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.
In short, she was not his sweetheart, and this confused Nina. If he was to marry her, shouldn’t he spare a kiss for her and declare his love? She was certain they’d wed and had written practically as much when she corresponded with her cousins and her sister. The whole household watched them both with expectant eyes. It could not be her imagination, as Valérie implied. That day, when she invited him to Oldhouse, she’d thought he’d kiss her.
The answer, then, must be he was shy. She’d have to have enough boldness for the both of them. Should he remain aloof, she would put pen to paper and express her affections. She did like him, although she had not ever thought how a lady would go on about revealing this to a man.
As she was considering this, she saw a white object on the floor, half-hidden behind a curtain.
“There!” she exclaimed, and rushed to pick up the model she’d been looking for. It was heavy and Nina could not imagine how it had ended up there—though, when she was nervous or excited, she did have the tendency to move things around the room without touching them.
Nina held the model up between her hands.
“My brain, Mr. Auvray,” she joked.
“A fine one it is,” he said, grabbing the model and turning it around in his hands.
His finger traced