Sweet Romance10 min read
He Called Me "My Wife" Over Two Paintings
ButterPicks11 views
"I will not bow to a single rule I don't understand," I said, standing on the wagon while the city shrank behind us.
"Abigail," my brother Kenneth hissed, "behave. We are in the capital. You are not in the market square."
"I am not a thing to be bought," I shot back. "Even if they call me a prize."
The road smelled of dust and fried sugar. My hands smelled of thread. I had grown up threading needles, trading silks, learning stitches that turned cloth into rumor. My father, Bryson Johansson, had built our house from those stitches. He kept his face hard, but he loved us in the way a man loves the thing he made.
"We do this for the family," Emilian said. "Your marriage will make the house safer."
"I know," I said. "But I am still me."
They sent me because the palace wanted a side wife for the prince. Men at the court argued like geese over who had the finest daughters. Highborn houses shouted names in the hall. But a quiet man—Salvador Mikhaylov, an attendant of the king—looked at our house's records and pointed to my name.
"She is well raised," he told the prince's father. "She will make the prince respect a new kind of house."
"So I went," I told the sisters who braided my hair.
"You will learn to lower your voice," Autumn said.
"Lower my voice? I learned to argue with clay-faced merchants and still sold them more than they planned to buy."
They laughed, then stopped when I shivered.
The capital rose up like a stone in a river. It swallowed our caravan and pushed us down narrow streets. Carriages jingled. People stared. I heard whispers: "merchant girl," "a fortune," "the prince's new side wife."
"Smile," Kenneth said, "and do not tell them where Sibyl's lane hangs the best cloth."
"I won't," I said. "I will tell the prince the truth. If he needs lies, he can find them in other courts."
The palace gate threw shadows like teeth. Salvador walked beside me. He was small and polite and had the steady air of someone who had learned how to mean things without shouting.
"You will be careful," he said.
"I will be myself," I answered.
They dressed me in pink because I was not a chief wife. They put pearls around my throat and packed home in boxes that smelled like home. My heart beat like a small drum.
"Abigail," Kenneth told me on the threshold, "remember the rules. Do not answer before you are spoken to."
"I won't promise to be silent," I said. "Only to be honest."
We entered the prince's house. The rooms were pale and neat. The prince—Agustin Wolf—sat with his back to the window. He looked like a boy and like a man at once.
"Sit," he said. The word landed like a small order.
"I am Abigail," I said. "I have come from the south."
"Sit," he repeated.
We ate with my hands and their eyes. The prince's wife, Aurora Baird, smiled at me like a woman who keeps a knife wrapped in lace.
"Welcome to the house," she said. "We will be sisters."
"Thank you," I said. "I hope we can be kind to each other."
Aurora's maid whispered things into her ear and looked at me with old, careful suspicion.
"Your clothes are too bright," she told me later, when she thought no one else listened.
"They are mine," I said. "They are honest and they keep me warm."
"You must be careful with color and with money," Aurora said. "Our house has rules."
"So many rules," I said, "I will need a map."
"You will learn," she said.
The prince watched us and did not speak. He ate with slow interest. He folded a napkin into a shape and kept looking at a painting.
"You mocked us," he said once, when my temper had run in front of my wits.
"I did not mock," I answered. "I asked why your wife pretends to be small while wearing fine things."
"You asked me to apologize to my wife," he said. "Apologize now."
"Why?" I asked. "Because I told the truth? Because she wanted you to see me as small?"
"Because you are a guest," he said. "Because this house accepts my rules."
"Are your rules made by paper or by a man?" I asked.
He stood like a struck reed. "You are insolent," he said. "My court will hear of this."
"I am a merchant's daughter," I said. "I know how to call things by name."
He laughed then, a short thing that sounded like a bell.
"You are brave," he said. "You will make my household lively."
And yet he was quick to anger. The house felt small the day someone from the queen's rooms came and carried my name like a cold stone. The queen, Eleanor Olivier, came with a thunder I did not know a woman could cause.
"You came to the other woman's rooms," she said to me when she spoke next. "You put yourself where you did not belong."
"I was invited," I said. "And the woman was kind."
"Kind?" she yelled. "Kind will not keep an empire. You live in a nest of vipers and you walk in without armor."
She raised her hand and struck me. The sound of her palm on my cheek filled the room. I fell.
"I did not do anything," I whispered.
"Do not forget your place," she said. "Stay inside your gate. If you dare conspire with others, I will ruin your family and you will not be welcome in daylight."
I walked home with nothing but the words of the slap ringing in my ears. My hands trembled. That night I fell ill, fever burning like debt.
"They struck you because you are different," Autumn said, wiping my brow. "They thought a merchant girl could be scared."
"I am not scared," I said, but my voice broke.
The palace did not like when their mistakes made heat. My fever rose. The prince did not come. Aurora walked past my door like a cloud that rains on other fields.
"Why didn't your husband come?" I asked Autumn.
"He is busy," she said. "He has teachers to please. He has people who watch him so he will not be too soft."
I was so weak that I held the bedcover like a lifeline. A healer—Hugo Mustafa—came with strange smelling herbs and a calm face.
"He was sent by Lady Ivanna Cochran," Autumn whispered.
"Who?" I asked.
"A woman who tends the prince's wife's books," Autumn said. "She cares for the house. She had the ear of someone who could ask for a doctor."
I slept and woke and slept. The fever broke like a poorly mended wall. I opened my eyes to see Autumn and Winter—my two maids—sitting like sentinels.
"You have teeth like a sword," Autumn told me. "Use them carefully."
"I will," I said.
When I stood, I wanted revenge because revenge tastes like sugar to someone who has had salt for dinner. But Autumn and Winter pulled me back.
"Not revenge," Autumn said. "A plan. We are poor at swords. We are good at craft and at making people want things. Make him want what you are."
So I began again with what I knew. I summoned the city's best painter and the house's minor art keeper—men who had small warehouses of color and patience. The prince loved paintings; he loved lines and mountains and the way a sky could be folded into paper.
"My brothers will let you choose," Emilian said, smiling in that way that slides out a promise and keeps the rest folded. "Choose what will make him look."
The city had two scrolls: one claimed to be by a master named Wu Daoxin, the other by a quiet man called Fan Kuan. The house artist, a humble man from the family's little shop, swore that two pieces had come into his care.
"They are faithful copies," he said. "But they have a spirit. A king will see it."
"Then we give them," I said.
That night I set a small table and lit small lamps. The prince came later than I hoped, ruffled and restless. He sat and ate the food I had paid for with my own coins. He tasted and teased and then—then I rolled out the first scroll.
He took it with both hands like a man holding a bird.
"Wu Daoxin's lost 'Jialing River'!" he cried. "Where did you find this?"
"A friend of the family's kept it," I said. "It belongs where it is looked at."
"I will take it to the study," he said, and his eyes were bright. "But first—"
He held the second. He opened it. The cold mountain on paper made him breathe as if he'd seen snow in the river.
"You gave me both," he said. "These are not copies. They are true."
"I thought you might like them," I said.
He looked at me from a chair where the lamp hid his face in half-shadow. He smiled the kind of smile that breaks a man's stubbornness.
"You are impossible," he said. "You give me things I love instead of groveling. That is brave."
"Then love me for it," I said foolishly.
He laughed, surprising me, and reached out as if to pull the scrolls closer to his chest, then reached farther, and said a thing that landed like warm bread.
"You are my wife," he said.
I blinked. "You can't—"
He lifted one hand, light as a curtain. "I called you 'my wife' in the study just now. I will call you so again."
"Is that an order?" I asked.
"No," he said softly. "It is a permission."
That night I pretended I did not hear him say my name, but the sound of it folded into the pillow. When I slept, I dreamed of the river painting and of his hands turning the paper like a lover turning a page.
The house had enemies. Aurora watched me as if measuring the growth of a plant she planned to clip. She left little stones in my path and watched me stumble. She talked with her ladies as if planting seeds.
"Be cautious," she said once in the hallway, sweet as syrup. "You cannot let the queen think you want her place."
"Would you think I want that?" I asked.
"No," she said. "You would be a dangerous friend if you did."
"Then I will be a safe friend," I said.
The queen's fright returned like frost. She remembered that the other woman—Harper Koch, the proud concubine—had once been low and had risen. The queen feared that trade and money had teeth.
"You make careful enemies," Aurora said one morning. "They bite."
"I make friends who know how to hold a knife," I answered.
Then the worst came: the queen found reason to call for me before the whole household. She ordered me to remain behind walls. She lifted her hand and called me out and struck me again. This time the world fell into a crooked bowl. My fever returned. I slept with Autumn and Winter on guard like two small moons.
"Do not take revenge," Autumn said. "Make him keep his promise."
"He promised nothing," I whispered.
"He called you wife," Winter said. "Keep him to that."
After I grew stronger with the healer's herbs, I asked to see the prince. Autumn and Winter stood at the door like two fierce small dogs. When Agustin returned—he had taken the paintings to the scholar Dimitri Dunn, who was amused and jealous—he walked through the doorway and found us waiting.
"You frightened them," he said, and scolded like a boy but had a softness in his voice I did not know how to take.
"You left when I needed you," I said. "You sent a doctor only when someone else asked."
"I was a fool," he said. "I thought paper and practice came before pain."
"That is an odd thing to think," I said.
"It is my fault," he answered. "Forgive me."
"You were gone," I said. "You sat where I had hurt and felt only your lesson."
He pressed his thumb to the table. "I will do better."
"Will you call me wife again?" I asked, suddenly brave because of the way the fire of my anger had cooled into warmth.
He smiled like a storm broken. "I already did."
I had not meant to love him. I had only meant to be faithful to my family and myself. But the way he angled his head toward my voice, the way he kept the two paintings on his desk as if they were children, made me something I did not expect: content.
"I will teach you to read what I read," he said one afternoon, when I found him tracing the river on paper.
"I can read trees," I said. "I know when a thread will pull a pattern apart."
"Then teach me," he said.
I taught him to see the small stitches that make a coat whole. He taught me how to hold a brush. We traded small lessons. The house changed a little. Aurora softened sometimes and sometimes did not. The queen watched like a winter bird. Harper Koch came once and offered me a hand.
"Merchant-blood," she said. "You are useful."
"Are you kind?" I asked.
"Useful and dangerous," she said, with a laugh that was not all laugh. "Take care."
I planted a small camellia in the little garden the prince walked past on his way to the study. I kept a scrap of embroidered cloth in my sleeve, the last piece my mother had tucked in my trunk. Sometimes in the nights when the house was silent, I would unfold it and remember the smell of our kitchen and the tiny room where the needle made me whole.
"Why that cloth?" Agustin asked once, when he found me holding it.
"It reminds me where I belong," I said.
"You belong here now," he whispered, leaning so close I could see the small freckle near his ear.
"Do I?" I asked.
"You are my wife," he said again, and this time the word was a promise that had weight. He put his hand over mine. "We will keep each other safe."
The months moved like slow embroidery. I learned not to step into rooms when the queen paced. I learned to make the right courtesy and to refuse the wrong one. I learned to press my delicate strength into the corners of our house like a hidden seam. People came to me with small favors because I had a way of sewing people to their needs.
"Will you stay?" the prince asked one night, after a long lecture about maps of the state and about ceremonial robes.
"I said I would be honest," I answered. "I did not promise to be small."
"You are not small," he said. "You are the most dangerous sort of person: you make me want better things."
A winter passed. The camellia I planted sprouted a small bud. He stopped hiding paintings. He called me wife sometimes in the study and sometimes in the small dark corner of the garden. When he said it, it was always like bread: plain, honest, something to lean on.
One morning the queen came again, her face a map of frost. She stood by the gate and watched the garden where my camellia now had three crimson flowers.
"You keep the merchant's garden," she said. "Do not think the crown will forget."
"I do not want the crown's favor," I said. "I only want to keep my family safe."
"You cannot keep both," she said.
"I will keep my family," I answered. "And I will keep the prince's trust."
She laughed then, low and tired. "You are audacious."
"So are you," I said.
She turned away.
That afternoon the prince found me by the little tree and took my hand.
"People will watch us," he said. "They will count favors, measure debts, wait for mistakes."
"I know," I said. "They will be wrong then."
He kissed my hand, not because we had a match and because the world filled our mouths, but because he wanted to claim me like a thing he valued that needed no hiding.
"Tonight you will teach me a stitch," he said, smiling.
"I will teach you how not to ruin a hem," I answered.
"Then you will stay," he said.
"I will stay," I promised.
Years later, if people speak of the merchant girl who married the prince, they will tell a tidy story: she arrived loud as a market and quiet as a locked chest; she insulted the queen and was slapped; she fell ill and was saved; she showed the prince paintings and he liked them; she kept her head and a little garden.
What they will not tell is how the prince would come quietly to my window, cup a small cup of tea, and say, "My wife, have you seen the river today?"
And I would reply, because I liked the way he trusted me to name things, "I saw it. It is made of many small lines."
He would laugh, and then water the camellia.
On the day I learned to fold the king's seals without bruising the paper, I wrapped my embroidered handkerchief around the base of the camellia, a tiny knot no one saw.
"That is ours now," I told him.
"It is ours," he said.
We stood there with our hands on the small wound we had bound with love and thread.
I had come from a house of cloth. I had thought myself chosen because I was quiet, or because I was cheap. But the palace taught me something else: value is not always loud. It can be stubborn like a seam.
"Promise me one thing," he said, brushing my hair.
"What?"
"Promise to keep calling things by their names. Promise not to be small when you are right."
"I promise," I said.
He smiled, and with that small brave smile, he put his forehead to mine and said again, so the garden could hear, "My wife."
Outside, the camellia dropped a single petal into the dark soil, a tiny bright coin against the brown, and we both bent and touched the earth like people who know where they have come from and where they will stay.
The End
— Thank you for reading —