Sweet Romance13 min read
Three Years, No Child, and the Secret Paintings
ButterPicks12 views
I had been married three years and still had no child.
"You've been married three years?" A voice in the garden said, warm and conspiratorial. "Three years no heir — you should pay attention."
"I am paying attention," I answered. "But he does not like me."
They exchanged looks. "Then be clever, Lenore. Be clever."
Lenore. They called me Lenore Smith now, though I never had a surname that felt like mine. I had been raised by the Crown Prince as if I belonged to his household, and when the man who became my husband first set eyes on me he said, "The Emperor likes fragile, pale beauties. Grow thin like that."
So I tried. I learned to tilt my head, to cough the right soft coughs, to speak like a thread. I learned to be small.
"It was an accident," I told them. "I fell from a horse during the parade and landed in Edgar Curtis's arms."
"That ruined your honor," one of them said bluntly. "What man will truly love a wife with a ruined honor?"
Edgar Curtis — the Prime Minister, the house with the proud pillars, the family that had once been all honor. He took me like a trembling thing, because duty demanded, because I had been left on his path.
"I thought he'd save me," I told them. "I thought he would protect me."
"He married you," they said. "He may not want you."
That night I carried a bowl of warm soup into his study. The moon was a pale coin rising; the manor's lanterns flickered. Through the lattice I saw Edgar bent over a desk, the lamp catching his cheekbone like glass.
"Come in," he said without looking up.
"My hands are cold," I lied. "I made you something."
He glanced up. "Thank you, wife."
His words were smooth, polite as a bow. Not a thing to taste.
I sat and waited my courage like a bird waiting to fly. When he did not notice me enough, I climbed into his lap, one clumsy motion, like a child seeking shelter.
"Lenore?" His eyes were the color of cold tea. "This is—"
"I want to sleep with my husband," I said. My voice vanished between us.
He put his hand at my waist. "Place your hands here," he murmured. "Do not move."
"Are you saying no?" I whispered.
"Tomorrow I must read state papers," he answered. "I will not—"
He refused me with a softness that burned my face. I fled embarrassed, footfalls loud in the quiet hall.
Days afterwards I barely left my room. People whispered. A woman named Ainsley Alvarez — the housekeeper who had the look of someone used to hiding things — opened a book for me one afternoon.
"This will buy you coin," she said, eyes bright. "Write for the streets. People love a scandal."
I wrote a story in the dead hours, full of the gossip and the old songs, and it sold like bread. My name was not my own—my booklet went out under a silly title, and people read it and counted the coins into my hand.
Then, in the way of all small happiness, it turned dangerous. Half a month later a decree went up with Edgar Curtis's seal: illegal printing, punishable by prison. My hand shook. I had thought my little book was a kindness to share; I had thought Ainsley would keep me hidden.
"Will he punish the one who printed?" I asked Ainsley.
"They will take the earnings," she said. "And the hand that wrote it."
At midnight I crept to his study to plead. A servant said, "Do you come to confess, madam?"
Edgar looked up at me. "Why are you here?" He sounded weary.
"I came because—" I stopped, because at his desk lay my manuscript, and the cover was smeared with ink. My heart fell into my boots.
"I thought you might need a word," I said. I hugged him without thinking, and tried to hide the manuscript in my sleeve.
He startled, then made a small sound and took my hands. For a moment he pressed his face to mine; the inked pen dropped, a dark star on the desk. His hand tightened around my waist. He kissed me clumsily at first, then like someone who had been starving.
"Lenore," he said afterwards, voice raw as cloth. "You like to start at the eyes."
"What?" I mumbled, floating in the tremor that had just passed through us.
"Write that next time," he said, and then he laughed a little, and then the mask was back. "Would you rather confess? Or go to the jail?"
My throat closed like a fist. I could hardly breathe. Someone had built a guillotine of paper and ink over my head, and he was deciding whether I fell.
"I would not put you in jail," he said finally. "Not for this."
I sobbed with relief and passed out.
When I woke, a doctor told us quietly, "Your lungs are weak. You must not be frightened."
He listened as if that had always been his voice: gentle, commanding, very far away. "We will treat you together," he said to the man beside him. "We will keep her."
"Keep us both safe," the man murmured.
Outside, the city prepared for travel. I took the road with Jaqueline Deng — my dearest friend since the prince's garden. She laughed like bells, and in her carriage we were a small court of two.
"How will it be?" I asked her. "To be away from the capital?"
"Fun," she replied. "And if you want company, take mine."
"But we will return for the rites," she said, and then sobered. "And Lenore, if any woman says you must be left, tell them to mind their own business."
We were giddy for weeks: wine, gossip, long sunsets. Edgar was sometimes tender. One night, in a rest stop of the road, he took my feet and rubbed them as if he could unpick the aches from my bones.
"Do you like that?" he asked.
"It's... good," I admitted. "Where did you learn?"
"Old nurses," he said. "They keep secrets like herbs."
That night we returned to the inn and he told me, softly, "They will bring me a gift from the noblewoman above. A woman meant to entice other men upstairs."
"Will you accept her?" I blurted.
He pressed his mouth to mine in answer. "I do not take concubines," he said later, with an odd set to his jaw. "But I may not be wholly free of palace favor."
We went on; sometimes he was cold, sometimes he was an island of warmth. I began to trace him like cartographer — every wrinkle a map.
Then there was the accident. Jaqueline came back wrapped in linen, her carriage burned and her leg broken. She smiled weakly. "I can't walk, Lenore," she said. "It was a carriage. A hit-and-run. They say..." She trailed off.
"Who?" I demanded.
"I didn't see," she whispered. "But they say a hired driver."
I thought of Edgar. The questions crossed my mind like startled fish. That night, I could not sleep. I wandered the streets and found myself outside the Prime Minister's outbuilding — the place where he sometimes went to work late.
"Why are you here?" a guard said.
"I am his wife," I lied. He let me in.
The room smelled of old paper and of a single perfume I knew. There were books everywhere. A small window threw a rectangle of light on the floor. When I stepped in, my feet scuffed a mat, and I froze.
There were dozens of drawings pinned to the wall. I know the sight of my face; I knew my lines. There were portraits, and in many of them I was the subject — sleeping, bathing, stripped to the private soft places of my body. I put my hand over my mouth.
"Lenore," Edgar said gently, but his voice had another grain now—an edge that cut. "You should not be here."
"Why did you—" It was a whisper that had nowhere to go. "Why did you draw these?"
"I could not stop thinking of you," he said simply.
"You—how could you—" I staggered back. I felt like a thief having found the chest of someone stealing my name.
"Lenore, look."
"No." I shoved him away and ran.
I left the city that night. I went to the river. I thought of my childhood — of a boy who had once been my whole world. I remembered being so small and hungry and someone kind taking me in. I remembered a promise. I remembered a face in the dark that I later saw across a court and never forgot.
But I could not rest. I could not forget Jaqueline's broken leg, the stack of pictures, the way Edgar said he had "not known how to stop." I boarded a boat and fled.
The next days were chaos. Fire and torches flared. Rebels — or maybe they were part of an unrest staged by men with different motives — poured into the city. I was seized by one of their captains, who laughed when he saw my dress.
"Well," he said. "If you are truly Edgar Curtis's wife, we shall see whether he will trade for you."
Edgar stood in the firelight like a statue and surprised me. He did not bargain as gently as in his study. "Let her be," he said. "If you want someone, you may take the lady above."
"The lady above?" They jeered.
Edgar's face hardened. "Name her, then. Take who you will, but leave mine."
One of them called out the noblewoman's name. She stood nearby, shocked and white-faced — Kenia Donaldson. The name was spoken like a match striking a jar.
"You are the one who sponsored this?" Edgar asked, voice low.
"Me?" Kenia said, and the world changed for her as it always does when a small lie meets a big crowd. She smiled toward the militia. "I would never."
Edgar's eyes went very cold. He stepped forward and took me into his arms as if he had been carved to move that exact way.
Men fought. Blood spilled. The rebels were cut down. Edgar moved through them with a single terrible obsession: he wanted me safe. The noblewoman was seized and dragged away, but I had already lost the sense of who had struck and who had saved. The city was in pieces and I fainted under the stars.
When I awoke, I remembered faces. Memories long-buried surged: a man who had held me when I was a child, a promise to guard me, and the sound of his name as a war cry.
"Edgar," I said. "You were there?"
He sank to his knees. "I had to save you, Lenore."
"You drew me," I said. The words fell out of my mouth like stones.
"I did," he answered. "I couldn't stop."
"Why?"
He told me the story of the boy who had been his brother-figure, stolen away by an army. He told me of promises made over dying men. "I thought you were her," he said. "I thought I had a right."
"You painted me like a thing," I whispered. "You collected me."
He looked like a man who had split into two: one who loved fiercely, another who had a dark fever in his mind. "I thought if I owned the image I would never lose you."
That was when I stopped seeing him as only cruel or kind. He was everything that fear could stretch a man into.
Weeks passed. Jaqueline recovered slowly, her leg mending with careful time and a bandage. I carried rattling small miracles of salt and herb to the apothecary. Edgar brought me a dog — a lively yellow beast named Ainsley by Jaqueline — and it ticked around our days like a clock.
A small discovery made me laugh and choke at once. The dog collar — a simple leather loop — had been taken from the yard. I later found the same collar folded in Edgar's study drawer, stained with graphite and dust. He looked at me and shrugged, like a man caught with a child's toy.
"Why did you keep it?" I asked.
"Memory," he said.
"You keep everything," I replied. "Even the things that hurt."
It was true. He had catalogued my face and my movement as if my existence were a museum piece. He had painted the private places and stored them in secret rooms. He had pinned my image on walls like trophies.
"I know what you will ask," he said one night. "Please. I will not hide things anymore."
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe the man who had sat by me through faintness and the man who had nearly destroyed me in his obsession were the same. I was pregnant. The doctor told us. There was fear, and then a small hot joy like bread fresh from the oven.
Then the rumor reached us: Jaqueline's injury had been no accident. The little concubine in her household — Kenia Donaldson — had bribed a carriage man to strike Jaqueline. People said it as if saying the words alone would make it so.
"I will find proof," Edgar vowed.
"No," I said. "Let it be. I do not want more blood in this house."
He would not let it be.
A public trial was arranged, not in the hush of council but in a square where merchants hawked fish and children chased one another, where the sound of boots and gossip could not be buried.
"You will come," Edgar said. "Come stand with me."
"I will come," I answered. My stomach was a small, coiled thing that trembled.
The morning of the punishment was bright and cold, a white sky brittle as bone. The square filled: merchants folding their wares, soldiers unfastening belts, women clutching children, men craning necks. Word had spread like spilled oil; people came to see what a great house did when it wanted to teach.
Kenia Donaldson arrived in fine robes, face painted in the careful blandness of an actress. She held herself like someone born to be exempt from shame. Behind her were two men: a coachman whose hands were thick and smelling of grease, and a clerk who had taken coins in his palm and called it a law.
"Is this necessary?" Kenia said loudly, with that brittle cheer of the undeserving. "I am a noblewoman. Why be dragged here?"
"You struck a woman with a carriage," Edgar said. He did not raise his voice; his calm made the crowd lean in. "You paid a driver to cripple Jaqueline Deng."
The crowd hissed as if something behind them had been pricked. "Is this true?" a woman shouted.
"It is true," Jaqueline cried from the front row, her leg bound and her voice small but sharp. "She had my carriage run down. See my scar!"
Kenia's smile flickered. "She is a jealous woman," she said. "She wants to ruin me."
A soldier stepped forward and produced a letter. He read that Kenia had paid coins, described payments, and named the driver. The clerk had been seen taking notes. The driver squinted at the crowd, shifting his weight. A boy came forward and pointed to the place where he had been offered silver to wait.
"Coin changes hands," said a merchant. "We saw it. We saw Kenia in the alley that night."
Kenia's laugh turned thin. "They lie for a pittance," she cried. "They are cheap."
A soldier slapped cuffs on the coachman. The clerk tried to step between them. "You have no proof," Kenia screamed. "You will ruin me!"
"Proof is in the driver," Edgar said, stepping closer. He held up the collar that matched the dog collar I had sewn. "Is this yours?"
Kenia's face painted paler. "No."
The clerk's face had gone slack. "I took coin," he said. "I thought it would be a small thing. I am sorry."
The crowd swayed with the change. "Confess!" someone called.
Kenia's eyes rolled from face to face, hunting for the expression that meant rescue. There was none. Children in the square pressed forward to see a woman's fate. A vendor clanged a tray, and the sound echoed.
"You bribed men to run down a lady," Edgar said. "And then you expected no consequence."
Kenia's hand flew to her mouth, a gesture of someone searching late for a script they had not rehearsed. "You—you're brutal," she said, and the timbre of her voice crumpled. "You will not do this. I am the daughter's of—"
"Names do not save a leg," Edgar replied.
Kenia tried to regain control. "I did not—"
"Shut up!" The driver, now under oath, spat. "She gave me silver and told me to strike the carriage and flee."
"She gave me gold too," the clerk babbled. "I took it and wrote nothing. I feared her."
The crowd leaned, leaning like wheat in wind. It was almost as if the city itself wanted to see justice done.
Kenia's expression moved: first defiant, then startled, then frantic. "You cannot do this to me!" she yelled. "I will have you sundered for slander!" She stamped a foot. Her voice lost shape. Tears appeared at last in her eyes, real or planned I could not tell.
"You will be judged," Edgar said. His voice did not waver. "For your crime."
They dragged her onto the platform. The clerk wept openly. The driver lowered his head. People shouted, some for vengeance, some for pity. The noblewoman dropped to her knees and pounded the dirt, the theatrics of a woman who had never known the ground as a thing to fear. "I did not mean—"
"Meaning does not make a leg walk," Jaqueline said small and furious. Her hand clutched at my sleeve as if I were a raft. "She did it. She tried to end me."
Kenia's face collapsed. She shifted from outraged queen to a child who had been caught stealing. The merchant's wife in the crowd spat, "Bitch of appetites."
Another voice said, "She made a toy of life."
Kenia began to beg. She begged everyone she had once believed subservient — the clerk, the driver, the soldiers — "Forgive me! Forgive me! I will give you coin! I will—"
The soldiers stood like walls. The man who had been paid by Kenia to strike Jaqueline stepped forward, trembling, and with his small voice said, "She asked me to do it. She gave me coin. I did it."
Around us, phones — if phones had existed — would have flashed. Here it was eyes and tongues and rushes of feeling. Someone in the crowd started a chant: "Shame! Shame!" Others joined, louder and louder until the square was a single living thing.
Kenia's face changed again — from pleading to shrewd calculation. She tried to name names, to smear others, to find a scapegoat. But the more she flailed, the less she looked like a noble and more like a hunted animal. She paced, and her voice lost form.
"Please!" she cried finally, sobbing. "My family will fall!"
"Then fall," said a woman whose son had been a laborer for Jaqueline's household. "Let her family fall. She endangered us."
A silence fell from nowhere: the city held its breath. Kenia's eyes traveled across the crowd and finally fixed on me. "You will not treat me like this," she whispered. "You are an instrument for them. You are men like them."
"You did this for your greed," Edgar said. "You set a plan in motion. You thought your status would shield you."
Kenia's body gave. She doubled over, then collapsed on the platform, weeping in shuddering, animal sounds. The crowd stepped back as if a disease might leap off her. Some people nodded, satisfied. Others pressed their hands to their mouths in sympathy. Many took notes with quick hands and heads bent together, gossip sewn fast like thread.
They condemned her to public restitution: her wealth seized, the driver and clerk shackled for their part, and a proclamation posted outside the gates warning all that those who hired harm would be shamed and stripped. The city approved the sentence with a chorus of voices. Kenia's fall from grandeur was complete.
When they pulled her from the platform, she had changed: a woman who was once mocked now looked small in the world. She looked like someone who had finally understood the sound of a word she had never learned—humility. She begged for mercy until no one could hear her anymore. The crowd recorded everything in sharp, satisfied murmurs. Children imitated the movement of hands and were scolded.
Later, when the crowd thinned and the stalls were closed, a few old men still argued whether the punishment had been right. Some said the city had needed spectacle. Others said public shame did not heal broken legs. I stood with Jaqueline, and she said, "It is enough to know she cannot hurt me again."
The eyes of the people had mattered. The way she had narrowed and then widened, the flicker from smug to panic to denial to collapse to begging — it had all been there for everyone to see. Kenia had been stripped not only of gold but of the mask she had worn. She had become small and human in the face of an audience. That was the worst punishment of all for someone born to think themselves untouchable.
Edgar watched the scene from the side and held my hand until my fingers stopped shaking. He did not make any grand speech; he merely said, "They will not do this again."
"You did it for me," I whispered.
He only squeezed my hand.
Life grew steadier after that. The little dog, Ainsley, chased his days in circles. I bore our first child, and when I lifted him to the window he looked like a bright pebble of future. Edgar learned boundaries. He still painted sometimes, but he put locks on the drawers with shameful keys.
Sometimes at night he would trace a finger over the chain I once found on my ankle when he bound me — a childish relic of a fear we had both survived — and whisper, "I was not always sane."
"I know," I would answer. "You were not always sane, and neither was I. But we are here."
On a spring morning, I found myself by the private study again. A single painting hung by itself now, not a dozen, not mounted like trophies but framed with respect. It showed a girl, very young, standing in a garden with a dog at her feet. She wore no shame. She wore a small crooked smile.
"Keep it," Edgar said when he came up behind me. "A reminder."
It was the rarest thing: a picture that asked nothing and gave everything. I curved my hand against the glass and said, "I will."
I had been given many names in my life — a ward, a novelty, the prince's toy, the prime minister's wife. I had been stolen and saved and betrayed and carried. But at the end of that long year we learned how to be less dangerous to each other.
"Will you ever paint me again?" I asked one evening.
"Only the good things," he said.
I smiled. "Which are many."
He leaned in and kissed me, gentle like a pen settling on a page. Outside, Ainsley barked twice and ran to the doorway, a small, perfect bell.
"Stay," I told our son. "Stay and watch."
He blinked back at me with whole new eyes, and I knew the name I had chosen — Lenore Smith — had become mine at last.
The End
— Thank you for reading —