“It seems strange. To spend your life wandering from place to place.”
“It was a living.”
“And now? Have you fallen under the spell of Loisail and wish to remain there forever and ever?”
The mention of Loisail brought to him, unbidden, the memory of Valérie’s face. He associated her with the city, her white dresses and pale face seemed to reflect the beautiful, clean lines of the metropolis.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“That is no answer,” she reproached him.
“I am sorry if my words do not please you,” he said, his voice harder than he had intended.
Nina quirked an eyebrow at him, perhaps trying to determine what was souring his mood. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his trousers and stared at the water.
She, in turn, began humming to herself and walked a few steps from him, picking a twig, tossing it at the water first with her hands, then grabbing another and flinging it away without touching it. Nina was lighter on her feet now. More practiced, as if she was better suited to navigating slippery stones and muddy banks than dancing on glossy parquet floors.
Unlike Valérie, who had been made for elegant dances and the lights of the city, the whisper of a fan against her cheek, her smile sparkling under a glass chandelier. The most beautiful woman he’d ever met.
He tried to imagine what he might be like if he’d never laid eyes upon her, if they’d never spoken. Whether he might be happy or equally miserable. Perhaps he was predisposed to follies, the victim of a nervous ailment.
Hector looked across the water, at the trees on the other side of the riverbank, and he breathed in deeply.
Nina turned toward him, her smile full of mischief. “I can make a stone skip farther than you,” she proclaimed.
Hector looked at her and shrugged. The game had lost its appeal for him.
“Try me. If I win, I am mistress of this river and it shall bear my name. If you win, we can call it the Auvray.”
“It is silly. The river already has a proper name, and no doubt you know it.”
“What if it is silly,” she said, standing on a rock, close to the water. “Are you afraid I’m better than you at this?”
“Surely you are not,” he said.
“Toss a stone.”
Hector decided to humor her, feeling that she would not cease if he did not concede. He sent a stone across the water and it skipped four, five times.
“I am better,” she said as the stone disappeared into the river.
When she proceeded to demonstrate that this was the case with ease and panache—her stone skipped six times—he chuckled and placed an arm around her shoulders in a gesture of gentle camaraderie.
“You are mistress of the river, Nina Beaulieu.”
“You can borrow it once in a while if you like,” she said. Nina glanced up at him, resting a palm against his chest, her fingers on the buttons of his coat.
He was scrupulously well behaved when it came to the girl, not even daring to kiss her cheek. He did not fancy himself a cad. He was cautious. There could be no harm this way, he reasoned. He was but a friend, he told himself. He had yet to make binding promises. He could have peace of mind this way.
Nina was a pleasant creature, and if her face was not as pretty as Valérie’s, then her disposition was more amenable. Logic dictated he should cease any pursuit of Valérie and attempt a more solid and achievable relationship with Nina. In theory, he was willing to follow such logic.
In practice, he was paralyzed, and had been in this state for some time. His visit to Oldhouse only served to make this point more obvious.
Hector had spent so many years being the man who loved Valérie that he could not conceive of becoming anything else. She was a goddess at whose feet he worshipped, and to cease in his adoration of her would imply he had spent a decade following a false idol.
All his grand romantic passions and florid sentiments, each sigh and each ache, would amount to nothing. He might amount to nothing.
Hector gently stepped back, putting a certain distance between them. Nina gazed at him with questioning eyes. Innocent she might be, but not so innocent as to not realize something was amiss. Books and poems must have suffused her with notions of romance, of suitors and kisses, which now did not come.
But her suspicions were vague. Fervent passion had evaded her. Nina could only guess a void existed. Hector could keep her dancing to this tune for months. And yet.
Love, he’d told Étienne, was not a concern for him anymore. He could not assume it was the same for her. She’d want to be loved, and then what would he give her, except wan smiles, a tepid kiss upon the brow, a life of monotones?
He turned around to look at Oldhouse and slid his hands back in his pockets. “Shall we head back?” he asked, his tone light though his tongue felt leaden. “Étienne and Luc might have returned by now.”
“Very well,” she said, and her voice was also mock light.
He watched her walk ahead of him and shook his head.
The sublime pain of Valérie kept dragging him away, down, like the river dragged stones, twigs, and leaves in its path, brooking no compromise.
CHAPTER 15
They went back not to the river but to a sluggish stream that ran farther away, specimen bottles in hand. Nina picked up pieces of bark, looking to see what insects lay beneath. She brushed her hands against the tall grasses and listened to the wind rustling in the trees. Red and blue dragonflies danced above the riverbanks. The caddisflies had not yet hatched, and rested upon the surface of the water in their cocoons of silk.
Hector brought her luck, nevertheless, and Nina found a beautiful water diving beetle that was the color of molten gold and looked like a lady’s brooch that she might wear to the opera. In the process of catching it, Nina thoroughly soaked her shoes and skirt.
They sat atop a stone slab, the sun shining bright, and in a short amount of time her skirt was dry. It was nice outside, the silhouette of Oldhouse in the distance against the blue sky like out of a picture book.
When they reached the house, she guided him straight to the library. The bookshelves spanned from floor to ceiling, sagging under the weight of knowledge, decades of the family’s books also piling on the floor and chairs. This was one of the finer rooms in the house, and Nina had spent many hours here, spinning the engraved terrestrial globe upon its cherrywood base, reading at turns sentimental fiction and at others scientific texts. Anatomical drawings decorated the walls, and a long carpet, dimly faded and with an elaborate pattern of green and golden diamonds, ran at one end of the room.
The most eye-catching element in the library was a massive mahogany cabinet containing rows and rows of drawers, each one with a number painted on it. Next to it, there was a humbler cabinet that held pins, bottles, pillboxes, string, cork, brushes, ink, and all the other items one might need to mount beetles and butterflies, which she’d been doing since she was a child.
Nina set her specimen bottle upon a table and opened the mahogany cabinet for Hector to see. “This is what I was telling you,” she said, holding up a tray. “All my specimens are kept here.”
The tray contained diminutive yellow, red, and blue beetles in the brightest colors imaginable, glistening like fine-cut glass.
Hector looked at them curiously. “You must be able to fit many specimens in here.”