Sweet Romance15 min read
The Lantern I Wanted
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They used to call me YuanYuan until I stopped answering to anything but the soft shape of my own name in his mouth.
"I told you you'd grow up stubborn," he would say, and then call me by that name again like calling a bird down to a warm palm.
"Jacqueline," I correct myself in English now, living the story through a different tongue, but in my chest the old sound is still YuanYuan. I speak in the first person because everything that followed began from the way my life fit into Duke Bennett's shadow.
I was a maid at the Ninth Prince's mansion. Not the lowest kind; I was a chamber maid who slept in the inner rooms. That made my life "better," the other girls said, if "better" means never being left alone at day and at night.
"You're lucky," Hallie would whisper when we passed the main hall. "You serve the Prince's household. You won't be for some country farmer's son."
"Luck," I would say and force a laugh. "Maybe."
"It could be worse," she would add, as if listing favors were the same as tasting them.
"Thank you," I'd say, because being grateful was part of surviving, and because my name—my small private name—was now closely tied to the person I served.
Duke Bennett was not easy to please. He was handsome—everyone agreed on that—and people liked the idea of being tied to someone with status. But he was hard in ways that made the nights harder than the days. He laughed rarely and kept his temper like a locked box. People called him a man who had everything, and that made them greedy for what he might give.
"You liked being with him?" Hallie once asked at dusk when the kitchen lights were low.
"I don't know," I said. "He's complicated."
"You mean he's a cruel man." She smirked, as girls do to keep themselves warm with other people's misfortunes.
"Maybe," I said. "But he was the one who called me by my name."
"Called you what?" Hallie tilted her head.
"YuanYuan," I said, and the single syllable felt like a pulse under my ribs.
He called me YuanYuan so often that it became the map of my days. When he spoke to me three times in one sentence, the sound of my name would lay itself on my skin like hot honey.
"Do you love me?" he said to me once when the wind made the curtains dance.
"You always say that I loved you before I admitted it," I told him once, because he would say such things as if reading my private ledger.
"Maybe you did," he replied. "Maybe you just didn't say it."
There was a night I remember because the moon seemed to make the rest of the world very small. There were bundles on the floor, coins and gold leaves spilled like insect wings, and a dagger with a glittering edge that anyone would be afraid of. Yet there we were, sitting on the cold boards, not afraid.
"You ask me if I'm happy tonight?" Duke Bennett said then, his voice close and soft in a way that caught me off guard. "Yes. I am happy. This night is enough."
"One night?" I asked, not because I doubted his words but because words were a poor measure for what hearts wanted.
"It will do," he said simply, and his hand found mine.
He was always lying in small, lovely ways. He would promise "one night" and it would mean little; to me it meant more than weeks. I learned to read the grammar of him by actions. He could be cold, then gentle, then inscrutable, then a warmth so sharp it made me dizzy.
"When is the Mid-Autumn?" I asked him later, the word "Mid-Autumn" feeling like a promise I wanted to keep in my mouth.
"In a month," he said. "I'll take you to the lanterns."
"It's enough," I told the moon in my head. I counted the days toward it like beads on a string—each day a small comfort.
People believed in gods and ghosts and fortunes. Duke Bennett did not. "If there's a god," he told me once with that stubborn tilt of his chin, "they must have never been kind to me. Why bow to something that hasn't looked after me?"
Once or twice in his life he had bowed—to use a soft word—one time when I bore twins and another time that autumn night. "I burned incense," he confessed once, with his face turned away. "I donated money to the temples. I did it to buy time for you. If I can live one more day, I can protect you for a day more."
"You shouldn't waste days for me," I said. "They are yours."
"Then I'll spend them," he said, and that is the kind of shrunk confession that swelled larger than the words.
The night of the lantern festival arrived like a bowl of black ink spilled with a bright coin. The moon hung low and fat and enough to be embarrassing in its splendor. Streets were full, lanterns bobbed like fish around people's shoulders, and laughter filled spaces that usually had formality and hush.
"Pick any lantern you want," Duke Bennett said, and his tone had the dangerous ease of a man throwing a coin into a fountain and expecting a miracle.
"I want the one in the small upstairs room," I said, nodding toward a balcony of a famous house where a young woman held a lamp that looked as if it were lit by captured moonlight.
He smiled. "You want what you can't easily have. Typical."
"You know this house is a brothel," I said, smiling anyway. "They have rules. Women choose a suitor only if they like the person. If someone is chosen, they give the lamp as dowry."
Duke Bennett's eyebrows flicked. "And you want me to go there and ask?"
"You of all people," I teased, "with your face and your money. It would be easy."
"Are you testing me, YuanYuan, or your stubbornness is at play?" he asked, amused.
"Both," I admitted in a low voice.
He walked away into a crowd with the comfortable confidence of a man who never feared being stopped. I watched him climb the narrow stairs. He stopped at the balcony, spoke with the girl who held the reason for my small desire. I saw the girl hesitate; the lamp drew back a hair. He lowered his head, explained—his brow furrowed in the way he does when he is giving up a battle—and then he looked toward me with a small, wounded expression.
It was a sight I'd never seen him share: the man with power looking deflated because of a refusal. I thought then that he had chosen to risk pride for something that mattered only because I had wanted it.
"You could have come down," I shouted once he returned.
He simply shivered his shoulders and shook his head. "She refused to give it to me."
"Then she must be a fool," I said, stamping my foot, proud and petty at once.
He held up the little lamp he had bought elsewhere; the light danced on his face. "I brought you something else," he said, and his voice had the gentle mischief that told me he had won some other way.
I pushed it away, pretending. "I don't want it," I said loudly.
The girl from the small room laughed softly in the shadows. She stepped forward with the ease of someone sure of herself and spoke to me in a voice like a small bell.
"Don't be like that. I only wanted to see her," she said, curious eyes on me. "This Duke likes you."
"You like me?" I snapped, joy and indignation tangled together.
"Maybe I did," she said. "Who can tell?"
Her words, so composed, made me red. I wondered if she meant to wound; instead, she offered the lamp back in a gesture that said more than she intended: "If someone loves you enough to make a fool of himself, it's worth noting."
After that, we walked together through the crowd. He teased me, and I pretended to resist. He touched the small place on my ear with a flower he'd bought—sweet smelling—and I tried to dunk his face in the nearest basin for being ridiculous.
"You were not looking for me earlier," he said suddenly in a tone that made me stop.
"I was," I argued. "You were right behind me."
"I saw you searching," he said. "I could have called to you, stepped forward, and you would have turned. But I didn't. I wanted to watch you scramble, see your face like that."
"You beast," I said, punching him softly.
"Admit you liked it," he pressed.
"I will not," I lied, then kissed his cheek quickly because the street was full of eyes and I wanted them to know he had me.
"Do you like me?" he asked. He wasn't mocking this time.
"I do," I answered because I couldn't craft a better lie.
"Then I don't need you to guess," he said, and he pulled me in until the air between us was less crowded than around us.
That night I let him buy me a sprig of osmanthus and loop it in my hair. I wanted to press it in the hollow behind his ear but it was not right then. He would not allow crude displays in public more than a kiss on the cheek, which somehow made the rest of me explode with laughter and warmth.
Later, we placed a lantern on the water. My small hands held the braided rim, and he stood beside me. I watched my lamp bob away with a string of others, and the river swallowed them with small, gold mouths.
"Do you pray?" I asked him, because I saw him light incense earlier.
"I didn't before," he said. "I have done and will do things that I never thought I would. For you, I began to believe in small mercies. I lit incense tonight so that if there is fate or gods or whatever, they might spare me another day."
"Another day?" I repeated. His gaze was fixed on the drifting lamps.
"For each day I live," he said, "I buy you protection. Even if I cannot be a good man, I will be a long one. I'll live long enough to keep you safe."
"You suppose you choose such things?" I asked, not daring to demand anything bigger.
"I suppose," he said, and his hand covered mine.
We prayed with folded palms and breathed out wishes that went into a tide of shared sounds. Others around us prayed and shouted and laughed. The night felt like a world conceded to us for a few hours.
"Promise me the moon," I joked, then whispered, "No, promise me the feeling of this night."
"I will," he answered, and his eyes stayed on me, serious and strange.
I thought then of the poem I'd copied and thrown away when fear made me cowardly. I had been so afraid of being a woman traded for beauty, a thing valued only for its look. The poem was old and cruel; it named women by the fragility of their days. I had feared becoming a page in such a sad book. That fear had made me test him and step back and act small.
"I know you saw the poem," he said once, when the crowd had thinned and we were walking back through a hush of dark lanes.
"You read my foolish thoughts?" I asked.
"I read enough," he said, and then he told me, "I am ashamed."
"Of what?"
"Of being the kind of man who would allow you to think you were replaceable," he said. "Of letting the court and its games make you doubt your worth. If I have done wrong, I want to make it right."
"How?" I asked. "You can't control their eyes."
"I can't," he said. "But I can promise I will not be careless with you. If I have made bargains and lost things before, I will buy tradeoffs with my life now. Let me do that."
The way he said it made a hollow in my chest fill with the sound of something that might be love. Not the loud, court-notch declarations we were fed, but the patient, relentless kind that showed itself in small, careful choices.
"Will you stay?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied. "For as long as I can."
We returned to the mansion and everything inside it—lamplight, servants drifting like shadows, Kelsey Cruz with the cold smile that masked her ambitions—fell back into place. She had always had an air of being ready to take a step up; people whispered that she clung to right people, that she had her own designs.
"You're not the only one who has a place in his house," she said one dawn, voice like oil. "Do not be foolish."
"Do not be unkind," I said.
"Kindness is for those who are naïve," she said, and something in her voice skittered like a trapped animal.
When I became his concubine officially—ceremonies small and stiff; people calling me "your lady" in hushed tones—life changed in strange ways. The servants started greeting me as "Lady Jacqueline" or "YuanYuan's master." Late Shao—Kelsey—adopted a colder distance that was only thinly veiled as civility.
"Don't let it go to your head," Hallie warned when I returned to my old corner of the inner rooms. "You still have to answer to many more people than you think."
"I know," I said. "I only want a few good nights."
"He's not always gentle," Hallie said, lowering her voice. "Remember, there are public eyes you can't ignore."
"I'm aware," I told her. "I will be careful."
He continued to surprise me. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, he would suddenly come to my room and pull me into a corner and speak in low, absurdly tender ways. "Do you know how much I hate you when you are shy?" he'd ask. "You make a face as if the world is ending and I adore it."
"You are a terrible flattery," I'd reply, and he would grin.
"Only for you," he'd say, and the little phrase dug into me.
There were times, however, when I reminded myself of the dangers. I watched him move through the court like a well-tuned instrument, charming some, frightening others. He had obligations. There were corners of his life I could not enter, rooms he closed with iron lids. In those hours I feared for both of us.
"Don't look at others, Jacqueline," he told me once in a rare private moment. "I will not be persuaded away. But do not make me tempted."
"I wouldn't," I said, truthfully. "I refuse to be an ornament."
"You are not an ornament," he said. "You are the center I orbit. That is worse, perhaps, because then I will do everything to keep you."
When I worried aloud about his enemies and the machinations of those who thought women like me were disposable, he would only smile and say, "We have each other for such nights as these."
We had quiet, too—small, stolen breakfasts; an afternoon where he taught me to fold my hair in a way that made him laugh; a night where he read to me lines I had copied and thrown away and said, "You are not the hurt in this poem. You are the protest."
"How can I be your protest?" I had laughed.
"By being the one you are," he said. "And by letting me stand with you."
People changed the names they used for me. The servants began to call me Lady Jacqueline or YuanYuan Zhu—a title I did not care about much. Farewell whispers rattled in the corridors like loose papers. Kelsey watched me with that steady gaze someone reserved for an enemy, always held close enough to hurt.
On festival nights afterwards, people would nod, point, and sometimes lean and say, "The Duke seems different with her." It was a small victory each time, because it meant he showed me to the public in ways he had refused to before.
Sometimes he would do something small and reckless just to prove a point. Once, when Kelsey made a bitter remark, he did an outrageous thing: he took my hand in the middle of a courtyard and kissed it, loud enough so that servants nearby glanced, awkward smiles flickering.
"He's ridiculous," Kelsey muttered.
"He isn't ridiculous," I said. "He's brave in small ways."
Bravery for him meant risking mockery for the sake of a small, private tenderness. Each tenderness made the rest of the world less sharp.
There were nights when worry returned. Fear sat beside me like an unwelcome guest and asked me how long we would be. "For how long will he defend me?" I'd ask the dark without expecting answers. I could not know the future; I only knew the present when he was at my elbow, a steady weight.
One day he found the scrap of poem I'd copied and thrown away, tucked between pages of a book. He read it in the quietness of his study, and when he came to me that evening his face had a new softness.
"I read what you wrote," he told me. "You think yourself like the women of that poem."
"They lived and suffered," I said.
"You are neither of those things," he replied. "You are yours."
He walked over and took my chin in his fingers. "Let me carry the weight of their histories," he said. "Let me be the one who refuses to let you be erased. I will not let you become a footnote."
"Are you sure?" I asked. "These are big words for a man who walks like he belongs to a cold world."
"Words are cheap," he said, smiling. "I will prove it." He kissed me then, not in public show but in the hush after a long day, and the kiss held a promise.
I believed him because he kept showing up. He would stand up in places that mattered and give me a look that turned people’s murmurs into silence. His protection had a cost—he was sometimes austere, sometimes distant, and there were parts of his life I would never enter. Still, he chose me in the small ways that count: a hand on my back when the world pressed, a laugh at my ridiculous stories, a purchase of a lantern when a girl on a balcony made me want something impossible.
Once, in the dim hours before dawn, I woke to find him kneeling by the window, hands folded as if in prayer. I watched him and thought of the incense and the lamplight and the promise of living for a day more.
"You were never a believer before," I whispered, sitting up.
"People change," he said. "Or perhaps I am finally honest."
"What do you want?" I asked, tired and still half-asleep.
"I'm selfish," he admitted. "I want you to be safe. That will do for me."
"Then keep being selfish," I murmured, and he laughed.
There were moments of foolishness too. I would test him out of fear—make small scenes, tie my stubbornness to a chair, behave like a child because I feared being traded for someone more dazzling. Each time, he responded with a peculiar combination of indulgence and firmness.
"It's bad to make such a ruckus," he scolded once, but the scold was soft and made me melt.
"I will behave," I begged, and he kissed my forehead.
We kept each other's secrets in small boxes. Once I wanted nothing but a small lamp; he wanted to look like himself and yet be turned into something softer at my asking. We found each other in the messy middle.
Time made things settle like dust. My name remained a private melody he would sing. The world still churned around us with court politics and small cruelties, but sometimes, for a night or two, it would stop and let us be foolish and whole.
Years later, when people talked about me and the Duke, they would recount the lantern story and the way he stood empty-handed outside a brothel and came back with me laughing. They would tell how he changed little things—walking a step closer in a crowd, pressing a flower into my hair, lighting incense and praying like a man learning to be a better one day by day.
And I, who had once considered myself only a fragile thing, learned to keep a small inner house of iron. Not because I had to be hard, but because tenderness also needs defense.
"Do you regret anything?" he asked me once when the moon again hung low and forgiving, and every room smelled of the same faint osmanthus that night we'd watched the lanterns.
"I regret a world that taught me to hide," I answered, thinking of the poem and the girls who taught me fear.
"Then don't hide with me," he said. "Stay visible enough so I can see you."
I smiled, thinking of the lamp bobbing away downriver years prior. "I'll be visible," I promised.
He cupped my face, eyes as honest as river stones. "I was foolish in many things," he admitted. "But loving you has been the best foolishness."
We were never perfect people. We were people who made small bargains with each other that the world sometimes could not understand. But there was a good sort of stubbornness between us; we chose each other in front of others and in private, and that made an ordinary life feel heroic.
The moon we watched that first festival did not belong to us, yet it bore witness and kept its light. Sometimes late at night I wind a thin ribbon and tuck it into a hidden place—an ordinary paper lantern's strip—which I keep like a relic. In the quiet times, when the house is asleep and civet-scented lamps burn low, I take it out and press it to my lips.
"Do you remember the lamp?" I ask him now, the night before another festival.
"I remember you wanting it," he says, smiling and brushing a stray hair from my face.
"It was not the lamp I wanted," I say. "It was the small proof that you would cross silly distances for something I loved."
"I will cross longer distances," he promises. "I will cross whatever you ask next."
"Keep that promise visible," I say, and tuck my hand in his, holding the small ribbon.
He squeezes my fingers. "Always," he replies, but he does not say 'always' like an end. He says it like a fact we both know and a thing that lives in the warmth of our room.
The moon slides behind a cloud and we listen to the house breathe. I think of the first time he called me YuanYuan and how odd it was that a single sound could become the shape of home.
I close my eyes and can still see that small balcony where the girl with the lantern looked at me and told me he liked me, like someone pointing out a small truth.
"Did she really like me?" I ask, because even now a tiny part of me insists on being modest.
"She saw something in the way he looked," he says, amused. "And she was kind."
"Then keep telling me stories like that," I say.
He grins. "I will buy you lamps if it means your heart stays warm."
I let him, and the night grows soft like cloth.
The lantern I wanted remains my small possession—not because it was expensive, but because it marked the first time he let the public see the foolish edges of himself in order to make something small happen for me. That foolishness taught me how to ask for things I truly wanted and how to accept the ones who bother to try.
"Do you know the poem?" he asks later, voice a hush.
"I do," I say.
"Then do this for me," he murmurs. "If ever you fear being small, remember that the poem will dust itself away in our hands. We will make new pages."
I nod because he has been making new pages for years, and the moon will remember the nights we used our foolishness to carve small, lasting things into our days.
The next morning I go to the window and look out at the courtyard. A small strip of paper is tucked inside my sleeve, a scrap where I kept the memory of a lamp. I take it out and trace the crease.
"To the lamp," I tell him when he passes by, and he kisses my knuckles.
"To the lamp," he repeats.
We laugh, and the sound is ours.
Outside, the servants ready the house for another day. Kelsey moves through the great room like a silent wind. Hallie hums something as she folds cloth. Annabelle Popov—the girl with the lantern that first night—has become a distant name I hear once or twice at a festival, now a story to tell, not a wound.
I keep the ribbon. I keep his small promises. I keep the nights when the lanterns floated like coins down the river. I keep the small, sharp kindnesses he gives me in the middle of unruly days. They are proof enough.
The moon comes out again that evening, a thin upturn like a smile. I wind the ribbon around my finger and press it to my lips.
"This is mine," I tell him.
"It always was," he answers, and his voice is low and sure as the tide.
I believe him, because he has taught me that promises are not just words—sometimes they are the sound of hands folding around yours in the dark and choosing to hold on.
We light a small paper lantern together and send it off into the night. It bobs and joins others, and I watch as it becomes part of a small river of light that moves like a slow breathing thing.
"You see that?" I ask.
"I see," he says, and I feel him at my shoulder like a steady rock.
I let the lantern go, and for once I do not want to hold anything back. The lantern floats and slips into the future, and I know that whatever storms may come, the memory of this light will be a small shield I can press against my chest.
"Remember the balcony?" he whispers.
"Forever," I promise.
He smiles and pulls me closer. The moon arcs over us like a well-kept secret, and in its pale light, I press my forehead to his.
We had nothing but each other, and that was more than enough for the nights we were given.
The End
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