For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” There was an Alejandro POV scene before this in the outline, which I decided we didn’t need. Marianne’s intense navel-gazing suits Claude’s style down to the ground, so this is a lightly edited first draft. I did add the reference to Alejandro possibly pursuing Marianne as a mistress or “sidechick.” I feel that this is consistent with Marianne’s social standing and the 1810s New Orleans environment, but I probably got the idea from Kandukondein, where the Willoughby analogue briefly attempts to take the Marianne analogue as a second wife.

A Letter from Alejandro

The letter came on a Tuesday morning, four days after the ball, which was four days after she had sent hers and three days after she had begun to regret sending it and two days after she had passed through regret into something more like defiance, the conviction that she had done the right thing and that his response, when it came, would prove it. She had written to him because she was Marianne Dashwood and she did not know how to wait in silence for something she needed to know, and because the alternative, sitting with the image of Sofía Mendoza in ivory and gold and Doña Isabel’s hand on his arm and the word always arranged in her mind with its flat precision, was not something she could sustain indefinitely without some action to set against it.

She had told no one she had written. Not her mother, who would have been alarmed. Not Éléonore, who would have been measured and careful and who would have said something true and useful that Marianne was not ready to hear.

She had been sitting in the courtyard with a book she was not reading when the servant brought it, and she took it with a steadiness she was moderately proud of and said thank you and waited until she was alone to break the seal.

The paper was good, heavy cream stock with the Villarreal cipher at the top, and the handwriting was the handwriting she recognized from the notes he had sent earlier in their acquaintance, the ones had kept and then had made herself not keep, elegant and slightly compressed in the Spanish manner. She read the salutation and stopped and looked at the courtyard for a moment, at the bougainvillea over the gate and the lemon tree in the corner with its winter fruit, and then looked back at the letter and read it from the beginning.

He wrote formally. This was the first thing, the thing she noticed before the content arranged itself into meaning: the register was that of a man addressing a social acquaintance, not the register of the concert or the levee or any of the conversations she had been carrying with her for weeks as evidence of something. He thanked her for her letter with the warmth of someone thanking an acquaintance for a pleasant note. He expressed, with what she recognized as considerable skill, a general regard for her that managed to be both genuine in tone and entirely without specificity. He said that he had valued the conversations they had shared and that he hoped she would find New Orleans as welcoming in the coming year as it had been in the months of their acquaintance.

Then he told her about Sofía Mendoza.

He wrote of it, she noticed, as though she already knew, as though the ball had communicated everything that needed communicating and this letter was merely the formal confirmation of what had been publicly established. The engagement had been long understood between the families. Doña Isabel had been most particular in her hopes for this outcome. Sofía was a woman of exceptional qualities whom he had known since childhood and for whom his regard was of long standing. He trusted that Miss Dashwood, with her characteristic good sense, would understand that family obligations of this nature were not entered into lightly or without genuine feeling, and that he wished her every happiness in her continued life in New Orleans.

He trusted that she would understand.

Marianne read the letter to the end and then sat with it in her lap and looked at the lemon tree. The courtyard was quiet. Somewhere in the street beyond the gate a vendor was calling in Creole French, the words not quite distinguishable, the cadence familiar. The bougainvillea moved slightly against the gate in a breath of wind that was almost warm for December.

She read it again. This was not because she had failed to understand it the first time. It was the impulse of someone looking for the door in a wall that has no door, running her hands along the surface in case she had missed something, a hinge, a seam, any indication that the surface was not as continuous as it appeared. There was no door. The wall was the wall.

He had written of family obligations in almost exactly the words he had used at the concert. She had thought, at the concert, that she was hearing a genuine struggle. She understood now that she had been hearing a practiced navigation. The constraint was not temporary. The people whose wishes must be consulted had always been consulted and had always reached the same conclusion, and the conclusion had always been Sofía Mendoza. She realized, with a shudder, that all his interest in her had been aimed at procuring an interesting mistress, a diversion from Sofia. He had not thought of entering into the kind of life her father had chosen with her mother.

She put the letter on the stone bench beside her and looked at the courtyard and thought about the second movement of the Viotti concerto and the way he had looked at her when it ended and the lemonade he had brought without being asked and the expression she had seen on his face in the interval and held carefully because it seemed like something fragile.

It had not been fragile. It had been fluent. There was a difference, and she had not seen it, and she could not now determine whether this was because he had been exceptionally skilled or because she had been exceptionally willing not to see it, and she suspected the honest answer involved both in proportions she did not want to calculate.

She sat in the courtyard for a long time. The vendor’s voice moved down the street and faded. The bougainvillea stilled. The winter light moved across the courtyard brick with the patience of something that had no awareness of and no interest in what was happening beneath it, which struck her as either very peaceful or very desolate.

She heard Éléonore’s step in the passage from the house and did not move.

Éléonore came through the courtyard door and stopped. She saw Marianne on the bench and she saw the letter beside her and she said nothing for a moment, which was the right thing, and then she came and sat on the other side of the bench and waited.

“He is to marry Sofía Mendoza,” Marianne said. Her voice trembled.

“I know,” Éléonore said. “I heard it at the ball. I did not know how to tell you.”

“You could not have told me,” Marianne said, which was true. “I would not have heard it.”

A pause. The lemon tree in the corner was very still.

“The engagement has been understood between the families,” Marianne said, “for a long time. He says so himself. He is very clear about it.” She looked at the letter. “He is very clear about everything, in fact. It is a very well-written letter.” She paused. “I think it has probably been written before. In substance if not in detail.”

Éléonore said nothing, which was the right thing again.

“I wrote to him,” Marianne said. “After the ball. I should tell you that. I wrote to him because I needed to know and I could not sit and not know.” She stopped. “I think perhaps I made it easier for him. To write this. I gave him an occasion for it.”

“You gave yourself an answer,” Éléonore said carefully. “That is not the same thing as making it easier for him.”

Marianne looked at her sister and thought about this and could not determine whether it was true or whether Éléonore was being kind, and she was not sure the distinction mattered very much.

“I am not going to weep,” she said, not as a declaration of strength but as a statement of fact, in the way one reports something observed about a situation from the outside. “I thought I would, but I find I cannot. I think the thing I feel is too large for weeping. It requires something else and I do not know what it is yet.”

“You do not have to know yet,” Éléonore said.

“No.” Marianne looked back at the lemon tree. “No, I suppose not.”

She reached out and picked up the letter and folded it along its original creases with a precision that her hands seemed to manage independently of the rest of her, and she held it folded in her lap and looked at the courtyard, at the bougainvillea and the old brick and the winter light moving across the ground, and she thought that she had been wrong about a great many things and that the full extent of how wrong she had been was only now beginning to be visible, the way the shape of a landscape becomes clear only as the light changes and the shadows fall differently and what you thought was one thing reveals itself to be something else entirely.

“Éléonore,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I am not hungry. I do not think I will want supper.”

Éléonore looked at her with the quality of attention she gave when she was assessing rather than simply listening, the careful look that their mother also had and that Marianne had never been able to produce and had sometimes envied. “All right,” she said, after a moment. “Not tonight.”

Marianne nodded and looked back at the lemon tree and said nothing more, and the courtyard held them both in its December quiet while the city went about its business beyond the gate, and the letter stayed folded in Marianne’s lap, and after a long time she set it down on the bench again, gently. It had already done all the damage it is capable of doing.