Finding Emilie by Laurel Corona Page B

self-assurance in his tone caused Lili to pull up her horse and turn toward him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve given me no cause to be so rude.” Her horse snorted and tossed its head, as if it wanted to rejoin the others, but she held it firm while she looked at her riding companion.
    Puberty had given Paul-Vincent de Praslin a gawkiness that made him temporarily unattractive, with a cluster of pimples on his cheeks and a coat of dark down on his upper lip. But his expression hinted at a depth she hadn’t seen in any of the young people chattering away on horseback farther down the trail.
    “People think I’m scowling at them,” she said, “but they’re flattering themselves, because most of the time I don’t even notice they’re there. I’m entertaining myself in my own head—or at least trying to—over all that prattle.”
    Paul-Vincent’s adolescent laughter turned into a bray, and his cheeks reddened in embarrassment. He began sauntering along the dirt path. “Just a minute ago, I was concentrating on a math problem,” he said. “Something like, if I started riding in the opposite direction right now, and none of them noticed for ten minutes, but then my ridiculous sister and that Joséphine person started chasing me, going twice as fast as I was, how long would it take them to catch up and tell me all the gossip I’d missed?”
    She giggled, and he looked over at her. “You have a nice laugh,” he said. “And a nice smile too. I never noticed that before.”
    If he were a little boy or a grown man, I’d know how to take the compliment, Lili thought, but coming from someone who was neither? Still, the math joke was the funniest thing she’d heard in a long time. “Where are you all day long?” Lili asked. “I never see you except at dinner. How do you avoid having to come out and play paillemaille?”
    “No one cares where a thirteen-year-old boy is. I’m too old to beadorable and too young to be entertaining. I just wander around, or stay in my room and do what I want.”
    “Like what?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Little science experiments. I’m setting up a laboratory at Vaux-le-Vicomte, and I look at things under the microscope mostly.”
    “Laboratory?” Lili’s jaw dropped. “Microscope? Here?”
    “It’s not what you think. Right now, it’s just a corner of my dressing room set up with equipment. My father’s promised to build a real lab at Vaux-le-Vicomte, though I’m not sure how much I’ll be here to use it.”
    “What do you look at?”
    “Oh, whatever looks interesting. Moss, mold, leaves. I watch fleas crawl around and see little things squirming in water drops.” He tapped a pouch tied to his saddle. “I was hoping to find some things to look at today. Maybe you can do it with me.”
    “How could a microscope fit in there?” she asked. Lili heard how childishly eager her voice sounded, but as thoughts of Delphine’s disapproval flitted through her mind, she brushed them aside.
    Paul-Vincent pulled up his horse again and took out a little case. Inside was a copper instrument small enough to fit in his palm. He handed it to her, and she looked up at him, perplexed. She had seen a drawing of a microscope, and it was nothing like this tiny, violin-shaped object with a large screw in place of the instrument’s neck, and a glass lens where the sound hole would be.
    “This is the kind Leeuwenhoek invented. I’ll show you how it works.” Paul-Vincent put out his hand to take back the tiny device. “The screw tightens or loosens this little bracket that presses on the lens, so whatever you’ve put on this little skewer”—Paul-Vincent touched his finger to a needlelike prong set just over the little circle of glass—“can come into focus when you hold it up to the light.”
    He looked up at the lattice of tree branches above their heads. “When there is some light, I mean.” He put the tiny object back in its case and slipped it into his saddle bag.