For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Nothing exciting about this one, except that I had to shuffle things on wordpress a bit so that it came before tomorrow’s Marianne scene. First Claude draft below the cut; trimmed and tweaked.

The Proposal

Edward rode up the River Road on a Thursday, twelve days after the fever broke, which was four days after Éléonore had sent a note to the city saying that Marianne was recovering and that the worst was past. She had not asked him to come. She had written the note because he deserved to know and because not telling him would have been a withholding she was not willing to practice, and she had not asked him to come because asking felt like a presumption she had not yet earned the right to make.

He came anyway, which she had not allowed herself to expect and found, when Joseph appeared at the gallery rail to say there was a rider on the road, that she had been expecting after all, in the way one expects things one has been carefully not thinking about.

She went down to the gate to meet him, which she did not examine too carefully as a decision. He dismounted and Joseph took the horse and they stood in the January light at the gate with the kitchen garden behind her and the levee path behind him and the River Road beyond that, and he looked at her with the look she had learned to read as the look that preceded his saying something he had decided to say and was now saying.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I am tired,” she said. “Come and sit down.”

They went up to the gallery, which was empty in the mid-morning, Marianne having been persuaded inside for her rest and Céleste occupied in the kitchen with Élise. Morin was in the fields. She brought coffee, and Edward accepted it and they sat in the chairs that had become their chairs across the weeks of visits and the weeks of convalescence, and she looked at the rosemary along the wall and waited, because waiting was what the moment required and she had become, across the past weeks, very practiced at waiting.

“Marianne is truly better,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“She is on the gallery every afternoon. She and Morin have been arguing about Rousseau for three days.” She paused. “She is better.”

“And you?”

She looked at him. “I will be better when I have slept properly. I am told that will happen eventually.”

He smiled, briefly, and then looked at his coffee cup.

“I went to dinner on Esplanade,” he said. “Two weeks ago. The evening after you left for the River Road.”

She was still. “I know. Mrs. Jennings wrote.”

“What did she write?”

“That you had declined your mother’s plans for you.” A pause. “That the conversation had been considerable.”

“That is one way to describe it.” He set down his coffee cup on the gallery rail. “Robert is to be my father’s heir. My mother has made her position clear and I have made mine clear and we understand each other.” He looked at her steadily. “I have spoken with Louis Palmiere. He has a correspondent in Philadelphia, a merchant house. He believes there is work for a man of my background if I am willing to start modestly and build from there. I am willing.”

Éléonore looked at the rosemary along the wall and thought about what she was hearing and what it meant and what it required of her, and found that it required honesty, which was the thing she was most capable of giving and most afraid to give simultaneously.

“Philadelphia,” she said.

“Pennsylvania law does not prohibit what Louisiana law prohibits.” He said it plainly, without the softening that would have been less accurate. “There is a Catholic parish, Saint Mary’s, established long enough to have a community around it. It is a city where I could work and where we could,” he paused, with the precision of a man selecting the right word for a thing that required precision, “where we could be married. Legally and in the Church. If you were willing.”

The gallery was very quiet. Below, in the kitchen garden, a small bird landed on the rosemary and departed again immediately, as though it had remembered somewhere more important to be. The river smell came over the levee on the light wind, cold and mineral and entirely itself.

She thought about what he was offering and what it would cost. It would cost her the city she had come to know in the way one knows places that have required something of you, not comfortably but deeply. It would cost her the cottage in the Faubourg Marigny with its bougainvillea and its lemon tree and which had become, despite everything, a place she had made her own. It would cost her the known quantity of what she had, in exchange for what she and Edward might build in a city neither of them had been to, on the strength of a letter of introduction.

She thought about Lucie Acier, which was the illogical thought she had been carrying for weeks. She looked at it directly, and found that it was what she had always known it to be, which was small and unfounded, and she dismissed it.

She thought about her mother, which was not a small thought and was not dismissible. Céleste had made her life in New Orleans. She had roots here that went deeper than the plaçage arrangement, deeper than Henry Dashwood, deeper than the cottage in the Faubourg Marigny. She had friends here and history here and the particular belonging that comes from knowing every street and every season of a place over many years. Asking her to leave it was not a small thing.

She was about to say this, to begin with it as the practical question that needed answering before any other question could be answered, when he said, “I have already thought of your mother. If she will come. I think she should come, if she is willing, and I think Philadelphia will suit her better than New Orleans would with you gone. I have discussed it with Louis, who agrees, and I believe Mrs. Jennings will agree when it is put to her, though she will take some time to reach that conclusion.”

Éléonore looked at him.

“You discussed my mother with Louis Palmiere,” she said.

“And with Mrs. Jennings,” he said, with the composure of a man who has anticipated this response and considers it reasonable. “I wanted to have the practical questions in order before I asked the question that made them necessary.”

She thought about this for a moment and thought about the man who had shown up on moving day with a crate of preserves and secured the weakened trunk latch without being asked, the man who had ridden alongside the carriage all fifteen miles of River Road without saying anything because that was what was needed. She found that she was not surprised, and that not being surprised was, in itself, a kind of answer.

“You should have asked me first,” she said. “Before Louis. Before Mrs. Jennings.”

“Yes,” he said. “I should have. I was managing my own uncertainty before I had dealt with yours, which was the wrong order.” A pause. “I am asking you now.”

She looked at him for a long moment in the January light, this man who had come fifteen miles up the River Road on a Thursday morning to ask her a question he had already done the practical work of. She thought that she had been right about him from the beginning.

“I have one condition,” she said.”My mother comes with us,” she said. “Not as a courtesy. As a settled thing.”

“I had assumed as much,” he said, “and have already calculated for it.”

She looked at him for a moment, this entirely predictable man, and she laughed, which surprised her more than it surprised him. She thought that she had not laughed, properly and without effort, in quite some time, and that it felt considerably better than she had remembered.

“Yes,” she said, when the laugh had finished. “Yes. I will marry you and go with you to Philadelphia and we will see what we can build there.”

He looked at her with the expression she had seen on him in the bookshop and at the levee and at Mrs. Jennings’s window, the expression of a man who has found something he had stopped expecting to find.

“Good,” he said, which was not adequate but it was the only thing to be said.

She said, “You should stay for dinner. Marianne will want to know you are here, and Morin will be interested to hear about your plans in Philadelphia.”

“I had hoped to stay,” he said. “I brought preserves.”

She looked at him. “You brought preserves.”

“From Mrs. Jennings. She said to tell you she is furious about Philadelphia and entirely in favor of it and that these are the last of the fig preserves from the summer.”

“Come and say hello to Marianne,” she said, and stood, and he stood, and they went inside together.