“You’ve succeeded in your venture,” he said as he stood in the doorway.
“I return like a triumphant conqueror,” she replied. “There’s some more items that will be delivered in a few days, but this should do for now.”
He nodded at her, a smile on his lips, before he removed his hat and began tugging at his cravat, his eyes unable to mask his worry.
“Where have you been?”
“I went to see your cousin, but he would not speak to me. I left a letter for him, but he sent a note back saying he is to be Luc Lémy’s second and cannot converse at this time.”
“Then I shall have to go see him.”
Nina sat down at the edge of the bed. In her childish excitement over purchasing new clothes, she had forgotten all about her mother and her sister and her cousin. She should have written to them at once; it might have smoothed the proceedings. They must all be thinking ill of Hector and of her.
“No, let it be. He has made a choice. After the duel, we can try to speak to him together and secure your family’s blessing.”
The duel. That, too, had been pushed from her mind, eclipsed by her mundane errands. Now the fear clawing at her heart washed over her anew.
“Luc hunts,” she declared.
“Yes, he does.”
“I mean he is a skillful shot.”
“I won’t deny it.”
“How good are you with a pistol?”
“I am a performer, not a hunter.”
At Oldhouse, Luc had made a show of riding on his horse and slinging a rifle over his shoulder. He’d know how to shoot; it was a gentleman’s pursuit. Hector had not been reared a gentleman, and even if he’d had a chance to toy with pistols at a later point in life, surely he could not overcome the edge Luc had.
“But then, what will you do?” she asked.
“I shall wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow he may have changed his tune,” he said calmly, as if they’d invited Luc over for tea.
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then tomorrow my second is coming to see me, to relay and negotiate the conditions of the duel.”
She’d thought duels romantic, but now that they were discussing this matter, now that this was real, she only felt alarm.
“If you can’t shoot properly, we might as well call it an execution,” she said, unable to soften the grim words.
Hector removed his jacket and set it on the back of a chair. “Let us not debate my mortality right this instant, shall we?” he asked, trying to make light of the whole affair. “There are more important topics to ponder.” He sat next to her on the bed.
“Like what?” she scoffed.
“Like you.”
“Me?”
He leaned toward her, his voice dipping, almost secretive. “I have a delicate question to ask. It is about us. About us last night. I hope I did not frighten you.”
Rather than feeling embarrassed, as might have been expected, she was incensed, guessing that he probably thought her a complete fool fresh from the countryside who could not say what went on in the marital chamber. They covered the genitals of statues with fig leaves, marble made modest in this manner, but not the drawings in anatomical books.
“Hector, I am a naturalist. I have read books discussing the mating habits of many species,” she told him.
“It is somewhat different when you are talking of something other than beetles.”
“It depends. Beetles have fascinating mating habits. When stag beetles emerge, all they want to do is mate, and the male encloses the female on the ground with its antlers.”
“I’m wanting to ask whether you are fine. Whether it was fine,” he said.
He ran a hand carelessly across the rumpled bedsheets, and it was that vague, intimate gesture that made her dip her head and blush.
“My cousin Cecily, all she’d say after she married Émile was that she wouldn’t rise for a week, but she is a liar and was surely trying to scare me, though her point about having to speak to the druggist, to ensure one doesn’t have a babe at the first opportunity, I think was true,” Nina said, frowning. “I don’t think I’d like to have a child now. But I didn’t think it was too awful.”
“Not too awful,” he repeated.
“Don’t take it like that. I hardly know what to say.”
He put both hands on her face, and she looked up at him.
“You can say, ‘Hector, you fool, you were too impatient’ or too unkind or anything at all. It is the way it gets better, if you correct whatever inadequate notions I may have.”
Nina considered this with care, her fingers twisting around a corner of the bedsheets.
“What?” he asked.
“We could try again, and I can keep better mental notes next time you seduce me and discuss the results of this experiment with you later.”
He laughed loudly, where before he had been speaking almost in whispers. “What a lovely creature you are,” he said.
She kissed him and undid the buttons of his vest.
“I think you seduced me and not the other way around,” he said as she eased him from his shirt.
“You might be right.”
He had not kissed her for a considerable length of time, but now he kissed her slowly, over and over. He wasn’t greedy on this occasion—there had been a volatile impatience to him, as though he’d thought she’d vanish from his arms—and she thought it pleasant, the weight of him on her and even more pleasant later as she gripped his shoulders.
Nina had spent the previous night in the darkness of his room, feeling startled, her eyes wide open as he slept next to her, the thought that the priest from her church and the martyrs on the stained-glass windows would have been cross with her. In the morning, though, she had sneaked into his bathroom, and lying in the tub all that came to mind were the songs she sang whenever she went by the river, the water reaching her thighs. Then he’d walked in as she sat in the tub, and even though there was her immortal soul to consider and also the scandal, she’d shoved those concerns away. They didn’t seem important anymore.
It wasn’t dark this time. She could see him as he lay next to her, his chest rising and falling, and it was a substantially more attractive sight than the images of martyrs. Not that she was ever worried about damnation; it had always seemed an abstract concept.
Other, more practical matters did disquiet her.
Hector toyed lazily with her hair, wrapping a strand around his fingers.
“We could run away,” she said.
“From Luc Lémy? I am certain he meant what he said, that he’d give chase.”
She folded her arms across her chest, and fear filled her, as water fills the lungs of the drowning swimmer. “We could get on a ship. He is not going to chase us all the way to Iblevad, is he?”
“Perhaps we’d evade him. And you’d spend the rest of your life as an exile.”
Nina did not reply. It was heartbreaking having to picture her family lost, her mother and her sister and her cousin turned into a distant memory. But it was the logical choice.
“Never to set your eyes on Oldhouse again. Do you think that would be correct?” he asked.
She knew the answer even before he spoke, resolution sharp on his face. There was no convincing him. He would not relent. Matters of honor were paramount to gentlemen, and he was more stubborn than most.