First off, happy tenth anniversary to my blog! For more information about this fanfic project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” This was a good example of why you can’t turn your back on the LLMs. Claude’s initial draft had the Villarreal-Mendoza wedding happening in March, and frost on the River Road. I haven’t been to South Louisiana in a long time, but I remembered enough of the climate to be pretty sure frost was not a routine occurrence, and I’m Catholic enough to know that Lent was not considered to be an optimal time for weddings. What is below is the draft that resulted from my polite discussion with Claude about these issues. I hand-fixed some logistics issues related to the carriage and as usual trimmed the more overwrought bits.

The Fever

Marianne had not eaten properly in four days.

Éléonore had been counting, and the count was four days of picking at food and pushing it around and producing, when pressed, the performance of eating that was designed to forestall concern and that fooled no one in a household of women who had been watching each other carefully for months. Marianne had not wept, which was in some ways more troubling than weeping would have been. She had sat in the courtyard with books she was not reading and had gone to bed early and had appeared at breakfast pale and composed and had not eaten.

Céleste had said nothing yet. This was itself a form of speech.

Mrs. Jennings arrived on Thursday morning with Charlotte, which meant she had news significant enough to require a witness, and she came into the cottage parlor with the particular energy of a woman who has been sitting on something for two days out of consideration for other people’s feelings and has now reached the limit of what consideration can reasonably be expected to sustain.

“My dear,” she said to Céleste, and then to Éléonore, and then she saw Marianne in the chair by the window and her expression did the thing it did when she was moderating herself, a brief internal negotiation visible in the slight adjustment of her features, and she said, “My dear Marianne, you look pale. Are you quite well?”

“Quite well, thank you,” Marianne said, with the composure that had replaced her usual manner and that Éléonore found considerably more frightening than any amount of visible distress.

Mrs. Jennings settled herself and accepted coffee from Céleste and Charlotte settled beside her and the visit arranged itself in the usual way, with the usual topics, and Éléonore sat with her hands in her lap and waited, because there was clearly something coming and the only question was the shape of it.

It came after the second cup of coffee, which was Mrs. Jennings’s habitual threshold for the subjects she had come to discuss.

“I have had the most extraordinary account from the Fontenot girl,” she said, “about the Villarreal wedding preparations. It seems Doña Isabel has wasted no time, which I suppose one ought not to be surprised at, she is not a woman who wastes time on anything.” She paused, with the brief consideration of someone arranging a great deal of material into the most navigable order. “They are to be married in January, before Lent, which I think tells you everything you need to know about how long this has been settled in Doña Isabel’s mind. The Mendoza family came up from their plantation last week and there have been dinners every night, and the young couple were seen at the Cathedral on Sunday with both families, which I think leaves very little to the imagination about the state of things.”

Charlotte, who was not without sensitivity, said, “Maman,” in a tone that suggested this was perhaps enough.

“I say only what everyone knows,” Mrs. Jennings said, not unkindly. “And I think it is better to know things clearly than to be surprised by them later.” She looked at Marianne with the genuine warmth that always underlay her conversational excesses. “The Mendoza girl is said to be perfectly agreeable. Very well brought up. I am sure they will deal very comfortably together.”

Marianne said, “I am sure they will,” in the voice that was not her voice, and looked out the window.

Éléonore looked at her sister and then at her mother and the look that passed between her and Céleste was brief and sufficient.

Mrs. Jennings stayed another half hour, during which she covered the Mendoza family’s property, the question of where the couple intended to live after the wedding, and a digression about the Cathedral organist who was said to be learning a new setting for the wedding Mass that would be very fine if he managed it and very unfortunate if he did not. Éléonore heard it all from a slight distance, the way one hears a conversation in an adjoining room, and she watched Marianne, who sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes occasionally on the window and who had the look, Éléonore thought, of someone sitting very still because movement would cost more than stillness, and because stillness was the one economy left available to her.

When Mrs. Jennings and Charlotte had gone Éléonore went to find her mother.

Céleste was in the kitchen, not cooking, simply standing at the table with both hands flat on its surface in the posture of someone who has come to a room to think and has found the thinking no easier there than anywhere else. She looked up when Éléonore came in.

“How long has she had the headache?” Éléonore asked.

“Since yesterday morning,” Céleste said. “She did not tell you.”

“No.”

A pause. The kitchen smelled of coffee grounds and dried herbs and the faint damp that came up from the courtyard in winter, and outside the window the lemon tree stood in the flat grey light with the stillness of something that has withdrawn into itself against the cold.

“Her color is wrong,” Céleste said. It was not a question and it was not quite a statement. It was the thing she had been not-saying for two days said aloud finally, in the tone of a woman who has delayed saying a thing as long as delay was defensible and has now reached the point where saying it is the only responsible option.

“Yes,” Éléonore said.

“I have seen this before.” Céleste said it quietly, without elaboration, which was more frightening than elaboration would have been. “In the summer, when the fever comes, it begins like this. She has not been eating. She has not been sleeping. Her body has no reserves.”

“It is December,” Éléonore said.

“December is not as safe as people suppose,” Céleste said. “Not this year. Louis Palmiere told Charlotte there have been cases on the waterfront since November.” She looked at her hands on the table. “I want Christophe Morin.”

Éléonore had already been thinking this. She had been thinking it since she had looked at Marianne’s color in the morning light at breakfast and felt the cold specific alertness that her mind produced when a situation required action rather than management. “I will send Joseph with a note,” she said. “He can be there and back by evening.”

“Send him now,” Céleste said.

Éléonore sent him now.

She spent the afternoon doing what she did when she was frightened, which was to be useful with such concentration that the fear had no surface to adhere to. She checked on Marianne twice, who was sleeping. She assessed, with the practical eye she had developed over months of managing reduced circumstances, what would need to be packed for an indefinite stay at the Morin property, and she began to pack it with the economy of someone who has thought about this before it was necessary and is now grateful for the thinking.

She was in the middle of this when Edward arrived.

He came to the door in the late afternoon with the straightforward purposefulness of someone who has heard something in the city’s social circulation and has decided that hearing it and doing nothing about it are not compatible. He had heard from Mrs. Jennings, she supposed, or from Charlotte, or from the general atmosphere of a city in which information moved faster than people. He stood in the doorway of the cottage parlor and looked at her, and she looked back at him, and he said, “What do you need?” which was, she thought, asked in exactly the right way, without preamble and without the performance of concern that would have required her to manage his feelings in addition to everything else.

“Joseph has gone to Morin,” she said. “We are waiting to hear back. Marianne is sleeping. We will need to move her tomorrow at the latest, possibly tonight if she worsens.”

He nodded. “I have a horse. I can ride ahead to the property if Morin’s answer does not come in time, or I can ride alongside the carriage. Whichever is more useful.”

“I do not know yet which is more useful.”

“Then I will wait,” he said, “until you do.”

He sat down in the parlor with a book he did not read, which she was aware of in the peripheral way she was aware of most things Edward did, and she went back to the packing, and the afternoon moved toward evening with the slowness of afternoons in which one is waiting for something one does not want to arrive.

Joseph came back as the lamps were being lit, with a note from Morin that was brief and entirely sufficient: he had been expecting word, the cottage was prepared. Joseph would rent a carriage in town, and Elinor was to bring Marianne as soon as it was light enough to travel safely. Morin had, apparently, his own sources of information in the city and had not been waiting only for her note to understand that something was wrong.

Céleste sat with Marianne, and Éléonore finished the packing and went to tell Edward, who had stayed without being asked and without making anything of having stayed, that they would leave at first light.

“I will have the horses ready,” he said, which was not his responsibility and which he had made his responsibility without discussion, and she looked at him in the lamplight of the parlor and thought about what she had said to him at the levee, and what he had said to her, and thought that there were things she had been intending to think about later and that later was apparently not arriving in any form she had anticipated, and that she was going to have to make do.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Go and be with your sister,” he said. “I will manage the rest.”

She went. She sat with Marianne through those feverish hours, listening to the city’s night sounds diminish as the hour advanced, the guitars and the voices and the distant river noise settling toward the particular quiet of the very late, and she held her sister’s hand and thought about fifteen miles of River Road and the Morin cottage with its lamp on the gallery and the free laborers in the fields and Colonel Morin’s remedies that worked, and she thought: we will get there, and she will be all right, and I will think about everything else when there is time to think about it.

The carriage came at first light, and they got Marianne into it with the careful efficiency of people managing something fragile, and Céleste got in beside her, and Éléonore stood for a moment in the grey morning light of the Faubourg Marigny and looked at the cottage and at the bougainvillea over the gate going brown at the edges in the December cold, and then she turned and Edward was there with the horses, hers borrowed from somewhere she did not ask about, and he helped her mount with the matter-of-fact competence he brought to everything physical, and they moved off down the street toward the River Road.

The city gave way to the river parishes in the early light, the streets narrowing and then opening into the road that ran between the levee and the fields, and the fields on the low side of the road were lost in the river mist that lay over everything this morning in long pale layers, muffling sound and softening distance and turning the live oaks into shapes rather than trees. The air was cold and very damp, the particular raw damp of a Louisiana winter that found its way through wool and settled in the bones, and above the mist the sky was the flat pewter of a day that intended to be grey from beginning to end.

She did not let herself think about any of the larger things. She looked at the road ahead and listened for any change in the sounds from the carriage and managed the horse and watched the mist shift over the fields as the light strengthened slowly and without warmth, and she did not think.

After perhaps a mile she became aware that Edward had brought his horse alongside hers and was riding at the same pace without speaking, which was exactly what she needed and which he appeared to understand without being told, and she looked at the road ahead and thought that she had been wrong, earlier, about later not arriving. It had arrived. It simply looked different from what she had imagined, which was, she was beginning to understand, how most important things arrived.