Her tone was matter-of-fact, but the nervous blush on her cheekbones stood out like two pink flags. Elias found the contrast very charming.
“Will my pocket watch suffice,” he asked, “or are you planning on winning by drawing it out for sixteen hours?”
She looked alarmed. “Which game was that?”
“Howard Staunton versus Pierre St. Amant, in 1843.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“It rang in the era of chess clocks.”
Her lips quirked wryly. “I can’t think why.”
He smiled, and her color deepened. Being here was costing her. And yet she had come. He knew why he was here—he had entered the Common Room with a plan of seduction:
checkmate her in ten instead of five moves to draw out their time together
refrain from overt, flowery wooing because this would not charm her
steer the conversation to a topic that roused her passions—it might put her in a passionate mood
A limited strategy, and he hadn’t expected to deploy it. Notwithstanding her reaction to his chessboard the other day, she had not shown for the first few days. What, then, is your intention behind this visit now, Lady Catriona?
He pulled out the chair for her, then arranged seating for the chaperone.
“You look very fine today, Mrs. MacKenzie,” he told the Scotswoman. “Would you care for a drink?” He gestured at the well-stocked shelves of the bar at the back of the room.
MacKenzie regarded him with a reproachful frown. “No, thank ye. We’re not in the habit of drinking so early in the day here.”
He gave her his politest smile. She pursed her lips and whipped spear-sized knitting needles from her bag. All righty.
“I’ll have a sherry, please,” came Lady Catriona’s calm voice from behind his back.
He didn’t let MacKenzie see his grin. The path to the lady led past this stalwart woman.
When he returned to the table with a tray, Lady Catriona had removed her gloves, and she was wearing her spectacles on her head as though they were a pair of sunglasses.
She gazed up at him when she took the sherry glass off the tray. “Thank you.”
He stood holding the tray, head empty, trying not to stare down into her bare face. Her eyes were enchanting, a clear, deep cerulean blue, the kind silk-makers used to imbue a gown with hints of heaven.
When he sat down, a distracting heat was simmering low in his body. “I suggest fifteen moves per hour for time control,” he said, his voice a little scratchy.
A nod. “Very well.”
She had placed a little notebook and a pencil in front of her. She was taking this seriously; she would keep track of their moves. Her fingers, curled around the sherry glass, looked naked, like her face. Her gloves, white leather with pearl buttons, lay snugly on top of each other at the edge of the table. Elias sucked in a breath and placed his pocket watch next to the board. His seduction plan should have included provisions for defense, not just attack.
“I use algebraic notation,” he said with a nod at her notebook, because in Britain, they used descriptive notation, which he had never bothered to internalize.
“That’s fine,” she said. “I use algebraic, too.”
“Ah,” he said. “How come?”
A small hesitation. “I used to play with a German.”
“I see.” The thought of some stiff German count playing away with her in close quarters annoyed him. “Please. Choose your color.”
“Dark,” she said easily.
He turned the board around, putting the black army in front of her. She studied the board for some time in perfect silence.
“It’s beautiful,” she said at last. “A work of art.” The fingers of her right hand twitched, as if she imagined touching it.
Her appreciation unexpectedly grazed a tender place in his chest. The board was one of his most prized possessions. He never parted from it. He knew its details with his eyes closed: the filigree patterns on the pieces, fine as if carved with a needlepoint. The squares were set with the precision of a watchmaker’s hand, the white ones shimmering iridescent with mother-of-pearl; the dark ones intricate inlays of differently shaded kinds of wood. He could still smell the piney scent when he pressed his nose to the board. He still saw his father’s patient fingers on the pieces, moving them toward victory. The chessboard had been a wedding gift to Elias’s mother. Your mother could play so well, her cousins refused to play with her . . . His parents had enjoyed playing together; his father had taken pleasure in his wife’s wit. The memories Elias had of them sitting together, looking connected and content in their own private cosmos, included the chessboard.