The Beautiful Ones

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  “A bracelet here and there. Besides, haven’t I been marvelous lately? And I’ve been thinking about that hotel I told you of, a resort by the sea, if only I could gather the proper funds for—”

  “You might as well ask for the moon.”

  “No, it makes perfect sense, Étienne, only you won’t listen, but I—”

  “Take it up with Father,” Étienne said, crossing his arms.

  Luc took out his cigarette case and shook his head. “I tell you, Hector, you had the right idea being an only child. Existing under the shadow of not one but four older brothers is exhausting. Especially when they won’t stand up for you in front of Father.”

  Étienne let out a loud “hmfff” in a reply but did not bother to vocalize his thoughts any further. Hector for his part merely shrugged.

  A little while later they arrived at Oldhouse and barely had enough time to rush to their rooms and change for supper. When they came down, they were ushered into a dining room that, despite its long table, hardly offered enough space for them.

  Hector found himself a bit astonished by the number of people around him. He had grown used to solitude and silence, and this was a loud bunch. People were introduced to him, but he soon lost count of their names.

  He was seated to the right of Camille, Nina’s mother, and across from Nina. A bit farther to Nina’s left sat Valérie, and they locked eyes a couple of times before she turned her head away. Étienne and Luc were seated apart, and Hector could not possibly speak to them.

  For dinner there was a vegetable soup with plenty of cabbage, followed by rabbit and lamb in a condimented sauce, accompanied with carrots and bread. There were also cheeseboards and biscuits. It was simpler fare than what could be had in the city, but then, he had expected this and did not mind.

  After dinner he attempted to catch hold of Valérie while everyone was exiting the dining hall. He had not had a chance to talk to her in private since their last disastrous encounter. He wanted to attempt a more civilized interaction.

  It was not to be had. Nina intercepted him before he could stop Valérie, as he was preparing to climb the wide stone staircase that led to the second floor.

  “Did you have a pleasant journey?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And your room? Do you like it? We can have you moved if it’s not to your taste.”

  “No, it is fine,” he said, his eyes following Valérie, who was walking up the staircase, pins with pearls decorating her hair, her dress the most blinding white.

  “If there is any dish you’d rather have, you can let us know. We have a fine cook.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He could not see Valérie anymore. He’d lost his opportunity. Now he looked down at Nina, almost surprised to find her standing in front of him; he had been distracted by Valérie’s presence and she’d quietly moved closer to him.

  The girl looked different. Her thick black mane fell loosely down her shoulders, as it had near the staircase in Loisail. She was not the kind of woman men would stare at in admiration, attempting to secure a dance with her. She lacked style and grace. But there was a mysterious assertiveness in her eyes at times, which he enjoyed, and her hair was nice—it made him curious, he wished to touch it.

  “I can show you and your friends the house tomorrow,” Nina offered.

  “We’ll take you up on that offer,” he replied.

  There was no more to add, but she hovered in front of him and he did not dash up the stairs, stretching the seconds, until, blushing, she spoke an excuse and retreated from sight.

  When Hector arrived in his room, he discovered it had been commandeered by the Lémy brothers, who were sitting at a table by the window, playing cards. Luc drank from a silver flask; Étienne was tilting his chair back and forth.

  “Do you not have rooms of your own?” he asked.

  “Yes. But they are tiny. You have the largest room of the three of us. I’m practically sleeping in a closet,” Luc complained.

  “I’m sure that’s a lie.”

  “You should join our game,” Étienne said.

  “I’d lose my shirt.”

  “You can afford another one,” Luc said. “Say, do you have any idea what Nina’s dowry amounts to?”

  “No idea and no interest,” Hector said, crossing his arms and leaning against a bedpost, watching the men play.

  “A romantic!” Luc said, chuckling.

  “Don’t bother him,” Étienne said.

  Hector glanced down. A romantic, no. A fool. What was he doing in this place, even? But she’d asked him to come, and he had not wanted to say no even if a dozen excuses might have been easily manufactured.

  The next morning, Étienne, Luc, Nina, and Hector walked around Oldhouse, with the girl pointing out the library in the annex, the sitting room, the dining room, which they had already seen, and other areas of interest. They had stables and horses, but no courts for the modern sports preferred in the city. There was a music room with a piano and a harp, but no proper game room where the gentlemen might smoke and play billiards. No conservatory, instead an herb and vegetable garden. And so it went. Oldhouse was plainly an old-fashioned, simple country manor. Luc seemed deflated by this discovery, Étienne was slightly pleased at his brother’s discomfort, and Hector accepted it without judgment.

  After their tour, Nina offered to show them the river she said ran near the house, but Étienne and Luc wanted to go riding. Hector and Nina were left to themselves.

  The river was close, as Nina had promised. It was wide but its waters were gentle. When they reached it, she picked up a flat stone and turned to him.

  “Watch,” she said.

  The stone hovered above her hand and she tossed it away, making it skip across the water without laying a hand on it.

  “Bravo,” he said. “Nicely done. I’m impressed.”

  “You are not humoring me?”

  “I would never.”

  She smiled at this and made another stone skip across the water. Hector imitated her and sent several stones skipping across the water behind her own.

  “When did you know you were a talent?” she asked.

  “Ever since I can recall.”

  “But who taught you? Someone must have taught you, as you have been teaching me.”

  “My parents were both performers of a sort—she played the violin and he could sing. We were part of a troupe. There was an old woman who performed with us. Grandmother Sandrine, they called her. She was a talent. She’d juggle objects in the air without touching them. I learned from watching her, and then the rest was me testing my limits. Once in a while I might catch sight of other performers and try to determine what they’d done. I made my professional debut at eight.”

  “Did you get to travel much?”

  “Somewhat. All through the spring and the summer, but in the fall and the winter we’d head back to Treman to rest. There’s no business at that time of the year in the small towns, and the roads are hard.”

  “What about Iblevad? Did you travel often?”

  She flung two stones this time and they both skipped gracefully across the water.

  “Yes, and far in the beginning. I went with small acts to obscure towns because those were the places where you’d be booked. But then, if you were good and you were lucky, you could claim better spots and remain in a significant city.”

  “It seems strange. To spend your life wandering from place to place.”

  “It was a living.”

  “And now? Have you fallen under the spell of Loisail and wish to remain there forever and ever?”

  The mention of Loisail brought to him, unbidden, the memory of Valérie’s face. He associated her with the city, her white dresses and pale face seemed to reflect the beautiful, clean lines of the metropolis.

  “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “That is no answer,” she reproached him.

  “I am sorry if my words do not please you,” he said, his voice
harder than he had intended.

  Nina quirked an eyebrow at him, perhaps trying to determine what was souring his mood. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his trousers and stared at the water.

  She, in turn, began humming to herself and walked a few steps from him, picking a twig, tossing it at the water first with her hands, then grabbing another and flinging it away without touching it. Nina was lighter on her feet now. More practiced, as if she was better suited to navigating slippery stones and muddy banks than dancing on glossy parquet floors.

  Unlike Valérie, who had been made for elegant dances and the lights of the city, the whisper of a fan against her cheek, her smile sparkling under a glass chandelier. The most beautiful woman he’d ever met.

  He tried to imagine what he might be like if he’d never laid eyes upon her, if they’d never spoken. Whether he might be happy or equally miserable. Perhaps he was predisposed to follies, the victim of a nervous ailment.

  Hector looked across the water, at the trees on the other side of the riverbank, and he breathed in deeply.

  Nina turned toward him, her smile full of mischief. Her eyes looked more green than brown under the shade of the trees. “I can make a stone skip farther than you,” she proclaimed.

  Hector looked at her and shrugged. The game had lost its appeal for him.

  “Try me. If I win, I am mistress of this river and it shall bear my name. If you win, we can call it the Auvray.”

  “It is silly. The river already has a proper name, and no doubt you know it.”

  “What if it is silly,” she said, standing on a rock, close to the water. “Are you afraid I’m better than you at this?”

  “Surely you are not,” he said.

  “Toss a stone.”

  Hector decided to humor her, feeling that she would not cease if he did not concede. He sent a stone across the water and it skipped four, five times.

  “I am better,” she said as the stone disappeared into the river.

  When she proceeded to demonstrate that this was the case with ease and panache—her stone skipped eight times—he chuckled and placed an arm around her shoulders in a gesture of gentle camaraderie.

  “You are mistress of the river, Nina Beaulieu.”

  “You can borrow it once in a while if you like,” she said. Nina glanced up at him, resting a palm against his chest, her fingers on the buttons of his coat.

  He was scrupulously well behaved when it came to the girl, not even daring to kiss her cheek. He did not fancy himself a cad. He was cautious. There could be no harm this way, he reasoned. He was but a friend, he told himself. He had yet to make binding promises. He could have peace of mind this way.

  Nina was a pleasant creature, and if her face was not as pretty as Valérie’s, then her disposition was more amenable. Logic dictated he should cease any pursuit of Valérie and attempt a more solid and achievable relationship with Nina. In theory, he was willing to follow such logic.

  In practice, he was paralyzed, and had been in this state for some time. His visit to Oldhouse only served to make this point more obvious.

  Hector had spent so many years being the man who loved Valérie that he could not conceive of becoming anything else. She was a goddess at whose feet he worshipped, and to cease in his adoration of her would imply he had spent a decade following a false idol.

  All his grand romantic passions and florid sentiments, each sigh and each ache, would amount to nothing. He might amount to nothing.

  Hector gently stepped back, putting a certain distance between them. Nina gazed at him with questioning eyes. Innocent she might be, but not so innocent as to not realize something was amiss. Books and poems must have suffused her with notions of romance, of suitors and kisses, which now did not come.

  But her suspicions were vague. Fervent passion had evaded her. Nina could only guess a void existed. Hector could keep her dancing to this tune for months. And yet.

  Love, he’d told Étienne, was not a concern for him anymore. He could not assume it was the same for her. She’d want to be loved, and then what would he give her, except wan smiles, a tepid kiss upon the brow, a life of monotones?

  He turned around to look at Oldhouse and slid his hands back in his pockets. “Shall we head back?” he asked, his tone light though his tongue felt leaden. “Étienne and Luc might have returned by now.”

  “Very well,” she said, and her voice was also mock light.

  He watched her walk ahead of him and shook his head.

  The sublime pain of Valérie kept dragging him away, down, like the river dragged stones, twigs, and leaves in its path, brooking no compromise.

  Chapter 15

  THEY WENT BACK NOT TO the river but to a sluggish stream that ran farther away, specimen bottles in hand. Nina picked up pieces of bark, looking to see what insects lay beneath. She brushed her hands against the tall grasses and listened to the wind rustling in the trees. Red and blue dragonflies danced above the riverbanks. The caddisflies had not yet hatched, and rested upon the surface of the water in their cocoons of silk.

  Hector brought her luck, nevertheless, and Nina found a beautiful water diving beetle that was the color of molten gold and looked like a lady’s brooch that she might wear to the opera. In the process of catching it, Nina thoroughly soaked her shoes and skirt.

  They sat atop a stone slab, the sun shining bright, and in a short amount of time her skirt was dry. It was nice outside, the silhouette of Oldhouse in the distance against the blue sky like out of a picture book.

  When they reached the house, she guided him straight to the library. The bookshelves spanned from floor to ceiling, sagging under the weight of knowledge, decades of the family’s books also piling on the floor and chairs. This was one of the finer rooms in the house, and Nina had spent many hours here, spinning the engraved terrestrial globe upon its cherrywood base, reading at turns sentimental fiction and at others scientific texts. Anatomical drawings decorated the walls, and a long carpet, dimly faded and with an elaborate pattern of green and golden diamonds, ran at one end of the room.

  The most eye-catching element in the library was a massive mahogany cabinet containing rows and rows of drawers, each one with a number painted on it. Next to it, there was a humbler cabinet that held pins, bottles, pillboxes, string, cork, brushes, ink, and all the other items one might need to mount beetles and butterflies, which she’d been doing since she was a child.

  Nina set her specimen bottle upon a table and opened the mahogany cabinet for Hector to see. “This is what I was telling you,” she said, holding up a tray. “All my specimens are kept here.”

  The tray contained diminutive yellow, red, and blue beetles in the brightest colors imaginable, glistening like fine-cut glass.

  Hector looked at them curiously. “You must be able to fit many specimens in here.”

  “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 Gaetan 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.