Revenge14 min read
The Jade Hairpin and the Peach Blossoms
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I learned to sew before I learned to answer for myself.
"I will take a concubine," Jagger said the moment he crossed our threshold that spring. He spoke as if the season itself had instructed him.
I kept stitching. The unborn child in my belly had been with me five months; my fingers fumbled but I kept at my needle because that was what I could do. Only two little sets of garments were good enough to be shown.
"Madam," he said louder when I did not look up, "did you hear? I will take a concubine."
I set the needle down. I stood, slow, not to give him a show. "If you must, then take one. Who is your choice?"
"Xiao Ling seems clever. Let her come."
I bowed. "I will arrange it." I called for the house steward to prepare the formalities.
He sat in the high chair sipping tea. I was tired. "Spring is warm," I said. "I am weary; I will go rest."
Alivia steadied me to the inner room and closed the door. "Miss," she said under her breath, "I told you that that Xiao Ling had eyes for Master. You didn't listen. What are we to do?"
I smiled and handed her a cup. "Don't fret. You are clever, Alivia. Why would the master look at you?"
She drank and then frowned. "Madam, think of the women before us. My mother says the master favored Zha concubine and my mistress lived in grief. I don't want you to have that fate."
"I don't either," I said, but I had spent most of my life learning a different lesson. "Girls like us marry with hope. But houses are full of knives. I stopped dreaming on the day my oldest sister returned home and our mother was crying about how her husband took a concubine and shut my sister out. Since then..." I trailed off.
Alivia began to cry quietly. I handed her the handkerchief I'd just embroidered. "Shh. No more of that. Dry your eyes."
Days later he installed Keyla Leroy as concubine.
That night he did not go to her room. He came to mine.
He lay with his arm around me and his other hand on my belly. He called me kind names. "With you, I have no regrets," he said.
It was the very politeness that stripped him bare. I wanted him to say, "I love another." I wanted bluntness rather than pretty lies.
Tears came quietly. I turned my face away.
Jagger was the eldest son of a prominent minister — handsome, brilliant. I married him because our families matched, nothing more romantic than that. At first we were close. He bought me sweets, books, even chose clothes. My friends envied me.
But that half-year of bliss became a cage. I miscarried many nights of peace imagining him with others. I moved my bed. I lied that I slept separately because the truth — my jealous dreams — sounded shameful.
Then I saw Keyla touch him in his wardrobe. His laughter with her cut me deep. For a second, a savage relief warmed me: the suspicion had a face.
The next morning he still woke beside me. "Madam," he said, "rise."
He was gentle as if we had never broken.
"Xiao Ling will come today for the formal drinking of tea," I thought. I let Alivia pick a hairpin for me, and she offered the jade orchid pin Jagger had given me. I chose the old plum hairpin instead and tucked the jade into the dark box.
At the sitting hall Keyla bowed deeply and sweetly. I gave her a jade bracelet. "Serve my husband well," I said. I signed two maids to serve her.
The theatre of hostility should have flamed, but it didn't. I could have thrown a tantrum, but the women in these houses are older than hot tempers. We all know the same lines.
I wanted to be strong, like the neighbor's wife, Rosa Chase, who ran her household like an army. But pity and the knowledge that we are all battered made me back down.
Because I was heavy with child, Jagger began to spend nights at other rooms; more of Keyla's kin came into our businesses. People muttered. I moved in quiet.
One day I went to the study with pastries.
"Have you visited the rice shop lately?" I asked.
He smiled and took a piece. "I've been busy with my new appointment. Why?"
"Keyla's relatives were placed in our rice shop. They do not fit. Maybe they should go to the dye-house."
He picked at his sweet. "Are you telling on me, madam?"
I bowed. "Everything is for the family's good."
"Then handle it," he said, smiling in a way that said he trusted me — or that he enjoyed watching me try.
"Tonight I will come to your room," he called after me. It sounded like a promise.
I moved Keyla's kin from the rice shop to the dye-house, quietly. The household bit of peace returned. He thought this was my fight for recognition.
That night, he did come to my room. I was eight months pregnant and had finished only two sets of infant clothes. I was fussy about the baby's garments. Mother said a mother's own hands made the safest things.
"Put the jade pin on," he said softly later. "I want to see it."
I did not answer. The next morning he was gone at dawn for an official post.
I put on the jade orchid pin I had loved since before marriage. Alivia cried a little as I let her fasten it. "Madam, it's beautiful," she whispered.
We went to see the peach trees in the west garden because the doctor said walking was good for the baby. The peach blossoms were bright.
"A storm of petals," I told Alivia, and I let the pink rain fall on my shoulders.
A child ran out to chase a butterfly and crashed into me. I fell. The world folded in blood and pressure and a cold that said, "sleep." I fought with the forgetting, hearing Alivia call for help. I saw motherhood and my own mother’s face and my sister's, and I pushed until I could not.
I woke hours later to Alivia's face. "You had a daughter," she sobbed to the sleep-warm in my arms. "A girl. She is fine."
"Where is she?" My throat was glass.
"She sleeps. You, you are tired. Rest."
When I opened my eyes again I saw my child: small, round, red, like a tiny sun. I touched her. "Little Yanran," I whispered. I asked for a nurse, but worried I would pass on what I had been given.
The household simmered with its own friction. Keyla's belly swelled as if in mockery. She was allowed to bask in attention. Her followers were bolder.
Once, when the small boy of her kin charged into the garden and frightened me, I suspected it was not accident. "Bring him," I told Alivia. "Find him, don't tell them why."
Alivia went. She came and whispered back, "He is gone. They left the house."
The household kept spinning. Jagger came in and tucked me in, cradling my hand. He named our daughter "Yanran" — "peach blossom's smile." He promised grand gestures and tenderness. I wanted to believe him. I wanted him to be honest if he loved another.
Weeks passed. I fed Yanran myself when I could, because milk from hired women often came with coldness.
Jagger's attention toggled between home and other rooms. Keyla pressed her advantage. She brought her own maid into the household and her kin's faces grew across our ledgers.
The other wives played their parts. Cadence Holmes — the other concubine — learned singing to please him. Keyla pressed harder. The household's center of gravity shifted.
I tried to keep calm. I arranged marriages, I did the small things. I pushed Alivia towards Ian Chavez, the young man who had always left sweets at our gate. "Marry him," I said. "Take a life where you are treated as more than a hired hand. I will sign for your freedom."
"Miss," Alivia cried, "you really mean it?"
"I mean it," I said.
Ian came with a matchmaker. The wedding was modest. I paid for the dowry from my small savings. Alivia left to be another man's wife. The house felt thinner without her tiny bustle.
I took Yanran to the city gardens that spring. A woman called Wang Xichun — a neighbor, jealous and sharp — stopped me mid-stroll to blurt about Jagger's supposed night at a pleasure house. "He was at Qingfeng Pavilion," she said bluntly, staring.
"Rosa," I said, keeping a bowl of pleasantry, "men are men. I cannot watch every hour. Why do you care so much?"
She smirked and left, making the rumor bloom.
Gossip moved like lantern smoke. Jagger was questioned. He was made to kneel before his ancestors and apologize. The city rolled its eyes; a neighbor's matchmaker was rarely kind.
I went home to my mother's house for a while. Legacy Drake — my mother — had dishes and cures and a steady, patient way. She said, "A child becomes a reason to endure. You get strength from this child."
At her house I felt the old ache and a new fire. My sister, Addison Andersen, was expecting too and my mother's hands fussed over both of us. "I'll pray to the gods," she said, plying us with warm broth. "But think, daughter. If he continues to bruise you, you have a right to leave."
"Leave?" I said.
"Would you take Yanran with you?" she asked.
"Yes." The answer came out sharp. Mother leaned forward. "Then think it through."
We returned to Jagger's house. The domestic theatre resumed. For awhile he courted me as if we had never been wounded: he brought toys to Yanran; he sent a carriage to fetch my mother. He kept his night watch in my room. I pretended to soften.
Then the day came when I found the kitchen's pot had scalded Keyla and she staged a fall and bed-plea. I was wary. The house felt thin.
A few days later, I was feeding Yanran at night. Jagger pushed into my room with the smell of spirits about him. He seized the child as if he owned her. I held my infant close.
"Give me Yanran," he demanded.
"She is mine," I said, heart pounding.
He pushed and the house erupted. He tried to take my child. I clutched to her, rocking, panting, calling to anyone to help. Downstairs a maid pulled someone. Cadence found a way to lead him away.
It was not the first time his temper had endangered us. I could not sleep after that night. I feared him in a new way.
That is when I decided to do what many women in our city had learned as currency: a trick of threats.
I had found an ally in Clancy Herve, a physician who had practiced in the city and whom the singer-woman Wang Xichun had known once. He agreed to help stage a false pregnancy for me if I wanted a bargaining chip. "A well-managed story can move mountains," he said in a low voice.
I went home and told my mother the plan. She did not smile at such stratagems but she did not stand in my way. We arranged evidence: potions, visits, a carefully timed faint. Clancy would vouch in public.
The acting began. I feigned fainting. I had hidden the bloody stains in my sleeve just under the fabric and then pinched my thigh and let a small contrived amount of blood show. The doctor pronounced me in early pregnancy. I held to the role as if it were a prayer.
The performance worked: the house rushed to me. Jagger came back and spun between rage and care.
But then the plot turned. Someone swapped my medicine. The pain was real and I bled — not a trick. I was not certain if I had conjured this consequence or if another hand had struck.
Hospitality becomes a petty kingdom: petty men, petty women. The finger of blame landed on Keyla's handmaid, Xia. Xia was terrified and told on her mistress.
The storm broke. The household turned into a tribunal. I was frail and pale. Jagger's face twisted between regret and duty.
It was then I decided he must sign the papers.
When I faced him with a slender sheet, my hand shook. "Jagger," I said, "we will part. Sign and you lose no honor. Do it now."
"Is this a joke?" he demanded. "Don't be mad. It was a mistake."
"Sign," I repeated. I would not whisper. I placed the jade hairpin — the original one he'd given me, the one that had broken in halves — on the table between us. "If not, I will make certain I go before the house in a way you will not forget."
He raged. He raised a palm. The slap echoed. "Guards! Take her to the ancestral hall to face penance!"
They dragged me to the hall, my face a map of humiliation. I let them handle me with the same calm I'd used to stitch cloth.
When he saw me laugh — real or crazed, I could not care — I saw something that looked like fear cross his face.
People came and left. Alivia slipped me a package of ointment that saved the raw behind my ear. They tried to starve attention away from me. I let them believe that.
A week later I had two things sewn: a letter and a plan.
Then the turning came that I had both dreaded and needed.
I made two moves at once. First, I told my mother everything. She gave me papers and a key and a place in the south, a small courtyard purchased quietly. Second, I arranged for a public unmasking of Keyla Leroy.
I could have done simpler things: whisper, blacken, bargain. I wanted exposure, a punishment that would make the house flinch.
The morning was bright. The courtyard of the ancestral shrine was full for a festival: neighbors, merchants, cousins of the household, even Rosa Chase and a dozen gossips sat ready. Jagger was there early, stiff in a day robe, his brow knitted. The senior family and some magistrate-level people had gathered under a tent because the harvest had promised prosperity. I came with Alivia and Marina at my side. Addison — my sister — stood behind us with mother Legacy by her elbow.
"Bring her out," I told Marina softly. "Do not let them move her."
Keyla was called into the hall as if for a courtesy. She came dressed as always: silk thin as knife-edge, a smile that had covered teeth like a veil. Her followers clustered like frightened sparrows.
I made sure a steward read aloud the accusations: the tampered medicine, the child’s sudden fainting, the boy who had been sent to push me; a dozen small facts that during the week had been gathered and taped into a scroll. Clancy the physician had written notes; Alivia had found a ledger entry that showed payments to Xia. The household's own bookkeeper had been bribed to let the truth out.
"You have been accused of trying to cause harm to the legitimate wife's pregnancy," Marina intoned. "You are to answer."
Keyla's face first held haughty confidence. "Madam," she said in a voice made of silk, "I serve, I do nothing but serve. What do you mean?"
I stepped forward and said the one thing she had never expected. "You told your boy to run, Keyla. You told others to be in places they should not be. You poisoned a cup to make me fall ill."
The tent stilled. Jagger's jaw moved. Keyla's friends made small noises that had no courage in them.
"How dare you?" Keyla shrieked. "I—"
"Clancy Herve," I called.
The physician came forward and held up a small sealed vial. "I found this in the spice chest," he said. "Not meant for the household. It contains couter-chemicals that will induce hemorrhage in heavy women."
Gasps came. Someone in the crowd muttered, "I remember seeing Keyla near the chest." A steward stepped forward, a man who had been loyal to me, and confirmed he had seen Keyla's maid Xia playing near the spices on the morning in question.
Keyla's expression flickered: shock, then fury, then denial. "This is slander. I would never—"
"Your maid, Xia," I said, and I had made sure Xia would be brought. Xia entered trembling and told the truth — in a child's voice that trembled but was clear. "Mistress Keyla said the wife had to be made sick; she wanted her out. She told me to slip something into the bowl."
"A lie!" Keyla screamed and struck out. The steward pulled her back.
I had arranged for witnesses. I had arranged for an old friend from the market who had seen money changing hands. I had arranged for a scroll of entries that named Keyla's cousin receiving pay. The crowd had pieces of the puzzle. The house could not swallow it all.
Then I spoke softly, so all could hear. "This is no private quarrel. This is attempted murder on a mother's child. You have used small hands and mean hearts. The law in our house is simple: a crime like this demands public renunciation."
"Mercy!" Keyla cried when the magistrate — a known friend of Jagger's father and yet a fair man — pronounced his judgment.
I had planned the followings precisely: Keyla would be stripped of her title in a ceremony; her silk robes would be taken and her family name announced as disgraced. Her maid Xia would be freed from obligation and given coin. The kitchen staff who had been forced to comply were to be protected. Keyla's own son — the infant Greyson Craig she claimed as proof of her favor — would be removed to the care of Cadence Holmes, who had been more moderate and to whom Jagger would later assign guardianship to keep the household calm.
Keyla's scream when they tore the silk off her shoulders is a sound that will remain. The crowd's reaction changed in a breath — from rumor to rage to spectacle. Women spat. A man snapped his fans and called her a thief. Someone took a palm-sized paper and began recording her disgrace with ink. People laughed. People whispered. A girl in the back took out a brush and sketched Keyla's face with small merciless strokes.
She changed: from contempt to shock, from lies to a fish-out-of-water clamor, then disbelief. She grabbed a steward's sleeve. "You can't! My kin—"
"Leave my house," Jagger said finally, voice like flint. "You are a stain."
They packed her into a small cart with her remaining servants. The escort to the gate was not respectful; it was packed with faces that spat out misshapen sympathy. Children made fun. Someone in the crowd shouted, "Karma!" and the word traveled like a contagious fire.
I watched Keyla's face go pale and then become hollow. She had measured herself by the master's favor, but she had not measured the rage of being found wanting in public. The sting of that humiliation made her small. She glared at me once, a hot look, then slid out of the gates like a person in a robe that no longer fit.
A hundred people nodded or whispered. A few embroidered the moment anew. The steward in charge handed Xia two silver coins and a new name in the household books. Cadence was granted care in writing for the child.
It was not revenge enough. No court can return the blood. But the public unmasking changed the balance: when a woman is found out before many, the household shifts. Men who might have stayed silent count their losses. Keyla lost the currency of influence and the face that once rounded like a coin.
After that day the corridors felt different. People looked at me and they put together the lines between the small acts that made a great crime. Jagger stood awkward, guilt and shame fighting under his skin. He could not look at me the way he had before.
But the punishment for Keyla was one thing; the larger wound — the betrayal by my husband — remained.
I left, quietly, with paper signed that freed me. He could not keep my name. I took little: Yanran, the embroidered hair-shirts I had made for her, the broken jade half of the hairpin I had kept in my pocket.
"Sign here," I said in his study, laying the release before his hand.
He tried to bargain. He tried to plead. He could not find the signature he wanted in my face. When he realized I would not be moved, he placed his seal on the paper and the sound of the press hitting the wax was both an end and a carelessly placed punctuation mark in our shared life.
I left with mother Legacy's small papers and a few coins, with Marina and Alivia's blessing — Alivia had long been gone to Ian and a life away from our house. Addison walked with me to the carriage. We passed the peach trees in their new green; a few flowers clung stubbornly to their limbs.
At the gate I heard Jagger's voice calling for me. He was late. He had tried to stop me at the gate. I undid one of the pins he'd given me and let it fall to the ground. I did not look back.
A good many people said I had lost my mind. Others said I had been brave. The city tells many stories.
Years later, I sit in my small courtyard by the southern markets and watch a child — not mine by blood but ours in every quiet hour — chase butterflies. I keep the half-jade pin in a drawer beneath a pot of tea. It fits in my palm like a small testimony.
Sometimes on spring days I walk with Yanran under peach trees and I let the petals fall on her hair. She laughs. "Mother," she says, "the petals are like snow."
"Snow that only blooms in spring," I tell her. "Pick one. Keep it."
One afternoon, a councilman from the old days came by. He had heard the story of the house and the scandal. He looked at me. "You made a choice," he said.
"I made many," I said. "I sewed my life out of small stitches."
He smiled. "And you have worn many needles."
My laughter sounded thin and bright. I folded a scrap of cloth, put the broken piece of jade inside and locked the drawer. The heart remembers, but it will not be bent forever.
When the town had gossip, Jagger showed his new family to the world at the peach-bloom festivals. He brought his younger children, dressed and stiff. Once, I saw him from afar across the blossoms. He stood under a tree with a little girl on his knee, Greyson Craig perhaps, now cared for by Cadence. He looked for me in the crowd and did not find me.
"Are you sorry, mother?" Yanran asked once, looking up at me.
"I keep the ache as a map," I told her. "It teaches. It is mine."
The jade hairpin I left at the gate that day never returned to me whole. It is a broken relic and a small, private signpost. When the wind pushes a peach petal into the tea steam, I remember the day of public shame — the day Keyla was unmasked, the day a household changed.
I walk past the shop that once sent our rice and I buy loose tea. The market people nod. Alivia — two towns away now a married woman — once sent a thread of embroidered cloth back. I tie it to the handle of my kitchen door.
"Why do you keep it?" Yanran asked.
"Because things remember us," I said. "Because a woman can be many things. Because the world remembers the sound of a silk tearing and the day the color goes from a proud face to someone who cannot breathe."
We eat our soup. I watch a child chase a butterfly and I think of small hands, of a hairpin, and the peach trees that bloom and fall and bloom again.
The End
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