Finding Ever After: four fairytale-ish novellas Page 16

  All Nic saw was a haphazard board and overturned milk crates. “It suits its purpose.”

  “Shall we toss a coin to see who begins?”

  Esther forgot. Sitting on a milk crate in a hideous room mulling over her next move she forgot. For brief, shining moments she was no longer fettered by Thomas’s proposal. The ostentatious prison of her upstate Rutherford House a distant horizon. She was so grateful for his suggestion she almost burst. But not so grateful that she would relinquish the game. No. Esther had let Thomas win too many times. She would show her gratitude to Mr. Ricci by playing at his level (which was quite good). She would thank him by being a worthy and equal opponent.

  And so they played.

  Esther won. Nic won. They laughed. And life, at least for a little while, was music.

  She counted the seconds until their next match, at home as she began packing. Her efforts saw to the transference of her clothes, jewelry and belongings to the Rutherford Estate of which she would soon be mistress. Thomas arrived for dinner most every night now and she imagined what it might be like to look up at Nic Ricci in the chair he occupied. In addition to his obvious attempts to impress her with his knowledge of the estate they would inhabit, he interspersed Von Witterhorn quotes. It was so important, he told her, that they be able to converse easily with each other in public. So that other couples would envy their natural rapport. Thomas and her father were thick as thieves at the table. Discussing shipments and peering over ledgers and manifests, they were completely oblivious to Esther moving the oblong curve of her soup spoon over in her bowl. Esther tried to bow to Thomas’s ever increasing demands on her time and presence but noticed his temper was shorter and often flared. One evening, when she joshed him about a second serving of brandy, he roughly thumbed her cheek and chin jostling her gaze up to meet his in reprimand. Esther, sure that the movement would leave a bruise, blinked surprised tears and looked to her father for support. Finding none, she smoothed her skirts and watched as Thomas slipped back into his usual snobbish veneer. It seemed the more time he spent in Esther’s company, the more he learned about her and the more he was willing to bend her to his expectation of how she should behave.

  But when she was in the rehearsal space, looking over the piano at Nic, she was seen. Truly and wholly seen. He had a preternatural anticipation of her next note. Often, they locked eyes over the piano, Esther’s expression as surprised as Nic’s that their interpretation of the notes and sounds so closely connected.

  Widow Barclay snoozed over her knitting and Esther let her guard down. For those brief hours she was no longer a woman bound to a future not of her choosing. She was just Esther. Esther as she was always meant to be. She didn’t distill her thoughts or choose careful words. She sang and she played.

  She learned Nic loved his father and that his mother’s passing almost broke his heart. Nic described the Molasses factory disaster in vivid detail, closing his eyes as he recalled the screams and carnage of a horrible day. He devoted everything to his father. He talked about his math students and the nuns who made him sandwiches and Mrs. Leoni’s cannoli. Any barricade of social restriction dissolved with two bars of eighth notes on a rustily-tuned piano.

  Esther liked the way the lone bulb over the piano flirted with his black hair. She liked the way his fingers riffed up a scale before he settled into the preliminary bars of her next number.

  Mostly, she liked that he didn’t treat her as anything but an equal when they sat on either side of the chess board.

  Never before. Never ever before had Nic Ricci talked as comfortably with another living soul as he did with Esther. Of course, there was his dad. But, his dad didn’t meet his eyes straight on with a twinkly blue. His dad didn’t make him swallow three times a moment and tug at his collar. This was something different. This was something new. This was a woman. Everyone had chided him about romance. Now, he found it in easy conversation and wistfully interpreted song. Romance. At first, Nic resisted. Attraction to a beautiful girl who would be tugged from his world in a manner of weeks was a waste of his time. He had no right to dwell upon an affianced woman. No right at all. But then she would sparkle and warm to a theme. Or she would tilt her head, hand poised with a pawn ready to make another move and say something he had been thinking for a long while.

  Nic watched the middling light spin her intricate hair gold and a slight smile part her lips as she maneuvered a tactic on the board that would put her ahead of him.

  “Your move,” she said.

  Esther didn’t need to rehearse anymore. Not truly. The event was still weeks away and she was in tremendous voice and she could sing the songs inside out in perfect memorization. It was a shame she had become so used to Nic accompanying her, guiding her through tempos and keys, flourishing fortissimo and times and softly scaling back at others so that her sweet vibrato could reach the back of the old, dusty hall.

  There came a moment in the third week of their thrice weekly hours together when something shifted. Widow Barclay snored softly, the rambling trolley trundled past the splotched and murky windows and Esther recognized that the warmth surging through her was not just music or chess or affinity or banter. It was something much deeper. It was a feeling stirring solidly and surely down from the tip of her toes. It was something akin to a feeling she only got when listening to Verdi on the phonograph or re-reading Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It was familiar and wistful at once. It made her nostalgic for something she was sure she had never experienced. It was as if Nic was a part of the sphere of her life from before she knew he existed and forevermore. Even when she was tucked away at the Rutherford Estate, these moments with him would be ingrained in familiar chords and keys. Were deep in the curves and carvings of chess pieces. He was a part of the fabric of her life now.

  It startled her. She had never felt so strongly about another person before. Certainly not one different from her usual social set. Could he see? Did he notice? Esther was certain her face showed what her heart was wrestling. She set her mouth and blinked the glaze from her eyes and focused. Erecting her shoulders, she decided she would conquer it. She was engaged. Her course was set. She was only experiencing a very natural reaction to an imminent change in her life. Her attraction to Nic wasn’t grounded in anything lasting. It was just a limited connection. That was all. She was being foolish. She found a kind heart and a kindred spirit.

  Nic finished a scale on the piano. “I’m a little nervous to play with you.” He said.

  Esther wondered how one’s eyes could be as dark as licorice when seen over a piano but then light as chocolate when catching the light and pent-up laughter over a chessboard.

  A limited connection, she reminded herself. Just a little bit of starlight she tried to bottle with a mason jar as a kid thinking she could capture it as she might a lightning bug or a butterfly.

  Nothing to it.

  Nic was predisposed to love. At least to look for love. What his parents had was something out of a fairy tale. He grew up surrounded by their easy camaraderie, the respect and reverence with which his dad cared for his mom’s happiness. His dad always told him that he would find it and he would know.

  “When I saw your mother, all of the clocks stopped.”

  Nic studied Esther, an errant finger caressing a stolen curl over her ear as she contemplated her next move. He tried to funnel his growing and very real attraction through the film of his father’s stories. When he had first seen her, he had thought her pretty. But then there was her singing, the unexpected things she said, her ability to take down his King and steal the game with a triumphant smile.

  He was in very big trouble. Because she couldn’t be his. He had no right to think of her with any affection but that of mutual camaraderie and friendship. He stole his palm over his heart as if it might shield it.

  When Nic’s mother died, the clocks stopped again. His dad spent months not sleeping or eating or speaking to anyone but him. Nic moved his pawn over a square
studiously. Some games were quietly raucous, laughter spilling between them even as they poorly tried to keep their enthusiasm from Widow Barclay. Today, he was silent. Solemn.

  In those horrible months after his mother’s death, the only thing that livened Nic’s father and separated his clockwork routine of trudging to work and refusing to eat was his concern for Nic. He would press through the fog and cup Nic’s cheek, eyes weary but sparked with tenderness.

  “I’m sorry, dad.” Nic would say, again and again. Knowing his heartbreak was of a different kind than his father’s and unsure how to change it.

  “My poor Nic. I promise that I will be better.”

  “You don’t have to…”

  “Because I am sad but I have you. You are the best of her Nic. And at least I still have her in you.”

  The chess board became fuzzy and Nic blinked so he could see her next move.

  “Is anything the matter?” Esther said.

  Nic stretched his hand out. “I was just thinking of my mother.”

  “Oh.”

  “When you have something with someone. A connection. A feeling. I don’t think you ever lose it.” His voice was wistful. Too wistful. He straightened and smoothed his hands over his knees. “My apologies, Miss Hunnisett, what a sad study I have become.”

  Esther shook her head. “It just means we are becoming true friends, Mr. Ricci.”

  Nic smiled. “I could use a friend. Particularly one who knows her way around a chess board.”

  Esther giggled and slid her pawn on a diagonal. “I could use a friend, too.”

  6

  Somehow, if possible, the tender way Nic talked about his mother and father made Esther even less immune to the growing hold he had on her. He was loyal to his family. He took care of his father and supported him and by all signs seemed to be delighted by it. He was friends with his father: playing chess and laughing and burning toast and eggs. Esther’s heart clutched a little when he spoke about the relationship that was so far from her own interaction with her father. To her father, she was merely a bargaining chip, a piece to be played.

  She expressed as much vaguely to Nic one day who was gentlemanly enough to cloak his response in the terminology of their game.

  “If you ask me, women have power we men will never see the full extent of. Look at the Queen: she queen can move in any direction on the board. And is by far the most powerful piece in the game. It stands to reason that you wouldn’t want to wait for some little old king to move forward. In Italian, it is donna or lady.” He smiled at her.

  “You are quite a forward thinker, Mr. Ricci. Believing a lady to have such agency.”

  “I wish a certain lady would have enough agency to call me Nic.” His long fingers pinced a pawn and he slowly assessed the checkered board before casually moving it a slow inch. “Queen, Esther?” he said, assessing her move and her white regal piece.

  “So we are using our given names.”

  “Or I am of a Biblically disposed nature this morning.” He winked at her.

  They were continuing a game from the previous afternoon and she was winning, Barclay was snoring and Nic had let the slightest bit of guard down. He did so a little every day. She noticed it in a growing physical affinity between them. Their shoulders brushed as they moved from the piano to the makeshift chess table and overturned cartons acting as chairs. Their fingers met over a piece when they both moved to assess a choice play. His shoulders relaxed, his long legs stretched and they had as many conversations in music and movement as they did in word.

  Perhaps what she liked best was how she sounded when he accompanied her. It was as if she was finding depths of her skill she hadn’t discovered previously because he gave her the right volume, tempo and anticipation to truly interpret the piece in the way she wanted to. Like the Queen in the game. She had such agency.

  “And my fiancé has permitted me to have an extra hour on one of our days. And I was so hoping that that might prove convenient to you.” Her hands were balled. Waiting. He most likely had a sweetheart at home to steal his time on top of his injured father and the work he did at the church and his teaching. This was money, but not a great deal of it and she wondered why he would possibly be tempted by the offer.

  “It would be my pleasure.”

  Esther deflated a little with relief. “Thank you.”

  A shadow passed Nic’s face. “He doesn’t treat you very well, does he?”

  Esther pulled at the lace sleeve of her dress. “I don’t… I would rather that we not talk about him. This is a corner –albeit a temporary one—of the world that he has no access to. I can’t… I don’t want you to look at me with pity in your eyes, Nic. Just as you’re doing now.”

  “It’s not pity, Esther.” He said. “Pity is an emotion I consider along the line of a lessening of respect. Can we call it empathy?”

  Esther nodded. “Empathy. Yes, we can call it empathy. But we’re both trapped.” Esther slid her bishop to another square. As much as Nic loved his dad, he was speaking more and more to the limitations that closed around him after his father’s accident. His dream of graduate studies and composition.

  “Except, I don’t hate my father.” Nic defended.

  “I don’t hate my fiancé.”

  Nic’s long fingers tapped the knight and then the king. He leaned back, rolling his shoulders. “Oh?”

  “The Gospel speaks against hatred.”

  A smile whispered at the corner of Nic’s mouth. “So, you love him through the Lord Jesus Christ but in earthly terms, mostly just un-piously loathe him.”

  “Precisely. Your move.”

  Nic finally made a decision and raised his eyebrow in challenge.

  Her move. She recalculated. “Rats.”

  Widow Barclay shifted in her seat.

  II

  Luft: a space made for the king to avoid a back rank checkmate

  7

  Widow Barclay had helped with the invitations to the recital and Mrs. Mayweather, the woman who had found Nic Ricci for rehearsals, serendipitously appeared with a list of florists and caterers for the evening.

  “I am so interested in hearing you sing, my dear. I once knew your mother.”

  Esther sat across from the fair, lithe woman at tea and sensed that music drifted off her in the same way a woman’s rosewater might. She loved hearing about her mother. She even indulged Mrs. Mayweather by accompanying herself in a small concert of Flow Gently, Sweet Afton. Esther didn’t have Nic’s proficiency on the piano, but she was competent.

  “You sing like an angel.” Mrs. Mayweather melted in her chair. “Now my love, I must ask you, woman-to-woman and in strict confidence, how much does Mr. Weatherton consume?”

  “Consume?”

  “Spirits, my dearest.”

  “I don’t…I don’t spy on him.” Esther looked around as if anything she might say would fill the ears of a hidden party.

  “Of course you do not. I merely ask you out of my affection for your mother and as a woman of temperance. Lately, my husband, who works in automobiles and often requires parts from Weatherton Shipping, has had batches of a spirit called No. 7 F delivered in crates that ought to have carried car parts.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “I mention this in confidence to you as a bargaining chip.”

  “Are you trying to bribe me?” Esther’s face went white.

  “Oh heavens, no. I am giving you the means to bribe him. My dearest, sometimes men like Thomas can be a little enthusiastic with power. You need the safety of knowing that if he argues or threatens you or keeps you from having everything you deserve, that you have a piece on the board and a move at the ready.”

  “Sounds like chess.” Esther murmured.

  “Doesn’t it just?”

  “Why are you doing this for me?”

  “I didn’t fight for our suffrage and for our temperance to see men like Thomas Weatherton overlook the best thing to ever happen to him. That is you, Esther. He doesn’t
deserve you. No. Don’t even try to defend him. We are beyond that.”

  Later, Esther was puzzled by her exchange with Mrs. Mayweather. It certainly aligned with what she had seen in the ledgers in Thomas’s briefcase. Thomas was supplementing his income with liquor trade and accidentally depriving rich and influential men like Mayweather their legitimate goods.

  Mrs. Mayweather called it a bargaining chip. Esther hoped her life never got so complicated that she had to use it.

  “I want to play for stakes.” Nic said. He could not take another morning sleepily arriving at rehearsal having spent the previous night awake and looking at the ceiling and wondering what her hair would feel like between his fingers and her lips would taste like over the slow part of his own. Their time was ticking to a close and he convinced himself he deserved one opportunity to see the full display of her hair. He blurted his requisition before he had time to safely, sanely redirect his course.

  “I don’t gamble.” Esther said.

  “You’re gambling with your future just by agreeing to marry Weatherton.” Nic regretted the line when instead of cracking her smile, it merely saw a grave shadow cross her face.

  “What are we playing for?”

  Nic leaned back, folded his arms across his broad chest and studied her gently.

  “Your hair.”

  Esther blurted a laugh. “My dear Mr. Ricci, for what salacious purpose could you possibly need a woman’s hair?” She chewed her lip. “A lock of it, perhaps? Should I weep over that lock and press it into a long cursive letter bespeaking my undying love for you?”

  “I want to see it. There’s clearly a lot of it. Women in my neighbourhood have taken to bobbing theirs. Clean across the back.”

  Nic held up a finger before standing and retrieving something from the piano. He sat back down on the upturned milk crate and using his knee as a desk scribbled several things on a small, folded piece of paper.