For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude drafted this scene out of order, so I had to trim a fair amount to bring it into continuity with scenes that take place earlier but were written later. I did like Claude’s take on how Elise’s revelation affected Marianne. I also liked that it assigned Morin a rather skeptical opinion of Rousseau.

Marianne’s Recovery

The gallery had become her world.

She had graduated to it ten days after the fever broke, which Morin had permitted with the qualified approval of a man who considered fresh air medicinal and bed rest subject to the law of diminishing returns, and she had not left it in the daytime since. It faced south and caught the January sun. From it she could see the kitchen garden and the fields beyond and the line of the levee and the winter sky above the river, and she had spent the days of her recovery learning this view with the attentiveness of someone who has been reminded recently that the ability to see anything at all is not to be taken for granted.

She was not the same person who had ridden up the River Road in Morin’s carriage in the grey December dawn. She was aware of this without being entirely sure yet what the difference was.

“Did I say anything else?” Marianne asked.

“You said that the second movement was the one,” Élise said. “Several times.”

Marianne had looked at the kitchen garden for a moment and then said, “That part was true, at least.”

She knew about Pascal’s father. She had held this knowledge carefully in the days since, turning it over in the way one turns over something that has sharp edges and must be handled with attention. Alejandro had seduced and abandoned Élise, who was white, who had no color to be held against her. He had done to Élise what he had done to Marianne and he had done it for the same reason. Sofía Mendoza had three sugar plantations and property in Havana and a family whom Doña Isabel had been cultivating since before either of them could walk.

She had not been rejected because of what she was. She had been used because of what he was: a man whose charm was real and whose character was not.

This was not, she was discovering, an easier thing to know than what she had believed in the fever. In some respects it was harder, because it removed the explanation that had at least made a kind of painful sense in the world she knew. Alejandro’s true sin was more arbitrary and therefore more difficult to respond to. The world’s racial hierarchy was an injustice she could be angry at. A man who had simply found her disposable was something smaller and meaner, somehow unworthy of the anguish he had caused her.

She had talked to Morin in the late afternoons when tthe farm’s work had reached the point where Morin could sit with the account books and be interrupted without too much trouble. She had learned, across these afternoons, that he had opinions about books that were as decided as her own, and that he found her tendency to feel her way to conclusions amusing rather than frustrating. She had learned that he spoke of Saint-Domingue in the way one speaks of a place that is still present in all the ways that matter, but most especially as a set of convictions that no loss or betrayal could alter. She had learned that he read Rousseau, whom she had always loved, and had arrived at conclusions about him considerably more sterner than hers. This had produced an argument lasting two afternoons that she had enjoyed more than anything she could recently remember enjoying.

She had learned, more gradually and without intending to, that the quality she had initially identified as reserve was not reserve. It was the quality of a man who did not speak unless he had something to say. She found, sitting with this knowledge in the January sun, that she had been misreading him since the first visit to this gallery. That the misreading had been a failure of attention she was not accustomed to in herself, and that it had taken a fever and ten days of convalescence to correct it.

Pascal was brought out to the gallery in the afternoons by Élise. Pascal at two months was small and dark-haired and regarded the world with the serious attention of someone who has recently arrived and is forming considered opinions about the arrangements. Marianne had, somewhere in the second week of her recovery, begun to hold him. She had discovered that he was very warm and that he had a way of looking at her face with complete absorption that she found, unexpectedly, very settling.

She was sitting with Pascal in the late afternoon of the twelfth day of her recovery, watching the light change on the fields, when Morin came in from the levee path and came up the gallery steps.

“Élise tells me you have been asking about Philadelphia,” he said.

“Éléonore mentioned it,” Marianne said. “The Palmiere connexions. The Catholic parish.” She looked at Pascal, who had fallen asleep against her arm with the sudden completeness of infants. “It seems a serious plan.”

“It is a serious plan,” Morin said. He looked at the fields. The light was going, the brief January afternoon contracting toward evening, and the laborers at the far edge of the property were moving toward the barn. “I have been in correspondence with a man in the free colored community there. A property owner. He knows of work.”

Marianne looked at him. He was still looking at the fields, his profile toward her in the fading light, and she thought about the account books and the farm and the kitchen garden and the free laborers and what it had cost to build this, and what it would cost to leave it, and what kind of man built a thing knowing he might have to leave it and built it well anyway.

“You would leave all this,” she said. It was not quite a question.

“I would leave what can be left,” he said. “The land can be sold or held in trust. Joseph will manage it.” A pause. “Some things cannot be left. Those come with me.”

Marianne looked at Pascal asleep on her arm and thought about what could not be left, and she thought that she understood what he meant and that understanding it was itself something new.

“I have also been thinking about Philadelphia,” she said.

He turned then and looked at her, with the full directness that she had learned to meet without flinching, and said nothing, which was the response of a man who has said what he intended to say and is waiting with genuine patience for the other person to say what they intend to say.

“I find I am thinking about it quite seriously,” she said. “More seriously than I would have expected, some months ago.”

“And what do you find, when you think about it seriously?” he asked. He asked it without inflection, the question of someone who genuinely does not know the answer and intends to listen to it rather than to what he hopes it will be.

She looked at him for a moment, this man who had read to Élise through the fever and was up before dawn every day and had sat with Marianne through the worst of her own fever with the steady unhurried presence of someone who had decided to be there and was there, entirely, without reservation or performance.

“I find,” she said carefully, “that Philadelphia seems considerably more interesting than it did before I came to this place.”

He held her gaze for a moment and then looked back at the fields, and something in his expression shifted in the way she had learned to watch for, the small change that in another man would have been a smile and in him was the thing behind a smile.

“It is a good city,” he said, with the restraint of a man exercising it deliberately. “Cold in winter. But there are worse things than cold.”

“Yes,” Marianne said. “There are considerably worse things than cold.”

The last of the light left the fields and the gallery held for a moment longer the particular quality of an understanding arrived at without being stated.

She pulled the blanket up against the evening chill and looked at the darkening fields and the lamp Morin lit on the far side of the gallery, warm and small against the January dark, and thought that she had been wrong about a great many things, and that being wrong, when it ended here, was perhaps not so very bad.

It was, in fact, quite a remarkable outcome.

She intended to tell Morin so, when the time was right.