Sweet Romance12 min read
My Threaded Life: A Stitch Between Two Men
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I was born into the smell of blood and salted meat, the world of my father’s butcher stall. My name at home was Alivia Beach. At seven, when both my parents were gone, I was folded into another family like a small, creased handkerchief. They called themselves the Dumas household; the older master—Foster Martinez—smiled once and put a hand on my head. His wife, Kathleen Bogdanov, said words meant to comfort and then set me to learn manners and stitches I could not yet imagine would stitch the rest of my life.
“You’ll not be awkward forever,” she said, turning my fingers to teach me the satin stitch. “You will be useful.”
“Useful,” I repeated in my small voice. “I want to be useful.”
There was a boy in that house named Rex Dumas. He was eleven and already cruel and bright. He would curl his lip when he saw me, and when he was younger he would tug my hair or push my pail. He said, “Who wants to marry this ugly thing? Shoo.” He was the sort of boy who practiced cruelty like a craft.
“You don’t have to like her,” Kathleen Bogdanov told him once. “But you will be proper.”
Rex only laughed. “Proper for what? To be bossed? I’d rather be king of a pigsty.”
Even then some part of me waited for mercy from him. I do not know why. Maybe the world casts nets that way; maybe I am stubborn. I learned stitches—that much the house would not let me escape. Alessandra Fedorov, who ran the embroidery shop in town, taught me how to coax silk into a picture. Martina Falk—who had once been like a mother—coached me in letter-forms. I was clumsy and slow, but I persisted. Threads went through the eye of the needle again and again; threads, I learned, can be taught to hold.
When the Dumas household fell under a scandal—when a neighboring magistrate’s schemes swallowed Foster Martinez and his wife’s patronage—soldiers came like early frost. They tied hands and turned faces to the wall. I was shoved out the back gate. Alessandra hid me as long as she could; she spoke for me: “She is not their blood. She is Alivia, an apprentice with me. Ask the master of the shop.” But soldiers do not listen to women in a town on edge, and the blade of politics is not tempered by pity.
Everything changed in three heartbeats. Rex was taken away too—taken and mutilated, made a eunuch. He was a boy of spirit, and they stripped him of a future on purpose. “They made him safe for service,” the town whispered. He left for the great house of the Zhao Prince where Eunuch Superintendent Alfredo Johnson’s shadow was long and cold. He was gone, yet I kept his small name like a pebble in my mouth.
“You must live,” Alessandra said, pressing a cloth-doll into my hands. “Learn to stitch. No one can take that from you.”
So I learned. I kept my head down in the Zhao Prince’s laundry yard and later in the porcelain-bright rooms of Mistress Kathleen Boyle—she took me as a maid in her chambers, set me to minding the dumb little duties of great women. Faith Dennis, a kind washerwoman, watched my hands grow callused and my stitches neat. Haylee Cote taught me how to mend a brand-new purse with a hidden pocket, and when the palace steamed with gossip, I listened and learned. I was always careful to look like no trouble.
Rex came back in pieces and iron. I saw him at the edge of the courtyard once: his shoulders were broad, his chest was scarred, and his jaw was set like flint. He did not smile when he handed me a small cloth-bag of sweets. “Do not tell,” he said, and his voice had become a hard thing.
“I will not tell,” I said. But I did not know what I had promised. I only knew I kept that bag close to my chest like a memory.
Years passed. The Zhao Prince’s court burned and shifted with the flames of power. Rex—who had once been a boy who tripped and broke chairs—had become a tool sharp enough to cut the world. Alfredo Johnson rose and rose until his name was at the center of a storm; men bent toward it like wheat toward rain. Rex had been one of Alfredo’s blades. He came and went like a shadow; he protected what he needed to protect. He came to me three times a year, as if we were a private weather.
“You are quiet,” he said once in the cold of a winter corridor. “Always you hold yourself like a seam.”
I swallowed. “I learned to sew so no one could traipse over me.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he answered. He knelt, faced unsteady in the torchlight, and put ointment on my frost-bitten hands. “You are all wrong about yourself. You are not the thread to be pulled. You are—” He stopped. The words did not come easily from him any longer.
When Rex was first transformed in the house of power, he had told me in the dark, “I am a eunuch.” He said the label with a kind of bluntness as if it were an instrument of honesty. “Alivia, you must know that. Do you understand it?”
I had been fifteen and still barely brave. “I understand,” I had whispered. “I will love you anyway.”
He only looked at me and said, “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I had said, stupid, certain. “I asked to be yours.”
That foolishness of mine carried us forward. For a time I thought I could be satisfied with the margins. I had a shop in another province—money I earned with my needles—and I thought: perhaps ease exists for a woman who can sew well. Kirsten Berry, the madam of a nearby house, said, “Sell to the houses of pleasure; they will pay with gold, and you will not have to beg.” I sold embroidered skirts to women who sold nights; I watched my hands work day into thread, thread into coin, and coin into shelter. It was honest, if small.
But the world is not small. Alfredo Johnson’s wars and intrigues widened and swallowed things. One day the city reeked of fear; word came that his palace sent riders calling loyal banners to the capital to “protect the throne.” The streets filled with banners. I was in my shop when soldiers came for the palace men who had once conspired against my first home; they came with a crier.
“Bring forth the traitors,” the crier called.
It was then that the first public punishment I witnessed in my life was staged.
“Those men are corrupt eunuchs and conspirators,” a court official proclaimed at the square. Arnaldo Richter—who once had the power to bend exchequer ledgers to his will—and Johann Amin—whose small, clever hands had arranged illegal mines—were brought before the people. They were stripped and bound on ladders; everyone was told to come and see. Negro banners were raised. I should have turned into a child and hidden, but I stayed, like the needle that will not stop.
“Confess,” commanded a magistrate. “Your crimes and whom you served.”
They confessed, not quietly. Arnaldo stared at the crowd and laughed, “You think you see truth, peasants? You see a story.” Johann Amin spat at the magistrate and said, “You cannot cut the wind.”
Then the sentence: heads displayed. The crowd gasped. Guards placed the heads on pikes at the city gate.
I remember how the sunlight hit Arnaldo’s eyes as they took him—like the glitter on water when the wind is up. He walked like a man who refused to be drunk. He called out, “I was an instrument—like most of you. You blame the blade and forget the hand.” The crowd murmured; some turned their faces. A boy held a stick and poked the bloody crown of a severed head, curiosity trumping horror. A woman fainted. Martina Falk, who stood near me, clutched my sleeve and sobbed: “Oh, my God. Look at what power makes of men.”
This scene is the one that forever broke something within me: to see the faces of men I had seen once at a distance—satellite faces, familiar—reduced to spectacle. Men who once had walked by me without knowing me were now banners of tragedy. The crowd took pictures with the tiny glass lenses they kept; people whooped and cursed and spat. A man near the gallows took a coin from his pocket and whispered, “Now it’s safe.” The shift of power was a physical thing; I felt it as if standing on a floor that moved beneath my feet.
Arnaldo laughed as they brought him up. He went from arrogance to confusion, to denial and then to the hollow of terror. The guards tightened the ropes. Johann Amin, who had a clever tongue, tried to sell a story as he lost breath—“I was obeying orders,” he mouthed, then his lips stilled. When the blades fell, the sound was bone-on-bone. Someone in the crowd clapped. Another sang, a crude folk rhyme. “Power is a cruel seamstress,” someone muttered, “and men like plucked threads.” The hangman wiped blade with a rag as if dusting a sword after a walk.
That punishment satisfied the mob; it fed the need for a morality play. And yet no tribunal can wash away the rot power collects in those who wield it. Later I learned the trial had been staged—selected men sacrificed like winter cabbages to tidy a political floor. I learned that because politics always trades children for land.
“You have seen too much,” Rex said to me once later, fingers flat against my wrist. “You should be simple and quiet. That is safer.”
“I cannot be what makes a person safe,” I said. “You are not the only blade.”
He pressed his mouth to my knuckles. “Then be my shield,” he said, like a command wrapped in tenderness.
When the emperor climbed and changed names—when Alfredo Johnson became the head of a new dynasty—the palace cake changed layers. People were given titles; some were taken down from pedestals. Rex rose to control the city’s enforcement in a way no one expected. His face grew flinty, his eyes turned to metal. He was the instrument and the hand, and he loved me in a halting way that contained both a touch and a command.
“You are not mine to give away,” he told me in the twilight of our marriage. “You were promised to me once, child. You do not belong to the city or to the emperor. You belong to me.”
“You are a eunuch,” I said, because saying it made it less like a wound.
“And you chose me,” he said, voice dense with hurt. “You chose this life.”
Our marriage was, outwardly, one of pomp. The throne ordered it, and so order it did. There were silk banners, drums, gifts that would have fed a village for a year. When we became husband and wife in the formal words the court used—my name shifted, embroidered in gold into new household forms—I thought of Foster Martinez and the wet stall of cold meat. I thought of Alessandra’s rough hands and Martina’s soft, impatient touching of my hair when I stood still as a child. I thought of the needle and how steady it had become.
There were nights when I would wake and find Rex whispering like a child in the dark. “Do not leave me,” he would say, and then add, “It is not fair you would choose another life.”
“Who?” I asked, and my hair turned white under the moon.
“No one,” he said too quickly, and his fingers were far too busy tracing the pattern on my sleeve. “No one that matters.”
But the palace does not respect promises made in the dark. While I sought small mercies—charitable cures for beggars, soup for the homeless, a schoolhouse for needlework girls—the court was turning its tide. The emperor, Alfredo Johnson, was not as immortal as his titles. When he lay at the edge of death, there were whispers that the throne shifted like a boat on a roiling sea. The new emperor’s hand pressed differently; he checked the lists of wealth and removed names. He gave an edict called a “crime-of-power” proclamation and insisted on ritual ablutions of the state. He demanded lists of blame.
During those purges, Rex did not aim the sword at the highest of the court. He saw that to survive, one must sometimes trade ghosts. He made choices with teeth. I never knew if he did them to protect me, to clean his past, or because the taste of order pleased him. I only know that he brought names to light and he let some go by—carefully selected skeletons.
“You are cold now,” I told him once after a night of court and punishment.
He smiled without humor. “I am necessary.”
I stayed. I traveled south to tend my shop when the walls of the capital were not kind; I came back when the need called. I taught girls to sew: Blythe Copeland learned embroidery the way a gull learns to ride wind; Kirsten Berry taught herself patterns of business. The shop became a shelter. We made deft pockets and secret seams to hide letters and small coins, and sometimes to smuggle truth.
Years will roll on and turn into cruel distances. Rex’s hands became the hands of a man who could never leave the office of a eunuch and a governor. He sat at the center of the world and gave orders that moved troops. Alfredo Johnson, the man who had raised him, aged and died. New emperors rose. Rex was always near the edge where the scythe swung.
One late summer, when the air stuck like honey, I was called to a great audience hall. The emperor—Alfredo Johnson’s successor—sat with thin eyes. He smiled and shuffled papers. Beside him stood Rex, black robes making him a comet in a hall of candles. The emperor told me in a courteous, low voice, “Alivia, choose to be with Rex, or be with me.”
I was exhausted with choices. I traced the seam of my sleeve. “I choose a life I can stitch,” I said. “I choose to keep my hands.”
Rex said nothing; his eyes trembled. He lifted my chin with a thumb as if I were porcelain. “Then stay,” he said. “You will not be able to tell me no twice.”
Marriage bound us; so did rumours and palace orders. Rex bought me back from the life I had chosen in the south with the price of his blood and politics. We lived in the marble house with a hidden room for prayer. I set up charity houses that fed children and taught girls to sew. People called me the benevolent wife of the factory of power; they praised my face and my hands. The people came and we fed them. I bought a silk farm; Kirsten and Blythe and I made patterns and we taught girls in the countryside. I thought I had stitched a good life.
And yet—power leaves holes. In their noon-time courage, some men rise to monstrous deeds.
The worst punishments, I realized, are not always public. There are punishments that leave a person in a cell with rats, with no sky to look at; there are punishments taken in secret by the hand of a jealous lord. That is what Rex did to Blythe Copeland—the woman they called “Luo Luo” in our youth—when he believed she had been his rival. He locked her in a cellar and let the darkness press her like a wet sheet. He did not kill her by steel. He killed her by inches, by denying her daylight and company. When I found her, when I opened that door and saw her cheekbone showing like the rim of a shell, when she mouthed lies and truths at once, I vowed I would never again watch power degrade into cruelty.
“You could have left,” I told Rex that night, when she sat across me and chewed at the memory of things.
He looked like a man both spent and all-consuming. “Would you have left me?”
“No,” I said, cold. “Because somewhere—I was always yours.”
He laughed and it was not a sound of triumph, but of collapse. “You were always mine.”
The day that Rex fell—or rather, surrendered—came like a winter fog. Alfredo Johnson’s old loyalties were dead and the new emperor looked on with a diplomatic face. There was a plan where Rex was to give his list of secrets in exchange for a safe exile. He did. He burned papers and we watched the smoke rise. The emperor signed and the palace knelt. Rex handed me the little packet he had kept hidden for years—letters he had written and never sent, and a tiny scrap of silk that once was folded into a pocket.
“This is all I can give,” he said.
“Then give me this,” I said, and I took his hand. We had been two needles working on the same hem for years. We had sewed and unsewn. We had kept the other’s seams from catching. I did not know how to save the world, but I could hold a hand.
The choice to leave for the south came by way of a carriage and quiet night. Rex helped me aboard the cart, pressed my palm hard. “Do not forget the house,” he said, “and do not forget the girls.” He bent and kissed my forehead, like an apology that could not be finished.
“I will not forget,” I said, and the cart rolled away from the palace and toward the river.
In the south the months unrolled like silk. I taught more girls; we made cloaks and small linens. I married and did not marry. I kept my name and my practice. Rex’s face stayed like a watermark in my mind. He wrote to me once on a scrap of paper sent by a loyal servant: “You must do what you must,” it read. I sewed the scrap inside my wallet.
Years later, word spread that Rex Dumas had been taken in the night—there were rumors that he had been burned with a humbling pall of disgrace, and that he had been whisked away to a small grave outside the city. Some said the new regime had not forgiven him. Some said he had given himself up to save scores of others. I could not hold either explanation as truth. I held the fact he was gone like a stitch I had to knot.
I still remember the last scene between us: it was in a room that smelled of camphor and ink. He was drunk with a little wine and grief; he sobbed like a child into my shoulder and said, “You were always mine.” He let the admission out like a confession. I pressed my head to him and said, “I was always yours too.” We were ridiculous and tender and two halves of an old seam.
If a stranger asked me what I had learned, I would say: people stitch and people unpick. Some men became instruments; some men become wielders of instruments. Power rewards cruelty and disguises cruelty as necessity. Love survives on the edge of reason, and sometimes carries the heavy, honest burden of forgiveness. I planted my needle and embroidered my days with kindness. I taught a generation to thread the eye and keep their own hands.
Years on the south river, while the willows swayed and small boats drifted past my shop, a child’s laughter would catch on the wind. I would look up and see the girls I had taught, older and stronger, with their own shops and their own apprentices. They would call me Alivia or they would call me Aunt; they would carry a needle and a sense that someone had once kept them from despair. That, perhaps, is punishment enough for the men who believed in absolute dominion.
Rex’s monument is a small stone folded behind grass; I visit sometimes and leave a scrap of embroidered cloth. I cannot unmake what he did. I cannot unmake what was done to him. But I can make something that will outlast all of us: a pattern, a seam, a life that is honest.
We were two stitches in a wide hem. We held one another against a world that cut freely. We were, in the end, what we had always been: human beings trying to keep something from fraying.
The End
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