Sweet Romance14 min read
"I Was the Fake Heir — I Left with My Pocket Full of Elbow Meat"
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I learned two things the day I decided to be practical.
"Money is portable," I told Aubree, my hand on the thin stack of silver I had just finished counting. "If they throw me out tomorrow, I want something that won't weigh me down."
Aubree blinked and curtsied the way she always did. "Yes, Miss Arielle. What shall I call the little house?"
"Rui Chi is a good name for her," I said, and she smiled till I saw the little line at the corner of her eyes. "Not because it sounds noble. Because it sounds like someone who can keep a secret and pretend nothing's wrong."
"Miss Arielle is so clever," Aubree replied. "The name is very beautiful."
"You're welcome." I smiled. "It's my duty to be useful."
"Then how will you keep money?" she asked, practical as only a woman who had learned to sew with a needle that every thread mattered could be.
"Gold," I said. "Plain, ugly gold. It won't be fashionable, but it's honest. It travels, it doesn't tarnish, and it buys a ticket out of town."
Aubree nodded like she already understood. "And the rest?"
"The rest," I said, "is labour."
"You mean—"
"A job. A watchman. Someone who doesn't gossip. Someone who can mend a wall and carry a bucket. Someone who eats, sleeps, and keeps his mouth shut. Someone I can pay in pieces."
Aubree curtsied again. "Excellent plan, Miss Arielle."
Dale Craig, my fiancé, would call it mercenary. He called most things that bought me time "vulgar."
"When shall I invite the theatre?" he asked one evening as if we were arranging embroidery patterns.
"Don't waste money on actors," I told him. "Give their fee to me." I pushed a small, neatly folded note toward him.
Dale laughed once, short as a snapped thread. "You love coin as though it is the only lover you will ever have."
"I love it more safely," I said.
His eyes — Dale's eyes — cooled but did not close. He loved the theatre of being engaged. He loved the idea of being admired standing next to me. He loved the politics of a good match more than the woman he was promised. That made him a civilized man, but not a dangerous enemy. He was, I thought, easy to cheat out of a little fortune.
Half a month later we were both exhausted and heavier by the same number of silver coins. I had five small pouches sewn into the hems of my simple gowns. Each pouch held something that could pass through a search: rings, hairpins, a fan blade, and two thin wafers of gold wrapped in cerulean paper.
I had rented a shabby little house behind the market. A low wall, a crooked gate, a crooked roof. The perfect place where no nobleman looked.
"Old man Will is to be your guard," I told Aubree at dusk. "He'll open his mouth only if thieves try to eat his bones."
Aubree's father nodded as if he had always been a sentinel. "You can trust me, Miss."
Just as I finished arranging the small house, a small storm arrived in the shape of a masked shadow.
The man dropped from nowhere into the back of my hired carriage the day the household reported a missing token. He wore dark clothes and a mask that let only his eyes show — eyes that looked like they had been carved by wind and moonlight.
"Keep quiet," he said, and his voice was soft and knowing. "Keep still, and I will not cut you."
"You're bloody dramatic," I said, and he started; he did not expect me to speak without squealing. "You stole a token, didn't you? Very brave."
His fingers tightened on my wrist for a second. "I can be very unkind if you ruin my chance of leaving city gates uncovered."
"Then let me bribe you with food and a roof," I said. "And the chance to leave this city with pockets full."
We stared at each other in the carriage as the rain walked down the window.
"I need shelter," he said finally.
"I need a guardian," I said. "And I need a man who will not run and will not gossip."
He weighed me, eyes tracing my face like a ledger. "Why help you?"
"Because I'm honest," I said. "And I can pay."
He did not answer me with words. He answered with a little nod and a lopsided smile. He let me name him.
"I'll call you Bilin," I told him. "It sounds like someone who can hold a secret."
"No name," he said flatly.
"Fine," I said. "Then I'll call you Bilin anyway." I folded the token he had taken — a carved piece of jade — into my palm and slipped it into my inner pocket. "You can stay. For food and shelter. For now."
He stayed. He ate. He fixed my leaky roof with hands that moved like craft. He trained with a kitchen cleaver like a surgeon and mended the old well's pulley like a man who had grown tired of running. He hummed as he worked and taught the old gardener to lift water buckets just so.
"Why do you work like you are paid?" I asked him one night while we ate tough, but cheerful meat with my hands.
"Because work is honest," he said. "And it keeps me from thinking things that would put me at risk."
"You sound like an honest monk," I teased.
"Not a monk," he said. "A man who wants a garden."
"Then work," I told him. "Tend my garden. Keep my house safe. Eat my food. And I will pay you in the kindness you didn't expect."
He grinned. "And what if I want spring rolls from the East Quarter?"
"Then you shall have them," I said. "Once every other month."
He laughed, a sound so rare that even the sparrows in the rafters fell still and listened.
"By the way, what is your real name?" I asked.
"No name," he said, and I named him Yousef Dyer in my head because I liked the way it fit him — a thief who was, in his bones, a craftsman.
Days folded into each other. I paid him by giving him pieces of the carved jade back, one by one. "A piece every seven days," I told him, and he accepted.
We built a life that was small and clever. He fixed things. I counted coins. Aubree folded linens. The old man Will kept the gate. Everything felt like it would never be dangerous again.
Until the day a nobleman with round cheeks and a sharp temper arrived at my gate.
"You are harboring thieves," Dale announced in our little yard, all puffed ribbons and cold authority. "My household reported missing goods. Show me what you hide."
Bilin — Yousef — was leaning by the wall with his sleeves rolled. He brushed mud off his hands and looked at Dale as if at a storm.
"Evidence?" Yousef asked, lined voice like a blade that had never cut wrong. "Do you have evidence?"
Dale's face went red. "I will have this place searched. I will find the token."
"You will?" Yousef mocked. "And then?"
"Then I will know what to do with you," Dale said.
"Mayor, my lady, do you want me to show the token?" I snapped back, less clever than I thought and suddenly exhausted.
"You harbor a thief?" Dale said to me. "You are my betrothed. Explain."
"I am your betrothed," I told him. "And I am also my own business."
"Speak plainly," Dale insisted.
"My token is not yours to search," I said. "But fine. You can look."
He ordered the guards to overturn rugs, to lift floorboards. Yousef lounged, as if watching a theatrical farce. When the guards pried and scraped and found nothing, he shrugged as if bored by a magician's secret.
"Search the outer yard," Dale barked. "The thief may have hidden it under the gate."
They ransacked my shabby yard. They rummaged the pots you used to grow herbs in. They found nothing but a small chest of useless trinkets.
"Next," Dale said, frowning. "Unless—"
"Wait." I clapped because the noise felt better than panic. "I have nothing to hide. This man is my...friend."
"A friend?" Dale made the word into a weapon. "You are trying to insult me."
"He is not the thief," I said. "If you keep searching you will soil my house and our name."
"She will be honest with me," he said.
"Honesty is sometimes about choices," I replied.
Dale's face twisted. "You will bring shame to my family if you keep secrets."
"Shame is temporary," I said. "But a packed satchel is permanent."
He turned and left as if I had stabbed him with words. His exit was cold.
The next day the city buzzed with a rumor. A real girl had returned — Esperanza Edwards, the true daughter. The household doors explosion with incense and bells.
"A true daughter?" Aubree whispered. "Miss Arielle, what should we do?"
"Do?" I shrugged. "Love her or not, it's the same person. I'm not here to fight fate. I'm here to keep a pouch of coins and a ticket out of town."
Esperanza walked in like a quiet storm, like someone for whom storms were weather and not threat. She was luminous in a way that hurt, and when she smiled at my parents the way only a living child can make a parent smile, something inside the hall eased and my throat got thick.
"Who are you?" she said when we were alone.
"I'm the girl who laces my shoes by myself," I said. "Welcome home."
She crouched and touched a cracked tile as if it held a memory. "You look like you belong here."
"I belong to myself," I said, and she laughed as if the joke were hers. "Come, there's tea. We can sit and talk."
A few days later, my ordered life — small house, small thief, small pouches — was disturbed in the ways old books promise. The household discovered a secret: the woman who had stolen the babies so many years ago was Natalya Ramos, a woman the household had once turned away, now old and knotted with fear.
When the news leaked — "She swapped the babes!" — people whispered like dry leaves. There was outrage, there was pity, and there was the inevitable demand for justice.
I watched from a corner as the household gathered for the truth's unveiling. My father, Cyril Devine, who had always been like winter light, stood with hands clasped. My mother, Hanna Mariani, whom I had called "mother" for seventeen years, had a face that held both regret and relief. Leon Petersen, my brother, looked bewildered as if the world had been turned like a pot and all the spoons were in the wrong places.
"You want her punished?" I heard one servant ask.
"Yes," another voice hissed. "She stole a life."
I had always thought of the tale of switched babes as fiction. Seeing the woman made it savage and small. Natalya was shorter than the cruel story made her in my head; she had eyes that kept wanting to soften when men were watching. When she was brought into the hall on a rope of shame, her hands were shaking.
"Confess," my father said to her, a public command like a bell.
She closed her eyes for a long breath, then spat, "I did it not for greed. I did it for love e'er since been poisoned."
"A reason is not a pardon," someone muttered.
They brought her forward. The hall filled — neighbors, servants, tradesmen, even Dale and a number of noblemen who had come to stare. The clang of the torches made the room look like a shallow sea.
I stepped forward. I had plans — escape plans, quiet departure plans — and yet the human mind divides itself in public like a seam. I could not stand as if I were not part of this family that had fed me and seen me as their child. For once, I felt something that would have shocked seventeen-year-old Arielle in previous lives: a thread of loyalty.
"You ruined two girls' lives," Leon said, and his voice broke a little.
"Did she?" Natalya hissed. "Did you think I wanted to raise someone else's baby? My girl was cast out to a nunnery—"
"Enough!" my father said. "Tell the truth and the punishment will fit the crime."
She nodded, and then she said what she had been hiding, and the hall turned to stone.
"I was paid," she said. "But it turned into a debt I could not repay. I hated my master, and I wanted my own child to live. I took the babe and I swapped them at the temple gate. But when I saw the babe grow up here, with a woman kinder than any I had known, I could not take her back."
"How dare you?" cried someone.
"And you left your daughter at the nunnery?" my mother demanded. Her voice had the thin edge of a woman broken and yet still standing. "Where is she now?"
"She died," Natalya said, head bowed. "Or I thought she had. I could not keep both."
That admission began the punishment, but I remember the finest part of that morning began with how people reacted. The crowd gasped, some with righteous anger, some with the shock of betrayal, some with pity for a woman whose life had become a knot of misfortune and poor choices.
"Bring the rope!" someone cried.
"Wait," I said before the first blow was chosen, and my voice had the soft cruelty of someone who has learned to count their coin and their conscience carefully. "We will not hang her. We'll test the law and make a scene of it. She will be shamed properly. She will live and remember."
They did not like my tone. But the world must have rituals. They dragged her into the square before the evening sun. They made her sit on a low stone under the watch of the town bell. I watched as faces folded forward in judgment, as the murmur of the crowd wound like a thread into a rope ready to bind.
"Strip her of titles," someone demanded. "Make her stand before the market. Make her confess her actions to every person she harmed."
"Yes!" cried the women whose children had been ill-treated by gossips. "Let her be known."
They took Natalya to the market and set the stage. Here is the punishment the law of my town made for public crimes: humiliation, truths spoken aloud, the witness of the stray dogs and the baker and the women with their arms full of linen. The town needed to see the wrong and to say it aloud. I remember the details because they mattered. I had always planned to be tidy about things.
"People of the market," Leon said, "this woman took a babe, and she swapped it like a puppet. She took a life meant for another."
"They were babes," a servant muttered. "They could have been switched many times."
"Do you deny what you did?" my father called.
Natalya lifted her head. The square grew still as a held breath.
"I do not deny," she said. "I extracted a babe and left it where it might grow. I did so for my child, who I thought would have a chance. For that I should be punished."
"Then tell us," the baker urged. "Tell us where the nunnery was. Tell us who took your child. Tell us the name you knew her by."
She told them, and each word was a new slap for the families who had suspected less. People in the crowd began to record the confession, some with gossiping glee, some with logical, measured condemnation. A few looked away, ashamed to listen to the mechanics of such cruelty.
"Let the rope hang over her head; let her sit in the square for a week," someone proposed.
"No," my mother said. "We are not beasts. We will restore what we can. We will make her labor, make her public apology in the monastery and at the temple. She shall do penance and confess daily, and every merchant who bought food on the day of the swap will refuse her bread."
They designed punishments like a council planning to mend a brittle vase: public apology morning and night, a sign hung over her stall if she ever sought work, and—most crushing—forced service to the family she had injured. They saw their justice as practical: let her confess and then repair what she could. The crowd cheered; mobs want work and a spectacle. Natalya's face collapsed from defiance to hollow resignation.
"Humiliate her so that she remembers," the mayor said, and the sentence given was more than the shame. It was the slow, binding rope of daily reminders. She would go to the nunnery and apologize. She would work in the kitchen and take care of children she had put in danger. Every day, someone would read the record of her confession aloud so that charity could not forget the cure to her crime.
"And if she lies?" someone asked.
"Then the rope will hang longer," said my father.
Natalya bent her head. "I will do it," she said. "I will confess in every market and every house that will hear me. I will kneel in the rain. I will tend children until my hands are too old. I deserve this."
The crowd pressed, some pitying, some vengeful. I watched a man in the far corner who had once been kind to me cross himself. His face had the softness people only show when the world is in balance.
They took Natalya away with a little procession, and as she passed, the younger children threw stones — not heavy stones, but pebbles that children think of as words. She picked them up and used them to mend a cracked pot later. They set the scene for the punishment, not the death. That was my decision. I had decided then I would never carry a dead conscience. I wanted to save my coin and my life, but not my soul.
After the public penance was arranged and the town satisfied itself with seeing justice done, I sat on my step and thought: I had been ready to leave. I had been ready to vanish into the thin world beyond the city walls with nothing but a bundle for the road and a small coin. And yet something in seeing a human being break in public — and rise wearing penance like an ugly but useful cloak — made me hesitate.
"Você ainda vai embora?" Yousef asked me that night as he tended the pot. He had learned bits of tongue from different men in different inns. "Are you still going to leave?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then go," he said. He did not add the foolish, sweet thing everyone expects. He did not say "I will go with you" like a line from a dime romance. He said, "Then go. Make sure you learn to cook elbow meat like the old woman at the market did. It is the thing that will buy you a roof."
We laughed. He had a way of being honest without being cruel. I loved him for that and for the way laundry hung straighter when he folded it. But there was more than laughter now — the truth had come down like rain, and the world smelled freshly washed. I stood by the gate in the early morning with the gold packed and the tickets sewn into seams.
"Arielle," Aubree said, voice small. "Will you take me?"
"No," I answered. "You will stay. This house was your steady. I will send you letters — and a third of the shop money. You will live, and you will keep your head."
"You have given me more than money," she said quickly. "You gave me a place to keep secrets and a name to call home."
"I'll keep your name safe," I said. "Now go."
My journey began with the taste of spring rolls and the ache of small goodbyes. I left a note on the table and the last of the coins in a jar.
"Eat the elbow meat at my place," I told Dale once when he insisted on one last meeting. "It is the small mercy I can give you."
He stared at me as if I had insulted him. "You leave me?"
"I leave with the small dignity of having made my own plans," I said. "And with the memory of your polite cruelty. Good-bye."
I walked out without looking back, with my pouches sewn into my hem, with a head full of small plans. I walked until the city gates opened and closed behind me. The world outside was less polite. It was a market of small compromises.
I found a tiny town and a small stall where elbows turned to sauce and turned to hope. I learned to braise and to sear, to listen to the right cut of meat, to choose bones that sang of flavor. Business was hard at first. Men were suspicious of a girl with a noble manner selling humble food. But my elbow meat was honest and smelt like a promise.
One morning a neat line of women came by the stall with petty complaints. "He sells poor meat!" cried one. "He overcharges!" cried another. I raised my chin and turned to the second stall.
A thin, handsome butcher — Yousef, in another name, in another place — looked at me in the crowd and winked. He had become the town's butcher. He laughed when I ordered ten pounds of good bones and asked for them to be finely minced for smattering. "Do you want the bones," he said, "for stew or for love?"
"For both," I said.
He leaned closer so only I could hear. "In this town, I am just a butcher," he said, "but when my hands are not cutting, they are mending."
"Then be my mender," I said.
He smiled like a man who had never been surprised but who was surprised now.
"Then I accept," he said.
We were small and ordinary enough to be safe. He unlocked the gate of our new little house one night and stepped in, and I found the world worth tolerating. He carried wood and he fed the hungry and when he laughed, even my careful counting softened for an instant.
"You are not a perfect man," I told him.
"No," he said, "but I am your man."
"Good," I said.
We married quietly, the kind of marriage that stitches two lives together and calls it a bargain and a blessing. We opened a shop that smelled of sauce and trouble. People came and ate and smiled. Sometimes they told us the news from the capital and sometimes they brought gossip about old nobles who had fallen out of favor.
One late evening, when the sky was thin and silver like a coin, a messenger came. He had a seal of the capital.
"From your family," he said.
I opened the letter with a hand that trembled more than I liked. My father wrote a few lines, short and steady.
"Your mother says the home is yours if you wish," it read. "Everything is forgiven. We made a mess of a child's life. If you come, you will be welcomed as the daughter you were raised to be. If you stay, you will be a woman who cooked elbow meat good enough that the Emperor will have heard of it."
I looked at Yousef. He put his hand over mine.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"To be myself," I said. "To be a woman who can choose. To have the safety of my pocketed gold and the mess of my heart."
"You can have both," he said. "If you want to go back, we will go. If you want to stay, I will be your butcher."
I thought of Dale's cool smiles and the way he made society callous. I thought of Esperanza's quiet grace and the way she had given me a bag of silver with a polite nod. I thought of the way Natalya knelt and took her punishment, a human being remade into service.
"I will not rob you of the life you were given," I told them both later. "I will not fight the perfect things. I will find my small things. If the capital calls me home, I will go sometimes and bring elbow meat as a present."
"Then make me a promise," Yousef said, which felt like a trap and a warmth.
"What promise?" I asked.
"Keep your hands busy," he said, "and your heart honest."
I laughed. "That is not a promise. That is a religion."
"Then worship with me," he said.
I said yes.
We made a life that was not in any book's beginning, but it was ours. We had small triumphs: a pot that never burned, a child who learned to count coins and to blow on soup. We had small tragedies: a storm that ruined a season and a winter that tested both the bones of the house and the patience of the people.
But the public punishment of Natalya — the angry market, the rope kept like a threat — had given me an understanding: justice is not always a cut-and-dry end. It is a process where people decide who will be punished and how, and then decide, later, if the punishment saved that person or broke them further. I had chosen the path that saved both my pocket and my pulse. I had avoided being a villain like some in the book. Yet I had not forgiven myself for every small selfishness.
In the end, I learned something else.
"Money can buy a way out," I told Yousef one evening as we locked up the stall. "But a plate of elbow meat can buy you a village."
"Then let's stock up our bones," he said.
"Agreed," I said, and the town laughed as they ate.
The End
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