Finding Ever After: four fairytale-ish novellas

by Pepper Basham

  But he didn’t go home. If he did, he would just confess everything to his father. That the girl he had fallen in love with had fallen easily into his arms and teased his lips and stretched his heart to a breaking point. That the same girl… no … woman had borne the rough treatment of a beast of a man who treated her as if she weren’t the same woman who hung stars in the sky and told the moon to brighten and shine.

  Nic rambled through the Common and the Public Garden and wove around Boylston Street, the late afternoon sun winking over buildings that had stood sentinel on either side of the thoroughfare and seen worlds change and history shift. Everything made him think of her: the promenade of ornamented lines on the merchant shops and the layer-cake steeple of the Arlington Street Church, as refined and carefully sculpted as Esther and the world she came from.

  No one had won the chess game. He had been too preoccupied Lewis and Clarking his way through the wealth of her hair to count all of the respective pieces from their harmless competition. She wanted something from Brattle Bookshop and he would find it for her.

  Much later, at home, he thumbed through the tome he had carried with him. A book of fairytales whose title Finding Ever After was dreamily embossed in gold finish over the cover.

  His father, later than usual from bridge club, found Nic in pensive study.

  “What’s this?”

  “A present for a friend.” He passed his dad the compilation.

  “Fairy stories.”

  Nic nodded. “Yes.”

  “Which one were you reading?”

  “Rapunzel.”

  “The girl with long hair the color of gold who is trapped in a tower?”

  “The very one.”

  “There is a girl, isn’t there?” his father attempted a casual tone.

  Nic raised his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does, Nic. I have watched you for the past several weeks and you are different now. I know it has little to do with your math courses and it certainly isn’t piano tuning that has lit your eyes. It takes someone who has experienced true happiness to see it in another.”

  “True happiness?”

  “I had it with your mother.” His dad cupped Nic’s cheek. “And I have her through you. And now you have someone. It is in the way that you hum while making the tea and the flowers that you make sure are watered. I can see love, Nic. Because I have lived it.”

  “How can anyone see love?”

  “It is in your eyes. In your step. In the way that you think about eating but mostly just push your food on your plate.”

  “Well, I am a cad. She is engaged. To a man who hurts her. Yes. He treats her badly. And I can’t rescue her.”

  Milo Ricci studied the book on his son’s lap. “But you must rescue her.”

  “How? She is an heiress. I am just her rehearsal pianist. I cannot even properly tune a piano for her.” Nic shut the book and moved it to the table beside their ongoing chess match. “Dad, how could a man be so cruel as to harm his fiancé?”

  “You know, in all of my years, I have never heard you talk about a girl. The last time I mentioned it you listed off these high ideals. These standards.”

  “She loves Mozart and she loves chess.”

  “Ah.”

  Nic rubbed his eyes. “You needn’t worry. I won’t leave you.”

  “But you must leave me. Do you think I care that I hurt my hand in the factory? The only grief it has truly caused me is knowing that you feel obligated to take care of me.”

  “It’s not obligation.” Nic said sternly. “You’re my family. My only family. I want to provide for you.”

  “Nic, you have provided for me. But you cannot live like this. It hurts me to watch you knowing that you were meant for so much more than math in that second rate institution on Charter Street and fiddling with dusty pianos. If you love this girl, then she is a princess. What’s more, if you love her…she is worthy of you.”

  “I have nothing to offer her.”

  “You have everything to offer her. What you don’t have is money. But money has never given you your talent. It hasn’t purchased your loyalty. It has no hold on your morality and sense of goodness. It is just paper and weight. I don’t see your worth in sums and figures, Nic. Neither should you.”

  8

  Dinner assuaged a bit of Esther’s guilt. She was humiliated and horrified, of course, by Thomas’s possessive grip and the scene in front of Nic; but she slowly realized his anger was exacerbated by a business problem. His seeking her out was his desire to talk to her. For a walk in the Common. To feel normal after a trying day. She almost felt sorry for him before remembering how her skin burned with the twist of his hand.

  The moment they arrived at her father’s house, Thomas abandoned her, slamming the door of her father’s study, their voices raised behind the heavy mahogany. Esther tried to make sense of the muffles and heard the words manifests and Canada. She knew so little about shipping. So little about what her future husband did other than that so much of their resources were bound to the Weatherton name.

  By dinner, her father looked pale and exhausted, tugging his collar over a neck still heated with anger. Thomas was far more invested in refilling his brandy glass than slicing at the prime rib on his plate. To his brief credit, he hadn’t said two words to her since he shoved her in the back of the automobile and he hadn’t given her censure in front of her father.

  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 wa
s 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 rumours 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 days 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 t
he 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.