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Her children are asleep. They are no longer children, but Leonora does not care to trouble herself with the distinction. They are hers and they are asleep in the same rooms they occupied during youth, in this house that has always been so quiet and beautiful with its vaulted ceilings and carefully curated art. Everything her husband brought into his home had always been beautiful, because that was what he mandated of life. Tamwyn Etoni, the distinguished collector of beautiful things.
Fine taste, a fine discerning taste. Leonora appreciated that about him. She had been grateful for it. Enjoyed it, amenities and responsibility both: the ease, the self-satisfaction, the seamless shift her husband in all his adoration and expectation had faciliated in her life to being an enviable, esteemed wife and mother from a youth spent in preparation for it. The cultivation of his own life had been exacting; the man she married accepted only the best or that which exceeded it. His wife was idol. It was a role tailored for Leonora or else she for it; her pride had never found suffering at his hand, only praise and reason to preen itself.
Tamwyn had understood her as well as any man could have ever hoped to, gazing in on the grey-pink piped labyrinth of her mind as though it were crystal; she had been indulged, encouraged and loved for her invisible work, the efforts to advance her personal fascinations no matter how unacceptable. To move through the world as Tamwyn did required cruelty. To know her and love her so ardently issued the same mandate of higher, harsher degree, and so Leonora had been dearly beloved. Everything treated as it should have been; everything as it was.
Her hand, as steady as it always is, folds to the other, fingertips finding slender metal band and turning it around bone and flesh grown thinner beneath the weight of gold.
It is emptier now, this house. It has always been quiet, the air slowly growing into hollow as the children grew out of childhood, but it seems to have suddenly capitulated with its owner, leaving walls as skeleton, empty lung suspended by single enduring breath. Here, in the brightly-lit levels insulated by steel and concrete where few feet besides Leonora's own have ever fallen, the corpse of the house stands silent and sterile, almost completely free of the accumulation of fifty-odd years’ living. The floor, scrubbed each time she sets foot on it, throws white back to the ceiling just as it did when first poured; her tools, scalpel beside scissors beside neat roll of gauze, sit patiently in their places as they always have and always will.
This is a place removed from sentiment and thus purely of sensation, free of the frippery and adornment that governs her public life. The house is empty; her most private space within it is austere and within its enduring austerity sublimates comfort.
It occurs, belatedly, to Leonora that this empty house is hers. This room has always been hers, yes, with its stainless steel tables and shelves to house all her dearly beloved curiosities in pristine glass, but somehow she had never thought of the house in entirety as hers. It had been her husband’s, just as the house with white stone walls to hold her and her brothers and mother by the sea had been her father’s.
This house will be her son’s, when she dies.
The thought strikes her with surprising force, lodging between seventh and eighth rib deeply enough to be felt when she draws in breath. What a beautiful house, so perfectly decorated with the manners of a life well and extraordinarily lived, and beneath its marble floors and vibrant garden this, her most precious secret.
Half a lifetime ago, carried over the threshold, she had held a breathing hand in hers and felt metal warm between two palms, gold bands borrowing the heat of blood to make bond. One of its masters lies extinguished now and the other stands dimming, with a son whose dawn pales Leonora’s heart to think of on the cusp of inheritance. Her legacy is secured in stone as a mausoleum holds state, the abstraction of distant future suddenly rendered in searing, immediate clarity.
Fatigue follows the impact of her thoughts. Leonora casts a slow, sweeping glance over the room, palms pressed together as she surveys her careful records and research, the collected evidence of her life’s work beyond the ring on her hand and the map of creases over her skin. Her husband had surprised her with just how well he learned her: the plans for this laboratory had been hers to make, hers to adjust, hers in entirety save for the signing. She had reviewed the drafts in Tamwyn’s office, leaning over the arm of the chair beside his desk and borrowing a pen for two days before she was presented with her own and a stand for it to await her use from. Hers to have, he had promised, and his to visit at her will. Just as his office was to her: so unfolded the realms of a marriage built from fine match and finer taste.
Leonora steps closer to the corner of her kingdom that had been Tamwyn’s. She keeps her domain cold, all the better suited to preservation. By now, she is well-practiced at it. Time will not rot the armchair with its tall, broad back and brass studs. Nor will it warp the bookshelf’s dark bones, titles sparing as if aware what intruders they would be without her blessing. The chessboard, as all the venues of Leonora’s games have, will endure.
She steps closer, eyes disturbing what her well-heeled hand will not. The pieces stand at attention under cool, steady blue; hers is the only half of the familiar pair they will ever know again. It was not often that they played chess here, in Leonora’s arena instead of Tamwyn’s. It was impractical, and less enjoyable for the both of them here, where she almost certainly had preferences for other pastimes and her husband for her presence but not conversation.
This game had thus been a rarity, an odd thing the oddness of which bled into the meat of the thing. The development had gone quickly, pawns marched out with quartets of knight and clergy directed to follow in gambits reminiscent of youth’s urgency. Leonora had dictated half her moves to Tamwyn from worktable and sink, hands busy first with incisions, then sutures and scrubbing before she had shed heavy white apron to join him and survey the bloodless expanse of their playing war.
He had taken her proffered rook but not the knight she sent to harry his queen, and smiled at her when she dangled a pawn over his second rank.
“Tempo to spare, beloved. It becomes more difficult to break from mate the closer one nears it.”
“More impressive, Leo,” he had corrected, and castled. Leonora had frowned at his king tucked queenside behind its loyal pawns, feigning annoyance rather than smug recalculation. It would have been disappointing, for their game to be over so soon. She frowns again now.
Tamwyn had played well. He had played well, been a cruel man and a kind husband, and she had loved him for it as any cruel woman and good wife should.
Her hand is steady when it moves, pale and cold-ringed, to ignore the static entertainment of their center and hover precisely over a white pawn’s head. Two moves and black king would fall into check, cornered by remaining rook and a sly bishop whilst her queen busied itself with the splendor of capturing attention and a knight. Three, if he played so cleverly as his custom and valued his pawns worthy of sacrifice to cut her tempo from advance to reserve.
Upstairs, in the office with its lingering scent of cigar smoke and port, she would have considered offering a draw at check, ever traditional.
Here, she had intended to take Tamwyn through endgame. To wear victory on her brow as master in this place so entirely her own. Just once, their secret.
“J’adoube,” Leonora says softly. By proper rules, she can touch any piece and be not beholden to its movement. Adjustment is not a move.
The ivory warms between index and thumb. Leonora plays with her left hand, as she has ever since she first crossed this threshold. Her right, bare of adornment, moves black as a ghost.
The field develops its final structure, an end spelled out in black and white.
Leonora smiles as she always has to be known by her husband. In her mouth, a curious fortification of salt and wine sting beneath her tongue. Tamwyn would have read an outcome on her lips and in the shape of her silence.
“Would you allow me a draw, beloved?” she murmurs in his place.
The clean, beautiful air of her empty home does not respond. Salt, thin and bitter, bleeds over the port in her mouth, sea dripping from open eyes to the seam of her lips as Leonora swallows.
Ivory crown is as warm as her own flesh when its base knocks king prone with a clatter.