“I have fallen in love with someone whom I am not supposed to love,” he confessed. “It is a great secret that I have carried around with me like a millstone around myneck.” He gave another tug at his neckcloth. “It’s suffocating me not to be able to talk about it.”
“There is nothing wrong with loving someone,” Lena had countered. “Most of us do at some point in our lives, I dare say.”
“Yes. But I am not ‘most of you’.” He leaned back his head back against the armchair.
“What exactly does that mean?”
He hadn’t answered, but merely sighed a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of his tortured being. “It means that some of us can’t love the way the rest of humanity does.” He stared morosely into the fire.
She tilted her head with a frown. “You can’t love like the rest of humanity? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Shouldn’t,” he amended. “Maybe the correct word is ‘shouldn’t.”
She shook her head. “Equally nonsensical.”
“I am in love. With a girl.” His teeth worried at his bottom lip. “She is the granddaughter of a mathematician and scholar of natural philosophy. He’s an Englishman who through some quirk of fate ended up living in Austria. Far up in the Alps, where fox and hare say goodnight to each other, like we say in German.”
Lena bent forwards, listening intently. “Yes? But that sounds charming.”
“Charming?” He tore his eyes open in horror. “She is outrageous. She dresses like a boy. Her hair is short. She’s not beautiful. She spends more time in the stables than in the house and carries with her a whiff of manure everywhere she goes. She has straw in her hair. She eats with her fingers. She has a heart bigger thanthe universe, an intelligence that rivals her grandfather’s, and she is better at arithmetic than I am. She weeps when she sees a dead fly. She is kind to a fault and altogether wonderful, and I want to marry her.” He stared at Lena with horrified eyes. “By Apollo. I didn’t just say this out loud, did I?”
Lena smiled serenely and folded her hands. “Like I said, she sounds charming. I think you should marry her. Does she love you?”
“Heavens, no.” His shoulders slumped. “She thinks I am a good-for-nothing dandy and a rake who is incapable of putting two sentences together, which might actually be true, come to think of it. She hates me. Which is probably for the best.” He heaved a sigh.
“Well then, I suppose you’ll have to woo her.”
He shook his head. “There is no time. Besides, if word ever got out that I’m courting an English mathematician’s daughter…” He suppressed a shudder.
Lena frowned. “I don’t understand. Is she socially inferior to you?”
Lindenstein opened his mouth to answer, when there was some banging outside, and the boys stumbled into the room.
“You won’t believe what just happened, Mama,” Hector said breathlessly. “We saw the Tsar ride by in the Prater, and he waved at me!” He stopped short when he saw Lindenstein. “Oh!”
“Not only that,” Les said, stumbling in right behind him, “we also saw—oh!”
Theo came in. “You won’t believe who we just saw—oh!”
The three boys stood in the room, mouths agape.
“Mama?” Lindenstein got up from his chair and looked at Lena with raised brows. “Did I understand them correctly?”
Hector pointed his finger at him. “He—he—he—is…”
Les took his spectacles off and cleaned them on his shirt, put them back on and proceeded to stare at him with owlish eyes.
“Are you who I think you are, or are you who I think you might be, but are not?” Theo demanded.
Lena blinked, confused. “Who do you mean, Theo?”
“He is—” Theo began.
“No one. No one at all,” Lindenstein interrupted hastily, waving his hand in denial. “I’m definitely not who you think I am. That is completely out of the question. I am no one. A complete nonentity.”
“Are you sure?” piped up Les, staring at him with his head tilted sideways.
“Absolutely. Unquestionably.”
