M. Patenaude was in an editorial meeting, which she didn’t mind so much, because she wanted to find out as much as possible on her own before talking to him. She was embarrassed that she’d known so little of Henard’s experiments and of the Insightfuls when she talked to Christophe. People who had or once had magical abilities may have walked by her on the street or stood next to her in the morgue room. There was so much to learn that she felt like an explorer discovering a new land.
Obviously her parents had avoided the topic because of Aunt Brigitte.
The archive room, a maze of soaring wooden cabinets, had at least one copy of every daily newspaper since its founding in 1863. Given that she didn’t know when Henard or his patients first made headlines, she began at the only place she knew for certain. The end. After searching just a week’s worth of newspapers—during September 1870, when Henard was killed—she knew she’d underestimated the enormity of the task.
Nathalie pulled out the article about Henard’s death and leaned against a drawer, sizing up the rest of the row. Hundreds and hundreds of newspapers. It would take days to sort through them all.
She unfolded the newspaper dated September 17, 1870 and began to read.
Pierre Henard, Doctor of “Insight,” Found Dead in Laboratory
Dr. Pierre Henard, 58, was found dead in his laboratory Friday morning. Henard, who briefly rose to fame with his now-infamous blood transfusions, was likely poisoned, says Prefect of Police Émile de Kératry. Signs of a struggle were also evident; much of the doctor’s equipment was destroyed. Dozens of glass vials containing blood were shattered throughout the laboratory. Henard’s neck and face were covered in cuts made with a glass shard found at the scene; de Kératry said these were likely postmortem.
Vials containing blood. Like the blood jar. Was that a coincidence or a connection? Nathalie continued searching backward. In July 1870, there was another article of note.
Henard to Resume Transfusions
Advertisement posters spotted throughout Paris yesterday made an announcement: After a six-month hiatus following the accidental death of a patient during a transfusion, Dr. Pierre Henard is resuming his practice on August 1.
Despite the controversy surrounding Henard’s experiments, people continue to ask for the procedure.
“It’s not as busy as it once was,” said the owner of a nearby business, “but people are still coming out of there with bandages every now and then.”
In 1866, Henard conducted an experimental blood transfusion, blending science and, as some claim, “magic” to bestow “magical powers.” The procedure entails drawing blood, adding Henard’s proprietary chemical concoction to it, then reinjecting the blood into the body.
That first patient: the doctor himself.
Henard, who will no longer speak to members of the press, reportedly still possesses his power—the ability to diagnose disease through smell. He claims never to have experienced side effects, unlike all others who have received his transfusions, though rumors suggest he periodically loses his sense of taste.
Several patients have gone mad, and many say their magical abilities were temporary, some lasting as little as two months.
Has Henard refined his formula or procedure? Or, as one distraught former patient says, is it simply that “there are always people imprudent enough to ignore the lessons learned by others”?
She folded the newspaper and filed it back into the drawer.
“Nathalie? What are you doing?”
She jumped. M. Patenaude stood at the end of the row, hands behind his back, a modest smile on his lips. He rocked slightly on his heels.
“I—I was waiting to talk to you,” she said, leaning against the drawer.
“Yes, Arianne told me.” He pointed to the cabinet. “I meant what are you researching?”
“Dr. Henard.”
M. Patenaude’s caterpillar eyebrows arched. He took slow, deliberate steps toward her. “Why so?”
“Well, that’s why I wanted to talk to you, too. Monsieur Gagnon said you knew a lot about Henard. And, um, Insightfuls.”
“Insightfuls. That’s quite a topic.” He removed his glasses and pinched the top of his nose. “Let’s … continue this conversation in my office.”
Nathalie closed the drawer gently, tucking away the people and events of everyday Paris, preserved in ink. She followed M. Patenaude to his office in silence. When she stepped in, he held up his finger and stepped back into the hall.
He sent Arianne away on an errand and entered his office, closing the door behind him. “Monsieur Gagnon told me you’d want to talk.”
The heat rose to her cheeks as she settled into a chair. “Did he?” How much did he tell you?
M. Patenaude put his hands in his pockets and walked over to the window. He stared through it for so long Nathalie thought he’d forgotten about her. She glanced at the closed door, uncomfortable with his prolonged silence.
“He didn’t offer many details, only that you found out that your aunt was one of Dr. Henard’s patients and that you had some questions he couldn’t answer.” M. Patenaude turned away from the window and faced her. “Also, he didn’t send you to me because of any newspaper stories. He sent you because I’m an Insightful.”
The words coming out of M. Patenaude’s mouth didn’t match Nathalie’s understanding of the man, the editor-in-chief of Le Petit Journal who was prone to restive gestures and always in a hurry. He had a magical power?
“I—I never would have guessed.” Her entire perception of him had changed with one sentence. Might she have an ally? She bubbled with excitement. This was it, her first chance to talk to someone who lived this experience and wasn’t insane. She appreciated that unlike Maman, he was direct. He wasn’t afraid to talk about it.
“We’re everywhere,” he said, spreading his palms out. “Men, women, all classes, religions, professions. You don’t often know it, not anymore. The rest of society has … varying opinions about it. Some of us boast about our abilities, others hide them, and most are somewhere in between, I think. Whether or not they still have their powers.”
“What’s your gift?” She leaned forward. “Do you still have it?”
“Yes. I can tell whether or not someone is telling the truth.”
She hesitated, halted in surprise, as if he had cast a spell. “You … can read minds?”
“No,” he said. “It’s more subtle than that. I can understand the intentions behind what people say and write. I hear words and voices in a way similar to music. Truth is melodious; lies are full of wrong notes, a blatant mistake in a symphonic piece. The bigger the lie, the more off-key it sounds to me.”
The admission sounded ridiculous yet plausible. As with her own mysterious ability. “Would you show me?”
“I’ll ask you some questions,” he said, tenting his fingers. “Lie in response to some, be truthful in reply to others.”
“Go on.”
“What’s your middle name?”
“Frances.” Truth. It was her grandmother’s name. Although she didn’t love it, she had loved Mamie very much.
“What’s your favorite color?”
“Pink.” Lie. She disliked pink.
“What is the last novel you read?”
“Frankenstein.” No, she’d yet to finish it, in fact.
He gazed out the window once again. “You told the truth, lied, and told a half-truth. You haven’t read the book in its entirety, I’m guessing.”
“All correct.” Nathalie paused, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She could trust him. “Monsieur, I have to tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“I have a special ability, too.”
He whipped his head around. “You do? I thought you were asking because … well.” He adjusted his glasses. “What do you mean, exactly?”
So Christophe truly hadn’t told M. Patenaude, just as he hadn’t told Nathalie about M. Patenaude’s gift. Until this moment, she hadn’t been able to tell if M. Patenaude alr
eady knew and was just waiting for her to come out with it; his reaction was too sudden, too honest to be an act. Christophe earned even more of her respect by not telling her secret or M. Patenaude’s and for merely setting a conversation in motion.
“It started shortly after I began doing the morgue reports.” Then, just as she had with Christophe, Nathalie took some time to tell him everything about the visions.
“Of course,” he said, clasping his hands. “Now it all makes sense.”
“It does?”
He nodded. “You once wrote that one of the victims ‘suffered’ before her death. I had you qualify that, do you remember?”
“I do.”
“I knew you were writing from a place of honesty.” M. Patenaude got more animated with every word, like a scientist happening upon a new discovery. “That is, I could tell you weren’t merely assuming—it would have been a sensible guess anyway—but that somehow you knew. I couldn’t figure out how, needless to say, and I confess to being … wary of you.”
She remembered well his strange behavior and how it had unsettled her. Never would she have guessed it was a reaction to her own conduct.
“Apologies if that came across at the time,” he added quickly.
“It’s understandable,” she said. And then, after pausing long enough to collect her thoughts, she told M. Patenaude how she’d learned more about Henard’s experiments, and how she’d deduced that Aunt Brigitte was an Insightful. She told him about the blood jar, too, and how Christophe had since assigned her police protection. He listened, bobbing his head and fidgeting incessantly with his glasses. “When I told Monsieur Gagnon all of this, he explained that Henard died in 1870, the year before I was born. That’s what I was searching for in the archives. More information about that and about Henard’s experiments. I—I need to know how this happened. Did someone else continue to do the blood transfusions after him, maybe something secret?”
M. Patenaude shook his head. “Unlikely. He was very protective of his work, especially when people started criticizing him. He made a ceremony of burning his notes once, claiming his knowledge would die with him.” He walked to the front of his desk and leaned against it. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Tenting them, pressing them against the desk, folding his arms, all in the course of a few seconds. “Nathalie, there’s something else you need to know. I shouldn’t be the one to tell you, but at the moment, I don’t think I have a choice. I’m sure your father will understand.”
“Papa? What does he have to do with this?” Yet as soon as the question left her tongue, she knew.
“Your father got one of Henard’s transfusions, too.” M. Patenaude’s words echoed Nathalie’s thoughts; in her mind she recited the answer right along with him.
Confusion and happiness spun her in a circle, pushed by the very unusual feeling of discovering a tremendous secret that had been kept from her.
Then he lowered his voice. “He has the gift of healing. And I’m forever grateful to him for it. My youngest son had scarlet fever, and if it weren’t for your father, he would have…”
Nathalie’s breath caught as the weight of M. Patenaude’s unfinished words, and of Papa’s gift, rested on her soul. “That’s—that’s beautiful.”
“It is. I have a lifetime of gratitude and debt to pay your father, though he’s too humble to acknowledge as much.”
Nathalie took in the profound significance of that sentiment. She could imagine no greater bond between two people than a life saved, and so many things fell into place at that moment. M. Patenaude’s willingness to give her an unorthodox job for a sixteen-year-old girl. His sense of loyalty to Papa and, by extension, to her. And her own blood tie, literally, to the Insightfuls.
“Somehow he passed it on to me,” she began, almost to herself. “Do you agree? It’s only logical. As much as magic can be logical, although I suppose together with science it is logical, or can become logical. Why didn’t I think of it before? I almost feel silly for not coming up with that idea.” Even as she spoke the words, tumbling one on top of the other before M. Patenaude’s shaking head could interrupt her, she recognized the hollowness in them.
“Insightfuls don’t bestow their gifts on their children, not that I know of,” M. Patenaude said, still shaking his head. His words were laced with empathy. “My wife and I both have gifts, but our sons have no magical abilities. And the same is true for the dozens of other Insightfuls I know, and the accounts I’ve read of still others, so—”
“I don’t care what you say,” said Nathalie, her demeanor stiff as a tree. First she had an answer, then she didn’t. No. She had to be right, and M. Patenaude had to be wrong. “You don’t know every one of Henard’s patients. Maybe some of them did give birth to children like me. There could be hundreds of us for all you know.”
“Nathalie, I’m so sorry—”
She stood up, bristling with annoyance. “We should talk about this again. I have as many questions as you’re willing to answer.”
He opened his hands toward her. “Anything. I promise.”
Now it was she who shook her head. “Not now. Maman is expecting me. I have to go.”
With a nod to M. Patenaude, she excused herself and hurried out of the building. Not until she was almost home did she even remember to look for her policeman, who sat in the back of the steam tram. Once she spotted him, she straightened up with even more resolve.
Time to explain everything, Maman. Everything.
* * *
For some time Nathalie had been dreading the possibility of running into Simone at the apartment building. When it finally happened, this day of all days, when she had so much else on her mind, the encounter was in some ways exactly what she’d imagined.
In other ways, it was not.
Nathalie opened the door to the foyer just as Simone was about to do the same from the inside.
Simone emitted a tiny “Oh!” while Nathalie lost the ability to make any sound at all. Instinct jumped in as Simone crossed the threshold to go out; Nathalie felt a rush of longing to tell Simone everything that had happened since their fight almost a week ago but forced it back.
They walked past each other in tense silence. Nathalie took one more step and caught the door so it didn’t close between them. She turned back to Simone, whose blond curls obscured half her face. “We should…”
We should talk sometime. That’s what was supposed to come out. Instead her words turned into weak, sightless baby mice when Simone wheeled around and threw her a cold look. Nathalie hadn’t noticed it before, but Simone’s face was tear-stained and her eyes puffy.
Nathalie hadn’t seen Simone cry very often. For all her exuberance, Simone protected her tears. “I keep them in an imaginary jar that only comes out when I’m alone,” she’d once said.
“What’s wrong?” Nathalie blurted out, taking a step toward Simone.
Simone turned her back to Nathalie, hurrying out and down the stairs without a word. Nathalie let go of the door and stood there a moment as it closed, leaning her head against it.
She didn’t feel as upset toward Simone anymore and thought perhaps the feeling was mutual. “Maybe it’s for the best,” she said out loud, because if you said something out loud it was easier to convince yourself.
Wasn’t it?
26
Nathalie entered the apartment to the sound of Maman humming cheerfully and the smell of boiling strawberries. Stanley greeted her, as he always did, and for a moment she took in this scene of what should have been domestic contentment. She looked around the apartment. Everything was so familiar. Yet everything was also different.
Papa was an Insightful.
And her parents had never told her. Never said a word about Henard’s experiments, such that Nathalie scarcely knew anything about them until recently. Like some ignorant child in a rural town where people couldn’t read instead of a young woman living in a magnificent city full of culture. Entrusted with the duties of a jou
rnalist, besides.
Do they think I’m a fool? That I would never find out, that they could hide it from me forever?
She reached for her catacomb dirt, forgetting for the second time that day that it wasn’t there anymore.
“Come try this jam!” Maman called from the kitchen.
She tossed her bag on the sofa and approached Maman, who stood with a spoonful of jam, ready to feed her.
Like a child.
Nathalie took the spoon and sampled the jam. With a forced smile, she handed back the spoon. “This will sell out in no time.”
Nathalie’s eyes went to the jars of jam, lined up in a row.
They resembled blood jars. Larger, of course. And she knew the dense, dark liquid and streaks inside the glass and even the droplet on the table was only jam.
“That’s my wish.” Maman turned back to her strawberries and stirred them.
All the way home, Nathalie had thought about what she wanted to say, how she wanted to bring up her powers and what she’d learned from M. Patenaude. She was tired of playing games.
“I found out some things, Maman. About Papa. And about myself, I think.”
Maman paused for a moment, and then continued stirring even more vigorously than before. “Things.”
“Aunt Brigitte isn’t the only member of this family who was one of Dr. Henard’s patients,” Nathalie said, her voice steady and clear. “Papa was, too. He’s a healer. Monsieur Patenaude told me.”
Maman placed the wooden spoon on the counter and reached for a lemon, the muscles in her arm taut. “That’s absurd, Nathalie. M. Patenaude peddles gossip for a living. You should know better.”
“He has no reason to lie. For what?”
“Who knows why people do what they do?” Maman said, cutting the lemon. She squeezed some into the pot of strawberries and stirred some more.
“Are we going to dance with one another again, Maman? I was right about Aunt Brigitte, and I’m right about this. What I don’t understand is why you’re lying to me.”
“Lying?”
“That’s what you’d call it if I evaded the truth, changed the subject, answered questions with questions, and dismissed the facts because they weren’t convenient.”
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