But if his temper was so easily riled at the rehearsal hall, she shivered to think of what it might be when he owned her. When they were behind closed doors. If she had his children.
Esther aligned a rim of peas on her untouched plate.
“Esther,” Thomas said.
“Yes?”
“We will need your girl to attend to your things. We need to move to the Estate at Rutherford by the end of the week.”
Esther’s fork clanged against her plate. “What? But the recital is not for another two weeks!”
“There is no recital.” Thomas threw his napkin on the table with finality. “There is a pressing matter and some men who would see my family’s good name ruined. Unless you want to risk scandal for you and your father you will follow me while my offer still stands.”
Esther felt a momentary weightless joy. “You mean you might rescind…”
“I wouldn’t want to.”
Esther deflated and turned to her father. “Father, surely I can take time here while Thomas leaves and sees to his business upstate.”
Her father pushed away from the table and his equally uneaten plate. “I have no say in this, Esther. Thomas makes your decisions now.”
The men left the table, presumably for more arguments and brandy. Esther felt the slam of the study door reverberate through her. She smiled and thanked the serving staff that were all too invisible to her father and fiancé and slowly rose, smoothing her skirt.
Thomas makes your decisions now. Tears stung her eyes. She couldn’t fathom that this was to be her life now. Trapped. She had been willing to do her part for her family: to obey her father and secure his welfare and happiness but at what cost? Ill-treated by an almost-husband who took away her last chance of joy?
A half hour later, Esther was pretending to read in the drawing room when Thomas approached.
“Tomorrow is your last rehearsal. Go and pay off that man. And be grateful I am giving you this one last indulgence. I know what he tried but I am too preoccupied to murder him.”
Esther nodded. She could play with the chip Mrs. Mayweather had given her but she should save it. The recital was a sad disappointment, but if Thomas’s anger kept escalating, she might need a safety net. It pained her that she couldn’t look to her father to protection. That the only person in her life that had taken a sure step to shielding her had been Mrs. Mayweather, a friend of her mother’s.
Of course she knew Nic would have wrestled Thomas to the ground without a second thought if Thomas hadn’t very wisely threatened injury to Esther. It was ironic that such a pained and humiliating moment reassured her feelings for Nic in a far more certain way. The horror in his eyes and his helplessness, not to mention his self-control, spoke to how far he would go to protect her. Her safety was more important than a hasty show of masculine pride.
Esther slowly crept up the stairs to her room. Everything about Thomas had turned to violence: his words. His thoughts. She needed to fight. But she had no control. Elsewhere in the city, women were cutting their hair and removing their corsets to go dancing under flushed fluorescent lights. In every crevice and crook of Boston there were women going to medical school and finishing their suffrage campaigns that would ratify their vote in the Summer of that very year.
But Esther? The only decisions she had were a chess move and a song selection.
She fell onto her still-made coverlet fully clothed and cried herself to sleep.
The next morning, the papers were at the door and her father was a tempest. Esther stole a look over his shoulder on her way to collect a breakfast she didn’t feel like eating from the sideboard.
Weatherton Industries may find itself in the middle of a legal scandal concerning imports of large quantities of forbidden liquor.
Esther’s small gasp drew her father’s attention.
“It is nothing, Esther. It is rumors and hearsay.”
“But there is illegal liquor, father.” Esther dropped into her chair, forgetting her breakfast and merely settling for tea that chilled untouched beside her. “There has to be. The amount that you and Thomas consume.”
“Everyone imbibes liquor, Esther. State affairs run on it. This is one journalist and he only has hearsay. Rumours. Reporters are sewer rats, merely sewer rats. Scurrying for any wishwash of a headline to make a buck.”
Esther finished her tea and nibbled at a dry piece of toast. Her father left to continue his business of the day and Esther grabbed the fanned newspaper tented over his soiled plate.
She read the rest of the article which did seem a little vague when it came to evidence.
James Morland. She wasn’t sure why, but something prompted her to tuck the name into her pocket for another day.
Just as she was arranging her hair, a maid appeared at her door.
“A package for you, Miss Hunnisett.”
Esther tore back the brown paper to reveal a gold-embossed book with the title Finding Ever After written in cursive. Just inside the front flap where the first of many carefully detailed illustrations blazoned the title page was a note from Nic:
Esther,
I hope you do not mind that I attained your address from Mrs. Mayweather. I was a little distracted yesterday afternoon and confess to not knowing who won our competition. You asked me to go to the Brattle Book Shop and get you something that reminded me of you. So many things remind me of you—especially beautiful things.
I never thought a lot about fairy-tales. Most of them are about princesses and knights who combat insurmountable odds. But I suppose I thought of you when I saw this book because it is something lovely but also something resilient. The characters in these stories are strong and most importantly they hope. So I give you this, Esther, in thanks for your trust and your friendship. If our time together has taught me anything, it is that you are strong and you are resilient (how many times have you caught me off-guard with an unexpected move of your Queen?) and that you should hope. Because I hope for you.
Esther pressed the book to her chest before opening it and taking in the fine illustrations, the colours, the words. Nic had touched this. Nic had chosen it for her. Nic had seen it and conjured her face to his mind’s eye. She would have something of him even as she left him. She would have something to hope with even as she was pulled further into Thomas’s tower. And she would be strong. For him. No. Not just for him. For herself.
9
Nic was nervous. He gulped his scalding coffee to the point of almost choking. He had sent her a book. He had seen her with her hair down. He had watched her with her fiancé. Where could they possibly go from here?
She arrived carrying the book he had purchased for her the day before.
“Story time?” he quirked a smile. He wouldn’t bring up the events of the previous afternoon unless she did.
“I prefer it to my portfolio.” She opened the book’s flaps, demonstrating how each song selection accordioned through glossy, illustrated pages. Schubert in Snow White, Bizet in Beauty and the Beast, Liszt in Cinderella and Mozart in Rapunzel.
“Are you well?” he asked.
“Thomas has a brute named Titus Fang waiting outside.” She inclined her chin over her head. “He is my chauffeur.”
“Do you want to sing?”
Esther shook her head. “I want to play.”
Moments later, she leaned into him over the chess board. Her blonde curls tickled lace that joined in an elaborate cameo intersecting her collar. Her long fingers held the bishop and her tongue stuck out a little in concentration.
She deposited the piece on the board and met his eyes.
He reached out his index finger and she flinched. She who had so carefully fit in his arms the day before.
“As if I would hurt you.” His voice was strangled.
She erected her shoulders and stayed still as he lightly moved a curl.
Esther’s face flushed with embarrassment. She averted her eyes when he tried to hold her gaze.
She was so
beautiful and strong and smart. He was moved by her singing, certainly. But mostly when she was sitting across from him, that knowing, teasing glint in her eyes, that intelligent turn of her lip into an uninhibited smile. One she would never gift an audience or acquaintance. One far from the realm of Widow Barclay. How could any man think of hurting her?
“You are embarrassed.” He couldn’t keep the anger from his tone. “You. As if you are to blame. The monster… Esther… I will …” He shook the rest of his words with his head. He didn’t want her privy to his thoughts. All of them, black and curling around him as if he had been the one on the receiving end of injury and force. “Did he hurt you again? When you got home?”
Her fingers trembled slightly as she picked up a rook. “Let’s continue our game.”
“I would have fought for you.”
“I know.”
“I knew he was as good as his threat to hurt you.”
“I need you, Nic. And not just your pity or your revenge. But you. You just see me as me. I don’t want… I don’t want what happened outside of our little world here to be stained by…by….” And the tears came in a hiccupped eruption. “I don’t need the knight who will rush off and drive his fist into a man’s face. I need the knight who will listen and be kind and give me memories to string together. Like… like..like a rosary. And I will take them out and recall them and survive. I need these memories or I won’t make it.”
Nic didn’t care about the sleeping chaperone. He didn’t care about propriety or rules and boundaries or a possibly opened door. He rose so quickly he nearly toppled the milk crate over. He dropped in front of her on his knees and cupped her face. His thumbs caught her tears as they fell. Once the waterfall started, it couldn’t stop. Her sobs got louder, her shoulders shuddered and he didn’t want the Widow to wake up from a noise varied from their usual playing and talk. So he moved the chess board to the floor, lowered on the small table and tenderly coaxed her head to his shoulder so she could muffle her crying into the crook of his neck as he squeezed her tight. The lace of her collar was a light-scratch friction on the open spaces fabric failed to cover and the weight of her dress pressed through his light cotton shirt. Her trademark scent of lilac was heady and almost overwhelming as she was so near, her skin so soft in the little spaces where they met. Her hair on his cheek a feather.
He knew there were unspoken words from weeks transposed into chess moves and minor scales. Beyond their friendship and camaraderie, the words that met in the middle plain of their common ground. But she had said she loved him and took the brunt of bravery even while he cowardly failed to return the words.
Her shudders lightened, her movements stalled and the trail of tears that soaked his shirt collar dried cold and damp as she slowly disentangled herself.
She didn’t break away entirely though, merely inched back so her hands were on his forearms and her red, tear-streaked face hovered a breath from his. He traced her with his eyes, the few leftover crystals clinging to her long lashes, the splotches of pink and heat and sadness flaking each cheek, a mouth trembling slightly. She sniffed. Their breaths met in the space between their slightly parted lips. He wondered if he would breathe in some of what she had just expelled. It was stupid, but so was he. Stupider still when he crooked his head at a slight angle to better catch her lips in a diagonal brush. An exquisite ache stabbed him at the moment of intersection, at the gentle way she parted her lips under his. Suddenly he felt more aware of himself than he had ever been. As if life had primed him for the connection. His head buzzed light and the nerves in his hands tinged, smoothing over her hair and down her back while his lips kept their exploratory rhythm.
There was a conversation in the kiss. For as much as he tried to turn his brain off so he could give over everything to feeling every last inch of a moment he hoped to bottle up forever, he couldn’t help but reconcile the shift he felt. And notice it. Dissect it. She was speaking to him in soft, vulnerable waves. He spoke love and tender insecurity, underscored desire and commitment and loyalty. She responded in acceptance and hope, timid and hurt.
Esther slightly sighed as he pushed his fingers further into her hair and he lost the last part of himself. Later, he would be able to remember the exact second where every last inch of self-possession crumbled just as her shaking fingers teased over his forehead and brushed a strand behind his ear. Her tears had dried but he still tasted salt on her lips. It was the only fleeting thing that grounded him from tipping over the edge.
“And now I can go back.” Her voice was heavy with exertion. She smoothed his hair, she touched his cheek, her fingers tripped over the curve of his chin and settled into the clef sign of his neck and chin. She tried a smile but it didn’t make it past a slight hover over her lips, certainly didn’t brighten her eyes. “Because I will always remember that a man treated me like porcelain.”
They turned at a rustle in the doorway that roused Widow Barclay who stood rather quickly for someone so recently in the throes of slumber. Startled, Esther took a step and toppled the chess board Nic had moved to the floor.
“Mr. Titus Fang,” the Widow said before Nic or Esther could move or speak. “I confess that the climate and dust in this space is overwhelming me. Would you be gentleman enough to see me for a small stroll in the fresh air?”
To Titus Fang’s credit, he answered in a quick affirmative growl that wasn’t exactly gentle but perhaps of the timbre a man of his size and stature would use when speaking to a grandmother. And, blessedly, with the Wolf and Granny out of sight, Nic and Esther could properly say goodbye.
“I love you, Esther.” Nic whispered over her hair. “I should have told you the other day. Of course I love you. And I said things because I thought you were bound and I know your sense of duty but that was before I knew that he abused you. I was weak. And caught off guard. Tell me what my next move is.”
“I can’t leave my father and break my word.” Esther said slowly. “And you can’t leave your father. And where would be possibly go? Our next move has to be goodbye.”
She knew he would honorably latch onto her but at what cost? That would set him gigantic steps back from his path. Supporting himself and her out of his natural dignity and honour. She wanted all for him and none for herself. She wanted to take the bounty of her ambition and circumstance and the hard-bought privilege and tear it off in certain strips so that he could realize the potential hovering in saw dust and dimly lit rehearsals.
Esther bent over the carnage of stray chess pieces moating the overturned milk crate and retrieved a rook by its smooth head, tucking it so tightly into her palm her skin broke.
“Esther… you can’t.” he stood quickly. She had noticed on several occasions that his chin would meet her forehead. He was the perfect height to tuck into. His arms slid so easily around her before. So naturally. “Please.” he entreated. “I can take care of you. There has to be a solution. I know I cannot live with you but I cannot live without you.”
“A paradox to stump Mozart and Mathematics.” Esther said.
She had been stupid for not anticipating love could reach down to your toes, clutch your heart and stir your head. That the slightest sadness projected from another would sting its way through you until it sliced you open.
Esther faced Nic as she had countless times from their first meeting: as a woman recognizing her counterpart. She aligned herself with him and kissed him again as if the sky were falling, as if the moon were dissolving with the pressure of his lips on hers. She felt him everywhere: from the curve of her cheek to the tip of her fingers, from the thrum of her heart to the turn-over in her stomach. Consuming her and brandishing her pride and timidity and second guesses. Right now… this… was ownership. This was hers for the taking, thrilling and keeping. A woman might harbour a hope chest, Esther harboured one in her deepest core. Treasured feelings and touches and lips and sighs. He was warm and there and present.
And he loved her. It was certainty. It was feeling without tr
anslation. It was in every soft caress over her hair and forehead. It had been rooted since the moment they met. The need for breath and the determination to keep a slight semblance of propriety cast them slightly apart. Memorize his eyes, she lost a bit of her soul in the glisten of his dark, sad gaze. Memorize his touch, she stirred at the knuckles grazing her cheek, lowing beneath her chin.
“Duty trumps love.” Nic said against her cheek.
“I will honour the promise that I made to my father for my dead mother’s sake. And you will stay with your father. That’s love, too.”
It was too soon to say goodbye but Titus Fang and Widow Barclay shadowed the door and Esther reached for her handbag. Now, they would be watched. She couldn’t steal a last kiss so she let it take residence in her eyes. She visually traced over his ears and his nose and the smile lines at his mouth. One last time.
She straightened her shoulders and watched his heart break in his eyes. “Well, Mr. Ricci.” She was proud her voice was sure and unrippled. She extended her hand. “You have been a wonderful rehearsal pianist and I will be sure to write you a recommendation whenever it is needed.”
Esther felt Nic’s palm like a parting kiss in the gentle way he took her hand: a feather lightness compensating for Thomas’s brutish touch the day before.
“You sing like an angel,” he said.
“Widow Barclay.” Esther summoned her chaperone. “Don’t you want to bid goodbye to Mr. Ricci? This was the last of our rehearsals.”
Widow Barclay clearly was not quite awake or addled by the sun because all she said was, “Oh I will be seeing Mr. Ricci again very shortly. This is merely a brief adieu.”
Puzzled, Esther crossed the dusty boards of the squat rehearsal space once more, leaving the happiest weeks of her life behind her.
10
Nic walked. And walked. And walked. There was a symphony to his neighbourhood: the turn of an automobile, music from his father’s homeland on a phonograph seeping through an open window and blessing the street below, the rickety wheels of a cart, the laughter of children and the lyrical language of his mother’s home. As much as he had wanted to escape the confines of red brick and cobblestones, sneak out of the squat alleys and tight corners to a world beyond, he recognized that it wasn’t a prison so much as a haven. He had been safe here. He had learned chess and played piano, watched his mother barter for cannoli as he hoisted a mesh bag full of oil, tomatoes and basil on his shoulder, rolled his eyes at his father each time his English was corrected.
Entanglements Page 6
