Chapter 2: Bellegarde to Paris

For the first ten minutes out of Geneva, Conner said nothing at all.

This was not shyness. He had never been shy. He had given a speech in Greek to a visiting bishop at fourteen and argued Hegel with Herr Brandt in front of the whole upper form at seventeen. He knew how to speak to people.

The trouble was that he had no idea how to speak to her.

She had gone back to her book, but not all the way. He could tell because she hadn’t turned a page. The sunlight came in low through the window and lay across her bare ankles and the compartment smelled faintly, of her scent, something lemony.

Conner sat very straight with his backpack on his knees. He pretended to be enthralled with the Rhône valley unrolling outside the compartment. He tried to think of something to say.

At Saint-Aubin there had been a something to discuss about everything. From the Rhetoric to the proper deportment of the gentleman. There had even been, at the start of every term, a dance lessons in which Madame Rousseau and her four friends taught the boys the waltz and the tango and the foxtrot by partnering them one at a time while the others stood along the wall and snickered at the hapless dancers. Conner had even been told by Madame he had danced divinement.

But Madame Rousseau had been sixty. And the whole thing had been a lesson, with explicit rules how to behave.

Nobody had given him the rules for this.

So, because he had been trained all his life that when you do not know something you ask the person most likely to know it, he turned from the window, and said:

“Excuse me. How should I act?”

She looked up.

“I’m sorry?”

“With you,” he said. “How should I act? I don’t know. I thought you might.”

For a moment she simply stared at him, the book open on her lap, her dark eyes very wide. A giggle erupted. Then full scale laughter...

It exploded out of her all at once. She put her hand over her mouth to stay the fit, but it came out around her fingers anyway. She laughed until her eyes were wet.

Conner waited. He was not offended. He was, if anything, interested. He had never made anyone laugh like that before. He was not entirely sure how he had done it.

“Oh,” she said finally, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. Nobody has ever asked me that. Men have asked me a great many things on trains, but never that.”

“It was a serious question.”

“I know it was. That’s what’s funny.” She shut the book properly now and set it on the seat beside her and turned to face him, pulling one knee up under her. “All right. Explain. Why on earth would you need to ask?”

So he told her.

He told her about being locked in the halls of Saint-Aubin. Eight years. Two hundred boys and forty masters and exactly four women on the whole property, three of whom were grandmothers who worked in the laundry and one of whom was Madame Rousseau. He told her that he could speak five languages and get by in a sixth. He could speak at length about Plato’s Republic, but that the sum total of his experience with girls his own age amounted to three school dances with a convent school from Lausanne, conducted under the eyes of twelve nuns, at which the approved distance between partners had been the length of a hymnal.

“A hymnal,” she repeated.

“Held vertically. Sister Agathe would walk among us and measure.”

She put her hand over her mouth again.

“So you see,” he went on, warming to it now, because it was a relief to say it out loud, “I decided last night to go on an adventure. I’ve been locked up for eight years learning how the world is supposed to work and now I’m off to see how it actually does.

And one of the things I know least about are ... Girls. Or women. Or ... females.” He frowned. “I’m honestly not sure which word is correct. Or which one is offensive. Is ‘girls’ offensive? You’re not a girl, really. But ‘women’ sounds like I’m writing a sociology paper, and ‘females’ sounds like I’m selecting the gender of a pony I want to buy.”