The Missing Bishop

So there I am, five forty in the morning, standing in a field of lavender in a two-thousand-pound suit, and I want to tell you I felt ridiculous. I did not. I felt like a woman on a mission, which is basically the same thing.

My name is Kristi Novak, I am thirty-four years old, and I do mergers and acquisitions for a bank in London. Have done for nine years. I am good at it in the way a knife is good at cutting. People compliment the result and then keep their fingers away from me.

And for the last eight months I have been renting the tiniest cottage you have ever seen on a lavender farm called Willow Ridge, out here in the Cotswolds where the stone walls are older than most countries. I came out for a quiet few months after a bad quarter. What I found instead was a farm worth roughly one point four million on the open market, and Marie Anderson, who owns it, who is fifty-eight and widowed and finally ready to sell.

Do you see the problem? The problem is that I want it. The farm. The cottage, the fields, the little distillery that smells like a calm morning all the time. I want it so badly I can taste it, and I have never in my life wanted a thing I could not price.

Which is why I am walking the rows at dawn with my phone in my hand, counting.

Let me do the math for you, because I cannot stop doing the math. Eleven acres in production. Distillery equipment, maybe sixty thousand in resale. The cottage and the main house, together, eight hundred if the market stays kind. Tourism revenue in season, the workshops Marie runs, the shop. It pencils out. It more than pencils out. And there is a conglomerate, Hargrove Wellness Group, sniffing around, and if they get it first I will lose my mind.

So this morning I am on a call with my colleague Dev, walking between the rows with dew soaking my beautiful shoes, whispering like an idiot.

"The seller hasn't signed anything yet," I say. "Marie's stalling. I need two more weeks."

"Two weeks? Kristi, Hargrove's people were out there last month. You know that, right?"

"I know exactly who was out there last month, thank you." I know because I watched their SUV crawl down the lane like a hearse and I stood in my doorway hating it with my whole chest.

"And you're really going to do this? Buy a farm? You?"

"I am going to do it, Dev, because Hargrove is run by people who fired me from my first job out of university, and I would walk over hot coals to take a property out from under them."

Wait, that is not quite the order of events. Let me be fair, since fairness is not my natural habitat. Twelve years ago, when I was twenty-two and fresh out of my degree, I took a junior analyst job at a firm that Hargrove later swallowed whole. They closed my entire department in a restructure and I got a two-line email on a Friday afternoon. I did not even get to clear my own desk, security did it. I have hated them with the clean, cold, well-organized hatred of a professional ever since. It is not my finest quality. It is, however, extremely fuel efficient.

"Fine," Dev says. "Two weeks. Don't fall in love with the bees."

I hang up and I am standing at the end of the long row where the purple just goes on and on in the half light, and here is the thing I will admit to you and no one else. For about four seconds I forgot the math. The light came over the wall and hit the whole field at once and the bees were already up and working and it was so stupidly beautiful that my eyes actually stung.

Then I heard someone clear their throat behind me and nearly died.

* * *

Alec Graham is the acupuncturist who rents the barn. He is thirty-seven, tall, wears linen like he has never once thought about it, and has hands that are apparently magic, according to half the village. I know this because they all tell me at the shop. He has never married, I have learned this through the village grapevine whether I wanted to or not, and he has been on the farm six years.

This morning he is standing at the end of the row in Wellies with two mugs of something steaming, and he does not look pleased.

"You were on the phone," he says.

"I was."

"At dawn. In the field. Saying you need two weeks before the seller signs."

Ohhh no. Ohhh, absolutely not. My stomach drops through the soil and into Australia, but my face does what it is trained to do, which is nothing.

"I don't know what you think you heard," I say.

"Kristi." He hands me a mug anyway, which is annoying of him. "I heard the words Hargrove and outbid and two weeks. So either you're buying this farm out from under Marie, or you're brokering it for the people who'll strip it down to a product line and a gift shop. Which is it?"

And here is where I should tell you my plan was to keep this quiet until the offer was signed. That was the plan. But Alec is looking at me with those serious dark eyes and the lavender smell is coming off the rows in waves and my whole careful cold blueprint suddenly feels like it is written on a napkin.

"Buying," I say. "Me. Not Hargrove. Never Hargrove."

He actually relaxes a little, then catches himself. "You were going to tell Marie when? After?"

"After it was done. Because before it's done, she has options, and one of those options is them, and they have a much better pitch than a banker in a suit."

"A banker." He says the word like it tastes bad. "You've been here eight months, Kristi. You come to the workshops. Marie adores you. You knew her tomatoes by name before you knew her surname."

"They're called the Marmandes, all of them, that's the variety, and I did not know that when I started."

He almost smiles. Almost. "You know what I mean."

"So what do you want from me, Alec? An apology for being good at my job? Because I have watched what Hargrove does to places like this. They buy the brand, keep the name, move the oil production to a facility in Bulgaria, and put a gift shop where the distillery is. I have seen it done to three farms in the last two years. I am not going to let them do it to this one."

"By buying it yourself?"

"By buying it myself, yes, and keeping every bloody bee."

He is quiet for a second. The bees are not quiet, the bees are extremely loud for such small animals, but he is.

"Marie doesn't want money," he says finally. "She wants someone who'll keep it alive. She's told me she's torn. Your chequebook versus six years of me building a clinic she believes in."

"Then we have a problem, don't we," I say, "because I'm not losing to a conglomerate out of sentiment."

"And I'm not losing the farm to spite."

"Spite is an underrated motivator."

"It really isn't." He drinks his tea. "Come on. Marie's holding court in the sunroom in an hour and she wants to talk to both of us. She said, and I quote, about the future of everything."

Oh great. Well. Nothing for it.

We walk up together, not touching, not quite arguing, and I keep doing math the whole way. And then we are in the sunroom, this bright glass room Marie keeps full of plants and one absolutely hideous Victorian chess table, and I stop dead.

Because I have looked at that chessboard a dozen times without seeing it. This morning I see it. The black side is missing its king's bishop. Just gone. There is a little round shadow of dust where it used to sit.

"Marie," I ask, "where's your bishop?"

And she gets this look on her face, this soft complicated look, and says, "Ah. You noticed."

That is where I will leave it for now, because Marie has decided to be mysterious and Alec is pouring tea like none of this is strange, and honestly? I came here for a property deal. Nobody warned me about any of the rest of it.

Marie sits down at the chess table and folds her hands. "I lost the bishop three years ago," she says. "Lamar dropped it in the compost heap the week before he died, and I never found it. I refused to buy a replacement. A board with a gap tells the truth about a household, don't you think?"

"That is either very wise or very stubborn," I say.

"Both, usually. Now. The future of everything."

And she lays it out. Hargrove has made a formal approach, in writing, with a number attached. She will not tell me the number. She will not tell Alec the number. She says she has not decided anything, and that she wanted us both in the room together because we are both part of this farm's future and apparently we have both been circling each other like cats.

"Have you two been talking?" she asks, all innocence.

"Constantly," says Alec.

"Lies," I say, and then, because lying to Marie feels like kicking a bee hive, "once. This morning. In a field."

"Well," says Marie, pouring herself orange juice with great ceremony, "talk more. And when you've both decided what you actually want, come back and tell me. I'm seventy percent through sorting the loft, so do hurry, I'd hate to die before finishing it."

"You're fifty-eight," says Alec.

"Fifty-eight and a loft," she says, and leaves us alone in the sunroom with the chessboard.

* * *

So here is the embarrassing part. We sit down across from each other at the ridiculous table because it is the only table in the room, and Alec starts setting up the pieces, and he asks me what my opening is, and I have to confess.

"I have never played chess."

He stares. "Never? You? You do hostile takeovers."

"Chess is not a takeover, Alec. In a takeover there's always someone you can pay."

"Sit down," he says, "and be humble."

And I sit down and I am humble, and it is awful, and also weirdly wonderful. He teaches me how the pieces move, patient as anything, moving my pawn with one long finger, and I am thirty-four years old and learning a game in a glass room while bees hum outside and my heart is doing things my heart has no business doing at a negotiating table.

"Now," he says, "the missing bishop. Watch."

He plays a few moves against himself, narrating, and then he shows me a position where the only good move is giving up a piece for nothing. A sacrifice. "You give up something you wanted to keep," he says, "so the position opens and you win something bigger later. That's the lesson of the bishop. Marie will tell you the same. Losing a piece taught her the shape of the rest of the board."

"That is a very acupuncture way of looking at chess."

"It is the only way I know how to look at anything, honestly."

We play for two hours. I lose six times. On the sixth loss I put my head down on the table and groan, and he laughs, actually laughs, and the sound goes through me like warm water.

"You're improving," he says.

"I'm a banker. I don't improve. I extract value."

"Terrible. Play again."

* * *

By nine that night we are back in the sunroom with contract printouts spread everywhere and cold tea and a laptop, hunting for a loophole. Because here is what we found out from Marie's solicitor's letter, which Alec had a copy of because Marie shows him everything: the Hargrove offer has a condition. A due diligence clause. If the environmental and land-use survey comes back with a finding the buyer doesn't like, Hargrove can walk or force the price down.

"Hargrove's own record," I say slowly, "is a landfill of findings. Two pollution orders in five years, one in Bulgaria, a water abstraction row in Kent. If that survey is done properly, done independently, they're exposed. They can't buy a heritage farm with that in their own due diligence file without the story getting out."

"So we make sure it gets done properly," says Alec.

"So we make sure the right people have the right documents before the survey happens. Quietly. Legally. Everything public record, I want to be careful about that, I know what I'm doing."

He looks at me across the printouts. "You're terrifying."

"Thank you."

"That was a compliment and we both know it."

Then he notices my shoulders, which by this point are up around my ears, because it has been a day, because of Dev and the two weeks and the suit I've been in since 5:40 in the morning. He stands up and comes around the table.

"Turn around," he says. "Neck and shoulders. Standard point work. You've been on my list for eight months, every time you come to a workshop hunched up like a comma."

"Is this you asking?"

"It's me asking. Yes or no?"

I should say no. There is a deal between us, an unspoken one, farm first, feelings never. I say yes anyway, and he puts two fingers on my shoulder and finds a spot that apparently connects directly to my spine's filing system, and I make a noise I will not be describing on this site.

"Goodness," he says.

"Shut up. Do the other side."

He does the other side. He works down my neck, unhurried, and the sunroom is dim now, just a lamp and the last blue light, and I am so tired and so loose that when I turn my head his face is right there, close, closer than a colleague's face should be.

"Kristi," he says, quiet.

"Yes," I say, which is not an answer to anything, and then his mouth is on mine and I am kissing him back, and it is soft and slow and entirely too good, and my hand comes up and holds his linen shirt like it belongs to me.

And then I pull back.