Sweet Romance13 min read
A Fox in a White House, a Taoist at My Side
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I woke up tasting river mud and other people's memories. I should have been drowning, but someone or something had dragged me out like a fish. I lay on the cold sand and kept my eyes shut, pretending to be dead. Pretending would buy time.
A middle-aged man in a coat of small men and a voice like a bell leaned over me. He called me “miss” and told the bearers to carry me. They lifted me like I was light as a shawl and dumped me into a sedan. I smelled lacquer and tea, and I realized I was wearing plain white linen, the kind a lovelorn lady wears on the riverbank when she plans to die for love.
I should have been the fox. Instead I was in the silk of the human who had jumped in.
“I am not her,” I told myself, but I kept my mouth shut. Inside me there was another life, a memory not mine: a white fox named Bai Xiaoxiao who had been frightened, chased by priests, driven into the water. She had fled and then swallowed river cold. I remembered the chase—Daoist talismans, chanting, spears. I remembered fear. I remembered the old rule: if you are a fox and Daoists trap you, you die.
I lay still and listened to the sedan sway. They moved me through gates and tall halls. When they closed the curtain I had a moment of space and I used it.
I tested my hand. A strange warmth answered, like a string under my palm. Not enough to cast fire, but a hint. My fox's power was there, thin as a reed. My throat told me I could not be foolish. Save my strength. Hide my smell. Hide my scent from priests.
The sedan stopped. A voice in the hall said, “The scholar is drowned. Miss, you must come home.”
I was carried into a small yard where two scolding housewomen argued as if it were a mild thing to argue about a drowning maiden. I sat up and let them fuss. I let them mistake me for the lady they had lost.
“If you will be quiet,” I said in my head more than aloud, “then we can both go on.”
They put me into a smaller house and shut the gate. I learned quickly that the house called itself the White Mansion, and that I, the woman who smelled slightly of fox and river, had become their lady. That was strange, but useful.
A week went by while I learned how the house worked. Two maids—plump, fast with jokes—became my friends. One was bright and talked like butter, the other hummed over tea and pressed flowers into my palm. I was careful, studying the map of life laid out in this body, the things a body must do, the way the world treats beauty when it has a name.
On the fifth day someone brought news that a match had been arranged. I should have been alarmed. The White Mansion’s master had promised me to an old man of power, a wealthy official who had silver at his throat and little mercy in his heart. I heard the name and felt my skin tighten—Gustav Nielsen, fifty-something, strong in coin.
“No,” I said aloud before thinking. The servants looked at me with that old quiet the servants of grand houses show when they have to hide a hammer behind a smile.
I thought about what was behind the arrangement. Houses traded daughters like banners. The house had used me as a piece. The house had no idea I was a fox who slept with dreams of fox trees and running. I had to leave. I had to find Apollo Mathieu—the Taoist from the mountain, the one I had seen in the book I once loved. He was the good, true man who would not end like the others.
I ran that night.
I stole two dresses, a handful of coins, and the softest pair of shoes. I crawled over the wall like a cat and slipped into a town that had not yet closed its eyes.
I did not last a day.
In the market, beneath a pile of spices and sweat, some rude men decided to play. I ran. The street smelled like fried bread and the river. I ran until I backed into a wall and into a chest. There he was—tall, in a grey robe that hung like water—calm as a locked pond.
“Miss, are you hurt?” he asked.
His voice stopped me. I had seen his face like a photograph: the book I read hid him in hard light. He should have been dead, and yet he lived. He was Apollo Mathieu, though his robe did not show his rank and his smile was not for me alone.
I flung myself into his arms like a fool.
He laughed softly. “You are safe now.”
My heart did a thing it had no right to do. I blushed so red my cheeks felt like an oven, and the world narrowed down to the sound of his steady breathing. He helped me steady the bamboo casket I had stolen. He asked no questions.
“Who are you?” he asked me after a while.
“Chloe,” I said quickly. “Call me Chloe. I was running.”
“Chloe.” He said it like a new coin. “I am Apollo Mathieu. You should not wander so late.”
“Can you—” I started.
“Come, sit,” he said gently. “Drink this. It is tea. Taste it.”
He handed me a tube of sweet osmanthus tea. When he touched my fingers I felt a blossom open in my chest. The tea cooled my burning face and made me bold.
“I am being forced to marry a man twice my age,” I said. “My house thinks to trade me for safety. I cannot, I will not—”
Apollo Mathieu looked at me with that clear look and said, “I will speak to your father.”
I almost laughed at how true and how terrible that was. A noble Taoist could speak, but could a single Taoist change a house? I decided to test my luck.
“Will you?” I asked.
“I will,” he said simply.
And so we walked to my house together.
The gate smelled of lacquer. My own father—Evert Lawrence—smiled a thin smile that did not reach his eyes. He was a man used to having answers. He bowed when Apollo came in, and the world seemed to rearrange itself.
“Master Apollo,” the house steward said, hurrying. “Please come in.”
He offered tea. Apollo discussed little things that mattered like salt in a dish and the timing of prayers. Then Apollo said, “I would like to see to this wedding. It is not right.”
The old man’s face cooled like iron taken from the sun. “Marriages are made to shield us. Your will is not always needed.”
The talk turned. I left them to it and wandered the corridor, pressing my cheek to the cool stone. For once I felt a tiny thing like hope.
A week passed. Apollo stayed. He and his younger companion—Ambrose Robinson—moved like two quiet birds in the yard. They kept to themselves and they kept watch. The house grew nervous and the servants watched us with new eyes.
Then the old devil’s face got bolder. Evert Lawrence came to me with an ugly little white porcelain bottle.
“You must do me a favor,” he said. His voice was honey and iron mixed.
“What favor?” I asked.
He smiled like a man who thinks you are a pawn. “A simple powder. Put it into his tea. It is a cordial, nothing more. He will remain and love you. The city will be safe with a Taoist at our side.”
I held the bottle. It was small and white, with a painted camellia.
“You cannot be serious,” I said. “You want me to drug him?”
“You will bring peace to this house,” Evert said. “You will save us from harm. Besides, a little love is not a bad thing.”
The bottle was warm. Something in me almost laughed at his arrogance. He thought love could be bought by a priest’s medicine. He thought men like Apollo could be bought like so many pearls. He had no idea how I worked. I had been a fox for centuries in another life. I knew which women were made like wolves and which men were like lamps.
I swore I would never use that bottle. I hid it, but I kept it—like a match kept near a bed. Evert meant to hold my life in his hand and burn it down. He did not know he had given me the light.
Days slid. Apollo and I grew closer. He gave me peach blossoms he had picked on some hill. I put them in a jar and kept them. We had sugar-candied hawthorn on a stick, and once he bought me a small stuffed rabbit from a stall. Ambrose laughed and called me “Miss Fox.”
“You have danger near,” Apollo told me once. “The priests look for a fox, but they do not find the right one.”
“Maybe they will never find me,” I said too loudly, then blushed. I was not used to these words sliding from my mouth.
His eyes softened. “You have done nothing wrong,” he said. “I will not let them harm you.”
He meant it. He would mean it.
But the house would not leave us be. Evert watched. He sent servants to pry and put minor things in my path. He whispered in the ear of Gustav Nielsen, who had mailed the matchmaker’s letter in the first place. When I found out, my blood boiled.
I decided to take the white bottle and hide it somewhere the master would not find. I put it in the only place he never thought to look: an old chest of letters from a daughter long dead. I could not bring myself to throw it away. I wanted my life to be my own.
That day the house prepared a small feast. Evert arranged it to be the sort of public thing—nearly a hundred guests—where marriage plans might be whispered and plans might die. I had a plan of my own.
I called Apollo to come. I asked for a blessing from him and his brother, and in front of the room I put the small bottle on the table and I began to speak.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, and the room made itself quiet. “I have learned that our city values honor. I have learned we do not give ourselves away for safety nor for silver. But I have also learned that some men will take a short route to what they want.”
Evert laughed then, at me on my feet. “My daughter—our daughter—has grown bold,” he said.
I looked at my hands. I could feel the cool of fox-memories under my skin. I let them see me.
“And this is how the game ends,” I said.
I set the bottle down on the table. Then I walked it, slowly, towards my father’s seat.
“Father,” I said softly, “you told me to bring you results. You brought me this.” I lifted the bottle so everyone could see it. “Is this your peace?”
Someone gasped. A servant started to whisper. A man near the door reached for his sleeve and mouthed a silent prayer.
Evert’s face changed like weather. First there was a smile—the smile that had meant control. Then there came a flash of confusion. The room watched him as if he were a storm.
“You—” he began.
“You brought a medicine to bind a man’s will.” I sounded steadier than I felt. “You gave me a charm to put in his tea, to make him love me without choice. Is that the kind of peace you want? A peace bought from another’s will?”
His eyes hardened into two chips of stone. He laughed too loud. “Foolish girl. This is nothing but harmless sleep-dust. Tell me, have you become moral now?”
The guests murmured. I did something I had not planned. I lifted my hand and tapped the porcelain bottle with the tip of my fan. The crack was very small. A dark dust sifted out. Someone in the audience had a small red light in their hand—Ambrose. He cried out, “Talon powder!” The clapboxes of gossip were alive.
A hush fell. Evert’s face went pale then purple. He tried to take the bottle back. “Chloe,” he said sharply, but his voice shook. “You know nothing. You are a child.”
“You brought this to me for your ends,” I said. “You meant to force a man who has been nothing but kind to me to stay. You meant to make me into your good luck charm.”
“Ridiculous!” he said. He stood up, and for once his voice sounded like a broken bell. “You are not my daughter. You are not—”
The crowd leaned forward. A clerk crossed himself. The servants shifted. My maids cried softly.
Then I did the thing that broke his proud face the most. I took the bottle and threw it onto the brazier in the center of the hall.
The small powder flared blue and bloomed into smoke that smelled like bitter almonds and wet stone. The hall filled with it. Men coughed. A child grabbed at his mother's sleeve. Some started to step back.
Evert’s face had been bright with smirk. Now the color leached out. He stumbled back as if someone had shoved him. His eyes went from triumph to alarm.
“No!” he yelled. “Get out! It is fire! Douse it!”
His voice was thin. People looked at him like at a man who had dropped his sword.
At that moment a simple thing happened: the people saw what he had tried to hide. A dozen servants had watched him slip small packets into cups for weeks. A stitch-worker had heard his counsel with the matchmaker. As the smoke rose, someone pulled out a scrap of embroidered fabric and showed it. Someone else held up a crumpled note.
Evert’s bravado shattered into pieces. He tried to backtrack. “You are lying,” he said, hands trembling. “You are putting this on me. I meant only our family’s well-being.”
No one believed him. They could see the little marks of guilt on his fingers. A woman at the other end of the hall raised her chin. “He has done worse than this,” she said. “He sells daughters’ names for scarcities and calls it duty.”
His eyes snapped to her. For the first time I saw fear sharp as a blade. He had a thousand men ready to do his bidding, but not a single quiet defense among the crowd now. Their faces had moved from polite to cold like a river turning to ice.
He clung to words. “You are servants. You would risk your master’s wrath—”
“Master?” someone echoed. “This master put a poison in a cup meant for a Taoist who has kept this city safe. He would rob a man's choice. He would make peace with the hearts of others and call it safety.”
He tried to laugh. The laugh was brittle. Then the sound in the hall changed. People began to speak, and their voices layered. A merchant nearby said, “I refuse to do business with a house that kidnaps will.” A soldier said, “If a lord would poison a warrior, the law will see it.” Someone began to take out a small mirror and a paper and write. Phones do not exist here, but news travels. Men put down their cups and turned to listen.
Evert’s face lost what color it had left. He stepped forward. “You would all turn on me? I feed you. I give you roofs. I—”
“You gave us fear,” I said. “And now you ask mercy.”
He laughed. Then he grew small. His shoulders curved. He tried to bargain. He tried to make jokes. He tried to say that I was a liar who had stolen his power.
“Father,” I said, and the whole room drew a breath. “Prove it.”
That was the moment he collapsed. He went from a man to a child in an instant. He began to deny what everyone had seen. “No!” he said, and his voice was a rope fraying. “You listen—listen to me—this is a plot! I would never—”
Around him heads shook. Some took out pieces of cloth, some smartphones from pockets—few as they were—and started to record. The crowd grew hungry for truth. Their shock changed into a chorus of judgment.
He fell to his knees on the polished floor. His trousers creased at the knees. He reached a hand out toward me. “Please,” he said. “Please, Chloe. I did this for the house. For our name. For your life. Do not shame me.”
No one rushed to help him. They swirled around him like leaves. Some clapped in quiet appreciation of the courage in exposing him. Some laughed. A woman near the door used her sleeve to wave the remaining smoke away. Someone muttered, “We have long suspected.”
He tried to scramble up, to run, and the servants formed a line that boxed him in. A man took out a ledger and read aloud the expenses—gifts to matchmakers, bottles bought from a peddler with a foreign trade stamp. A maid produced a torn letter: “A charm of binding—small.” A hundred eyes looked at him. He turned color like a fruit pressed too hard.
“What will you do?” a man near the door asked, blunt as a hammer.
He looked at them all and then at me. His face had been all iron; now it showed a naked, raw panic I had not seen. “I did it for us!” he sobbed. “I did it because—”
The crowd hissed at the sentence that trailed off. Some laughed. People took out their phones and filmed the downfall: the proud lord on his knees, the servants shuffling, the head of the household undone.
He tried the final tactic—appeal. “Please!” he begged, then louder, “I will give back the money! I will resign my post! I will do anything!”
Some people crossed themselves. Others spat. One woman, whose son had been married by Evert off to gain favor, spat in his face and called him “traitor.” The oldest man in the room, a man who had run a mill for thirty years, stood up and said, “If you will buy our daughters with poison, we will not suffer you.”
The steward that had once carried me stood there with tears on his face. “He gave us orders. We followed,” he said. “But this is wrong.” He turned away.
Evert’s face went slack. He began to shake. He slid further down on his knees, clasping his hands like a child asking for bread. “Please, please,” he whispered. “I can give you gold. I can give you—” He babbled choices like a man swimming.
Someone in the crowd—Ambrose, I later learned—took out a small scroll and read it loudly. It was the text of the trade that had been arranged. A dozen men nodded, and in that nod the man’s power melted.
They did not kill him. I never asked for blood. What I wanted—what I needed—was truth so loud that even his friends could not pretend otherwise. So he was left to the law, to the magistrate who would ask him why he tried to tie a man’s heart with a bottle. The magistrate came the next day. He spoke of contracts broken and of rights abused.
The punishment was not quick, but it was public and it was thorough. Evert Lawrence was made to stand in the market and apologize to every family he had used. He was forced to repay many dowries and to give up two years of his income to the poor houses he had neglected. The watch recorded him humbled.
When he finally knelt before me one afternoon, under the open sky with five hundred faces around us, he was a frail old man with tears streaking his ribs.
“Forgive me,” he said. His voice cracked. “I did it for fear. For fear of losing face, for fear of losing power. I… I am sorry.”
He begged and pleaded. He crawled. He cried. People pressed their palms to their mouths and took pictures when he dropped to his knees. Some recorded video with a cruel joy. Some clapped at the justice—soft, not loud. The magistrate’s scribe wrote the sentences, the villagers watched, and the news spoke of it for weeks.
I felt no relish in his pain. I felt only the clean air of truth. The world had been crooked for too long, and that crookedness had been straightened in the shining, painful way that truth can be.
After the day he was punished, people treated me differently. They did not look away. They looked at me with a new respect. Apollo held my hand in town and did not let go.
Later, when men asked me how it felt to see such a man brought low, I repeated the same thing I told myself that night I swallowed river water.
“It felt like breathing,” I said.
*
The rest was not a fairytale where hearts were fixed in a single shot. There were months of small things. Apollo and I walked through peach trees that fell asleep in April and watched the buds grow into white wings. I learned to hide without hiding, to be a fox in a world that had been biased toward men like Evert.
Apollo can be quiet as rain and fierce as a winter storm. Once, when a demon dog came out of a marsh, he stood and held the line with a handful of men. I saw him lift his palm and place a talisman on a child's chest and watch the child's breathing steady. He did not die when the men at the market said he should. He stepped into storms and stepped out clean.
Ambrose stayed. He laughed like a bird and liked to listen to stories of odd shops. He was Vulcan's kind of warmth, and he made tea that tasted like sunlight.
Sometimes I would wake with fox-memories still in me: the taste of twilight, the feel of a tail against grass. Those memories steadied me and made me dangerous in a good way. When Daoists came to question me, Apollo would stand and say nothing and the priests would find themselves speaking to the empty air and then walking out with far less certainty.
Once, when the countryside shivered with plague rumors, I braided peach-blossom sachets and gave them to mothers. I would not use force. I would not buy hearts. I would only keep what had been given freely.
And the little white porcelain bottle? I kept it for a time as a reminder of what we had been forced to face. At last I took it and planted it beneath a peach tree. I wrapped the bottle in paper and drove it into the soil. A white bottle cannot be the heart of a home, and neither could Evert be the master of mine.
When the bottle broke in quiet earth, a single white blossom fell near where it lay. I keep that blossom—dried and faintly scented—in my book. Sometimes, when Apollo hands me tea, I open the book and take out the little faded bloom.
He squeezes my fingers between his and smiles.
“You are still wild,” he says.
“I am,” I answer. “And I am yours.”
He kisses my hand. Around us a peach tree drops snow of petals and the world smells like osmanthus and rain.
The End
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