Sweet Romance15 min read
Not Clever, But Loved: A Palace of Orchids
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They sent me to the palace because I was not clever enough.
"My father said the emperor is suspicious," he told me once at the threshold, his fingers crooked like old branches. "If a girl from our house is too clever inside his court, they will think we mean revolt. If she is not sent at all, that would be suspicious too. You will go, Clarissa. Do as you are told. Listen to the emperor."
"I will," I said, because that was what daughters in the Marquis house did—obey with a straight back and a quieter heart.
The first night I slept in the emperor's hall, he did not come. The steward—Gustaf Lambert—brought me gifts and said, "Pedro has given you the rank of consort. They call you Consort Clarissa now. You must take this as honor."
"Thank you," I answered, because that was the only answer I knew.
I had only seen Pedro Leroy a few times before, from the shadows of feasts when my grandmother Gemma Lefebvre and I visited court. He was young and severe then. The Empress—Catalina Perry, daughter of the Chancellor—smiled like a calm bay. She had a son and a daughter; the eldest was already a crown prince, and they called her the Worthy Empress. She did not like me.
"Your Highness," I said when it was my turn to pay respect. She sipped her tea and looked me over with an expression I could not understand.
Later, Hiroko Wolff—my old nanny from the Marquis house—took me aside and said, "Child, the Empress does not want to share. You should be careful."
I nodded and learned to fold my hands the way palace women folded shame: small and neat.
Then the Empress gave me a task. "The Dowager celebrates a birthday," she said with that smooth voice, "and sincerity is shown by devotion. You must copy the sutras by hand. Do it yourself. I will have someone watch."
She sent a stern young maid to sit by me.
The room smelled of ink and wax, and I wrote the sutras until my fingers cramped. For three nights I did not sleep. On the third night I rose too quickly and knocked the candle. Flame took the scroll like it remembered a hunger. I screamed. Hiroko grabbed my sleeve.
"Take it off!" she shouted, dragging at my wet robe. "Gods, quick!"
Water came down; someone threw a basin over my head. For a moment I was a soaked bird. Charm and lacquer burned. The scripture I had finished half of curled into ash.
I wailed, "What will I do? I ruined the prayer for the Dowager!"
Hiroko made a face like she wanted to swallow the world. She held me until a voice like a bell cut through. "Why are you all standing dumbly? Fetch a physician. Send more clothes. Bring her to my chamber."
The voice belonged to Pedro Leroy. He was nearer now, larger, cold as frost. He put his robe over my shoulders and carried me to his bedchamber.
"Drink this," he spoke softer than I had imagined an emperor could. "Hush, Clara. Sleep."
"Pedro?" I said foolishly in my half-dream, "it's bitter—"
He pressed something sweet into my mouth like the sugar my father used to hide in my palm. I slept, and when I woke I smelled old paper and the metal tang of incense, and Gustaf was in the corner saying, "He told me to look after you. Do not rush back to your chamber. Rest."
"You were there?" I asked. "I thought you never came."
"He came to sleep that night," Gustaf said, and smiled with the softness of someone who keeps other people's secrets.
For a week he stayed near. He ate with me. He tasted the crystal buns I liked and nodded as if my chosen tastes made him happy. "You must be kept comfortable," he murmured once, touching my head. "If you thin, you must be fed well."
Those small things were the first sparks. I had never been someone who noticed smoke and forgot the flame; I noticed when a man who carried an empire found time to warm his hands on my small joys.
But palace breath is long and jealous.
One day the Empress sent for me. "Consort Clarissa," she said in a hall full of duck-boned couches, "you are fortunate. But there are norms. You disgraced the Dowager's ritual, and here you stay, yet you act as if no consequences fell upon you."
Someone at her side knelt down, a maid I recognized from the night I copied sutras. She threw herself before me and cried, "Lady, please, tell the emperor. The punishment came to me. I was only at her side—"
"Do you expect the court to be moved by a servant's tears?" the Empress smiled cool as glass. "Consort Clarissa, we ask you: what will you do about this disturbance?"
"I—I can write another scroll," I said. "I will apologize."
The maid wailed and said, "Lady, they beat me for it. They say it was you who upset the ceremony."
I looked to the Empress for justice. The Empress only looked like a woman with practiced hands. "She stirs trouble," she said. "A servant who thinks too much is dangerous. Let her be punished."
That was when Pedro came at the sound of the uproar. He stood like a column in the doorway. I grabbed his sleeve, shaking, "Pedro, she is beating the servant—please—"
He drew me in, the world narrowing to the warmth of his coat. "Empress," he said, and something in his voice changed. "Did I not tell you the others are to mind their bounds? I told you—"
She smoothed a smile. "He is wrong, of course. The maid has been disruptive."
"Take her away," Pedro said in a low voice. "I will not be troubled in my hall."
He paused, then faced the trembling maid and the mass of silence. "This kind of insubordination in the inner court—" he pronounced, "—must be made an example. Let the deed be public."
The Empress looked satisfied. "That will teach the rest," she said.
I watched the maid dragged away. Her face was a small moon of terror. I did not know then that the order "public example" meant the whip and the flagstones and the mouths of the palace full of hungry eyes.
Time is a slow pressure. He held me for a while, then he began to grow distant. Guests came, ministers bowed, reports came in. He grew very late. The halls felt like long corridors between him and me. I worried that I had misread the first warmth for something less fragile.
When he last asked me one night, "Are you angry you must move?" I did not want to be forced into a choice; I had no practice in claiming an emperor's attention. "I will do as you wish."
He glanced at my hair and said quickly, "There will be flowers in your new chamber."
"Lan—orchids?" I said, because my name is close to them, and I loved the scent the way a child loved a secret.
"Yes," he smiled, "many orchids."
He left me at Lan Fang Hall. "Lanfang," I repeated later with Hiroko by my side, the name blooming like a gift that smelled like home.
He did not come again for weeks.
The palace grew cruel in small ways. People talked under breath and pointed. Hiroko's old bones showed new bruises. "Who hurt you?" I asked her one morning as I found a purple across her cheek.
"I brushed past a lady in the garden," she said, and tried to laugh it away. "It is my fault. Do not fret."
But I did fret. I could not keep my hands out of fights the way a daughter in a marquis's home could. I had been taught to be brave with a blade. I had not learned to be brave in a room full of cunning.
One day I could not bear it. Hiroko had been struck for a small slip. I saw the woman—Brielle George—laughing with a fan. Brielle was a favored one, quick with a laugh, and she helped the Empress's moods like a lever. I strode forward.
"You hit my woman," I said plainly. "Why?"
She made a face like a spoiled cat. "You keep your outrage for your own name," she purred. "We are above you."
In a moment my hand was a slap.
"How dare you!" Brielle shrieked.
"You think you can bully anyone you want because the Empress smiles?" I said, and in my chest something broke. I struck her twice more. The hall went like bell-roar.
"Guards!" Brielle said.
They came. The Empress, the Dowager, saints forgive me, all came storming in. I knelt. I begged. "This is my fault. Please allow punishment on me only."
The Dowager's voice was a stone. "To cold palace with her. Cold palace to think on her lessons."
Cold palace was a place where walls are colder than people. I packed the few things I had, the things from my father's house I'd managed to hide in my sleeve, and the jade pendant Pedro had slipped into my palm one night—"If I am gone, this will keep you safe," he'd whispered—and I held it like a promise.
In cold palace the days are flat. Hiroko frequented the room and the servants tried to keep me amused. It never worked. Brielle and a few others came like winter birds, tsking. "You have no sense of position," they would say and leave a bruise left in air.
One night I saw a figure at my door. Pedro's shadow was sharper than most memories. He knelt by the straw mattress. "You had a fever all night," he said, strangely gentle. "Do not say cruel things about me to yourself."
"Why would I say cruel things?" I asked. "You saved me from the maid's punishment. You fed me when I was cold. Why are you far now?"
He looked at the floor. "This court is not kind to small comforts," he murmured. "But if I can be for you the small thing you need, then let me."
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to stay in his arms until the palace melted into a kinder shape. But the days change like curtains. He sent me home—my father asked, begged—Alfonso Simmons with an old-man's iron voice. "Take her with you. Let her heal."
"Will he miss her?" I asked Gustaf the day before they drew me away.
"Pedro?" he said, and his face was practiced not to tell tales. "He is worse than he looks. He is an emperor who is only human for the people he trusts. You are one of them."
I lied when I left, because I could not trust my heart. "I will return," I told him. He handed me his embroidered handkerchief. "Take care."
Back at our estate, it seemed possible to breathe. We planted small beds of orchids. I tried to make them bloom. I asked Hiroko to teach me every day. She would laugh, "You are patient, you are stubborn, you will coax them."
We heard the court's thunder from the mountain roads. "There is talk," my grandmother said one evening in the courtyard. "The chancellor, Asher Vinogradov—he is not pleased with Pedro. He thinks the soldiers should be easier to command."
"Rumors," my father grunted, but he did not like the way a man's eyes look when he thinks war.
War came like rain. Roads were split. Letters were angry and then silent. News came later and worse: Pedro had vanished from the city. The capital trembled.
We fled north at my father's order; he packed men and sold horses and said, "Our best place is the field, not the capital." My brother—Jaxon Gomez, the youngest son who cast childish shadows as a soldier—fell sick from a wound in the rear-guard but returned staggering with news: "They say the prince and the chancellor moved, and that the emperor fell into an ambush."
I folded my hand over the jade in my bosom and called out to the wind, "No, no, Pedro."
We found hints in cold lanes and in whispers. Johan Carlson—leader of the emperor's shadow guard—came to the house in darkness and bowed to my father before he told us: "The emperor is hurt. His leg is broken. He hid. He sent gold and command."
"Is he alive?" I asked, because I could not let my voice shatter.
"He is alive," Johan said. "He is more stubborn than orders. He has been carrying his people like a fire that would not go out."
I sent what men I could with Johan and the guards back to the capital.
The wintering camp smelled of smoke and bread. There, under flaps and in the flurry of soldiers, a ragged figure couldn’t be an emperor out of a story—Pedro came into our line, limping, a cloth wrapped round one leg, his robes torn.
"Pedro?" I did not think I could breathe. The camp hushed.
He limped toward me with the gait of someone who had learned to move through pain. "You always did cry when you were happy," he said softly as he held me, his chest heaving. "Do not make this camp a place for tears."
"Where did you go?" I asked, and he looked like a man with secrets older than him.
"Too far," he said. "But I am back. We must march."
We marched because the story of the court is a knot you cannot let loose for fear it snags you. Asher Vinogradov and Brad Luna—who styled himself like a duke of spring and the prince who betrayed his father—had risen with the moon in their hands. They declared the emperor dead and crowned the prince.
The final theatre came in the capital, as all things that burn do: in public, with stone and banners and a crowd that had kept its appetite open for a long while.
"Citizens!" a herald cried. "By the mandate of the throne, Asher Vinogradov and Brad Luna are traitors!"
They brought them into the square in robes meant to humiliate. Brad Luna still tried to keep his voice elegant. "This is a mistake," he said high and stubborn. "We did only what the people demanded."
Asher wore the face of a man who had polished his logic like a blade. He lifted his head and argued, "We preserved the realm."
"Preserved by murder," the new emperor—Pedro—called. His voice cut like wind.
There were so many eyes. The crowd leaned forward as if they would learn to read the faces they had trusted. I stood on a raised platform beside Pedro, because he had chosen me to be there. He held the jade I had carried with me and set it on the altar. "These are the men who would trade a throne for their fear," he said.
Brad's expression cracked first—shock at seeing a palace he thought his crumble like a painted wall. "You cannot!" he tried, voice small. "You were dead. You were gone."
Pedro's mouth lifted in a tired sort of kindness. "I was not dead," he said. "You were counting on my death. You planned wrong."
The prime minister—Asher Vinogradov—tried at calm. "Emperor, there are witnesses—"
"Who turned their loyalties for fear of losing their shadows," Pedro said. "Our land is not saved by traitors."
The executioners were given their orders. But the law of humiliation had many small stages here: first, they unveiled the proofs. Johan Carlson stepped forward and laid out scrolls—letters bearing Asher's seal, intercepted threads of plot, lists of favours. "He penned the fall of a thousand men," Johan said.
Asher's face moved like ink in water: smug, then thin, then aware of the air leaving his lungs. He tried to accuse the messenger. "Forged!" he barked. "This is deceit."
"Take him to the pillory," Pedro ordered. Asher was bound on the square's raised platform. They lifted a small chair to put his head into crimson wood. The crowd edged closer. A child spit. Someone threw rotten fruit. The man's denial turned into a shriek, then into pleading as his hands fell limp. "No, no—princes, ministers, I served you! I only—" he gasped, eyes searching for someone to catch him. People came with torches and recorded his pleading on little tablets for messengers. They circled him like wolves, and the man who had once told men how to live felt for the first time the cold of the crowd.
"Remember his words," someone shouted. "He said the emperor was feeble!" Others started to chant. "Traitor! Traitor!"
Asher's mouth worked. He became small in front of us. At first he tried to say, "I was saving the state," as if a reason could shield him. Then his voice changed: "You cannot do this!" The word "cannot" in his mouth sounded like a current pulling him under. He clutched at Pedro as if to twist the moment back. Pedro's face did not relight with mercy.
Brad Luna had been kept for last. He had thought his poise could be a kind of armor. On the stand he kept a bright smile then it slipped. His first change was disbelief. He turned to the crowd and cast fingers as if counting friends. "They lied to you," he shouted, "I never—"
"Enough," Pedro said, and his hand hardly moved, but the sentence dropped from the sky like a stone. "You used the prince's name to poison people. You are a man who would crown himself by blood."
Brad's expression moved like a clock caught in a storm. He blinked. "You—" He could not finish. Denial pounced on him like a dog that finds no bite.
"Let the pillory be a lesson," Pedro said. "Let the records be written of the man who traded vows for crowns."
They brought forward two poles and bound Brad's hands. The crowd began to hiss. He had been the pet of the salons. He had once been called graceful. Now his grace became a quivering pattern of fear.
Then Pedro stepped closer to the platform with a small folded scrap in his hand—some private proof Johan had found: Brad's handwriting confessing to the attempt on the emperor's life. The paper's letters were still moist in the ink as if it had been written yesterday in a fit of arrogance.
Brad's face went from shock to fury. "Forgery!" he blurted. "You—"
"Speak to this country with truth," Pedro said. "Let the people hear your word."
Brad's voice dissolved into a plea. He began to beg the crowd directly, hands outstretched. "I deserve mercy. I can serve—"
The crowd's reaction was a mirror of what the court had been: at first a stunned hush, then anger like wind. Someone in the back of the square rose and said, "You killed our sons for your fear! You schemed to crown a child! How is that serving?"
People pressed forward and their faces were carved with a new likeness of justice. They wanted to see the end of arrogance. Brad tried to bargain, to whisper of favors and alliances, but the square had learned to listen differently. The wives of soldiers pointed at him, and the mothers whose men had been led to death by false seals spat. He fell silent and knelt.
Asher's face now dissolved into trembling denial. He staggered when the crowd named his crimes. He tried at first slyness: "You will forget this," he muttered. Then his mouth opened into pleading like a child: "I was only—mercy!"
Children in the crowd were writing the scene into songs and people began to sing the names of the dead. Some of Asher's old clients from the palace who had tasted his favor watched with eyes like small grey stones. One by one they walked away from him. A minister who had once been his ally spat, "May your name rot."
Brad's last face was a child looking for a mother. He begged, "I can make peace. Let me serve. Do not ruin my family."
A hundred hands rose in the crowd and they shouted, "No!"
After the pillory came the sentences. They were forced to confess their acts aloud. Asher tried to stand tall and declare his own patriarchy; he crumbled into names and excuses, then into tears. The crowd's verdict was louder than any judge's decree. They dragged him through the square to a place where he would lose his title and his coat and, where in the end, he would be marched under torches away from the gate.
Brad's family came to the doors; his face had become a hollow bird's. He folded at the knees and wept for his children, for the future he had imagined. "I thought I saved the realm," he whimpered. "I thought—"
"You thought wrong," someone answered simply.
The crowd turned on him, recording him in curses. He tried to stand tall one last time, but the man who loved his own face had nothing left but a voice that shook. The people took his confession, his plea, and made them into lessons.
I watched their pride become dust. I watched the Empress—Catalina Perry—who had once smiled like silk see the men she could use fall apart. Her hands trembled for the first time in years. She stood near the Dowager and her face was the pale of a woman drained of her art.
"No mercy," the Dowager said quietly. "We must set the example."
They took each traitor's state and turned it into a public tale. People hissed; children shouted. Some clapped. Some took their stones back into pockets. The punishment was a collage of public humiliation, lost honors, forced apologies, and, for those most guilty of ordering blood, the final end the square demanded: disgrace and death.
Brad begged for a different form, a quieter end, a house exile, but the square wanted more. It wanted to see the consequences. He went slowly. His final change went from proud to pleading to small—then to silence. He fell to the ground and the crowd's chorus closed like a lid. People filmed it on carved wooden tablets for stories in the market. They took pictures of his despair the way townfolk might have once displayed trophies.
"They were strong when they were higher than others," Pedro said, his voice flat. "The road for the proud is always paved with the weight they threw onto others."
When it was finished, the square was hungry for less and for more; it fed on the fall of men. Some in the crowd wept. Some felt vindicated. Johan wiped his forehead and said to me quietly, "People will learn caution now."
I touched Pedro's sleeve. He took my hand and brought it to his heart. "You kept this till the end," he said. "Why have you never left it?"
"It keeps me remembering what I cannot say," I answered.
We walked away with heavy feet. The palace had been burned clean of some of its rot. The Empress lay quiet like a woman who had seen the ocean and found her ships sunk. She bowed to the Dowager with a face empty of cunning.
In the months after, the court learned to slow. My brother Jaxon married the warrior Brielle George in a union that surprised me more than anyone. "She is clever in a soldier's way," Pedro said, with something like relief. "She knew how to be where she had to be."
"They were together like two halves of an arrow," I told him, and he laughed the way someone who had nearly been killed can laugh again.
We returned to a remodeled palace. Pedro had gardens replanted with orchids on both sides of his study. Gustaf planted them himself. "You said you liked orchids," he reminded Pedro.
Pedro looked at me and his face softened in a way that is reserved for those who have seen long winters with you. "You bloom in mine," he said, and then, seeing he had used a line like a soldier uses a sword, he added, "It is clumsy, but true."
I had lived—if 'lived' can mean the wide wavering between fear and being held—through misjudgment and punishment and war. People would always call me slow-witted, perhaps because I laughed at the wrong moments and cried at the right ones. But I had never been alone. I had portable proofs of love—Hiroko's hands, Gustaf's steady care, my father's iron while he bowed, Johan's loyalty, and Pedro's stubborn, often incomprehensible heart.
"Why did you bring me back to the capital?" I asked one evening in the dim of his study where orchids gave off a mild perfume, like a memory.
"Because," he said simply, cradling a tiny shoot between his thumb and forefinger, "when you left, the palace felt wrong. You were small courage in my halls. I wanted it back."
"Did you ever think," I teased, "that I was not clever enough?"
He smiled as if solving a great puzzle and kissed my temple. "You are clever in the right ways," he said. "You see what others hide. You hold onto things they throw away."
"I keep this too," I said, taking the jade pendant out—worn but whole—and pressed it into his palm. "It kept me safe."
Pedro held the small stone and did not laugh. His fingers closed. "Then keep planting," he said. "Let the orchids remember that we once thought the world would burn down but it did not."
I did plant them. I tended rows of green and purple, and sometimes when the moon was very clear I would pluck a petal and put it between the pages of the sutra I wrote again—with my steadier hand. Pedro would come and, not always understanding why I insisted on this old work, would sit and read aloud in a small rough voice.
I listened and leaned my head on his shoulder, and there were times I could not help but think: perhaps I was not clever, but I had learned to keep steady like a root in dirt. Perhaps that steadiness was its own kind of cunning.
Once, on the anniversary of the night the scroll burned, Gustaf found me in the garden next to a new line of orchids.
"You still count the days," he said softly.
"I count the breaths," I answered. "They are cheaper than medals."
He patted my shoulder, and Pedro, suddenly near, planted a kiss on my hair like sealing an old promise. "You and your orchids have taught me many things," he whispered.
"Are you grateful?" I asked, with the small boldness of a woman who has stood through ruin and returned.
"Absolutely," he said. "I wish for nothing more grand. If the world will give me one happiness—and perhaps a million orchids—I will be satisfied."
I tightened my hands around a digging spade. "Then plant the orchard with me," I said.
He laughed, and the laugh fell like a bell into the row of flowers. They trembled in the night breeze and smelled like the old world I had lost and the new one we were still making.
The End
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