Sweet Romance12 min read
Marrying the Eunuch: Peach Trees, Promises, and a Public Reckoning
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I am Gwen Huang. I was sixteen the day they raised the small sedan into the courtyard and set me inside Eamon Vogel’s house.
“I asked Aunt Emmalynn,” I told myself, folding my hands until my knuckles ached. “I asked and she said—”
“Aunt Emmalynn,” I had asked once, clutching her sleeve the night before the wedding, “what is the real difference between a eunuch and an ordinary man?”
She had stumbled, her fingers twisting a rosary of beads. “It’s that… that they cannot have children,” Emmalynn Clarke had said at last, eyes wet and small.
I had felt the world change with those words. Cannot have children. For someone whose own mother lived under the weight of household cruelty and who watched the pale, small-faced concubine in our yard die in a single terrible night, the news offered a crack of sunlight.
I had made my choice quickly. Against Boyd Schwarz’s protests—my father had loved coins more than daughters—I married the young eunuch Eamon Vogel and negotiated with my father for Aunt Emmalynn’s freedom. “Let her go,” I whispered. “I will go. I will marry him. Save her.”
On the day the veil lifted, the man before me was younger-looking than I expected, almost softer in the face than the painted portraits of palace servants we had glimpsed in passing. He measured me with a small, surprised frown.
“Why so small?” he said.
“I’m sixteen,” I said, with a quick flush of pride.
He snorted, low and quick. “You look fourteen.” Then he softened, in a way I would come to know: “I am a eunuch—no descendants, no line. I live alone. If not for my patron’s drunken insistence and your father’s entreaty, I would not have wives to tie my life to.”
“You don’t think this is unfair?” I asked.
“Of course it’s unfair,” he said, then shrugged. “But I also know what I am. You should know what you are getting into—one meal a month from the palace, you guard the house, and don’t touch the bottom chest.” He suddenly added, almost shy, “Ask for anything else.”
“Then—” I swallowed—“be kind to me. Be mine.”
He laughed outright. “Kind? I am a eunuch. I will not be romantic.”
That night he slept in the outer room. I slept in a bed that was too big and dreamed of the concubine’s last, thin cry. In the morning, he left me a pouch of coin, small spoons of silver that could hardly buy comfort; he left a rough note in a crooked hand: “I do not like sweets. Do not waste on them.”
He would learn to write softer.
We were clumsy and gentle at the same time. I learned to cook, to stitch, to mend the yard. I planted seedlings by the back wall: a tidy row that looked like hope in dirt. I bought baby chicks and raised them with my hands, and adopted a lame dog that limped and loved with all its heart.
When Eamon returned, he stopped in the gate and stared.
“You did this?” he said, surprised.
“This is our home,” I said, with a grin. “Not mine alone.”
He softened—just a little. He complained about the taste of sugar and about men in the street staring, but he accepted the embroidered knee-warmers I stitched for him: two tiny peach blossoms over the cotton, something childish and precise.
“If you see those, you’ll think of me,” I said.
He took them as if the thought embarrassed him. “You are ridiculous,” he muttered, but the corner of his mouth moved upwards.
A month later, neighbor gossip arrived like wind. At the end of our lane was another household, bigger and lined with lacquered wood—a man with a reputation, a eunuch with old favors. From that house there came nightly cries—sounds of someone dragged against their will. I asked Eamon, and he touched my ear, like someone hiding from a storm.
“Don’t involve yourself,” he said. “We are small and unnoticed. Stay small.”
I did not stay small. When a bruised young woman slipped into our yard one afternoon, breathing like she might break, I did not ask questions. She had been a concubine and had tried to flee. Her face was swollen; she folded like a bird. I handed her the last of the silver and two blankets.
Later that same night a larger eunuch—Van Volkov—barged through our gate, teeth set. “So this is the wife of Eamon Vogel?” he mocked, spitting the words like stones. “You planted chickens and took in strays? Teach the stray to run!”
My dog, big and faithful with no more than a single good tooth, lunged. Van laughed and struck the dog. It did not make the brute stop. The dog fell, eyes waiting and open, and then the world turned for me.
Eamon came running. He grabbed Van by the sleeves, held him back while the man thudded fists against his ribs. Eamon would not let go. When Van turned to me, voice soft and dangerous, he sneered, “You—teach a woman to run, I’ll teach you how a man can be broken.”
I had a hairpin in my hand. I do not remember thinking. I remember the hot, empty moment when I thrust the pin into his skull and kept driving it through. He slumped. Eamon, with hands that trembled with pain and rage, pressed knives until breath stopped.
We buried him on the slope behind the house, clumsy and scared and clotted. We thought the soil safe.
The truth never stays buried. Soon Eamon was taken—thrown into a cell with iron on his wrists. When they dragged him out in chains to answer the charges, he looked toward me, eyes swollen and full.
“Run,” he mouthed, and the sound of it was a prison door closing.
I did not run. I had the house deeds he had once trusted me to hold. I had my mother’s savings. I went to search out Nash Sokolov’s wife—the great matron in the high house, the one who played finches in a gilded cage.
Inside the lady’s room, under carved wood and bright lantern light, the woman with jewels at her throat smiled like a blade. “You—do you truly ask my help for a eunuch?”
“I ask you to bring him back. He is mine,” I said. “He is not a thing to be sold.”
She touched the birdcage, and her voice was like cool water. “Very few women plead for eunuchs. Very few women plead willingly.”
But she listened, and she spoke, and on the third day Eamon came back. He returned smaller, all cuts and night, like a thing the winter had pruned, but he came home. I gave him baths, changed his bandages, and when we unwrapped his knees I saw the blue lace of pain bloom across his skin. He refused to be pitied. He breathed one word into my hand.
“Stay.”
We lived in the quiet that follows a storm—ash and soot, wary neighbors’ glances, stolen smiles. He left for the palace again, and this time it was for power not pity. He won a place under the new prince—the third son—and he rose. We moved into grander rooms, gold drums and lacquer, but the same nervousness pulled at his shoulders. He remembered each insult. He wore his power like a shield and never showed the tender spaces where I fit.
One afternoon, I lost my purse in the market. A young scholar returned it with a grin and light words. Eamon saw us from under a tree and came home, face a cold moon. “Who is this man?” he demanded softly.
“He was kind,” I said.
“Do not speak with men,” he said, fingers tracing my jaw. “If you must speak, let it be to me. If you must love someone, love me when I am gone. Promise me that.”
“I will only love you,” I said.
He made the watchful men move away. He kept me close. At night, sometimes, he would come and lay the length of himself against me like a child who feared the dark. I began to understand something fragile and impossible: he was jealous in his own way. He was small in the world of men but he was mine.
We stayed together, and little by little the court’s fortunes changed. The third prince rose to throne. Nash Sokolov, the great eunuch who had once pressed his weight into every place of power, backed the wrong horse. The palace burned with whispers. When Nash fell, he took his own poison in a private fury; his wife—who had once dismissed me—was forced out of a high window. The palace let her go with a story. People said the world was purging itself of rotten fruit.
Eamon grew in power and wealth, but his gaze remained narrow, tracking me, hesitating. He disliked other women—then he wanted them. He expected me to be both small and the entire house for him. When gifts arrived—two young maids with pale shoulders on a winter day—I asked, quietly, “Are we not enough?”
He laughed and sent them away with a smile. He held me tighter, then tighter still. The keepers about the house withdrew; he grew more possessive. He wanted to keep me like a secret only his chest could carry.
Once, in a drunken swagger home, he caught my wrist. “Do not speak to men,” he said. “Not even one. If a man smiles at you—tell me at once.”
“I am not a thing to be kept,” I replied. “I am your wife, Eamon. I am not a trinket.”
He softened and kissed my brow. “I know,” he said. “But I cannot help it. You are everything.”
We adopted a child who smelled of temple smoke—tiny Delaney Eriksson, small and named for spring. Eamon shuffled his feet, then grew used to the small thing’s sticky fingers and bright questions. “‘Call me father,” he said once, voice strange as if trying new clothes. Delaney clung to us both, and the three of us settled into a life that was a string of ordinary, bright things: pastry ovens, the dog’s old squeal, Delaney’s crowing laughter when she mispronounced words.
Yet the world keeps its claws. Old enemies of eunuch rule kept murmuring against Eamon’s rise. He sailed through the court, skillful and low, until one winter day the emperor took him aside and offered one final trade: the position of chief eunuch, with all the power that shadowed it, if Eamon would return everything he controlled back to the throne when the emperor demanded it—no bargaining, no hesitation.
Eamon dared to believe the emperor’s promise. He came home that day with a light that was not merely joy. He said, “They’ll let me see you. They’ll let me spend one hour.” He smiled as if the hour were a bloom.
At dusk he came back whiter than snow. He coughed black like an old candle. “They have taken what remains,” he said. “And now they demand a reckoning. They will come.”
“I will not leave you,” I said. “Why would I go?”
“You must,” he whispered, fingers finding and holding mine like a soft command. “If they come for me, they will come take everything. Take Delaney, take the coin. Go—leave the city. Run and be small. Be safe.”
I looked at the pale coins, the embroidered knee-warmers, his hands that had always touched me like feathers. “I will not leave you,” I said. He smiled as if I had offered him the last sun.
He died in my lap under the peach tree, his hand cooling like river stones. He breathed out of me, and the air went up like smoke.
After the funeral we left the city and bought a small house by the roadside, near a late grove of peach trees. I sold pastries and nalepas—cakes of date and walnut—and people queued at dawn. Delaney grew. The dog’s memory remained like a shadow of love. I kept his knee-warmers stitched into a pillow. I kept his name in my mouth like a warm herb.
But we never lived in peace. Word reached us that some of the men who had once pressed on the city were being hunted. Boyd Schwarz—my father—who had sold his daughters to the highest bidder, was dragged from his magistrate post as the court purified itself. The new magistrate’s men marched him bound through the market with a placard hung on his chest: “For selling daughters and stealing a household’s honor.”
This was the public punishment I had never been able to imagine, but that the rules of the new court demanded.
The day they brought him out, I stood among the crowd. People had gathered in knots, eyes wet and hungry for the sight. Boyd—older, his face caved like a thrown fruit—was led in chains. His robe had been replaced by a coarse tunic, his belt gone. He looked not at me but at the cobbles, his mouth working. I saw the woman he had dismissed—the concubine who had died—and her name in the mouths of the market women like a bell.
The magistrate was forced to confess aloud, and they made him speak of everything: how he had taken coin in secret, how he had arranged my marriage to a eunuch to save his own back, how he had gambled away the household’s grain. He tried to lie, to tangle words into excuses. Each time his tongue found a lie, the executioner’s boy struck his cheeks with a wet rod, and the crowd hissed like animals.
“You sold your daughter,” a woman called from the front, spittle on her lips. “You sold your own womb’s child for silver. Look at him! Is he ashamed?”
Boyd’s eyes flicked up and landed on me. For a moment there was a ghost inside his face—shame or something like shame—but then he looked away.
“Boyd Schwarz see the errors of his ways,” the magistrate intoned, reading a list, and the crowd repeated each sin after him, like a bad litany. “He will lose his lands, his right to hold office. The robes of his rank are stripped. From this day, he will carry no papers, hold no seals. He will beg in the market until those he wronged take pity. He will not come within the walls of a house that he once commanded.”
The ritual of humiliation moved on like a slow beast. Men spat at him and then turned to the market stalls. The public was not satisfied with words alone; they wanted to feel the decline, to see the man shrink. A woman—once my father’s servant—came forward with the concubine’s cloth that still smelled faintly of blood. She slapped it across Boyd’s face and then tied it to his wrist, like an accusation. “Remember what you did,” she said. “All your life.”
Boyd tried to make a plea—pleas like threadbare cloth were of no use. He started to mutter, “I was poor, I had debts—” but the crowd drowned him. A boy, not yet a man, threw rotten fruit at him. The pieces of fruit hit his coat and fell down like the years he had wasted.
I stood very still. My heart felt like a small drum tuned too tight. I had wanted him to suffer for what he had done—the neglect, the selling, the night I had left home. Yet seeing him crumpled and small made something inside me flutter with an ugly relief, sharp as a knife. The crowd pressed close, and someone took a whip and lashed it overhead, not to Boyd but in ritual, and the whip clicked and made a sound that sang through the market.
Then a woman shoved forward with eyes like knives—she was a neighbor I had often seen but never known, who had been publicly humiliated by Boyd’s taxations. She slapped him hard, right across the face. The slap echoed. The boy who had been my father’s clerk leaned over and called out his crimes again, making the market listen. They dragged him to the pillory for a time, and his name was read aloud; merchants who had once taken bribes came forward to testify, and each testimony was a blow.
At the culmination of the punishment, they tied a placard to him and paraded him through the main street. “He sold his children for silver,” the herald repeated. A child nearby cried. The more colors the market had, the more shame it seemed to bring. People took pictures with bamboo slates and wagged fingers. Some spat, others wept. A few clapped like hyenas, delighted at the fall of one who had once been above them.
Boyd’s face changed as the crowd moved through their motions. At first he looked faintly amused, as if he could bargain through any trouble; then the color washed out and terror came—his eyes grew large and wild. He tried denial. “It was not me—” he stammered as a fruit seller leaned close and called him a liar. Then he tried pleading: “Forgive me—” but his voice became smaller and smaller, then cracked. When the show was nearly done, and people began to go back to their stalls, he collapsed to his knees and begged at the feet of those he had wronged.
No one took his pleas with any grace. A woman he had insulted spat in his face. Boys threw stones. A line of women in coarse clothes, faces lined by work and grief, chanted the names of the daughters he had sold and the houses he had wrecked. The shame culminated in a final act: his magistrate seal was broken in public, hammered to pieces so that he could never sign away another girl’s life.
The spectacle lasted until the sun fell and the torches were lit. For me, the whole event was a hard thing—satisfying as honey and bitter as gall. People’s faces had shifted as they watched his humiliation, and I realized with a cold clarity that punishment was a communal thing. It fed them. It reshaped the balance for a while, gave the small comfort that the world could be made right, if only for an afternoon.
When they led him away, beaten and hollowed, his eyes seared into mine one last time. He mouthed, “Forgive me,” or maybe, “I am sorry,” and I felt nothing but an odd, small pity that tasted of rain.
After all of it, when the crowd dispersed and the night cooled, Delaney and I walked home beneath a sky that looked like an old pot. The peach trees shed soft pink on our shoulders. We kept our pastries on a shelf and our memory of Eamon in a small wooden box. I told Delaney, “Do not be like them—the ones who hoarded power. Be kind instead.”
She nodded at me and made me laugh, and so the world went on.
Years slid past. Last year a young scholar came with a hungry smile and a promise. He courted Delaney, not me—I was older and tasted of flour and memories. On her wedding day, I sewed the red into a gown and watched the sedan go like a bright bird. Under the peach blossoms I whispered into the grave where Eamon slept, “We were small and brave. You were not alone.”
The town remembers him sometimes: the old men call him “a brave eunuch who loved a woman and lost his life.” Children race near the wild peach grove and think nothing of vows or titles. I have learned to keep living in a way that honors him: a shop that gives a sweet to a poor child, a coin given to a widow, a book lent to someone learning to read. My life has become a series of small mercies.
Sometime in late autumn I saw my hair surrender a white thread. I wrapped it in a ribbon I had kept from Eamon’s knee-warmers and tied it to the branch of the oldest peach tree.
“You wanted me to live,” I told the empty air. “I have tried.”
Delaney’s child—small and loud and beautiful—grew up with a name that carried the old kindness. They call themselves by Eamon’s family name sometimes, a little joke between them, a way to remember. When the family comes to our door for cakes, they stand under the breath of the peaches and tell Delaney stories of how her father in the palace used to hum while he worked. Those stories make the old grief light up like grain on a shelf.
I keep to the small things. The pillow with his tiny peach blossoms sits on my bed. The kneepads are stitched and soft. In the evenings I sit by the shop window and watch the lane and think of Eamon’s final hour—the chill in his voice, the last hand I held. The promise he asked of me—go away, save yourself—was never mine to keep. I stayed. I baked. I kept.
Sometimes, in the hush before dawn, I hear the rustle of small wings and feel a hand that is not mine slip into mine where the old scar runs. I smile, and the street wakes up to the smell of fresh cakes. The world has been cruel and beautiful in equal measure. I have done what I can.
The End
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