For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude managed to leave Marianne – Mari. Fricking. Anne – out of the first draft of this scene. This is the second. I cut a whole two paragraphs of blah blah at the beginning and trimmed other bits throughout. My main takeaway from this particular ai fanfic has been that I do not remotely have the patience to ride herd on a book length ai first draft and make it good enough for publication. Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this fanfic. Stay tuned for The Rector’s Other Business, coming sometime in May.

Departure

Alejandro had died on the morning of the duel, which Edward had told her when he rode up the River Road that afternoon with the news. She had received this information and then gone to find Marianne, who was on the gallery with a book she had not been reading, and had told her directly, because Marianne had always been better served by directness than by management.

Marianne had looked at the fields for a long moment without speaking. Then she said, “Was it quick.”

“I believe so,” Éléonore said. “Yes.”

Another silence. The river moved beyond the levee in the ordinary way it had of moving regardless of what was happening on its banks.

“I don’t know what I am supposed to feel,” Marianne said. Not distress, precisely. The voice of someone conducting an honest inventory and reporting the results accurately. “I have been trying to feel the correct thing since Edward arrived and I find I don’t know what it is.”

“I don’t think there is a correct thing,” Éléonore said.

Marianne looked at her. “He ruined Élise. He was careless with me. He is dead and I am sitting on this gallery going to Philadelphia and I feel…” she stopped. “I feel that it is very strange. That it does not resolve into anything clean. I wanted it to resolve into something clean.”

“I know,” Éléonore said.

“Élise loved him,” Marianne said. “Some part of her. She would not have been deceived by someone she did not love.”

“No,” Éléonore said. “She would not.”

Marianne looked at the fields again and was quiet for a moment and then said, “I think I am sad for Élise. Mostly that. The rest of it I don’t know what to call.” She paused. “Is that sufficient?”

“I think it is honest,” Éléonore said. “Which is better than sufficient.”

Marianne accepted this and went back to the book she was not reading, and Éléonore sat with her in the afternoon light, and after a while Marianne actually read, and the gallery was quiet, and that was enough.

She had told Élise that same evening. Morin had already told her, she found, when she came to the kitchen where Élise was sitting with Pascal in the lamplight. Élise’s face had the quality of someone who has been weeping and has finished and is now on the other side of it, not composed exactly but past the worst, and she was looking at Pascal.

“He knew about Pascal,” Élise said when Éléonore sat down. “He knew and he chose as he chose. I am not going to grieve for him.” A pause. “I am going to try not to.”

“Those are different things,” Éléonore said.

“Yes,” Élise said. “They are.” She looked at Pascal. “I know that. I am trying to know it all the way through.”

Éléonore had sat with her until the lamp burned low, and had not said much, because much was not what was needed.

The packing had taken three days and the organization of the farm’s disposition had taken most of Morin’s attention and considerable amounts of Joseph’s, and the letters had been written and the accounts settled and the practical machinery of departure had ground forward with the relentless momentum of things that have been set in motion and cannot be stopped, only directed.

Mrs. Jennings had come to the cottage on the Monday with provisions for the journey and feelings about the whole affair that she managed in the way she managed most difficult things, which was by doing something useful at considerable volume. She had embraced Céleste in the courtyard and shaken Morin’s hand and told Marianne she looked better than she had any right to after a fever and told Edward that letters were expected and their absence would be noted at distance.

To Éléonore, in the kitchen, she said that she was glad and furious in approximately equal measure.

“The gladness will win,” Éléonore said.

“It had better,” said Mrs. Jennings. She pressed another jar of preserves into her hands, and embraced her with the fierceness of someone who has decided that if they hold on tightly enough the feeling can be converted into something useful, and then turned away and found something in another part of the kitchen that required her immediate attention, and Éléonore let her go.

The levee in the January morning was cold and busy with the ordinary commerce of the port, and the Étoile du Sud sat at the dock with the purposeful solidity of a vessel that has made this journey many times and intends to make it again regardless of the particular weight of those it is carrying today.

Louis was there, and Charlotte, and Mrs. Jennings, which Éléonore had expected. The loading of the trunks provided occupation for hands during the interval that was too late for more conversation and too early to board, and she moved through it with the attention she gave to practical things, confirming with the steward, checking that Élise had what she needed for Pascal within reach rather than in the hold, establishing which trunks could be stowed entirely.

She was managing the question of Edward’s books when she saw Marianne and Morin at the levee’s edge, slightly apart from the activity, looking at the river. Marianne said something without turning her head and he said something back and the quality of the exchange was too low to carry across the noise of the levee.

Then Marianne turned and looked back at the city, the rooflines and the cathedral spire and the streets she had come to against her will and found more various and more real than she had expected them to be, and her face had the expression Éléonore recognized as the one that succeeded grief rather than inhabiting it, the face of someone on the other side of something, not unmarked but past it.

Morin said something else, quiet, and Marianne looked at him, and something in her expression shifted into the quality Éléonore had been watching develop for weeks now, the quality of someone who has stopped bracing against a thing and has simply let it be what it is, which was, she thought, as close to peace as Marianne was likely to get in January on a levee in the middle of a departure, and was enough.

Céleste boarded early, with the composure of a woman who has made her decision and is living forward into it. She had said her goodbyes to the Faubourg Marigny in her own way and in her own time, and Éléonore did not know what those goodbyes had been and did not need to know, because her mother crossed the gangplank without looking back and that was sufficient.

Élise boarded with Pascal against her shoulder, and Éléonore watched her cross the gangplank and thought about October, the parlor at Mrs. Jennings’s house and the untouched lemonade and the eyes that were focused on nothing, the girl holding herself together under a weight no one in the room could see, and she thought that whatever Pascal grew up to be he would grow up with a mother of considerable strength.

Edward appeared at her shoulder.

“The books are sorted,” he said.

“Were you listening to that entire conversation?”

“I was nearby,” he said, and she looked at him with the look that communicated her opinion of this response, and he received it with the composure of a man who has decided that composure is the correct response to this particular look and will continue to decide so for the foreseeable future.

She did not say anything more about the books.

The levee crew was preparing to cast off and Louis was saying something to Morin with the handclasp that was more than a handclasp, and Charlotte had her arm through Mrs. Jennings’s arm with the practiced ease of a daughter who has learned exactly how much support to offer and when, and Mrs. Jennings was saying that was probably about letters and the consequences of not sending them, and all of it was happening at once the way things happen at departures, the whole of it too much to hold and therefore held in pieces, each piece its own small complete thing.

Éléonore looked at the city behind the levee. She had come to it in a carriage crossing Canal Street with her mother’s hands clasped too tightly and her sister’s hand fierce in hers and a future that had seemed at the time to consist primarily of what had been lost, and she had found in it, against the considerable odds of the year that followed, something that was not what she had expected to find. The cottage in the Faubourg Marigny with its bougainvillea and its lemon tree. Mrs. Jennings in the parlor with her warmth and her noise. The Morin property in the January sun. Edward in a bookshop on Rue Royale on a Thursday afternoon asking what she was looking for.

She thought about her father in the sickroom with the mockingbird in the courtyard and the camphor smell and the way he had said she was the best of them, which she had not believed and had not thought about much since because thinking about it was difficult, and she thought about it now and found that the difficulty had changed its character, was less sharp than it had been, was something she could hold without flinching.

She picked up the bag with the fig preserves and crossed the gangplank.

They assembled at the rail on the river side as the lines were cast off, all of them, Céleste and Marianne and Morin and Élise with Pascal and Edward beside her, and the Étoile du Sud moved out from the bank with the purposeful shudder of a vessel that has decided on its direction, and New Orleans fell away behind them, the levee and the rooflines and the cathedral spire and Mrs. Jennings on the dock getting smaller with the distance and still, even at this range, visibly in the middle of a sentence.

The river opened ahead of them. Broad and brown and silver in the flat January light, and the cold air on her face smelling of water and distance, and the city behind the levee’s curve until it was gone, and then only the river and the sky and the country on either side moving past.

Edward stood beside her at the rail and said nothing, because he knew when nothing was right.

She thought about Philadelphia, which she had never seen, and about what it would ask of her.

The river went north. The sky was pewter and wide. Éléonore Dashwood stood at the rail and looked at the water ahead and was ready.