Revenge13 min read
A Thousand Apologies, One Final Promise
ButterPicks15 views
My name is Adelaide Carey. I say it aloud sometimes just to remember who I am, though people long ago started calling me other things. "Second concubine," they said. "The general's mistress," they whispered. "An heiress reduced," the newspapers sneered. "Adelaide," I say it again now, to remind myself that once upon a different life, I had a name written in my father's careful hand.
"You look like a child," my brother would say when he felt generous. "Come, sit."
"Stop fussing," my mother would correct him, smiling as if my being fussed over was the finest thing in the world.
Those were small memories: silk threads, sugar on skewers, a courtyard's stone steps where I swung my legs and waited.
But larger moments have a way of folding everything beneath them. He came into my life first as a shadow on a winter night.
"I will bury them properly," he said then, at fifteen, kneeling in the snow outside my father's gate.
"Please," he whispered. "Please give me a coin."
I was small. I sat on the stone steps eating candied fruit while he bowed his forehead to the ice. Later, my brother took one of our silver dollars—silver that had been given to us on festivals—and said in a voice that was not mine, "Work for us three years."
He took the money and he took the work and he stayed. His name then had no titles. His hands knew only chores: firewood, laundry, carrying water. He moved through our kitchen like a machine, as if the house itself had given him a place and a punishment.
"You are lucky," my brother would shout at him sometimes, and I would think, lucky for what? To have lived and had fingers?
When I offered him my brother's old coat, he refused.
"It is dirty," he said, but his hands accepted it in the end. He tucked the coat around his shoulders in the way a child wraps a blanket.
"Why do you stay?" I asked him once, when the winter was thin and his lips were blue.
He looked at me as if the question hurt. "Because this is where I learn," he said. "Because I must learn to live."
I watched the boy with the coat and the empty eyes. I called him Driscoll in my head because names make people seem alive; it soothed me. His real name was Driscoll Dumas, but then it was only a sound. As the years wore on, that sound became a list of achievements and a rank that made other people bow.
"You will remember me," I told him when he left, before he promised revenge. "Remember my name: Adelaide. Anran."
He took my crooked child's handwriting folded into his pocket. "Anran," he repeated like a prayer.
Twelve years is a long distance in a life where everything turns. He left as a poor boy and came back as Driscoll Dumas, a general whose name made the docks whisper and whose army answered to his command. We did not meet as enemies at first. I was young and I thought of my life as a line I could walk straight through. I had my first real love with Jared Sasaki, who laughed loudly and promised me the Eiffel Tower and green fields and a life without war. Jared held my hand and said, "I'll take you away."
"You always say that," I told him. "But when?"
He looked at me like I was being foolish and said, "Soon. Soon, Adelaide."
We tried to run once. "Let's go," he said that night, under a cover of moonlight and terrible courage. "Leave it all." I wanted to believe him. We were caught before dawn, rolled back into the mouth of the house we'd escaped, and the world rearranged itself like a cruel jape.
When Driscoll's army took half of my father's properties in three months, when my father had to bargain and barter and then, ashamed, proposed my marriage to Driscoll as a way of repair, I felt something in me split and harden. They called it practical; I called it death.
"Do you consent?" my father asked when he told me.
"Do I consent?" I said. I wanted to rip his face and ask why he put me as an offering. "Do you want to marry me to your enemy?" I asked him.
"It is safer for the family," he said. He had learned the language of markets more fluently than the language of people.
I cried until I had no drought left inside me. "I'll die," I told Jared when he came that night and begged. "I cannot be the tool for their truce."
"Then come with me," he said, jaw set. He meant it. He tried and we failed and he was caught and he was kept in a house like a caged boy. My father did not fight for me; instead he sent silver and said sorry and pretended he had done what he could.
"They want you to go," he said. He kissed my forehead as if he was sealing the transaction. "Go. For the family."
"Then go," I said, but I didn't. I walked to the garden and pressed my forehead into the cold stone.
The marriage was a quiet thing. "You will be safe," they told me. "He is a stern man. He will not make trouble."
"Safe?" I laughed, and then the laugh coughed and became a sob.
Driscoll did not come to bed with me. I slept alone in the bridal chamber and woke alone in the morning. I would watch the great door of the house and think that if his face crossed it, maybe something inside me would stop sliding.
At first, after that night, I believed in the idea of being invisible: that if I made myself small, nothing would injure anyone else. But that faith was fragile.
"What do you want?" he asked once, when he finally came into the room. His voice was flat.
"I want my family safe," I said. "I want my brother to have a future. I want to be forgiven for everything I haven't yet done."
Driscoll looked at me and said, "Then don't expect mercy."
I fell at his feet one winter morning and begged him to spare my brother and father. My throat burned and words left me in torn pieces.
"Please," I croaked.
He stayed silent until his men had left the hall.
"You will have to do something I cannot do for you," he finally said. "You will have to give back a life with what you are given."
"I can—" I began.
"No," he said, and stopped me. "I will not be bribed with your apologies."
I realized then that he would not be satisfied with just the comfortable public arrangements. He wanted justice, or revenge, or the thing that looked like justice when held under the sun. That truth sat between us like a blade.
Time passed. "I will not let them take everything while I stand idle," I told myself. I pretended that to live softly was to live well. But the world kept forcing me into corners where my choices were cruel.
Then, on a morning I had thought would be like any other, they came to our gate.
"They are here," my mother whispered, the word drawn out like a bowstring.
I thought of the boy with the coat, the one who had taken my child's handwriting across the years and kept it like a relic in the shape of a promise. Driscoll stood in the main room of our house now, where once my father and my brother had sat like rulers, and the quietness around him was like the hush before a verdict.
"You will be careful," I wanted to say. I wanted to offer myself again, to bargain with my presence. "Do not be harsh."
Instead I watched as he directed the men to line up, as if a stage were being set for a terrible play.
"Cut his hair," he said.
The command snapped through the room like a whip. The men obeyed.
I ran forward when the first lash of leather rose.
"Stop!" I cried.
"You will make this go away," I heard Driscoll say calmly. "If you want them to stop—if you want to keep anything of your family—then get up and leave."
"Leave?" I gasped. "Where would I go?"
"Anywhere but here," he said. "Go now."
I knelt again. "Please."
He didn't look at me when he walked away.
When the first blow landed on Hudson Carver—my brother—my knees buckled. There was a sound of skin tearing and a sharp intake from the watchers gathered in the courtyard. Blood fountained and speckled the floorboards like a warning.
"Stop!" I screamed, and this time he turned.
"You said 'stop,'" he said softly. "Now watch."
What happened next I will never forget because it remade the terrible geometry of my life. He turned his back to the audience and then back again, and the next lash came not upon my brother but upon something sacred that had been kept hidden in cupboards and closets: my father's pride, my mother's name, the claim he'd lent to our family.
Hudson was whipped so that men watching would see not only a son punished but the whole house stripped of dignity.
"Do you see?" Driscoll asked when the blows stopped. His voice had a different sound—flat and almost clinical.
I heard the murmurs lift outside. "Shameful," one whispered. "Justice," said another. They had left the safety of their breakfast tables to gawk at the spectacle of a family being stripped.
Hudson looked up at me through the blood-splattered lashes. His eyes searched for shame, for forgiveness, or, God help us, for cowardice. He found me and pointed to the door.
"Run," he mouthed, though he couldn't find the strength to say it.
I had thought that if my family suffered, I would forgive him, forgive Driscoll, forgive anyone. But that day I learned that forgiveness is not always a choice in the face of violence. After the beating, my father stood tall as if he had not been broken, and yet his hands trembled.
"Enough," he said, and that small plea was like a child's attempt to stop a storm.
"Bring him out," Driscoll commanded.
They dragged my father into the center. "You will not call me by my name," Driscoll said. "You will call me by the thing I have become."
For hours—the hours I will never forget—Driscoll's revenge unspooled like rope. It was not a single blow; it was a spectacle of humiliations that left my family living skeletons of their former arrogance. He made them stand, made them listen as he named every debt, every insult, every offense so that their sins would not be flattened into a rumor but carved in the air like a public ledger.
"You made me kneel in the snow," he told my father, each word delivered as if placing a brick: "By your order my parents were condemned to die in the cold. By your hands, I learned that mercy can be bought and used as a weapon. You gave me nothing and you demanded everything. You did not bury them properly—you buried them in shame."
My father twisted and his face went white. He had not expected the ledger to be laid out beyond the private. "We did not—" he began.
"You called them thieves," Driscoll said. "You struck them. You threw them out. You watched them die. Did you pray for them? Did you dig for them? Did your conscience stir at all?"
"No," my father said. That single "no" was a falling stone.
Around us, the crowd shifted. Their voices rose and fell like gulls. Some took out little notebooks and started to jot down the accusations as if this were a court. Others had their faces turned away, as if the spectacle had a smell too foul to withstand.
"Do you remember the boy?" Driscoll asked, and all of us understood who he meant. "The boy who bowed in the snow outside your gate and begged for a coin so he could bury his parents? Do you remember the boy whose hands you made dirty?"
"Please," my father whispered, and his voice was the voice of a drowning man.
"This is not about pity," Driscoll said. "This is about balance. You took away what was dexterous and left nothing. You will pay back, in shame and in witness."
He made the crowd form a line, and each person stepped forward and spat on my father's shoes. The first man spat and laughed. The next woman spat and shook her head with a satisfied scorn that would have once been reserved for horse thieves. They filmed it—people took out small black boxes that clicked and projected and the images leaped to eyes in other streets. I saw a dozen faces I had known as friends become cold with the same embarrassment I now felt gluing itself to my skin.
"Is this enough?" my father asked in a hollow, broken voice after dozens had done it.
"No," Driscoll said. He tightened his jaw. He then ordered my father to stand on a small raised platform, in the public square, with a placard hung around his neck reading, "I was cruel." He demanded my brother read it aloud. "Say it," he told Hudson, "so the world knows what you were."
Hudson, with blood in his hair and a limp that would stay, read the words like a condemned man reading a sentence. The crowd cheered, jeering at us, and my mother's face crumpled into something like a child's.
"How could you?" she whispered later when the crowd had thickened and the sunlight blunted the edges of everything.
"He remembers," she said. "He remembers the snow."
It was public. It was a theater of punishment. Driscoll's revenge had moved from private to public, and with every public moment, our family's past crimes were peeled open like a fruit and exposed. He wanted them known, perhaps so that words could never be twisted to excuses again.
I will not lie: at the moment of the public shame, something in me raged and something in me relieved. The same hands that had stolen half our land had set a ledger in the public square so our names could be read and felt. The crowd had made us small; it had also made us real.
When the punishment finished, there was a silence so full my ears hurt. People turned back to their daily lives, tossing a glance over their shoulders, already hungry for the next spectacle. Cameras clicked. Phones whirred. The world that had once been private became public knowledge.
My heart was raw and the thought that I might have saved them through some secret bargain died under the weight of the truth: there is no escaping the ledger. The man who had been a boy with no coin had grown entire armies out of the hunger that once lived inside him.
"Will you forgive them?" someone finally asked Driscoll at the end, as if forgiveness might be the only thing to make order again.
"No," he said. "I will not forgive. I cannot."
The crowd murmured as if they'd been told to expect mercy and now were denied. It was as if the world had been told to choose a side and it chose spectacle instead of justice.
Later, when the court of knives had closed and our house lay in a new quietness, I went to Hudson and kissed his forehead, not like a child anymore but like a woman who has seen the belly of the world and knows its tastes.
"Was it worth it?" I asked.
Hudson squeezed my hand. "I don't know," he said. "But at least now there is no denying what happened."
After that punishment, nothing was the same. There were days when I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out. There were other days when I felt like I had been given an odd kind of truth, a clean wound.
Driscoll came to my bedside many nights after the public scenes. He brought medicines he insisted would help the blood stop seeping from the new wounds. He would stand there with his head cocked as if listening for something I could not perceive.
"Do you remember when you took my coin?" I once asked him, sitting on the edge of the bed as he waited for me to take a spoonful of bitter tonic.
He closed his eyes, and I could see long years mapped on his face. "I remember you handing it to me," he said. "You were small. Your face had sugar on it."
"I gave you my name," I whispered. "Anran. Adelaide."
He opened his eyes and for a moment there was something like softness. "Your handwriting," he said. "It is crooked and brave."
"Will you ever—" I began.
He set the cup down. "I will never be the man I once was," he said. "But I am still a man."
Those were not promises of love. They were not even loose civilities. Yet they were the nearest thing I had to conversation with him since the marriage papers were signed and the house keys exchanged.
"Do you forgive me?" I asked him outright one night, tired of hiding the question.
He looked at me and said, "You were always the one who looked." He touched the spot by my ear where a scar would remain and gave me a small and almost shy smile. "But forgiveness is not mine to give."
And still, there were small things. "You will always be foolish," he said once, when he found me trying to fix the broken music box that had once been Jared's gift and that Driscoll had, in a moment that made me dizzy, repaired for me.
"You repaired it," I said. "Did you—"
"You used to tell me not to break it," he said. "You looked at it a certain way."
"Then you remembered."
"I remember some things."
One night when he thought I couldn't see, Driscoll took his coat off and rubbed his hand across my shoulders—the sleeve smelling of cedar and field. He did it not as a favor but because the night was cold. It was a small rebellion against the hard lines he kept. "You will catch a chill," he said, and for a breath I believed that a man who had learned to be ruler of so many things might still be a man who worried.
"Do you ever smile?" I asked him.
"You watch me once in a while," he said. "I am not made for laughter."
But he did smile, eventually, on an afternoon when the sun made the courtyard glow like honey. He caught me in the garden with my hands in the soil, planting something that had nothing to do with politics. "You look like a child," he said, and then, in a voice that almost slipped into tenderness, "You look like home."
There were moments when his guards and servants would see him look at me differently. "He's not the same with anyone else," one of them muttered. "He never takes off his armor for others."
And yet, the past is not so easily unraveled. The demands for revenge remained like a geography that had to be traversed. Driscoll had a moment where he decided to do more than embarrass; he decided to break the final hold the family had by taking, in the cruelest way he could, their dignity.
He wounded my father and my brother and he left my mother clinging to the only thread she had left: that I might be spared.
I told Jared everything I could, through letters I wrote but never sent. "Jared, the world is crooked," I wrote, "but I am learning to be crooked with it."
He wrote me back in cracked but desperate ink. "Adelaide, come find me," he wrote. "If you can, leave."
It was not that simple. Even when my father's hands trembled and the last of the lands were exchanged, they had been our roots. To uproot them was to admit defeat; it was also to betray everyone still living. I couldn't bear that either.
War, it seems, has no respect for private grief. It eats up everything and asks for more.
When the Japanese general—Alexander Shimizu—drove a wedge into the city and made every day into a tally of losses, everything became smaller and larger at the same time. The ration lines hummed, and men learned to die in streets where they had once promised never to.
"Will you go?" Jared asked in one letter I did dare to send through someone who promised to be discreet.
"No," I wrote back, though my hand shook. "I cannot."
He left for the front. I wrote until my ink was smudged and still kept one small hope: that my letters might reach him as small testament.
We lived through other horrors. There was an evening when the house was stormed, when the Japanese placed a dagger at my throat and called me a bargaining chip.
"Land us what we want," they said. "Give us Driscoll's secrets."
"He's not going to trade," I said aloud.
They laughed. One of them—an overeager one—took offense when I spat. He struck me, and the pain came with a heat that made me dizzy. They left me bloody in the room like an offering. I remember the sound of the doors slamming as the men left and the smell of iron in the air.
Then there was the day when an attack went wrong and Driscoll was hurt. I stood barefoot at the hospital bed and watched him bleed and breathe, his chest a slow hill. He took a pendant from beneath his shirt and pushed it into my hands before the doctors muddled their way between us. The pendant would feel warm on my palm for years.
"Hold it," he said in a voice that had lost the sharpness of command. "If I don't come back, you will have this."
I held it like a confession.
He recovered in the way a man might recover after losing a battle: stronger in some places and with an old wound that would never be removed. Later, he grew sparser in the face, his chest hollowed, and one day he died in my arms in a small gray yard under a leafless tree.
"Adelaide," he said once, as if summoning me to remember, and then he closed his eyes like a lamp finally going out.
I cried and screamed and sank on my knees beside him, touching his face as if I could keep him from the forgetting.
When he was gone, I sold the house and returned, in a small and humble way, to the alleys and to the hands I had avoided for decades. I took my mother's old things and my father's papers and everything that once had weight returned to being weightless. I gave money anonymously to a small shelter and told nobody.
At the end, when the city burned in a war that made our careful pettiness into the least of human concerns, I learned to cook, to mend, to hold people's hands in the dark. I kept Driscoll's pendant always in my pocket. I kept Jared's unsent letters in a box.
I would sit under the tree where we had once been children and I would whisper the only two names that had persisted through all that had fallen.
"Anran," I would say, and the wind would take it.
"Adelaide," I would whisper back, and for a fleeting second the world would be still.
The End
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