“Hundreds,” she said, taking out another tray and showing him the beetles there. They were all a brilliant blue and larger in size than the others she’d shown him. “The most exceptional specimens go in the upper drawers.”
“Do you only collect insects?”
“Butterflies and beetles alone. There are an infinite variety of beetles, and you can find them nearly all year round. Do you know that perhaps one fifth of all living creatures are beetles?”
“I did not know that.”
“They live everywhere. Near the water and in the bark of trees, in the sand or in the jungle. Besides, they are most beautiful. It is like owning a chest of six-legged jewels.”
“In that event, I suppose instead of purchasing a necklace for you for your birthday, I ought to buy you a beetle.”
“Perhaps you should,” she said. “Though my birthday is not until the winter and still far off.”
Hector walked around the room and leaned down to look at a few volumes and journals she had left scattered upon a circular center table.
“The Gazette for Physical Research,” he said, holding up one of the journal copies.
“Where I met you,” Nina replied, setting her tray down.
She stood next to him, watching him as his fingers touched the cover of a book. He opened another one at a random page.
“Are you the chief naturalist in your family, or does your sister share this passion?”
Nina shook her head. “Madelena and my mother’s passion is words. If ever you need to know the meaning of an obscure word, Madelena will provide you with it. My aunts Lise and Linette were avid bird watchers and went to the islands of Souxe many times to see tropical ones, though they are far too old now to be chasing after them. They have rare illustrated monographs in their home. My cousin Gaétan enjoyed looking at moths, of course. And there was my father, though he was more interested in physiology, which seems reasonable considering his condition.”
Hector gave her a questioning glance.
“He was born with a weak heart,” she explained. “They said he wouldn’t live into adulthood, which is why he was not sent to be schooled in Loisail as my uncle was. He stayed in Oldhouse all his life with his sisters.”
“Hence the engravings.”
“Yes, see here,” she said, moving toward one engraving and pointing at it. “That is a human heart with all its veins and arteries. It was drawn by Georges Pizon—he is one of the best anatomical artists of our time. He was my father’s friend and correspondent.”
The drawing was in color, the ventricles rendered in shades of gray, but the veins and arteries highlighted with blue and crimson. The organ was shown in an anterior and posterior view.
“I saw a drawing once, it purported to show the regions of a woman’s heart,” Hector mused. “It mapped the lands of coquetry and sentiment.”
“A poet’s fancy.”
“And you do not fancy poets?”
“I didn’t say that, but one must admit a real heart as seen by the anatomist bears no resemblance to the heart the poets speak about, dainty in its shape.”
He was amused by her words, quirking an eyebrow at her and placing his hands behind his back as he inspected the engraving.
After a while, he turned his head to look at her. “When did your father pass away?” he asked her.
“Four years ago this fall.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be. As I said, they expected him to die in childhood, and he grew to marry and become a father. He confided in me once that he was so frail, everyone let him do as he pleased while his brother had to do as the family said. He said sometimes being the runt of the litter has its benefits, which is excellent news for me, since I am also a runt.”
“How is that?”
“I’m the Witch of Oldhouse, Mr. Auvray. Do you think there is a region of the heart where you can find our talent? Or of the brain? I have a porcelain model of the brain,” she said.
She looked around, trying to remember where she’d put it. Nina was scrupulous about her insect collection and she did try to maintain a similar amount of order when it came to books and other items, but they were more slippery to handle. She picked them up and dropped them and left them, she pulled them down and promised herself she’d take them up again only to find three weeks later they were still resting against the chaise longue. Letters, letter openers, knickknacks, suffered a similar fate, scattered by her talent or her own hands.
“I do not know what makes me capable of manipulating objects with my mind alone, though learned men have tried to provide the answer and will continue to do it,” Hector said.
“The tests they did, what were the machines like?”
“Measuring devices, for the pulse and respiration. A needle traces a line upon paper and they look at it.”
“It’s supposed to be a congenital condition, isn’t it? Like being color-blind,” Nina mused. “Did they tease you about it when you were a child? Or was it different for you?”
“I started performing when I was but a child, and there was not copious teasing. I was another act set between the pretty dancers and the man who could make dogs jump through a hoop. When I was older and we’d go into towns, sometimes the locals would give us trouble, but it amounted to naught for the most part.”
“What kind of trouble?” she asked, drifting to the other side of the room and climbing on the tall stepladder to see if the porcelain brain might be hiding behind the atlases she had been inspecting the previous day.
“The trouble bored lads like to get into. They’d taunt us and try to pick fights, but they’d generally stop when they saw I could hurl a man across the room without setting a hand on him. They were rowdy young men looking for another type of performance.”
Nina willed an atlas aside, and another. It was not there. She began stepping down. “Did they ever hurt you?”
“Someone cracked a bottle across my back one evening. But I was drunk and silly that time. And then, there were a couple of beatings.… I lost a tooth. I have a false one now. You’d never be able to tell, but it hurt like hell when it happened.”
He lifted an arm to steady her as she climbed down the last two steps. “I’m sorry,” she said gravely.
“I didn’t play the best of venues when I was starting out. And for a while after that.” He smirked, trying to make light of it. “You’ll think me a rogue now.”
“I would never. You know a gentleman by his deeds, my sister says.”
“Wise of her.”
Nina touched the ground and smiled at him. Their walk had left him in high spirits, and she was grateful for this. He’d been upset a few days before, when they’d skipped stones by the river. One moment he had been warm and near; the next he was a block of ice, impenetrable. In the love stories she’d read—books borrowed from this library—the men were always solicitous, sweet, and pledged their love in long, effusive speeches that ended with a tender kiss.
Hector said nothing of the sort and he did not try to hold her in his arms or kiss her like the polite gentlemen of those narratives. Neither was he like the highwayman or the pirate who appeared in yet another type of book, this one peppered with more adventure, which required that he kidnap her.