Sweet Romance13 min read
Pomegranate Flowers and the Wooden Comb
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The pomegranate tree in our courtyard was thick with blossoms, clusters so bright they seemed to argue with the sky.
"Ingrid, look how they bloom this year," I said, running one hand along the rough bark.
"They'll fruit before autumn," Ingrid Larson replied. "Miss Journi, they say pomegranate means many sons and daughters."
I smiled but kept my hands folded in my lap. "Then they will be busy trees."
Joyce Kraemer arrived that morning, not with a greeting, but with a slow, scrutinizing sweep of her eyes across my dress, my hairpin, the crease at my wrist.
"Journi," she said in that voice that always tried to be soft and ended sharp, "your life looks comfortable. Yet have you forgotten your duty to the house?"
"Mother," I answered, folding a handkerchief, "what do you mean?"
She sat, uninvited, and took a cherry from the tray I offered on reflex. "I mean your sister. Poor Brittany has had no peace since she left Wang's household. Do you not owe her a place? Our blood should stay together."
"You mean you want me to bring her here to be—"
"A wife," my mother cut in. "A co-wife to Everett Turner. A plain title for a plain solution. We can't let other houses take our fortune's children."
"Make her a concubine?" I asked, and kept my voice light as if the idea were trivial.
Joyce's face hardened. "Not a concubine. A lawful consort, a 'ping' help, an addition that keeps 'fertility' inside our walls. I spoke to Master Tao in the east lane. He said your luck lacks a son. If not you, then let her stand by you. It is family sense."
"Mother," I said, "do you think I don't know the talk in the lanes? Do you think I don't hear how every neighbor waits to see whether my belly gives us a son?"
"You were born to settle things right," she said, "and Brittany has always been generous."
Brittany Albrecht arrived with a sigh like silk. She bowed at once to Gloria Ivanov, to my mother, to the petty crowd of servants. "I came to rest, mother. The road was cold."
"Brittany," my mother beamed, "pain is behind you now. Step closer to Journi. Be sisters."
Brittany's eyes slid toward Everett Turner—Everett who had come with his hand smelling faintly of ink and street dust—and she smiled a practiced smile.
"Small in the eye, big in charm," she seemed to say with a glance.
Everett sat beside me at the meal as sunshine slipped through the eaves. He broke bread and looked at me steady and calm.
"Journi," he murmured when the plate was bare, "I will set these gifts by the carriage. Tell your family not to worry."
"I will," I answered. "Tell me what pleases you this evening."
I watched Brittany make the rounds of glances, slow and deliberate. She had always been skilled at throwing her gaze like a net.
"She is pale," Joyce whispered as if pity were a currency to spend. "You must be kind."
"I will be civil," I said.
After the meal, Brittany found a way to slip alone toward Everett's study with an excuse about a sweet soup.
"Ingrid, keep an eye ears," I told my maid.
"Yes, Miss Journi," Ingrid said, stern and small at once.
Brittany and Everett were found in conversation, Brittany leaning, Everett stern-faced. At the first knock my mother staged her performance—loud, accusatory. "He ruined her reputation!"
Everett turned, then froze; his back to us had been steady, but his voice was thin. "Wait—"
I stepped forward and raised my chin. "Everett, tell them who is in your room."
He looked at me, then to the man who stood behind him when the door had fallen open: a younger servant in patched clothes, eyes raw with fear.
"It was Elliot," said the servant, kneeling, his voice choking. "He was hungry. I drank the soup and I—"
"You mean Elliott Daniel?" my voice was soft enough to cut. The servant's name trembled on my tongue. "Everett, did you send him?"
Everett swallowed. "He pretended to be me. I had gone to the market. He stayed. He was lonely. There was nothing else."
"A trick," my mother shouted. "A trick to disgrace the house!"
"No." I let it be plain. "It was an hour's misstep. Not a crime."
Joyce collapsed into a show of outrage, the kind that gathered other people's eyes like moths.
"You are always cunning," she hissed to me. "You stand there and twist it."
Brittany fell, theatrically, into tears as if the day had been a blade. The women around leaned in to whisper. "Poor Brittany. Oh, the shame."
I watched Everett's hand close and unclench at my knee. He did not say much then. He had always been unlike other husbands in the stories—quiet, clear, present in a way that felt like a pillow. He put his hand over mine and squeezed once.
"Journi," he said, "I will not have you troubled for this by them. I will stand with you."
And that was a small star at my chest.
That night, I learned the worst of the house: arrangements with maids and gifts that were not gifts. Cassidy Bolton, the servant who had been sent to poison my life by Sunderland rumors, knelt and confessed. She had been promised a place, a relief from servitude, a life as "aunt in the inner chamber" by Brittany if she helped with a plan.
"I was weak," she cried. "She said only a drop would settle Miss Journi's trouble. I thought—"
"She promised me an aisle that opened," Cassidy sobbed, "a place to call my own."
Ingrid struck the floor with her palm. "Monster's ways," she spat.
"You took her welfare and turned it to ruin," I told Brittany.
"It was to help," Brittany insisted. "If I could be inside the house, I could hold family power. You are cold, Journi."
"I refused," I said simply. "I refused long ago."
"You refused the only way to keep our blood together," my mother wailed. "You would let outside men take our blood."
I put an end to it then. "Bring Cassidy her papers," I said.
They burned the contract of bondage that day. I gave Cassidy enough silver to leave the city. Ingrid asked for leave to marry, and I promised to arrange for it when the time was right.
Summer burned and cooled in a clean way after that. The pomegranate were fruiting.
My grandmother, Gloria Ivanov, was a woman with a hand steady enough to strike order. She was also one of the few who had ever shown me kindness. When her sixtieth birthday came, we went to the hall because some duties are unavoidable.
"Journi, your face is good," she said, tying back her shawl. "Keep your spirits."
"Aunt Gloria," I said, bowing. "I hope the day is full of joy."
"You will sit with Everett," she said with a tap. "You two look like a calm field."
For all the whispers that followed—about fertility, about omens, about the clear lack of a son—Everett's hand found mine under the table and held it.
Then, on the third day of festivities, a new chaos came. The callers that had been invited chattered about a missing woman, Brittany.
"She disappeared!" someone gasped, and the hush of women pried like fingers seeking a wound.
They found her at the water pavilion, faint and clinging to a stranger. The crowd swarmed. My mother was first to barge in and scream.
"It is Everett!" she cried. "He ruined her!"
But the man who turned was not Everett Turner. He was Ignacio Gentile, a young man with a reputation for wildness and a dazzling name. The rumors about him and his family were many; his presence there flashed like a new lamp.
"Who is this?" my mother stammered, half rage and half greed fighting in the same face.
"Is she ruined by him?" someone called.
I let the crowd make their own noise. No need for me to shout. Brittany's face was pale with a terror I understood: not the fear of being discovered with a lover, but the fear of losing control of the story she had meant to tell.
"You planned this," my mother accused, pointing at me as if all strings in the world led to my hands.
I did not flinch. "You accused my house without reason. I have witnesses."
Gloria Ivanov lifted her cane and struck the table hard enough to silence the gossip. "Enough," she said. "If a woman in my house is accused, we will behave with evidence. We will not ruin a family for petty gains."
That scene humiliated them. It cracked something in my mother's face that I had never seen break—fear under the brittle bark.
After the birthday, my father, Karl Hamza, fumed and made claims about trade and control. The house's largest deal was under my name now. I had quietly done things in the market—ensured that the trade with Everett's merchants remained in our hands if the family wanted to keep standing. I had means the family had not suspected, and I used them.
"Journi," Karl said in the study when I came with papers, "do you think you can command me now? Do you think a woman can wag a house?"
"I think a woman who knows what to do will save a house," I said. "I will give you three days to consider a plan. If you refuse, I will keep the business and the house will answer where it must."
He slammed a cup to the floor and called me defiant.
Three days later Joyce Kraemer was on her way to the charity cloister, disgraced and stripped of household power. Someone had paid the right people the right amount to ensure no more whispering. The household's balance was resetting.
My mother left with her head held like a person trying to carry a small sun inside a teapot.
Brittany, meanwhile, accepted a match from Ignacio Gentile—the same man who had been in the pavilion. It was a climb, not indifferent to him, and she found a new roof. She took the path that left our earlier quarrels behind her.
"I have a little one to tend," I told Ingrid as we watched autumn come. "Monica needs her lullaby."
Monica Davenport, my daughter, laughed as she chased a small shadow across the courtyard.
"Is it sweet?" she asked one day as leaves fell.
"Sweet as pomegranate sugar," I told her.
Everett and I found a steady rhythm. He had a way of being present and absent in the best proportions, enough to teach me the language of ordinary days.
"Why did you marry me?" I asked him once, folding a cloth.
"Because you were honest," he said. "Because you did not hide the way others hid."
"Even when everyone wanted to hide?" I pressed.
"Yes," he said. "Even then."
We shared small, bright moments—a hand over my shoulder when gossip rose; a low laugh when Monica broke a toy; the nights he brought back street pies that smelled of warm oil and sugar.
"It was the small things," he said one quiet evening, handing me a slender wooden box. "Look."
Inside was a wooden comb—simple, but with teeth arranged in double rows that staggered like city roofs.
"Is this odd?" I asked, fingers brushing over the wood.
"It is yours," Everett said. "I made sure it was the shape you wanted."
I held the comb and felt the past folding into the present—the pomegranate tree, the plans, Cassidy's freed hands, Brittany's choice, my mother's angry parades—everything smoothed by a little wooden touch.
We kept our rules: no concubine, no secret rooms. The house learned that the shape of love can be chosen.
Soon after, there came a day when punishment had to be made visible to all.
It was a market morning, and news travels fast in market towns. Somebody had whispered to a trader about a scheme my mother had quietly funded: a string of false testimonies and bribes to claim a family wrong. The trader had a cousin who owed favors in the city's square. By noon there were enough ears and eyes to form a crowd.
"She thought she could buy us all," one market woman said. "Thought she could stitch our tongues shut."
"Let her speak," said a baker, spitting into the dust.
I walked to the square with Everett and Gloria. Brittany stood across the way with Ignacio, a thin smile that revealed nothing. Joyce stood in her carriage, cheeks flushed with anger and the knowledge that something had gone wrong.
"Bring her out," someone called.
Joyce was pulled from the carriage, pushed onto the wooden planks of the square's platform. The crowd's murmurs rose like a sea.
"You dared to threaten my household, Joyce Kraemer?" Gloria asked, voice clear, cane held in a way that suggested a ruler.
"I did what I did for my daughters!" Joyce slapped back. "I raised them, I—"
"You raised your daughters by pegging them like lanterns," Gloria said, "and meant to sell their honor for family standing."
"That's not true," Joyce said. She moved from rage to a new shape—surprise, then denial.
"Is this true?" someone shouted to Brittany.
"I—" Brittany's voice thinned. She tried to take a step forward, then drew back.
"She hired false witnesses," a merchant called. "Paid for lords to look the other way. Tried to bind maids' mouths. Tried to poison a girl's future." The merchant's words were a chain thrown down the platform.
Joyce's face moved through its stages: haughtiness, then a flash of triumph, then the pale wetness of panic. She reached out to Joyce—no, to me—begging with a voice like flapping paper. "Journi, you will not humiliate me!"
The square was full of watchful faces. Some remembered the birthday scandal. Some remembered Cassidy's burned contract. Mothers with children at their hips murmured about the wrong done to helpers. Others—men whose trade had been turned by my firm hand months before—had a different kind of vindication.
"Tell them," I said, stepping on to the planks beside my grandmother. My voice was steady but not cruel. "Tell them what you made your daughters believe."
Joyce's blinking changed. Her words came out in a heap. "I—Master Tao said Journi had no son's luck. I put the thought into my head. I told Brittany to—"
"You framed your own child as a debtor to another daughter," I said, "so you could keep the house like a net. You bought silence and called it prudence."
Panic had become breathlessness. The square watched the move of a desperate woman as she tried to find a script.
"Why did you use them?" a woman demanded. "Why Cassidy? Why threaten the maids?"
"They were convenient!" she shrieked. "They were small! They would listen! They dared not speak!"
"Who dared you?" I asked.
"You—" she threw her hand toward Brittany. "Brittany wanted to be a consort."
Brittany's face had no armor. "I wanted a place," she said. "I was tired. I was tired of being small and looked at. I thought... I thought it would help the family."
"Was Brittany coerced, or complicit?" Gloria asked the crowd.
"Complicit," some answered. "She arranged things."
"This is not the way to mend a house," said Everett, stepping forward. His voice carried across the square. "You used people who could not defend themselves. You bought lies. That is the harm."
Joyce's last defenses crumbled. She moved from denial to bargaining. "I—son of Karl Hamza—think of our place? Our name—"
"Your name is in the dust where you threw it," said a tradeswoman who had lost a contract because of earlier bribery. "You should fix what you broke."
The crowd shifted. They did not want blood, but they wanted dignity.
"Let her mend," someone said. "Let her do public work for the poor. Let her restore what she stole."
I looked at Joyce. Her cheeks were wet. "You must stand where you tried to hold others," I told her. "You must go to the charity cloister and serve with the women you silenced. You will take no place at feasts. You will work with no comforts until you have restored every silver coin you borrowed with threats."
She cried, then collapsed in humiliation. The people of the square watched, some nodding, some whispering.
"And Brittany?" someone asked.
Brittany understood that she had been shown, like a lesson. She was not subjected to the same public labor. Instead, she stood there, small and losing her stage.
"You helped," I told her.
"I am sorry," she said, raw and almost honest. "I thought I could... I thought this was the way."
"It's not," I answered. "You took the easy path and left others to mend the nets."
She hung her head. Ignacio stood by her hand like a cool spear. He did not speak.
Joyce's face moved from fury to pleading in a breath, then to something like collapse. She tried to call down favors, to invoke old friends. The crowd shook its head. "No more," someone muttered. "No more of playing with people's lives."
The magistrate, who had come because word had slithered to him, listened, then pronounced a public reparation. Joyce would work the cloister, return funds, and stand barred from any family decision for the next year. Her public humiliation was not a lashing nor a pile of stones; it was the legal mirroring of the social weight she had thrown on others.
Her reaction moved through stages: pride, then gasp, then incredulous denial, then the slow crumple of a person who had lost the script of power.
"They took her silks," someone said.
"They took her power," said another.
A little girl in the crowd, clutching a rag doll, pointed at Joyce and whispered, "That is the woman who hurt the maids."
Everett put an arm around me and Derek—I mean, Elliott Daniel— kneel? No. Elliott Daniel stayed away, his face shaved with the fear of a servant who had stepped beyond his measure. He watched the humiliation as a lesson. Nobody clapped, but some faces held the cold satisfaction of justice seen.
The results were many: Joyce's social contacts shrank, her petitions were denied, and she went to the cloister with eyes like broken glass.
Brittany left for the country months later with Ignacio Gentile. Her life was not the golden bed she had imagined. The marriage had debts and small cruelties. Later, she lost a child and felt the impossible grief of someone who had stitched her prospects with brittle thread. I watched her news from afar like reading someone else's weather report.
Cassidy left with silver and dignity reclaimed. She married a potter and named her first child Ingrid after the maid who had struck injustice and then kept a hand at hers.
My grandmother returned to the house with a look settled like calm water. "We must remember," she said. "Mercy is not weakness. Let those who will repent do so."
Everett leaned into me on a late autumn bench. "You handled it gracefully," he said.
"Graceful?" I laughed, because I could not claim such a lofty word. "I did what needed to be done. I protected those who could not protect themselves."
"And you did it without becoming what you struck against," he added.
I took his hand. "Tell me, Everett, do you regret marrying me? You chose a life with quarrels."
He looked at me and smiled in a way that had saved me before. "I chose to stand by you when you speak with the world. I chose not to be a man of many wives, but of one partner who is fierce."
"I like that answer," I said. "I like the comb you gave me."
He brought out the comb. Its teeth were neat and slightly staggered. I ran it through my hair.
"Keep it," he said. "It will remind you—nothing in this life is only one line."
"When I look at this comb," I said, "I will think of the pomegranate and the market and the square. I will remember the day truth stood in the sun and our house learned to be better."
Monica came running. "Mama, the pomegranate fell early!" she laughed.
"I will pick some for you," I said, standing. I tucked the comb into my sleeve.
Later, when the sky had smudged into lilac, my mother returned from the cloister with hands washed clean, though her face held an old strain. She came to the gate and touched my sleeve, then, in private, she said, "I was wrong."
"It took you a long time to say that," I told her.
"I know," she said. "I will spend the rest of my life paying back what I broke."
"Good," I replied. "We must feed the house, not starve it for pride."
And when the winter came, I sat by the window and combed my hair with the wooden comb, thinking that small things—small acts, small kindnesses, a hand on a knee—shape life more than grand plans ever could.
"Everett," I asked one night, leaning against him, "do you think a person can change entirely?"
"I think they can choose to change from now on," he said.
"So they can become better."
"Yes," he said. "And when they try, we will see them in the market, in the square, on the benches."
We held hands. The comb lay on the table, a small object, heavy with ordinary memory. It had teeth in rows, odd and staggered, like the choices we'd made.
We keep that comb. It is not a magic tool. It only reminds me of a thing made of wood and years—of the pomegranate tree, of the market square, of Joyce in the cloister, of Cassidy's freed hands, of Brittany's regrets, and of my husband's steady answer when the world asked him to choose.
It is enough.
The End
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