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 with. 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. After all he grown up watching his parents live 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, her 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 and 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 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, Widow 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. 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. His arrangement with her promised money, but not a great deal of it. 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,” Nic clarified. “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.
“There.”
Esther skimmed a hastily created score sheet which weighed chess moves –played by both opponents---with hair pins.
“So for every piece you claim from my side of the board, I have to surrender a pin?”
“Not so bad, is it?”
“And what if I win?”
Nic tilted his head, raked his fingers through his hair. “I would buy you a trinket. But nothing that would make your fiancé suspicious. And, you know I have approximately zero pennies to rub together.”
“You will go to the Brattle Book Shop and choose something that makes you think of me.”
That wouldn’t be hard, he thought. Everything made him think of her.
“And what would we tell Widow Barclay? I will not be able to arrange my hair back in the same style without my lady’s maid.”
Nic mulled this a moment. Sometimes his ceiling reveries ended in a far-fetched scenario wherein Esther was his bride and he stood in Thomas Weatherton’s place. If anything could deprive a soul of that dream it was the realization that the woman needed a lady’s maid if only to fix her long Rapunzel locks.
“Can you say that a bat flew into it? Or a spider?” Nic suggested.
Esther nodded, her cheeks were somewhat flushed for as much as she had played buoyantly off of his suggestion, she knew that his request required impropriety. Intimacy.
Nic sank slowly under the weight of attraction. He nabbed a rook and the first pin from the side of her head released a waterfall of gold. A castling move and he swept a few more pieces. She was a good player. His equal. But he had never been so determined in his life. Nor so competitive. According to the hastily scribbled rules the higher valued pieces were worth more pins so when he sieged her knight a large swath tumbled over her forehead before she tucked its curtain behind her ear. A commandeered king and nearly the entirety of the long blonde swath at the back was released to fall down over the ornamented buttons fastening her dress.
Nic blinked. The board was becoming slightly blurred. Fuzzy. He looked back up at her. Her cheeks flushed beguilingly with each exposition of her hair. He had imagined its texture and length but he couldn’t have anticipated the liquid life of it. It spun everything in the drab horrible room into gold just by the way the stark, blinking bulb caught it. She bit her lip and he watched her make a move, long finger hovering over a bishop, hair in a delicious mismatch over her shoulders and into the curve of her waist.
He deserved the slight tremble in his fingertips and the quick stop of his heart. He deserved the cotton filming his tongue barring words from coming with ease. She was utterly beautiful and this was his idea. He hoped he kept the stark desire from his eyes, had cleared the thickness from his throat when he huskily reminded her that she was in the midst of an illegal move. He wanted to kiss her. Once. Twice. Forever.
They both turned at a shift in the Barclay corner of the room, Esther holding white-knuckled to a pawn in one hand and a fistful of hair pins in the other. The widow resettled and sighed, blew out a wisp of hair from her slackened bun and carried on in slumber.
Esther smiled at Nic coyly when their eyes met again over the board and Nic relinquished his entire life and soul to her.
“Would you like me to hold those for you?” his voice wasn’t sounding the way it was supposed to. Because his voice wasn’t supposed to crack like an ill-tuned scale half a way up the octave.
Esther shook her head and carefully lay them in the curve of a folded piece of Schubert.
They continued.
She surrendered more pieces and freed more hair, he sobered by thinking safe, logical thoughts such as how she got it to stay up on her head in the first place. She pursed her lips and scratched her ear and tackled another pin before she yelped a slight owww.
“What’s the matter?” Nic set his q
ueen down.
“It’s stuck.”
Nic wasn’t surprised. Her hair was like a field of wheat blazoned under a harvest sun. Great. Bad poetry. Just what the confusion in his brain needed. He slowly stood from his overturned milk crate and crossed to her.
“Let me help. You can’t see from there.”
She was doing a poor job of reaching over to the back of her head and straining her arm in the process.
Nic assessed the damage and leaned over. There was so much of it. It was so long and the most illustrious color. He gently parted a sea of hair and determined the opened end. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He whispered, carefully untangling the pin and sliding its oblong top up, carefully separating it from her scalp. “Did I hurt you?”
“No.” she whispered.
“There.” He held the pin up proudly. He lowered beside her to her shoulder level and dropped the pin in her open hand. Now, their noses were almost touching and he could feel the soft exhale of her breath on his cheek. Several stray strands of hair caught her chin and her forehead. Nic instinctively made to brush a shade from her cheek, surprised when she covered his hand in the movement. Nic tightened his hold and pulled them to their feet. Esther was unsteady with the quick movement on her fashionable heels and fell into him a little. Her riches of hair under his chin, the thrum of her heartbeat pressing the outer lace of her dress so he could feel it through his cotton shirt. Their eyes met. Esther’s were wide and hopeful, expectant and a little shy. He slowly looked in the direction of the masses of blonde hair down her back and then back to meet her gaze again. She showed consent for his wordless request with the slightest incline of her chin.
Entanglements Page 4
