment of everyone in her immediate vicinity, and she greeted Céleste with the particular warmth of women who have known each other long enough to have passed through several phases of assessment and arrived at something durable, and she greeted Mrs. Jennings with real affection, and she greeted Éléonore and Marianne with the gracious attention of a hostess who sees every guest and evaluates them simultaneously without appearing to do either.

Marianne received her scrutiny with composure and looked past her into the room.

He was there. Of course he was there; it was his family’s house and his family’s ball and she had known he would be there, but knowing and seeing were different things. He was speaking to a group of men near the window, gesturing with one hand in the way he did when a subject interested him, and he had not yet seen her, and she had perhaps three seconds of looking at him before he would turn and the evening would begin in earnest.

He turned. He saw her. He smiled, the social smile, warm and immediate, and crossed the room toward their group with the unhurried grace that was so entirely natural to him that she had ceased to think of it as a quality and had begun to think of it simply as him.

He greeted her mother first, Éléonore second. Then he turned to Marianne and said, “Miss Dashwood. I am very glad you are here,” and she looked at his face for the thing she had come to look for and found, or thought she found, something behind the social warmth that was quieter and more particular.

“It is a beautiful house,” she said.

“It has been in the family a long time.” He said it without pride, which she liked. “My grandfather built the upper gallery. The ironwork is his design.” He glanced up briefly. “Doña Isabel will not have it changed, which means it will outlast all of us.”

Mrs. Jennings had already moved away into the room with the purposeful sociability of a woman who considered standing still at a party a waste of resources, and Céleste was in conversation with Doña Isabel. Éléonore was beside Marianne with the quality of presence she maintained at these occasions, attentive and unobtrusive simultaneously. Alejandro asked Marianne to dance, which she had expected, and she accepted.

The first dance was a contradanse, which required attention to the figures and prevented the kind of conversation she wanted to have, and she gave herself over to it and watched him move through the patterns with the ease of someone who had danced since childhood and found it unremarkable, and she thought about what she was going to say when the dance ended and the music paused and they had a moment in which something real could be exchanged.

The dance ended. He led her off the floor with his hand at her back, the lightest possible contact, and she turned to speak to him and found, at his elbow, a young woman she did not know.

She was perhaps Marianne’s age, possibly a year or two older, with the olive coloring of the old Spanish families and a composure so complete it seemed less like a quality of character than a quality of the air around her. She was dressed in ivory and gold with the understated perfection of someone whose clothes had been made for her by someone who understood her exactly, and she looked at Alejandro with the ease of a person accustomed to his company.

“Sofía,” he said, and there was something in the single word, the way it landed, that Marianne felt before she understood it.

“They are forming the next set,” the young woman said, in the pleasantly accented English of someone who had learned it carefully and used it accurately. She glanced at Marianne with the brief, courteous attention of someone acknowledging a person they do not need to assess because the assessment has already been made. “I am sorry to interrupt.”

“Not at all,” Alejandro said. He turned to Marianne with a smile that was everything it should be and nothing more than it should be. “Miss Dashwood, may I present Señorita Sofía Mendoza. Her family and mine have been friends for many years.”

“Many years,” Sofía Mendoza agreed, with a warmth in the phrase that was not directed at Marianne.

Marianne said something. She was not afterward entirely certain what it was, but it was adequate to the moment, and she received Sofía Mendoza’s composed acknowledgment and watched Alejandro move with Sofia toward the forming set of dancers.

Éléonore was beside her. Marianne did not look at her.

The evening continued. She danced twice more, with other partners, and she spoke to people she knew and people she was introduced to, and she ate a little of the supper that was laid in the adjoining room, and she watched, without appearing to watch, the way Alejandro and Sofía Mendoza moved through the evening at each other’s side. It might mean nothing. Marianne thought of Lucie Acier, and the way she seemed always to encroach on poor Edward. This might be similar.

He came to speak to her once more during the evening, briefly, between supper and the resumption of dancing. He was charming and easy and said something about the music that was genuinely interesting, and she responded, and there was a moment when his eyes met hers with what she might have called, two weeks ago, directness, and she looked for the thing she had come to see and found that she could not be certain, and the uncertainty was itself a kind of answer that she was not ready to receive.

He excused himself. He went back across the room to where Sofía Mendoza was standing with Doña Isabel and a group of older women, and Doña Isabel put her hand briefly on his arm as he arrived, and the gesture was so natural and so proprietary and so entirely unconcerned with being observed that Marianne looked away from it.

Mrs. Jennings found her near the window twenty minutes later, flushed with dancing and with news, in the way she was always flushed with both simultaneously.

“What a delightful evening,” she said, settling beside Marianne with the satisfaction of someone who had enjoyed herself thoroughly and wished to discuss the enjoyment. “And what a handsome couple they make, do they not? The Mendoza girl and young Villarreal. Though I suppose it is hardly a surprise, the families have been intending it since before either of them could walk, Doña Isabel told me so herself years ago, she is devoted to the match, and the Mendoza fortune is considerable, which I am sure is not irrelevant, though one ought not to say so.” She paused, not for breath but for the pleasure of the next detail. “Three sugar plantations, Charlotte tells me, and property in Havana besides. It has always been understood between the families. Always.”

Always, Marianne thought. The word arranged itself in her mind with a flat precision that had nothing romantic about it.

The carriage home was quiet. Mrs. Jennings had transferred her attention to a detailed account of the supper, which had been exceptional, particularly the pralines, which she considered the finest she had encountered this season, and Céleste listened and responded and managed the conversation with the skill of a woman who understood that sometimes the kindest thing a person could do was keep talking. Éléonore sat beside Marianne and did not say anything, and outside the carriage window New Orleans moved past in its nighttime abundance, the lamps and the voices and the smell of the river, and Marianne sat in it all and thought about the word always, and built a version of what she had seen that evening which meant what she wanted it to mean.

It required considerable effort. She was not certain, by the time the carriage turned into the Faubourg Marigny, that she had succeeded.

She was not certain, by the time she lay in the dark and listened to the city’s night sounds and the distant guitar from somewhere down the street, that she intended to keep trying. After tossing and turning for an hour, she got out of bed and began to write a letter.