For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. This final stretch of the book was very messy at an outline level, so I had to talk Claude through re-outlining these last 6-7 scenes. The first draft had Louis Palmiere (Mrs. Jennings’s son-in-law) and Lucie Acier in place where I did not want them to be. This is Claude’s second draft, with the usual trimmings and tweakings.

Edward’s Declaration

The dinner on Esplanade was, Edward had known since the invitation arrived, not a dinner. It was a presentation, carefully staged, with Lucie Acier in pale green silk and Robert at his most fluently sociable and his mother at the head of the table with the composed authority of a woman who has arranged everything to her satisfaction.

He had known this and had come anyway. He needed to say this to his mother in person.

The house his mother had taken was well-appointed. There were flowers on the table, and the candles were numerous and the wine was good and the whole of it had the quality of an argument made in the language of material comfort, which was his mother’s most fluent language and the one she deployed when she wanted something badly enough to be subtle about wanting it.

She had not always been subtle. He could remember, at fourteen and sixteen and eighteen, versions of this campaign conducted with considerably less finesse, the directness of a woman who had not yet learned that her eldest son’s resistance was not the temporary condition of youth but a settled feature of his character. She had learned it eventually, and the learning had made her more patient.

Lucie was, as she had always been, composed and gracious and not entirely without his sympathy. She had conducted herself throughout the New Orleans months with a dignity that his mother’s management of her could not entirely account for, which meant that some portion of it was her own, and he had thought about this enough to be certain that his refusal of the situation his mother had constructed was not a refusal of Lucie personally. He had nothing against her. He simply was not going to marry her, and the distinction between these two positions was one he intended to make as clear as the situation allowed.

Robert talked through the soup and the fish and most of the meat course with the cheerful fluency of a man who considered silence at a dinner table a personal failure. He talked about New Orleans, about the business opportunities that the territory’s youth and the war’s disruptions were creating for men of energy and connexion, about the political landscape and who was positioned well within it and who was not. He talked about the Acier family’s connexions, woven into the conversation with the practiced casualness of someone who has been briefed on what to mention and when. He talked about the mercantile community in various cities and the prospects available to a man of the right background and attitude, and Edward noted each of these probes without responding to them. Responding to them would have moved the evening to its conclusion before Lucie had left the table, which he did not intend.

Lucie spoke when spoken to and was charming and sensible in equal measure, and once, when Robert had said something that was meant to be amusing and was instead only loud, she caught Edward’s eye across the table with an expression of such unguarded irony that he almost liked her very much in that moment, which was, he suspected, not an accident. She was a woman of real intelligence, and he was aware that what was happening this evening was not comfortable for her. But he was sorry for it without being moved by it.

After dessert, Lucie said her goodnights with composure, and Edward stood and wished her well with the genuine courtesy he felt, and the Ferrars family was left with the coffee and the thing that had always been the actual subject of the evening.

Robert looked at Edward with the expression of a man embarking on a reasonable discussion between reasonable people about a thing that was perfectly simple if everyone approached it reasonably.

“Edward,” he said. “I think we ought to talk plainly.”

“I think we ought,” Edward said.

Robert smiled, which was his response to most things, and began. He talked about the family’s situation and its prospects and the importance of the right kind of alliance in a period of uncertainty and opportunity. He talked about Lucie’s connexions and the Acier family’s standing, including the question of the inheritance, which he presented with the careful vagueness of someone who has been instructed not to overstate it. He talked about what a man of Edward’s abilities and character could accomplish with the right support behind him, by which he meant their mother’s support.

His mother said nothing. She drank her coffee and watched him with the patience of a woman who has learned that watching is more effective than speaking.

Edward waited until Robert had finished, which took some time, and then he set down his coffee cup and said, “I am not going to marry Miss Acier.”

A silence. Robert’s smile adjusted itself.

“Edward,” his mother said. One word, in the tone that had preceded every significant conversation of his life.

“I am not going to marry Miss Acier,” he said again, because repetition was the only defense against the particular kind of non-hearing his mother deployed when she encountered something she had decided not to hear. “I say this not because I have any ill opinion of her, which I do not, but because there is someone else to whom I intend to propose. I would have told you this before now if I had believed it would produce a different conversation than the one we are currently having.”

Another silence. Robert looked at their mother. Their mother looked at Edward.

“The Dashwood girl,” his mother said. It was not a question.

“Éléonore Dashwood,” he said. “Yes.”

What followed was not a scene, precisely. His mother was too controlled for scenes. It was instead a sustained and comprehensive presentation of every reason why the thing he had said he intended to do was not something he was going to do, delivered with the calm of a woman who has thought for a long time about this contingency. She talked about the family’s position and what it required. She talked about Éléonore’s position and what it precluded. She talked about Louisiana law with a precision that surprised him and should not have, since his mother was always precisely informed about things that were useful to her. She talked about what would happen to the family’s support for his endeavors, financial and political and social, if he persisted in this.

He listened to all of it. He had learned, across a lifetime of these conversations, that listening to all of it was both the respectful thing and the strategic thing, because it meant she could not later claim she had not been heard.

When she had finished he said, “I understand what you are telling me. I want you to understand what I am telling you, which is that I have made my decision, and that the consequences you have described are consequences I have calculated and am prepared to accept.”

“You are prepared to be poor,” Robert said, with the tone of someone identifying a logical error.

“I am prepared to work,” Edward said, which was not quite the same thing and he intended the distinction. “Pennsylvania law does not prohibit what Louisiana law prohibits. Philadelphia is where I intend to go, and Éléonore Dashwood is who I intend to marry there, and I have already taken steps to establish what prospects exist for me in that city.”

His mother looked at him with the look he knew best and liked least, the look of a woman recalculating. “You would throw away everything this family has built,” she said, “on the basis of steps taken without consulting anyone.”

“I consulted Louis Palmiere,” Edward said. “He has been very helpful.”

This landed as he had intended it to land, which was as the information that the practical groundwork had already been laid and was not dependent on anything his mother controlled. He had called on Louis Palmiere two days earlier, at the Palmiere house on Rue Toulouse, and Louis had received him with the basic goodwill that hid behind his sardonic manner. Louis had listened attentively to what Edward was asking. He had asked several precise questions about Edward’s background and his experience of commercial life and his facility with figures, and Edward had answered them honestly, and Louis had said that he had a correspondent in Philadelphia, and that he thought a letter of introduction could be arranged, and that a man who knew shipping and was willing to work would not starve in Philadelphia, even during this war with England. He had said this last part with the mild emphasis of someone who was aware of the full situation and considered the point worth making.

“Louis Palmiere,” his mother said, in the tone she reserved for people who had been useful to others at her expense.

“He has been very kind,” Edward said.

Another silence, longer than the previous ones. Robert was looking at his hands with the expression of a man who has discovered that the reasonable discussion between reasonable people has arrived at an unreasonable conclusion. His mother set down her coffee cup with a precision that communicated everything she was not saying.

“Robert will be your father’s heir,” she said at last. “In every sense.”

“I know,” Edward said. “I think Robert will manage it very well.”

Robert, to his credit, did not look pleased by this. He looked instead at the middle distance and said nothing.

Edward left the house on Esplanade at half past nine and walked back to his rooms in the Faubourg Tremé through the January night, which was cold by New Orleans standards and not cold by any other measure, the air damp and the streets quieter than they were in summer but not quiet, because New Orleans was never entirely quiet. He walked without hurrying and thought about what had just happened with the detached clarity that sometimes followed the conclusion of a thing long anticipated.

In his rooms he lit the lamp and sat at the small table where he wrote his letters and allowed himself, for a few minutes, to simply sit with what he had done. The money was gone, or would be, and the political prospects his mother had been cultivating with such patience were gone with it, and Robert would have the Baltimore house and the shipping contacts and the accumulated weight of a family’s expectations. Edward had a letter of introduction from Louis Palmiere and a Catholic parish in Philadelphia and a woman fifteen miles up the River Road whom he had not yet asked and who might say no.

He thought about that possibility with the honesty it deserved. She might say no. He did not think she would, but he had not always been a reliable judge of what other people intended, and she was a woman who made her decisions carefully and on the basis of clear thinking rather than feeling, and the clear thinking might produce conclusions different from his own about the practical difficulties of what he was proposing. She had a mother to consider, and a sister, and a life she had built in this city from reduced circumstances with considerable effort, and he was proposing to ask her to leave all of it for a city neither of them had been to, on the strength of a letter of introduction and his unproven conviction that he could make something of himself there.

He sat with this for a while and found that it did not change anything, which was itself informative.

He took out a piece of paper and began to write to her. He wrote for a long time, about the dinner and what had been said and what he had said in return, and about Pennsylvania law and Saint Mary’s parish and what Louis Palmiere had told him and what he thought it meant for the practical question of how two people built a life in a city they did not yet know. He wrote about the things he had not yet said to her and why he had not said them. He wrote about what he intended to say as soon as she would hear it, as soon as her sister was well enough for Éléonore to pay attention to other things.

He wrote until the letter was finished and then he read it and folded it and set it on the table in front of him and looked at it for a moment.

Then he put it in the drawer, because she was fifteen miles up the River Road with a sick sister and his letter was not the most important thing happening to her at this moment, and he knew it.

But the writing of it had done what writing things did, which was to make them irrevocable. He had said it, even to no one, and the saying could not be unsaid, and that was enough for tonight.

He blew out the lamp and in the dark of the room listened to the Faubourg Tremé going about its nighttime business beyond the shutters, a guitar somewhere, voices in French, the river doing what it always did, and thought that whatever came next, at least he knew what he was doing and why, which was more than he had been able to say for most of his adult life.