Sweet Romance14 min read
The Grandmother Who Wouldn't Sit Still
ButterPicks13 views
I remember the fortune teller's breath like stale incense, the way she pinched my wrist and said, "You are not ordinary. You will trouble hearts and start storms."
"I'll take the free reading," I had said, and then laughed at the idea of fate.
"Keep laughing," she said, "until you land on a throne."
I woke up under silk and lacquer and birdsong. I woke up with a palace roof over my eyes and a crown I had not ordered.
"Where am I?" I asked the maid in my bedchamber.
"You are at the Great Court of Yan," she whispered. "High enough to make birds jealous."
They called me Grand Empress Dowager because of a string of unfortunate official romances and deaths. I was twenty in the mirror, and the country called me ancestor. I had been handed a title and a net of ceremony that weighed more than I could lift. I had a house full of people who bowed like metronomes and a life scheduled like a hypnotist’s watch. So I climbed a tree.
"Please come down, Your Majesty," the steward said with hands full of terror.
"Let her be," the old dowager said from her sedan chair, amused.
"No, no — the tree is dangerous."
I curled my toes into bark and surveyed my empire of courtyard tiles. I wanted air and a sane laugh. I wanted to jump and feel something like living.
"Move," I told the cluster of palace attendants. "All of you, back up."
They bowed in a wave and didn't move an inch. They would not risk angering a title, even when the title wanted to be alone in a tree.
"Grandmother," a small, round voice sang up at me. A little king, with cheeks like ripe peaches, trotted up and looked at me with fearless curiosity. He was Drake Jorgensen, and he had ruled a country since he could wobble on two legs.
"Are you having fun up there?" he asked.
"It is treacherous," I answered, because treacherous made me sound dramatic. "Move, child, let me down."
Then Lorenzo Wallace arrived — tall, quiet, with an annoyance like frost and eyes the color of river stones. He had the air of a man whose childhood had been lectured into silence and whose smile was reserved for horns of victory, not for giddy women in trees. He was the Regent. He walked like a ruler who measured steps before taking them.
"Why are you in a tree?" he asked, as if the question was a simple one.
"Because," I said, and meant everything: because I'm bored, because I can, because I need to see the sky. "Because the palace does not smell like life. Why are you here?"
"I am on my way," he replied, too composed to frown. "I pass by."
He glanced up and, for the first time since I had arrived, looked at me with something that loosened warmth in my chest. It was not a smile. It was a pause in his ordered day where the air thinned.
"Don't be... careless," he said. "You could fall."
"Then catch me," I teased, and for a heartbeat I pictured the stories — slow-motion, the falling woman, the rescuing hero, a brush of lips and destiny. I let go.
My landing tasted of lacquer and dirt. The crowd gasped, someone clutched pearls, a servant fainted. I sat up, wiping mud from my lip, and found Lorenzo twenty paces away, hands noble and still. He did not catch me. He did not even frown in panic. He simply said, dry as linen, "You are reckless."
"I am not reckless," I lied, and the lie fit like a temporary sash. Drake giggled and called me "grandma" with the sweetness of a child who had not yet learned the sting of titles.
A seam of my skirt had snagged. As I fell, the silk tore. The palace took that tear and made rumor: "The Dowager flirted with the Regent in public." The market hummed. The dowager who had once been the center of court strategy coughed and tried to hide a laugh. The old dowager pretended delicacy and said, "Keep your distance from the Regent."
"Do you mean 'me'?" I asked Drake later, and he nodded solemnly. "Will you guard me from the Regent's bad influence?"
"Yes," he promised, in the kindest voice a king who loved pastries could make. "I like you."
"That is very democratic of you," I said.
Things settled into a pattern. I ate too many sweet buns with Drake. I taught him modern nonsense like which snacks made you fat. He learned the phrase "middle-aged oil man" and giggled every time. Lorenzo continued to be a silhouette in my mornings, the man whose sleeves hid the way he sighed. Sometimes he would walk past and drop a cloak on my shoulders when the wind bit. He did not pretend it was nothing.
"You're always cold," he said once, quietly, in a corridor lit like a still lake.
"I'm fine," I protested.
"Then keep still," he replied, an order wrapped in worry. He left his cloak draped over me, and for a strange second I felt stolen warmth.
We had a long night in the city wearing plain clothes. Drake insisted on the disguise, and I found my first true laugh in months walking under lanterns and market awnings. I taught him how to hold a skewer without dropping it, and he taught me how to be asked about embroidery like a normal person. We were ridiculous and alive.
"Don't call me grandmother here," I told him.
"What should I call you?" he asked, tiny serious face in the lantern light.
"Call me... Esme."
"Esme," he repeated like a vow.
Lorenzo had said he'd meet us at a tea house. He did not. Instead he paused to speak with a woman — the chancellor's eldest daughter, Annabelle Petersen, lovely in a way that made gossip smell like roses. I watched him go, watched him cross the lantern light and stand near Annabelle as if he had chosen the moon over disorder. My heart did something small and unpleasant.
"Where is he going?" Drake asked, and I could not find the words to answer.
"To speak with an old friend," I lied. "Come eat your sweet."
That night, someone moved with a blade and a quick skill. I remember the shock like a hand on my throat and Drake's scream like a bell. I remember trying to hold him and a cold sharpness and a dark blooming at my side. Then, nothing.
I woke up later in a different bed with a maid crying into my sleeve. "You are alive!" she sobbed. "The palace thought—you were gone."
"How long—" I said.
"Two months," she told me.
Two months of gossip had threshed the realm into rumors. The market had spread a thousand variations on my fall. The Regent had kept his shoulders steady, his duties all ordered and cruel. Annabelle had been seen with him in public. The simple courtiers whispered that I had been targeted because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The court priests said it was fate testing us. I thought: there's always a villain when a knife moves.
It took a whisper and a stubborn distrust of court stories for me to ask questions. I learned that someone had paid an expert to send a blade through silk and into an old woman's side. No names. No immediate answer. The palace moved in circles of ritual and broomed the blood from behind screens.
But I remembered the face of the assassin in the lantern light — a hand gloved, a whisper, a movement as practiced as a chop in a kitchen. I started to ask. I started to pry at the threads of this particular tapestry. People lit up: a conspiracy? Of course there was a motive. Of course. The chancellor's household had lost favor when the late emperor died. Annabelle's family had been seen at the tea house with talents for influence. Words are cheap, but when repeated in corridors, words become law.
"Are you saying they hired the blade?" I demanded of one insolent footman.
"People say it," he told me. "But what is a footman to truth?"
"Then bring the truth to me."
Lorenzo watched me build my questions like a mason, setting bricks of rumor and mortar of small facts. He did not stop me. He watched me with a look that was something between worry and approval, as if I had become a small country he liked.
I could have gone to the emperor, but Drake trusted me and I would not drag him into my quarrels. Instead, I asked the small things: who paid the street vendor that night, who had missing servants, which carriage had been late. A pattern emerged: a coach, a signal, a woman in Annabelle's livery seen near the lantern stall. I followed those small lights.
"Do you have proof?" Lorenzo asked once, when I brought him a scrap of silk with a dye only used by the chancellor's palace.
"No," I said. "But I have questions, and questions are a kind of proof if you ask enough people."
He looked at me for a long time. "Be careful," he said. "People get cut when they chase rumors like knives."
"Let them cut," I thought, and then I heard myself say, "I will not let murder be a seam in my small life."
I called in a public hearing. I would not let the palace bureaucracy bury the truth under incense and promises. I gathered witnesses: a lantern seller who had seen the gloved hand, a stable boy who had seen a carriage with a missing tie, a lady-in-waiting who had heard a conversation about "teaching an ancestor a lesson." I asked them all to stand in the main hall where banners watched and courtiers murmured.
"Why do you demand a hearing?" Annabelle's father asked, his voice silk and anger. "This is an internal matter."
"Because someone tried to kill me," I said, and the hall hummed, like bees finding sugar. "Because someone thought an old woman in a tree could be removed to shift power."
They laughed at me at first. A young dowager asking questions? Ridiculous. A woman with a laugh like an air raid alarm? Dangerous.
"Speak," I told the lantern seller. "What did you see?"
"I saw a glove, Your Majesty," he said. "Black leather. It broke the lantern string. A woman's hand put the blade into your side."
"A woman's hand?" someone cried. "Impossible."
"It was not impossible," I said. "It was deliberate. Tell me who wore that glove."
"A servant with a rose tattoo tied to her shoulder, from the chancellor's quarters," he said. "Madam Annabelle's servant."
Faces shifted. Annabelle's composure faltered like a candle in a draft. She stepped forward, white silk immaculate, and said, "This is slander. My household would never—"
"You let your servant go into the market that hour?" I asked.
"This is absurd." She had no answer. Her father stood beside her and reddened. The room watched like a sleeping cat roused.
One by one, the threads tightened. The stable boy told of a carriage returning late to the chancellor's gate. A laundress produced a bit of fabric with a dye that matched the scrap I had found. A minor clerk confessed that a payment had been made to a mercenary band under the chancellor's name, disguised as a stable supply purchase.
Annabelle's eyes became small, the way porcelain breaks at the edges. Her father slammed a hand on a table and said, "You accuse my family? Who backs you, dowager? Where is your proof?"
"I have witnesses," I said. "I have the payments traced. I have a servant who was frightened into silence and now will not be silent."
"You mock me," Annabelle spat, venom refined by teaching. "You are a stranger wearing my country's mourning. You have no place to judge us."
The chamber turned cold. The old dowager, who had called me "ancestor" with drying respect, leaned forward like a judge deciding if the play was worth the ticket. "If there is guilt in my court," she said, "we will see it revealed."
"Then reveal it," I said.
They called the accused in. The chancellor's servant was dragged forward, trembling in silk that had seen better hours. Annabelle stared as if seeing poison. The servant had a small tattoo of a rose, faded from good scrubbing, and a scar on her inner wrist. I watched her face and knew fear like a stone in a pocket.
"Stand," I commanded. "Tell us why you were at the lantern stall that night and who gave you the glove."
The servant's voice was small as a thrown pebble. "Madam told me to make a scene," she whispered. "To cause distraction, to allow an accident to happen to the grandmother who meddles." Her eyes slid to Annabelle like a broken compass finding north. "She promised me my father's debt would be paid."
Annabelle's color drained. She said, "I would not—" and then stopped. You could see her wearing denial like a mask losing its straps.
"Hand over the ledger," I told the chancellor. "Your household must account for payments."
He fumbled, face going the color of rice paper, and the clerk shoved a stack of receipts toward the hall. For every item I had suspected, paper tied to sums led back to a man who had promised to make "an unpleasant lesson" for a meddling dowager.
The room had become a slow-motion trap. Virtue, when practiced in public, can become a warrant.
Annabelle went from denial to pleading in a rush. She stepped forward with both hands empty. "I did not mean—" she began. "It was to frighten. I did not mean to kill her."
"What did you mean?" I asked. "To ruin? To scare? To teach? Did you think a blade would be an effective lesson?"
She began to cry then, which is a small weapon in court. People soften at tears. "I loved a man who would not look at me," she said. "He favored the Regent. I thought— I thought if I removed the distraction, I would stand closer to him."
Lorenzo's face did not change at first. I had expected fury—such court stories demand melodrama—but it was something else that loosened his jaw: disbelief. He walked forward in that slow way of men who measure their steps. He did not touch her. He asked, "You thought murder was an offering to love? You thought you could buy affection with silence?"
Annabelle shrank. The hall made stitches of her shame.
"You who called this 'teaching,'" I said, standing, my voice steadier than I felt, "have made yourself a spectacle. You will answer not only to the law but to the people you tried to fool with silk and fortune."
They stripped titles—there was no mercy in that moment. I insisted they strip them in public so the lesson could be a signpost. Annabelle's father had to kneel and read the counts: conspiracy to commit attempted murder, bribery, and the misuse of official funds to pay for a criminal. The hall watched. Courtiers who had once revered him now swallowed hard.
Annabelle's pleading turned to cursing only when the chamber hand removed the silver combs from her hair and the dowager ordered the house to bring forward the servants who had been bullied into silence. They testified one after another. "She promised me a safer life." "She paid my debts." "She threatened my family if I refused." Each voice landed in the hall like a loaf set down on a table. The public hates private cruelty because private cruelty is cunning and public laughter is cleansing.
The punishment was not a private apology. It was not a coin tossed into a river. It was public, and it was slow in its humiliation so that it could not be mistaken for swift forgetfulness.
Annabelle was humiliated in the market the next day: her hair pinned back, her robes stripped of banners, she was led through the merchant squares. The vendors who had bought favors from her pocketed their memories and spat at her feet. Children jeered. Women who had been slighted by her smiled like the sun. The chancellor's ledger was posted; the sums were laid out where anyone could count coins and see how purchases had been turned into sin. He was forced to sign a confession under the magistrate’s seal and to return the funds. A public notice declared the family's disgrace. They were not executed—this was not a theatre of blood—but they were made to give up their privileges and to spend seasons in public charity under watchful eyes.
Annabelle herself had to stand in the main square and listen to the list of grievances read aloud: the servants who had debts paid and had their lives rerouted; the markets where false deliveries had disguised payments; the times when she had turned away petitioners with scorn. For every petty cruelty, a small reparation was demanded. She had to sit on the edge of the statue plinth and sew garments for those she had harmed, and every morning, townspeople counted the stitches. They watched her hands move. She learned to be seen.
When I met her the day she finished one hundred shirts, her eyes were empty of the arrogance that had basked in silk. She looked at me and did not call me ancestor. She did not ask for mercy. She bowed low, a bone-deep bow, and said, "I am sorry for the pain I caused."
"I did not want your ruin," I told her. "I wanted truth. I wanted to know who thought it was right to hide murder under a ribbon."
Her voice cracked. "I gave into spite."
"Then learn," I said. "And do better."
Her father was dismissed from court, his name papered over in the ledgers of favoritism. They lost councils and feasts. Where once men had courted the chancellor for seat and smile, now they turned away. Power is fickle and can be taken by the softest of public tides.
The public punishment was long. It was stinging. It was necessary. It was also not my private joy. I did not dance in their disgrace. But I watched the market faces as they turned away from applause toward a new calm. People felt safer. They felt that justice had been served, not by blood, but by exposure. That is a punishment I prefer: one that leaves a person to see what they were in the eyes of the people they used.
After the hearings, Lorenzo and I walked through the garden. The air smelled of plum and something like relief. He touched the sleeve of my robe in the way of a man who was learning how to keep another person safe and not to possess her.
"You did not have to do that," he said.
"I did," I answered. "Someone tried to kill me. I am not a ghost to be swept under tatami. I am a woman who wants to live."
He looked at me then in a way that made my breath small. "Do you understand," he said, "that I..." He stopped, because he was not a man who spilled words like coins. He was a man who measured them like wine.
"That you worry?" I supplied.
"That I wish you would not stand in trees to be entertaining," he muttered. The faintest half-smile touched his mouth — a smile he reserved for when privacy let him be a better person. "And that you have a way of making the court less static."
I laughed. "Then stop me from climbing trees."
He reached out and, with a clumsy carefulness, tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. "I will," he promised.
I expected him to stay distant, to be choreographed into ceremony and statecraft and to let me remain a lively annoyance. Instead, little things happened: he stood to meet me at the gates without being summoned; he answered a letter of mine with a paper pressed between two dates offering him something human — a joke, a sketch of a pastry.
Once, when I complained about a draught in my bedchamber, he sent a footman with a blanket. "The blanket was too serious," I wrote back. "What I want is you." He came instead, and stooped to tuck the blanket around me; his hands were large and warm and patient.
"Is that a confession?" I asked.
"It is a promise," he corrected. "Sort of."
"I can live with that," I said.
We had small heart-stirring moments. The first time he smiled directly at me, it felt like sunlight finding a window. The first time he placed his coat over my shoulders when the rain started, I saw his care in the way his fingers lingered. The first time our hands brushed reaching for the same book in the library, we did not pull back. Each was ordinary and made me feel extraordinary.
"Do you think we are allowed to be ordinary?" he asked once, as we watched Drake race a dog through the courtyard.
"Ordinary is an act of rebellion in a palace," I said. "Do it with me."
He did. We laughed at late night tea over burned biscuits, and he told me of battles not won with swords but with promises to townsfolk. He sighed over petitions like a man who bore them like an ache. He was not a hero from a romance novel; he was a man who would be there when the sun rose and when a child needed sweets.
"One day," Drake said, plopping himself between us on a bench, "are you going to marry Ten-Six-Uncle?" He pointed at Lorenzo as if futures were cartoons.
"Marry?" I repeated, making a face I hoped was confusing.
"Yes. Marry him." Drake's eyes grew wide. "Because I like both of you."
Lorenzo turned, and for the first time in a long time his voice softened all the way through. "If you want ridiculousness and a kingdom of snacks, then yes."
Drake cheered. I kissed Drake's temple and watched Lorenzo's face shift as if something finally fit into place.
The palace kept moving with its seasons of rumor and incense. The chancellor's house woke to a new quiet, and Annabelle learned to stitch humility. Lorenzo and I discovered small riches: a private corner in a garden where no official ever walked, where we could surprise one another with bad poems and better pastries. A court is a machine, but two people can be a private room inside it.
I do not have a crown to wear in my head anymore, not all the time. I am twenty and ancient in the eyes of the court, and I am foolish enough to climb trees. I have a child who calls me by name sometimes, and a man who measures out his days with patience. I am happy enough to declare that in a palace of ceremonies and plots, I have built a few honest, sticky, human moments.
"Will you still climb trees?" Lorenzo asked once, as autumn turned the leaves into coin.
"Probably," I said. "But this time, hold the ladder."
"Deal," he said, and when he smiled, it was wholly his and no longer an act of state. It changed the way the sun hit the courtyard.
I had come to a strange place by a stranger's prediction and found how human a throne could be. And in the end, the court did what it always does: it turned my fall into rumor and my rise into example. I fell, I woke, I argued for truth in public, and I found a man who would stand beside me through hearings and markets and quiet mornings.
When Drake ran to me with a lantern and asked, "Esme, do you like Ten-Six-Uncle because he is brave?" I laughed. "No," I told him. "I like him because he keeps his word and because he brings me tea the way I like it. And because sometimes he lets me win."
"That's good," Drake said, satisfied. "Because I like you both."
On the day the winter plums bloomed, I climbed the same tree again. Lorenzo watched from below. Drake waved from the courtyard. I sat among the branches and felt like a proper old woman and a young thing all at once. The palace might weigh heavy, but the sky does not care who sits under it.
"Don't be late for tea," Lorenzo called.
"I won't," I promised, and then, because promises are like good pastries, I added, "Unless the sky looks like it needs a story."
He smiled, and for once I knew what our story would be: a small rebellion of laughter, stitched into the wide fabric of a court.
The End
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