Revenge16 min read
The Red Veil and the Empty Coffin
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I do not begin with panic.
"No," I say, and my voice is level, "keep going. Don't break custom for me."
"Keep going?" Quincy Kristensen's fingers, which are cold as carved ivory, close on the silk at my face. He pulls the red veil away like he is tearing a curtain from a stage.
"You should not," someone murmurs in the hall, a hush spreading like incense smoke.
"Why not?" Quincy asks, and he looks at me as if he has just read a mistake in a ledger.
I lift my chin. "Because the hour is right. Continue."
He stares at the half-exposed shape of me, then at the array of guests whose eyes have turned to the bride. I see their attention as a net. I see Quincy unsteady, like a man who has lost the balance of a life he intends to own.
He yanks harder and my veil falls. The red cloth flutters, lands at my feet with a soft, obscene sound. I bend, pick it up, and slip it back over my head myself. It is a small rebellion done with a smile.
"Why are you so impatient?" I say. "Aren't we supposed to follow the proper rites?"
"I..." He opens his mouth and closes it. There's a wet sound deep in his throat and he draws air in as if the room has become winter.
Someone whispers news—someone always hands news like a knife—and the whisper goes through the crowd: Kaia Hughes has fallen on the field.
There is a priest's pause, a breaking of silence that is heavy and absurd. It is my wedding day and death stands at the threshold with muddy boots.
Quincy coughs. He coughs up red and the sound is worse than any lie.
"You will not—" I say, and I fold the veil neatly, the way my sister once taught me to fold a soldier's sash. "Do not turn wedding white. Do not let the dead steal the bride's moment."
He presses his hand to his mouth. For a blink he is a man much my age, scrambling for something steadier than himself.
"Continue," I insist. "Do your duty."
He does it. We bow. We make our promises with borrowed words. Our foreheads touch finally, the ritual is done, and the eyes in the hall collect me like a held breath.
After the ceremony, the night is the worst kind of company. I sit in the bridal room, motionless under the red. The attendants shuffle about, their whispers like small knives.
"Lady Clara," Elsie Ford says and then stops, unable to continue. She is my childhood handmaiden and she has not yet learned how to look at me without pity.
"Don't send for him," I tell her. "Not yet."
She looks at me as if I am some brittle thing, and she kneels. "Shall I call Master Quincy to the bridal chamber, lady?"
"No." The word is a small, firm stone.
When the servants depart, I lift the veil and reach with trembling fingers for the cold pole of the bed's canopy. I want to understand with touch the reality of this new life laid on my shoulders.
A soft footfall approaches. The door opens. I feel eyes like wind. I cannot see him; there is only the shape against the outer dark.
"Lady Clara?" comes Quincy Kristensen's voice, and it is not a voice that asks. It is a voice steeped in command.
"What do you want?" I ask.
"To do what a husband must do."
"A husband?" I laugh once, thin and sharp. "You mean the man who looks like he is holding a funeral at home."
He is not an ugly man. There is a quiet cruelty to the angles of him. He is the sort of man who knows the value of silence and counts it as currency.
"You will be my wife," he says.
"I already am," I say.
He draws near and his hand finds my chin. His fingers are rough from a life I do not know.
"Why are you so insolent?" he asks.
"Because I am not your theft," I answer. "You came for the title, not me. You clasped my sister's name like a medal. I am what I was told to be, yet here I am—no fewer reasons to refuse—still given."
He laughs without mirth. "A wife can learn."
"A wife?" I repeat. "Are you sure you want to teach a woman to be nothing but a portrait?"
He stands still for a long time. Then he orders, "Take it off."
He means not the veil now but the red. The attendants freeze. I feel every eye on me like a flame. It is the moment every girl fears and this, too, is a way of breaking a woman.
"No," I say quietly. "If this is to be a mockery, I will not play."
"Do it!" he commands. "Do it now!"
The guardmen hesitate. They are the instruments of his will and yet they glance, uncertain, between command and conscience.
"Watch me," I tell them. "I will undress myself."
I unfasten the top buttons. Silks slide. I do it with the slow, mechanical motion of someone unwinding after a long winters' work. The last button catches on a fingernail. It tears. A thin, hot sting breaks across my finger. Blood beads and drips onto the hem. The red cloth falls and pools like a shameful bloom.
Quincy looks at the spill and there is a flash of something like triumph in him. "That will teach you humility," he says. Then he turns and leaves the room.
"Stay," I call after him. "Do not confine me to the name your hand chose."
He pauses in the doorway, his silhouette carved against the outer light. "Remain here," he says. "If you stay in the house, you are welcome. If you return to your father's home, that is allowed. But you will not be my wife in name beyond the roof of this house. You will be a concubine, if you remain."
"A title matters so much to you?" I ask.
"An appearance," he says. "Only appearance."
He walks away. The hall swallows his figure.
I do not kneel before the altar tablet with Kaia's name. The cloth of the hall, the incense, and the carved shrine feel like someone else's liturgy. If his love belongs to the memory of another, then my devotion will not be staged to honor a ghost.
When he comes to my room next it is with accusation. He tears the small embroidered handkerchief I had been making—the pair of mandarin ducks meant for some future invisible pocket—and he throws it to the floor like a dishonored petition.
"You resemble her," he tells me. "You are not her. You cannot make me mistake you. Try harder."
I cradle the shredded cloth in my hands, and with the motion of a child collecting shells from a broken tide I fold them, piece by piece, into my palm.
"I will not be your lesser," I say. "I am not embroidered spare parts."
"You are exactly what you are," he replies with a steadiness like iron, "and what you are will be enough. A face that eases grief. A body that fills a bed. That is all I want."
"Is that all?" I ask. "To be a shape to stop longing?"
He does not meet my eyes. He says, "Be grateful someone touches you."
So I learn the cadence of his contempt. He is quick to disinterest, quick to hunger, and quick to turn those hungers on the stage-girl he brings from the plays—Vittoria Bennett—whose soft laugh and practised back are a better consolation for him than any memory.
"She is mine," he tells me once, showing the playbill as if it were a proclamation. "She will amuse me."
"Is a woman in silk worth more to you than the woman who walked under your match for life?" I ask.
He laughs and the sound is like a sword dropped on stone. "You think like a general's daughter," he says. "Be gentle. Be small. Do not stir the court. It is better for you to be admired than to be feared."
I remember when Kaia had shown me how to hold a sword. She did not teach me gentleness. She taught me stance and truth.
One night, when the moon was a white coin in the sky, I snuck out to the gardens and found him in the open, drinking and speaking to the night as if it were his confidante.
"Why do you grieve her so?" I asked.
He did not look at me for a while. Then, with his hand on the pommel of a ceremonial dagger, he said, "She saved my mother. The woman who saved my mother had a will like steel. I watched in the street when she rode past. I thought, there is one who could be mine."
"You should have asked her," I said.
"I did," he replied. "I begged. She fled. She left on a horse. She went to die on the border."
His hands trembled. "I offered to her that a name might stop the winds. She would not yield. So I married you."
"You married me for that?" I asked, feeling suddenly very small and ridiculous.
"You would have been easier to buy if you were not the living twin of the steel one," he said. "But we make our choices."
In his tone was both confession and cruelty.
When Kaia's casket returned to the capital—when the drums that bring a body home beat on the streets—there came also a face that none could mistake: Emil Rivera, tall, a soldier's gait still in him, older by the rest of five years, and he had the look of a man carrying a weight.
He came to the house and nearly collapsed at the sight of me. "Clara," he blurted. "Are you well?"
"Do you mean Kaia?" I asked him, watching his fingers clench the handle of a bundle he carried.
"Yes," he said. "I must..." He faltered, then found the strength to speak. "Forgive me for coming unannounced. I thought to say—"
"You fought for her," I said.
"I did," Emil answered. His voice was as if he had been tempered in ice and fire. "I disobeyed orders because of her. For that I was punished. I did it because she asked me—because I loved her."
"You love her still?" I asked.
"Always," he answered. "But I could not bear her to be dishonored by rumor and battle. I could not afford to bring a corpse back in dishonor. If there was to be a coffin, better that it bear what the court required than the truth that would tear you all apart."
He did not say plainly what he had done; he said it in small sentences that together formed a truth like a mosaic.
Later he sat by my bedside while I was well enough to speak, and told me of an empty coffin and of a promise that had bent men.
"I brought an empty coffin to the city," he said once to my father, Hayes Bergmann, who had more sadness than pride in his face. "Kaia's body rests elsewhere. We agreed it would be better."
"Why hide it?" I asked. "Why all this deception?"
"Because she wanted a life with me, simple, outside this contest of names and honors," Emil told me. "She could not be both a general who spurred men into battle and a woman who would live a small life by a fire. She chose the small life. She feared the court would not allow it."
I felt something loosen in me, like the threads on the back of a tapestry.
"You lied to me," I said.
"I lied to keep you from harm," Emil answered. "From the truth of her flight. From your grief. The court would have twisted it into ruin."
"Or you protected your soldier's private plan," I said. The words were cold. "None of you asked what I wanted."
Emil's jaw tightened, but he said nothing more then.
Quincy, meanwhile, grows skittish like a man haunted. He spends nights at the foot of my bed and spends days ignoring me. He collects women the way some men collect medals—an actress, a dancer—and he parades them before me like trophies.
"This one is clever and coy," he told me of Vittoria once in a tone of triumph. "She will be an ornament in the hall."
"Or a lie," I said.
He waved my words aside. "You would be magnanimous," he said, "if you could be more like your sister."
"You will never be content," I told him. "Your hunger grows because you feed it with absence."
He scowled. "You think you know me."
"Not know," I said. "I see the shape of you."
And the shape is thin and hollow.
Days go by. My health begins to falter. The court doctors speak of fever, of shock of the mind. They decide I have been frightened into a sickness that eats at me.
"You must return to your father's home," my father says once, his voice torn. "You are not well here. You need the air of your childhood—"
"Yes," Quincy says quickly. "Do this, Clara. Leave if that is what you must."
But when I try to leave, he stops the carriage halfway and fetches me back like a man retrieving a lost object.
"Come," he says, and he lifts me onto a horse, carrying me crosswise on the saddle as if I were a bundle of linens.
"Stop," I tell him. "Do not treat me like a parcel."
He sets me down only long enough to throw me across his own saddle again and ride off. "Look at me," he says. "Will someone else be more grateful? Will you run and decide that no one can own you?"
"I am not for owning," I say. "I am Clara."
"You are what is useful to me," he says. "You look like she did when she stepped into the street. That is enough."
I am quiet for a long time, and then I run. I slip away from the mansion and hide in the plum grove. The garden is cold and the trees smell like winter. He calls for me like a man who calls a beloved horse.
"Come out," he says into the dark. "Clara, come out. You will not be harmed."
"You are a man who grants violence as a proof of love," I say. "What sort of shelter is that?"
He laughs and the sound comes from the throat of a man who has been lonely too long. "How small you think me. Come out."
I come out, because there are reasons we go to the places we are told not to. I find him leaning against a gatepost like a man who has surrendered.
"Do you want to die for her?" I ask him suddenly. "Do you want to die because you keep one memory as if it were a life?"
"No," he says. "But I cannot stop myself from wanting what I cannot have."
"Aren't we all that?" I say.
He steps closer, and for a moment his hand is on my hair like an apology. "You are not her," he says softly. "You are yours—Clara. If you were only this, I would be content."
"I cannot be content with being only a placard on your wall," I tell him.
He looks at me as if I have cut him with a blade.
We go back inside and my fever becomes a thing that rises like tide. The court brings new doctors. Even the imperial physician looks over me and pronounces me fragile in ways I never was.
"It is as if she has been frightened into weakness," one of them says. "Or a past that is not her own has invaded her."
"I will watch her," Quincy says. "I will not let a thing happen to the family name."
"You have erased the family name," I say in a whisper that is only for him.
"Shut up," he says. "Be quiet, Clara."
I do, because to speak sometimes hurts more than silence. My nights hollow out into long cries I do not remember in the morning.
One night, as my hands tremble and I cannot hold a cup of tea, there is a commotion in the hall. Servants are crying. A parade forms. My father sends for me to arise.
"There will be an audience," he says. "The court must know the truth."
I am in no condition to listen to another truth, but the idea that many eyes will look at a man who did me wrong gives me a brittle comfort.
They gather in the main hall: courtiers with their jeweled collars, the house staff, even the actors who were once presented to Quincy. Quincy stands at the center, his posture like a spear.
"Bring them forward," my father says.
The theater girl—Vittoria Bennett—walks in with her performer’s poise, but her face is pale. Beside her Quincy stands like a man affronted.
"I want everyone to hear," my father says. The hall is an amphitheater of gossip. "We have learned things about the conduct in this house that are not fit for a prince."
"Prince?" Quincy spits. "I am a lord."
"A lord who married under false promises," my father says. "A man who has humiliated his wife publicly. We do not allow that."
Vittoria's eyes dart to me. For a moment the room seems to hold its breath.
"You—" Vittoria begins, but my father lifts a hand and stops her.
"Stand," he says. The servants shuffle. "You were introduced in this house under pretenses. You were given place and grant. Have you taken advantage of this house's trust?"
She falters. "I—my lord—"
"Answer." My father's voice is like an old drum.
"I only..." Vittoria falters, and then, to our surprise, she bursts. "I only took what was offered. I was lonely. I am an actress. I play roles to survive. He—he promised me more."
"More?" my father repeats. "He promised you position, money, favor. Did he promise you to be the wife and not my daughter?"
"No." The word is small. Then, "He promised security. He promised that if I stayed, my family would be given protection."
"Protection?" my father's face goes hard. "Listen to me. This house does not buy servants at the cost of human dignity. This house will not see its daughters traded like wares."
The crowd mutters and the actor's face goes white. Quincy, losing control, raises his hand suddenly and points to the crowd. "You will think what you want. She came to me. She was given."
"You made a play of marriage," my father answers, "and then you used this woman as your amusement to pour contempt upon my child. We will not tolerate it."
"Traitor!" Quincy shouts. "You lecture me? I am the one who obeyed the crown's intent in wedlock, not you."
"Obeyed?" my father repeats. "You obeyed the shape you wanted to fit your longing. You made a funeral a bargaining chip. You refused decency."
The murmurs build.
Quincy, the man who had held commands like a cloak, suddenly looks small in the ring of the hall. He is not sentenced by law. But the punishment he receives is worse in its way: the court's contempt.
"My lord," the steward says, and he is a man who knows the habits of houses, "we will make the decision visible here. You misused your position to humiliate. Instead of a formal pardon, this house calls you to account."
"Account?" Quincy demands.
"Yes," my father says. "We will make known all. We will show how you stripped my daughter, how you mocked the marriage rituals, how you made a living woman a prop."
Quincy opens his mouth and for the first time there are no words that will steady him.
"And this actress," my father continues, "who has been given a boon from you, will stop performing inside our courts. You will be responsible for the remedies you owe. You will publicly return the gifts and apologize."
It is a public shaming that is worse than heavy punishment. It is a stripping of the social currency that men like Quincy buy and trade in. He has wealth, yes, but wealth without honor is paper.
Vittoria stands trembling and then, under the weight of the eyes, she speaks. "I was foolish," she says. "I did not know how to be anything other than...a player. I am sorry."
People clap. Not in joy but in the mechanical way crowds clap at the fall of a spectacle. Quincy looks like a man stripped of armor at the moment of defeat.
He staggers then, his chest heaving. "You think this changes things?" he says. "You will still be my wife on paper."
"Perhaps," my father says. "But paper can be folded, and in folding it we make plain the man who would hide behind a name. You will lose favor. You will be watched."
The servants mutter and a few step forward, placing small items he once gave to his mistresses on a table. The players who had been his consorts now are witnesses to his humiliation. Some of the courtiers pull out small tablets and begin to speak of how a man whose honor is broken cannot be trusted.
Quincy's reaction is, in those moments, a study in collapse.
He goes from flushed defiance to pale denial, cradling the idea that he is still entitled to his vanities. He tries to laugh, then tries to sneer, then hears the slow desertion of the court as whispers become the verdict.
"Stop!" He cries. "This is a lie. Falsehood! Do you all remember who I serve?"
"No one here denies your title," my father says. "But we will not allow you to use that title to abuse."
Quincy looks to the walls, as if the portraits might rescue him. He looks to the door. He looks for allies and finds only strangers.
Then, with a last animal sound, he bows his head. The laughter does not come. There is only the hush of men rearranging their loyalties.
Afterwards, as he stands—hollowed and small in the crowd—he turns to me. His eyes have a kind of broken thing in them.
"Forgive me," he says.
I watch the man who once tore my veil. The court's judgment is not law but it is more lasting because it is the telling. He has been reduced before his peers. He is not dragged with ropes or bound by law, but my father's pronouncement has made him a subject of scorn.
He crumbles in stages. First disbelief, then hatred, then a soft, pleading, "Please. Please."
"Do you expect me to answer you now?" I ask.
"No," he says. "I expect nothing."
That day may count as his punishment. The crowd's faces are like flints and the gossips will not let the story die. Vittoria leaves in tears and the servants who once bowed before her now avoid her. She will have to find a way to live without the favor that protected her. Quincy's reputation will not end in prison, but in the slow corrosion of trust. That is the cruelty of the court: it strips you clean of the illusion you built.
The public spectacle satisfies the rule of the house and provides a sort of immediate justice. It is what the ancestral voices in my head would have wanted. Yet none of it undoes the cold nights, the torn veil, the handkerchief that I had stitched for a dream.
"You think this will make things right?" I whisper to my father that evening.
"It makes the moment right," he says, and he presses his fingers to my brow. "That man cannot hide in the house again as he did."
"Does he look punished?" I ask, thinking to myself that punishment is not a consumption of a man's bones but the decline of his face in other people's eyes.
"He does," my father says. "But the heart is a complicated thing."
Weeks pass. I grow weaker and then a little stronger. There are days when I can cross the gallery on my own and days when I need Emil's hand to steady me.
Late, when the house is quiet and only the moon keeps company, Emil sits with me. He brings small gifts—a length of cloth, a packet of tea—and then one night he brings a confession.
"I lied," he says simply.
"For what?" I ask.
"For the coffin," he replies. "I put an empty coffin with her name on it so her steps could be settled and so that you would stop grieving in the public eye. She wished a life, a quiet life. I could not bear to give her up to this."
"Where is she?"
"At the border," Emil says. "She did what she wanted. After she staged her fall, she wrote to me and said she would rather be hidden than married to a name she had not chosen. She wished to be small, and I gave her the smallness she asked."
A smallness. I imagine her by a fire, softened. Kaia, the war-made woman, choosing a small ordinary life.
"Did you think of how this would hurt me?" I ask.
"I thought of your pain," Emil says, and his hand trembles. "I thought hiding the truth would spare you harm."
"But you hid a life from me," I say. "You hid my chance to mourn. You made me the substitute."
"I thought..." He stops and breathes. "I thought it was kinder."
The truth is jagged. But the moment gives perspective. My illness had been a fever bred from deception; perhaps that fever disappears when the lie meets the light.
I recover slowly. The house is quieter. Quincy avoids the main rooms and sometimes rides off at dawn and returns under the cover of dusk. He is allowed his face but not his full place. The court never quite forgives discomfort so thoroughly sown.
I am left with a small embroidered handkerchief and a memory of my sister who chose a fate I cannot hate her for. On my last good evening I ask Quincy for the small thing I had made long ago—the mandarin ducks I had sewn for the imagination of a future.
"Go," I say softly. "Bring me the handkerchief."
He moves without a word and fetches it. He is changed by what the house did to him. He appears quieter, his arrogance rusty.
When he lays the cloth in my lap, his fingers hover and then retreat.
I place the handkerchief against my face and feel the thread, the tiny bird shapes that I stitched while wide-eyed with hope.
"Do you ever think," I say, "that being seen is the only way to be alive?"
He looks at me and for once answers with truth rather than command: "I thought the look of her was all I needed."
"And it was not." I rest my head back. "It was never all."
He makes no protest. There are things the court could not unmake—how he held me like a thing and how the country pressed its expectations upon a name and a girl.
I close my eyes. Outside, someone laughs too loudly and the sound is faint as a bell. The house breathes, a living thing with a hundred small aches.
My final thought is an image of Kaia, perhaps real and perhaps not, living as she wished under a sky of dust and wind. If she found the small life she desired, then maybe the trick of the empty coffin was mercy after all.
"Will you remember me as you knew me?" I whisper.
He does not answer. He only lays his hand across the handkerchief and stays.
The end is not heroic. It is not fully just. It is a weave of mercy and cruelty and ordinary human mistakes.
But there is one final truth I carry—the embroidered ducks in my hand. I feel the stitches that I made with my own naive hope; I press them to my lips. A small, strange blessing, both like a thing finished and like a promise unmade.
"You were not merely a substitute," I say, voice thin, to the room, to Kaia, to Quincy. "You were Clara. Remember that."
He squeezes the cloth and for a moment I think he hears me. For a moment the house stands still and the moon hangs like something watching.
When I fall into sleep that does not return, I am warm with the thought that Kaia may be living quietly somewhere, and that I was—briefly—seen.
The End
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