Sweet Romance17 min read
How I Tamed My Mother-in-Law and Kept My Husband (with a Little Mischief)
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I remember the first night I married Gideon Russell like a strange, bright bruise—painful and impossible to ignore, but oddly vivid and unforgettable.
"You don't mind, do you?" Gideon asked, standing half in shadow, one hand on the door frame, the other clamped around the neck of a wooden washboard someone had left by mistake.
"I don't mind," I said, and pushed him. "After all, my husband can kneel before a washboard anywhere."
He blinked. "But... your husband mind. Why should his kneeling be chosen for him?"
I shoved gently. "Because your choice of kneeling spot is boring."
Gideon sank to his knees with a comic groan, the washboard clacking in his hands. I laughed until my sides hurt. He knelt all night—some nights my cruelty is purely strategic. The put-upon concubine they had slipped into the house sulked and called in sick the next day. I thanked fate, and played the gracious wife who had won the first round.
The next morning I walked into the account room of the Russell estate like a woman intent on balancing a stubborn ledger. People kept saying that when a general married a prince the headlines should explode; when a woman raised a sword and married a house of titles, the city whispered. I was both the sharp blade and the awkward bride.
"Do you know the books?" I asked the steward.
He looked at me like I asked him to recite recipes for dragons. "Not yet, my lady."
"Good," I said. "Start learning."
Of course, my mother-in-law, Cristina Cantrell, happened to pass at that moment. She curled her fingers in that old, practiced way she had—half-sweet, half-venom. "The young Lady Kaylee of the Chancellor's house was famous for running her household. You should understand what I mean," she murmured like a wind that smells of iron.
"Ah," I returned smoothly. "I understand."
By the next sunrise, the steward had been replaced by Ari Voigt—"the second Miss Ari of the White House," as Cristina introduced her with a smile as sharp as a paper cutter. Ari had opinions on thrift and revenue on her first day. Cristina clapped.
"Very good," she whispered to me. "See how obedient she is?"
"Obedient?" I echoed.
"Yes. Obedient."
I sent half the servants home the following week. Gideon went to court in the mornings and came back to scrub sheets in the afternoons. He didn't like it, and the sight of him with soapy hands made my heart do foolish, hot things.
"Maybe you should be more discreet," the old granddad, Francis Koch, said, squinting.
"Discreet?" Cristina sniffed. "What's the use of being discreet if you can't create a spectacle?"
I was learning that Cristina had a language entirely her own: spectacle, humiliation, and the quiet, gleeful power of forcing people to perform. She was a master at arranging the roles everyone would play.
"She shouldn't be doing this," Ari whispered to Gideon once when she thought I wasn't listening. "If it were me, you'd never be asked to wash."
Gideon brightened like a child finding coins in a fountain. "Why didn't I think of that?"
From then on, washing duties moved around like a badly negotiated seating plan. First it was him and his father; then it was his father and Ari; then it became whoever was left standing. Cristina instantly appointed other women—Ari, then Kaylin Casey (a soldier-turned-servant they called Kaylin "Guava" Casey), then Katrina Garnier, then Kimberly Camacho—and kept sending more like a relentless tide.
"Are these women for statecraft or a contest?" I asked Gideon once in the garden when Ari drifted past like a pale cloud in a white dress.
"They are morale officers," he muttered. "And you're the general of our house."
I liked that title, but I liked Gideon more when he blushed. He was soft in the most unexpected moments. He hated injustice; he loved order; and although he wore the weight of his title like silk, he had an honest streak of bewildered kindness that softened me.
"Mother says men can have many wives," Ari said once at the dinner table, teary and coquettish. "It's normal."
Gideon set his fork down and spoke like a bell. "Mother, did the law forget to tell you that the new era forbids many wives?"
Cristina blinked. "We have ancient customs."
"So do we have laws now," Gideon said plainly, and we all stilled. Ari wiped her eyes and smiled at me like we were conspirators.
Gideon started to do something surprising. He started to stand in front of me. He started to stop his mother with a look when Cristina tried to push another woman into the home. He had doubts—like a child learning a new tune—but his resolve grew.
"You're acting differently," I teased him once, in bed. He had been unusually quiet for two days.
"Because I'm tired of watching my house become a market," he said. "Because you look like the place I want to return to."
He leaned close and brushed a crumb from my lip. "You and me," he said softly, "we should be the pair here."
That was one of the small things—one of many—that made my heart stop.
"Last night you called me a liar," he said another evening as moonlight stitched silver into the garden. "You promised things you didn't mean."
I grinned. "I promised to make you kneel before a washboard. I didn't promise your dignity."
Gideon looked at me with a kind of fierce tenderness. "Don't make fun of me."
"I need you to be brave," I said, leaning against the cold stone. "If you aren't brave here, who will be?"
"Then watch me," he whispered, and for a long time we watched the water flick in the fountain like tiny, obedient stars.
The concubines came and left like seasons. Kaylin—called Guava for her bluntness—arrived one day wide-eyed and laughing and nearly tripped as she greeted Gideon.
"Who are you?" she asked, blinking.
"I'm not certain," Gideon said, deadpan. "Maybe a rare butterfly from South America."
Kaylin giggled. "I like butterflies."
Gideon sighed like a man who kept the world on his shoulders. "I like brave women."
Kaylin brought noise and practicality to the house. She had a habit of disappearing with a swagger and then leaving a trail of rumors in her wake. Within a week she'd left a private gift by the bedside: a cheap bottle of wine. I found it, tasted it, and frowned.
It turned out she had been dosed with something meant to complicate her story—a plot that Cristina loved. I pretended to fall for it. I acted slow and deliberately foolish, then sent Lakelyn Evans, my maid, to mix a soup and pretend to nurse Kaylin. Cristina loved it. She took Kaylin's pregnancy as proof that the house would soon flourish.
And then Kaylin lost the baby. The midwife came out crying and said there was no child. Kaylin wept and accused the household of poison. In the end, Kaylin was sent away, labeled "unsuitable," and Cristina's smile widened.
I watched Cristina steady herself like an accomplished archer, and her face was all the proof I needed that she felt invincible.
"You're soft," Ari told me one afternoon. "You laugh, you help, but you don't strike."
"Sometimes a laugh is the strike," I said.
"Is it enough?" she asked.
It wasn't enough—yet. There were more arrivals. Katrina—soft and bewildered—came with a childish devotion that dissolved almost immediately when Gideon couldn't satisfy the parade of expectations around him. Kimberly arrived like a small flame, beautiful and dangerous, and she lingered at the edges of our life, always too luminous.
George Popov—Gideon's childhood friend, who leaned toward us like a stick of warm bread—came into the household as a bright, relentless defender of truth. He called Cristina on her cruelty with the bluntness of someone who never learned to soften his edges. He fell, predictably, for Ari—who didn't mean to fall back.
"You let them treat you like furniture," he told me once, mid-argument, and I laughed. "And you let them name the cushions."
"Don't be rude to my cushions," I said, because jokes are armor.
One winter morning, when the courtyard was white and breath turned to silver and we all wrapped ourselves in our grudges, Cristina arrived with a grand pageant—a line of women like a necklace of pearls around her throat.
"Are they open for introductions?" I asked casually.
"They are for evaluation," she said. "A house must know its lineage. There will be children."
"Or there will be chaos," Gideon replied.
"You always sound like a scholar when annoyed," Cristina said.
I had had enough. The house had been a theater ever since I arrived, and I had been merely a pleasant spectator who kept the lead actor warm. I wanted to direct.
I announced a dinner in the main hall, a gathering of family and the city's gentlefolk—neighbors, officials, and a scattering of merchants who liked a good story. Cristina went to prepare her best face. Gideon walked stiff and proper at my side because he thought that would keep her from staging something she couldn't take back.
I invited everyone.
"Why are you inviting them?" Gideon asked, when he saw the list.
"Because," I said with my best smile, "crowds are witnesses."
That night the hall was stuffed. Candles threw soft, trenching light across faces. Everyone who could gossip came. They sat on polished benches and leaned forward. Ari and George were there. Kaylin had come back for reasons she tried to keep secret. Katrina was at the edge of the room, clutching her hands. Kimberly sat like a queen who'd been passed a usurper's crown.
Cristina took her seat with the slow authority of a woman who had never been denied applause. She cleared her throat like a conductor about to start an orchestra.
"Tonight," she said, "we celebrate."
"Celebrate what, exactly?" George asked aloud.
"The future!" she cheered. "Children! Lineage! The honor of this house!"
"Who says lineage is honesty?" I asked, and the room shifted. A hundred little conversations stalled like birds mid-flight.
Cristina narrowed her eyes. "Kaylee," she said, using my name like a scalpel, "you are new to my house. You are inexperienced. You survive by looking pretty and skipping chores. But life requires more than charm."
"Sometimes," I said, "life requires being seen."
The servants froze. For a moment everyone thought I would bow and ask forgiveness. Instead I walked to the head table and turned to the crowd.
"Do you remember when you first met the woman who wore white and called herself Ari?" I asked.
Ari's eyes widened. She hadn't expected the attention. She swallowed.
"She came with a ledger and a smile," I continued. "She said she would save the house money. She was placed over the accounts. Then half our staff was sent away. Do you know why? Because she promised thrift. But she also promised loyalty to one set of whims."
Murmurs grew. Cristina's mouth tightened.
"Do you remember Kaylin?" I asked. "She came as a soldier and, not long after, the house took note of a certain soup, and a midwife's trouble. Kaylin was sent away without explanation. The rumor was she poisoned herself—no, she was expelled."
A woman in the back gasped. "You can't say that!"
"I can," I said. "Because I also remember seeing the midwife come out and say she found nothing. I remember the red soup thrown out in a bowl like medicine. I remember who did the throwing."
Cristina's smile stumbled.
I lifted my hand and called Lakelyn forward. Lakelyn came, trembling but determined. I asked her simply, "What did you mix the night Kaylin fainted?"
"I mixed red bean soup," Lakelyn said. "For Kaylin's strength."
"Who stopped it?" I asked.
Cristina's voice came tight as wire. "I did. It was for order. For the child."
"Order?" I echoed. "You call sending away young women 'order'?"
Cristina laughed then, a sound that sought to peel the tension like lemon peel. "Young women are like ribbons; adjust as needed."
"Then adjust now." I looked at the crowd. "I propose a public reckoning."
A hush settled so quickly you could hear a candle weep.
"Explain yourself," Cristina snapped.
I pulled a stack of petitions from my sleeve—notes of complaints, small recordings made by the steward Emory Stevens, and two sworn affidavits from women of the neighborhood. I had been planting seeds for months, watching, listening. I had smiles ready like armor and evidence ready like stones.
"Here," I said. "Read them aloud."
Francis Koch, slow and dignified, read the first affidavit with a faltering voice. It spoke of coaxed soup, of women asked to leave with threats, of girls frightened and never seen again in good light.
"You can't fabricate this," Cristina said, lunging for logic like a drowning swimmer clutches flotsam.
"Watch us," I said, and pressed further.
"Where was the law?" she scoffed. "Who are you to bring bone to table of state?"
"A house is not merely for appearances," I said. "It's for children to grow up honest. You told us to be producers of heirs, but you turned the household into a pageant. You told men to wash. You told women to smile. You made men kneel to boards while you filled the rooms with people you could throw away."
The room murmured. Some of the merchants leaned forward, smelling scandal like a spicy stew.
Cristina rose, face flushed and proud. She lashed out. "You are ambitious, Kaylee. You think a woman's place is to correct other women. You think you can humiliate your elders."
"Humiliate?" I repeated softly. "You humiliated mothers when you sent their daughters away for failing a test they never had a chance to pass."
She stepped forward, the old authority trembling. "I have a reputation. I have a name."
"Reputations are for people with nothing else," I said.
She found herself unarmed against the truth we set like mirrors around her. A woman in the crowd began to clap. First one palm, then another. It should have been small, but it grew like a tide. Ironically, Cristina had always loved an audience.
"Don't clap," she hissed.
But the clapping didn't stop. Faces that had been polite now showed a different color—relief, anger, hunger for fairness. Some of her allies paled and shuffled.
Cristina's smile slipped into denial, then fury, then fear. Her voice became small: "You lie. You lie about me."
"I do not lie," Lakelyn said. "I saw Kaylin taken."
George Popov stood and said, "I have known this house for years. I saw staff replaced. I saw how a conceit grows into cruelty." His voice carried. "You have taken women like fashions and discarded them."
Ari, who had been sitting like a trembling moth, rose to speak. "I thought I would please you. I thought little of consequence could be done with ledgers and promises. I had no part in hurting them on purpose. But I did not stand up."
She bowed to the crowd like a small apology. It was the first true courage she had shown.
Cristina's face first turned ashen and then red. She looked smaller—like a statue losing its pedestal.
"You will apologize now," she demanded.
"Apologize to whom?" someone asked.
"To Kaylin," I said. "To every woman you gave away like a tool. To every mother."
"That is not enough," a voice called out from the crowd—one of the merchants who had supplied the house on credit. "We want restitution. We want the house to be accountable."
The merchants nodded; the officials murmured. We had moved from confession to consequence. This was public.
Cristina's denial began to crack. She tried to accuse me of treachery, of betraying her name, of being ungrateful. Her words thinned, and as they did the crowd's patience thickened.
Then her composure snapped.
"You cannot—" she choked.
"Watch me," I said quietly.
A jury of sorts formed: Francis, a neutral judge-like face; Emory Stevens, who had maintained the books; George; Ari. They decided Cristina should be stripped of the authority she had hoarded: she would no longer have the right to nominate servants or bring new women into the house without consensus; she would publicly acknowledge the wrongs; she would pay for the households of the wronged. Essentially, she would be made accountable in front of the very faces she had controlled.
Cristina's reaction moved through a painful choreography: shock that she was being questioned, then furious denial—"This is a conspiracy!"—then bargaining—"I'll sing for you, I'll kneel!"—then an ugly attempt to cling to dignity—"I will not be shamed like this!"—and then finally, private, the cracking sob as the room watched.
People whispered, drew their fans, some cried, some applauded. A young merchant took out a pen and scribbled. Someone else already had a sketch. A woman in the back, who had never spoken, said, "We can rebuild the staff together."
The punishment was humiliating in Cristina's terms: she had to publicly sign a covenant of restitution, to agree to train in charity rather than command, to accept that her word would no longer be law. She had to stand in the hall for an hour while each woman she'd harmed stepped forward and spoke—sometimes in sobs, sometimes in quiet. The crowd watched her face as it moved from fierce to fragile to pale to small. At last she dropped to her knees like a great bell that finally tolls at the end of a long storm, and the room fell silent.
She begged. "Forgive me," she whispered. "I was afraid of being forgotten. I..." She faltered.
"No more," I said. "We will not erase you. We will let you stay as a woman who learns, not as a queen who rules by fear."
Around her, people clucked, some sympathetic, some not. The public reaction was complicated: some pitied her, some enjoyed the spectacle, some took out their phones—no, they didn't have phones, but there were scribes who made notes for the next day's gossip. A few neighbors clapped slowly. The merchant who wanted restitution shouted the terms again so everyone heard.
Cristina's face crumpled in a way I hadn't allowed myself to watch before. She tried to stand several times, to straighten, to retake the posture of command. Each attempt failed. The crowd's eyes were the new ruler, and they had taken her measure. She went from commanding to pleading in the space of minutes.
At the end of the night, the crowd dispersed with new stories to tell. Cristina walked home humiliated but intact. The kind of humiliation we inflicted was public, surgical, and final: it deprived her of unchecked power, made her actions known, and forced her to face the daughters she'd hurt. That was punishment enough for the house—no lamp was broken, no one was thrown out into the snow. Instead, she had to meet the consequences.
"That was ruthless," Gideon said finally, as we walked the courtyard afterward.
"It was necessary," I said. "You were hesitant. But did you watch how you stood? You stopped her."
He looked at me—close, eyes rimmed with something like pride. "Because you stood," he said. "You made it right."
We were both quiet for a moment, the cold air ringing with the echoes of the hall. Gideon took my hand and, without thinking, draped his cloak over my shoulders. The small warmth on my skin made me look up at him.
"You're an outrage," he said softly.
"And you're my refuge," I answered.
He smiled then—just once—and I felt my pulse like a bird fluttering in a planted cage. That was the second heart-stopping moment. Later, over tea, he slipped a finger under my chin and said, "You are not a passing fancy. You are my chosen." That was the third.
After that night, things shifted. Cristina was not destroyed—life rarely breaks a person like that—but her authority changed. She maneuvered less cruelly and apologized more. She even—quietly—sent me bowls of nourishing soup. I know what people think when they hear "apology by soup": they imagine two women in a kitchen, steam between them and a treaty laid on a board. It wasn't that theatrical. Her soup had an angle of contrition.
I forgave her because I could see the old fear that had made her grasp so. But forgiveness did not mean oblivion. People who had been thrown out of the house came back in with new roles, agreements were signed, and we made a stable of honest work.
Kaylin returned as a helper in the garden—quiet, scarred, but lighter. Ari stayed and improved the books honestly. George tried and failed to court Ari with all the sincerity of a bruised poet; she accepted him eventually because he was steady and kind, not because she needed another rescue.
There were other reckonings. Kimberly was expelled when it was discovered she planned to sell secrets to merchants. Kaylin's failed pregnancy was examined, and while some sins were left ambiguous, the balance had moved.
Gideon and I moved out of the great house for a time and set up a small home with Francis's blessing. There we grew into each other like two saplings sheltering a seed. We had children later; our first son was given a name that meant motion and wind—Santiago Nasir—but we called him simply "the small one" until he learned to say our names.
The house calmed. Cristina learned to knit instead of scheme. She showed up at our little gatherings and fed the children with the same careful hands that had once signed eviction notes. Her face still bore the indignation of a woman who had to relearn being loved rather than obeyed. Sometimes she would meet my eyes and we would share a private, strange laugh—like two sailors who both knew how to fix a snapped mast.
George and Ari were married in a tiny ceremony, with Kaylin as the bridesmaid who still refused to wear ribbons. Christoph Hussein—Chistoph, who had been introduced later by my mother as a potential suitor—proved to be a kind man, honest, and I accepted him as a friend to the family.
We kept our debts and our friends. The house's history was changed, not erased. People still came to gossip, but they also came to ask for advice. I kept a ledger, not for cruelty but for fairness. Every time I saw a woman arrive shy and nervous, I remembered the hall, Cristina's shrinking body under the weight of her own deed, and I felt the responsibility of hospitality.
As for Gideon—he learned to be a husband that stood by me publicly and privately. He still knelt before ridiculous washboards when I asked for a joke, and sometimes he would surprise me by returning late from court with a ridiculous trinket because he thought it would make me laugh. "You are a fool," I'd tell him, and he'd grin.
Years later, when someone tried to humiliate me with a rumor, I called a gathering and did what Cristina once taught me: I let people speak, and I let truth shine. The difference was that when it was my turn, I did not crush; I answered with humor, with a bowl of soup, and with a quiet honesty that leaves no room for spectacle.
Once, at the market, an old neighbor pointed to Cristina and whispered, "Do you remember when she..." I smiled at Cristina, who turned and lifted a hand like a wave that says, We both remember. She had learned enough to be ashamed and enough to be kind.
When our son Santiago Nasir was old enough to ask why I had once stood up in a crowded hall and exposed a woman who had been cruel, I told him: "Because someone had to make the house honest. We make mistakes. We must also fix them."
He looked at me with solemn, uncomprehending eyes and said, "Like mending a kite?"
"Exactly like mending a kite," I said, and we laughed.
That winter, as snow again began to fall across the roofs and the city settled into its own quiet, Cristina came by with a small box of dried herbs for the tea. She set it on the table, sat down, and without fuss said, "I did wrong. I'm learning."
I poured two cups. "Then keep learning," I said. "And stop hiding your faults behind other people's skirts."
She laughed, and the sound was softer now. "Perhaps I am a stubborn student."
"Stubborn people make good teachers when they learn too," I said.
Gideon kissed the top of my head, and we watched Santiago Nasir pull at a frayed kite in the yard. The world was not perfect. We still had to defend ourselves against petty cruelties and untended pride. But we had learned something crucial: power without accountability is a house that burns people for warmth; accountability without mercy is a house that becomes a prison. We would keep the house open enough to warm and strict enough not to crush.
"Do you regret the way you started?" Gideon asked me one night, half-coy and half-stern, as frost waited like a patient guest on the window ledge.
"I regret nothing," I said. "Except maybe making you kneel over that washboard without a pillow."
He pretended to take offense. "You'll pay for that someday."
"I know," I said. "You'll make me laugh until I cry."
He wrapped me in his arms and whispered, "Then laugh forever with me."
"Forever is a big word," I said, and it became our private joke.
We built a life that was messy and real. There were still scandals, and there were new women who came through our door and left better for it. Sometimes a guest would say, "Your house is strange. People say so much." I would smile and answer, "We make it strange on purpose. Comfort without truth is a lie."
At the very end of one long season, Cristina sat with me under a low tree and taught me how to weave a basket. Her hands were not as steady as they once were, but they were hands that had mended. We did not talk of the past much—why re-open a healed wound?—but sometimes we would look at the horizon and let the quiet say what words could not.
"You tamed me," she told me once with a crooked grin.
"No," I replied. "We both learned to be tamed by the right things: by truth, by children, by love. Not by spectacle."
She looked at me as if she wanted to ask more, but instead she reached forward and plucked a stray thread from my sleeve.
"Keep your sword in your pocket," she said. "Use it only when you must."
"I will," I promised, and then I put the sword away and smiled.
The end of my story is not a pretzel-twist of victory over an enemy. It is the slow settling of a house into shape—of a mother-in-law learning humility, a husband learning courage, a woman learning how to be both soft and fierce. There are nights when I still push Gideon toward a washboard just to see him blush; there are days when Cristina bakes bread and leaves it at our door.
The real lesson, for anyone listening, is this: families are made by people who hurt and are forgiven, by those who are humbled and then try to be better. If you must tame a wild thing, do it with evidence and with mercy. If you must punish, do it in a way that makes the whole town wiser and the person better.
As the kite flew that afternoon, tugged by a small boy with sticky fingers, I thought of all the small, ridiculous ways we had reshaped our lives. I thought of Gideon's quiet, stubborn love, of Ari and George's shy marriage, of Kaylin's steady hands in the garden, of Cristina's slow, honest knitting.
"Do you still hate her?" Santiago Nasir asked me once, as children ask the bluntest truth.
"No," I said. "I waited until I didn't."
He nodded with the solemnity of a small judge and let the kite go higher.
We watched the kite climb until it was nothing but a small bright dot. The house behind us breathed, the snow began to melt, and life went on, oddly, perfectly, and again, entirely ordinary.
The End
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