“It’s not done,” was his reply.
“But they asked me to,” Nina protested.
“Yes. Best not make tongues wag, shall we?”
A man laughed loudly and she looked at him. He was glancing in their direction and she wondered if he was laughing at her or if it was a mere coincidence.
“Don’t be upset, I say this for your sake. You don’t want those old hens to be talking about you,” Luc said.
“If they are old hens, then what does it matter?” she said, pushing back. She was tired of everyone judging her harshly.
“You are a lady, not a member of a circus troupe.” His voice had a splinter of steel in it.
Nina looked down at her fingers. Luc handed her back her gloves and she clutched them but did not put them on. The fan dangled from a cord around her wrist.
“Nina, don’t be upset.”
She ran her hand along the mother-of-pearl handle of the fan. She had wanted to have fun, and the evening was souring.
Luc pressed a finger against her chin and tilted it up. He smiled at her and his eyes were soft, whatever slight unpleasantness had passed between them nothing but lightning streaking the sky, a moment there and then gone.
He was quick to forget, she thought. If ever they did quarrel in the morning, all would be amended by the evening.
“You look beautiful tonight. Did I say that already?” he told her.
She had woven hairpins that resembled orange blossoms into her black hair. Her dress was saffron taffeta with a ruched and pleated waistband, pretty and sunny and modish.
“Yes,” she said.
“Did I tell you I want to touch you?” he said. The timbre of his voice made her drop a glove.
He picked it up and handed it back to her, and Nina gripped it tight.
Luc lifted his head and smiled. He was amused. She guessed he’d wanted to make her blush, and he had accomplished it. Yet a second later, he was distracted.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I see Guillem is here. I must talk business with him. Ah, my luck.”
“Talk to him, then.” Luc hesitated and Nina chuckled. “I’ll be fine. It’s a party, Luc. We are supposed to chat with other people.”
“Perhaps we can dance again later. I’ve not bothered penciling anyone after the faster dances. Or, there’s always a walk in the maze,” he told her. “You’ll be well? On your own?”
“Yes, go,” she said, shooing him away.
She saw him walking through the crowd of revelers, greeting a man with an expansive chuckle. Two ladies, who stood next to the man, smiled and held their fans in their left hands, half-hiding their faces and looking at Luc. Luc was exaggerated in his charms, taking their hands and bowing low. Nina was not filled with cleaving jealousy. He had not spoken of courtship. She thought he might, and she did not know if this pleased her or not.
Nina felt eyes on her again and turned her head, guessing it was the “old hens” Luc had warned her about.
She was wrong.
It was Hector Auvray. Their eyes met, his gaze weighty then withdrawn.
He drifted out, away, and before she could put much thought into it, she was following him into another section of the house, into another room.
He stood in the middle of the library, his back to the door and hands in his pockets. The space was outfitted in crimson velvet, both on the curtains and the furniture. It was a small room, and the dark velvet made it seem even smaller.
And he seemed to fill up the space entirely.
“Do you always hide during parties?” she asked.
He turned around, looking surprised, but the surprise morphed quickly into composure.
“I don’t do too well at them, no,” he replied.
“A man of the stage and he cannot mingle at a party?”
“Being onstage does not require any conversational skills. I speak with my actions. At a party like this, though, everyone talks a secret language.”
“Yes. They do,” she said, remembering the women who’d glared at her.
Now that they were face-to-face, she did not know why she’d followed him. It had been a reflex, action before thought. She eyed the door and considered stepping out.
“I saw you out there, with the fan. You were good,” he said tentatively.
“You are saying that to please me,” she replied.
“No, I mean it.”
She thought he did. His praise had always been measured and doled out slowly. It was hard earned.
“You lacked a proper flourish, though,” he said, unable to leave a compliment be. “The ending. You can’t put your arms down and walk off a stage. You must give them a proper ending. It’s the most important part of the whole performance.”
“How would you have done it?”
“May I?” he asked, pointing to the fan.
The door beckoned. A clean exit without another word, she owed him nothing. But her interest had been piqued.
She removed the fan from her wrist and handed it to him. Hector let it rest on his left hand, then tossed it up in the air. As it fell, he opened it with the movement of two fingers and flung it to the right with great strength, but the fan then came recoiling back, snapped itself shut, and he caught it with his left hand.
He bowed, presenting her with the fan.
“If it’s moving that fast, how can you keep control of it?” she asked. The object had whipped by him rather ferociously. “And you were not looking at it.”
She moved her right hand, imitating his gesture, but he shook his head.
“No, not like that. Let it go, stop it at the last second, and don’t think that it will stop until that second. You don’t need to see, you don’t need to move your hands to know where an object is. If I dropped a coin behind you, you’d realize where the sound came from. Most of all, believe you can stop it.”
Nina flung the fan to the right three times, trying to catch it with her left hand as he’d done. She failed each time, but at the fourth she managed to grasp the basic mechanics of it even if she was clumsy in the execution.
He had manipulated the fan like it meant nothing, with the carelessness that can come only from years and years of practice. Despite her crude handling of the fan, he seemed almost to be admiring her in his own fashion.
She stopped, holding the fan tight in her hands. “I miss this,” she said softly. “The way you taught me things.”
He looked sad at her words and Nina bit her lip, wishing she had not mentioned it. How odd it was to be in his presence now, like drifting next to jagged edges and knives.
And yet.
“I should be heading out now,” he said quietly. “I hope I was not a bother.”
Hector inclined his head toward her, ever the polite gentleman, and she imitated him, not sure what she was doing. He’d be gone in another second. When she last saw him, it had been simpler to part, the memory of her misery giving her strength. But now she remembered the things that she enjoyed about him.
She didn’t think, just as she didn’t think when she climbed atop the Devil’s Throne and her sister chided her.
“Three Bridges Quarter is not far from your home. You could escort me to my great-aunts’ house,” she said abruptly.
Nina should not have said that, and yet as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she felt she could not have told him anything different.