Face-Slapping14 min read
Wake Up, I'm the Old Madam Now
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I woke to the sound of someone keening as if the roof had fallen in.
"I thought you were dead!" a voice cried, wild and loud.
"Mother! Forgive me, I—" another voice sobbed.
"Quiet," I said, and opened my eyes.
A dozen people were bowed on my floor. Two young faces were closest, their looks a mixture of supplication and calculation. One of them crawled forward and gripped my hand like a dog desperate for a bone.
"Madam—" he blurted, tears streaming. "Byron told me— I mean, we thought—"
I blinked. My head filled with a rush of memories that weren't mine: a life married young, a house with rooms too many to count, a husband gone, a pile of promises left like rotten fruit. I was twenty-five, owner of a small clinic, and I had not yet had a proper love. Now I was sitting up in someone else's bed, wearing a deep green silk gown that made me look decades older, and a crowd of relatives were kneeling like peasants at my feet.
"You called me 'Old Madam'?" I asked, and the room froze.
"Madam is barely breathing—" the same voice whined.
"Madam's quite alive." I yawned. "Get up, both of you."
A young man lurched backward so fast he nearly face-planted. "She— she isn't dead?"
"You bellowed for an undertaker and knelt for a month. Very dramatic." I swung my feet over the side of the bed and saw my hands were those of someone who had never learned to look after herself. My reflection in a brass mirror showed a face in its thirties, pale, carefully powdered—an old, household madam. I swallowed and let the new life settle around me like a cloak. I had landed in an old story. I had the title. I had the house. I had three kids and a thousand debts someone else had made.
"Jane," the nearest girl said, choking. "You... you woke."
"Jane?" I tested the sound. It fit oddly. It could pass. "Where's my tea pot?" I asked.
"Tea?" The boy—Calder Avery—scrambled to his feet. "You want tea? I'll fetch—"
"Listen," I said, and there was suddenly a clarity in me that felt like light. "Calder, sit. Tell me what you thought you were doing when you announced my death."
Calder's face was all smiles that had the stiffness of a practiced lie. "Madam, I only wanted to— to pay respects. I brought a paper. A proof, to make the inheritance official."
He stretched out a neat folded paper. I took it and read the handwriting; it was a list of houses and leases, of fields and shops. My eyes burned with cold anger. The woman who had lived here had written away the rest of her house like an amateur gambler throwing tokens at a board.
"You almost gave everything away to them," I said softly. "To whom?"
Calder's smile widened. "To my father. Ford Bryant says it only evens things out. Your lands would still be safe."
"Safe for whom?" I asked.
"Your children will be cared for," Calder said.
He meant his father. He meant himself.
I let him squirm. There was a brittle pleasure in watching greedy men feel small. "Kennedy," I called to the maid by the door. The kitchen girl—so alert when the house needed obedience—came quickly. "Buy two boxes of chestnut pastries from Zhou's. Hot. Bring them now."
Calder blinked. "Madam, Zhou's is far—"
"Your legs work," I said. "You fetching pastries or stuffing them in your pockets along with the deeds?"
He backed away like a man accused of theft. The room filled with people whispering. Byron Xu, my son—only fourteen, wild-eyed and thin—sat beside his stepmother, Juliette Silva, who held herself like porcelain. Celia Romano, my eldest daughter, pressed her mouth together and watched me like an enemy I had not yet recognized.
"Don't be loud," Celia hissed once I ordered Calder to go. "We don't need a scene."
"We do," I said. "We need honesty."
She flinched. The house had been run on fear: fear to me, and appetite toward those outside. The old woman—the original holder of this title—had been cruel, but her cruelty had a pattern, a predictability I could use. I would keep the pattern, for now. I had to.
A half-hour later, Calder returned, smelling faintly of straw and embarrassment, holding two steaming boxes and wearing the same arrogant smile. He attempted to set them before me with ceremony.
"You fetch and make the tea," I said. "You will serve me with the same courtesy you would serve to a guest from the court."
He bowed like a puppet and moved clumsily. The pastries were warm and smelling like sugar and chestnut. I tasted one and let a small smile leak out.
"Byron," I said. "Do you like them?"
Byron nodded, cheeks reddening. "Yes, Mother."
"I am your mother," I said, and the room sit up straighter. "Not 'Madam' for strangers. Not 'Old' as a club. We will call ourselves proper names. Also—"
I paused and deliberately let the memory of the paper burn cold in my chest. "Celia. Come here."
She came close but refused to meet my eyes. She had parasite patience—bred by fear. I reached into the pocket of my shifting skirt and pulled out the deed I had taken from Calder earlier.
"Do you remember this?" I asked.
She didn't answer. Her fingers twitched like someone deciding whether to accept poison.
"This was written by the woman I replaced." I tapped the paper. "She wanted to waste everything on her relatives. I will not let that happen."
Celia's hands shook as she took the paper. "We thought it would be safer—" she started, then stopped.
"Safer for whom?" I pressed.
"For us," Byron blurted. "For our future—"
"For their pocketbooks," I corrected. "Not anymore."
That night I slept well. I had decided to use the old woman's name to my advantage, but on my terms. I would keep the house together, and I would likewise keep my children from being sold like jars of pickles.
A week passed, and I learned the rules of this household like studying an old, important text. There were ledgers, and a man named Booker Pierce who kept them; he was honest enough to make me feel like I could breathe.
"Booker," I said one morning, looking over the dim ink of the accounts. "How much cash do we have?"
Booker hesitated. "Five thousand silver."
My mouth fell open. "Five thousand? Not ten, not twenty? This can't be."
Erick Faure, the steward—smooth, oily, used to slipping coins into his own pockets—appeared at that.
"No, this can't," Erick said with practiced mildness. "But you know, ma'am, there have been many expenses."
"Explain them," I said.
He offered a litany of small thefts, expensive purchases, and 'discretionary' gifts. Ford Bryant—the man everyone called 'uncle' with a smile—had married his son Calder into a relationship with our house, and the house had been sucked dry.
"I will check the warehouses myself," I said. "Booker, provide me the keys. Erick, you will help."
Erick bowed too low. "Of course," he said. I suspected his bow hid claws.
I learned quickly that kindness could be a spear. I cultivated it. I smiled more than that old woman ever had, and the effect was immediate: people relaxed around me. I let Celia sleep in her room again. I replaced Juliette's gray skirt with a soft pink.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked, eyes shining.
"Because I have learned that people who are gentle keep gentleness," I said. "And because you are part of my circle now."
She leaned forward, a small trust like a bud.
Days later, a horse-drawn carriage arrived. A tall woman in red sat in the front, commanding and furious, with a retinue that made the curtains whisper. Angela Ellis—if the voice I heard at the gate was hers—had come to our courtyard with a demand.
"You stole from my house!" the woman in red said the moment she saw me. Her face was sharp.
"Do not be hasty," I answered. "Sit down."
Her eyes narrowed. "Your daughter borrowed something my family treasures and never returned it."
Celia's face collapsed. She had not lied to me; she had indeed taken something, a rare seedling from the Shen family garden—the kind of thing people fought duels over.
"I did not steal anything," Celia said, suddenly quieter than a mouse. "I only took it to make you better."
"You stole from my father," Angela snapped. "You will repay."
"I will repay," I said. I had no intention of letting Celia rot in a cell. "Give me three days to fix this, and if I fail—"
"You have three days," Angela said, folding her hands like a trap. "If you fail, I'll take both of you to the magistrate."
"I will succeed," I promised out loud, though inside my palms leaked a cold sweat.
That night, I wrote a letter and slid it through a servant's hand to Matteo Blanc, the man who had been connected to the Shen family but who had known little of the deception. He was a quiet man, and I trusted words to him like I trusted a scalpel.
The next day I sat in a tea room with Matteo Blanc, and I made a plan. "You gave a fake seedling to Celia," I said.
"She wanted it for a cure," Matteo replied with a bitter smile. "But the medicine had been doctored."
"Who doctored it?"
He looked away. "My cousin. He may have given something false for profit."
"Then find us the real seedling," I said. "And bring me the man who sold the fake."
He rose. "I will bring them."
Three days later, on a crowded street, crowds gathered as news traveled. Angela Ellis, proud and furious, came back with more people. The Shen family carriage stood like a black flower against the gray sky. My house was at stake in the open air like a fish on a chopping block. This was the moment.
"Bring her out," Angela ordered.
"Bring who?" Calder sneered, as if the very street belonged to him. Ford Bryant stood close by with an insolent look.
"Your niece?" someone jeered. "Your debtor? Your junior?"
Calder was all bluster until a messenger walked up and handed me a cloth-wrapped package. "Jane," he said, "this came from Matteo."
I unwrapped it. Inside lay a pale, perfect blossom of a plant, dried and preserved like a miracle. The Shen lady's escorts froze.
"Is that it?" Angela breathed. "The true seedling?"
I nodded. "This is the true item," I said.
Her face softened with triumph then sharpened with anger. "If you lied, you will pay."
"I will not lie." I stepped forward. "Calder, Ford—step here."
They hesitated. The crowd edged closer.
"Tell them how you took my house to sell things," I said to the crowd. "Tell them how the accounts were cleaned, how our silver was bled away."
Calder tried to laugh. "You can't prove—"
"Booker?" I called. Booker Pierce, the ledger-keeper, came up, the weight of honesty in his shoulders. "Read."
Booker opened the ledger. "This line shows cash transfers to Ford Bryant's silk adverts," he said plainly. "This line shows funds moved to a private ledger under Erick Faure's signature."
A ripple of shock moved through the crowd. People pulled out phones—no, not phones; they pulled out little notebooks, whispered to each other, lifted murmurs into a storm.
"You!" an old shopkeeper shouted. "You greedy dogs!"
Ford's face drained. Calder's smile fell apart.
"Hold," Calder stammered. "This— this was done with her permission. Old Madam signed—"
"You stole while she slept," I said. "You folded her signature into a paper that promised her kin the lands, and you underwrote your own gilded lives with our name."
He laughed at first—an ugly bark. Then Booker read out line after line of ledgers where payments were made for items that never arrived, bridesmaid gifts that read like bribes, 'loans' to relatives with interest already assigned.
The crowd swelled. Voices rose. A merchant began to clap. "Shame!" he cried. "Shame on them!"
"What proof do you have?" Ford protested. "You can't accuse us like this!"
"Proof?" a woman called. "Look at their hands! See that one? He keeps his fingers stained with our silver!" She held up a scrap of paper as if it were a banner.
Calder's bravado crumpled. "You can't— you can't do this to us—"
"You did it to our house," I said, quieter. "You took our future and ate it."
He stepped toward me. For a heartbeat everyone thought he might strike. Then he staggered back as if the thought had reached him only now.
"You're not my judge," he said, voice soft as a begging bowl. "We are family. Can't you see that I meant—"
"Meant to steal?" I asked. "Meant to plunder? Meant to kneel on the bones of my children?"
The crowd hissed. Phones—small glass tablets—pulsed as strangers recorded. A woman whispered loudly, "Put it online," and hands began to move. People laughed, then cried. Officers of the magistrate, drawn by the noise, peered through the crowd.
Calder's face shifted from arrogance to fright to denial and then to pleading in a breathless cascade. "No! I didn't mean— I didn't—"
People around him began to shout, "Kneel!" The call spread like wildfire. Calder dropped to his knees in the street, his silk clothes gathering dust. His father, Ford Bryant, watched for a beat like a man watching a stove flame gutter.
"No," Ford said. "Not here. You have no right—"
"It was your greed," a neighbor cried. "You sold off our heritage!"
Calder's top lip trembled. "Please— I will give back everything. I swear—"
"Swear?" Someone in the crowd barked out a laugh that was cruel and baptized in long resentment. "Swear on what? On your ledger of theft?"
People were taking pictures now. A ring of merchants had formed. "Shame to you," a woman repeated. "Shame to you and your house."
Calder's eyes darted to the magistrate's officers. They were listening. Their faces were neutral. They would not act without proof—no, they would act if the tide turned. And the tide was turning.
He stood up suddenly, face contorted as if the last courage burst from him. "There were reasons—"
"Confess," I said. "Tell them how you used our name."
He faltered. For a second he considered lying. Then his shoulders collapsed as truth poured out because everyone was watching, and the crowd fed on the truth like hungry birds on grain.
"I took money for my debts," he said. "I signed papers for my father, who told me it was temporary. I thought the old woman would not live—"
"That she would be this strong?" someone muttered. Someone else spat. A child laughed.
Calder's voice went high. "Please— please forgive me. I'll return it. I'll kneel. Anything."
He sank to his knees in the middle of the street. Tears tracked down his cheeks like merciless rain.
"Beg," someone in the crowd ordered.
He put his forehead on the stones. "Please— please."
Ford watched, white-faced, trying to pull his son up by the collar. "Get up! Get up! This is undignified!"
But the crowd had already decided the punishment.
"Take him to the magistrate," a voice called. "Let him explain himself."
"No," I said. The sound of my own voice had the kind of finality I had been searching for. I stepped forward and raised the deed in my hand. "No magistrate. He will sign one last paper of restitution here, in front of everyone, and swear by the ledger to give it back. And he will never come within this house again."
Calder looked at me and then at the watching faces. His hands trembled as he took up a brush. He fumbled with the inkwell as if the act would burn him.
"Write it," Ford urged, voice broken and thin.
Calder scrawled. The servants leaned forward to see the words that would bind him. The merchant's phone screens reflected his shaking hand.
"Do you consent?" I asked.
"Yes," he whispered.
"Then as a first step," I said, "you will draft the paper. You will make a public promise: to restore what you took. You will take responsibility for this theft and you will kneel tonight in the market and ask those you wronged to accept. You will never show your face in this house again without my permission."
He put his head down and sobbed like a man who had been ringed in a trap too late to crawl out.
The public watched. Some clapped in satisfaction. Others shook their heads. A few wept for the old house, for the ease with which greed ate families. Cameras recorded Calder's begging. He had been strutting and had fallen. The cameras made him fall again, repeatedly.
"Good," I said. "Booker, record this. Erick, make sure the money comes back. Ford—" I turned to the father, who now had ash in his eyes, "—you will be watched."
Ford's jaw dropped. He tried to say something, but there was no voice that could change what had already been done. He sank slowly to a knee in the shadow of his son, not yet begging, not yet defeated, but undone.
The crowd dispersed with murmurs. I stood in the middle of the small square like a woman newly given a territory. Calder's denial had cracked into confession. His arrogance had collapsed into a spectacle of shame recorded by a thousand tiny mirrors. The sun hit the jade Buddha I had later placed on the hall table, and it threw back a green light that looked like mercy.
"Tonight," I told the house, voice steady, "we dine quietly. Tomorrow, the accounts will open and every cent will be traced. The pawned items will be reclaimed. We will clean the ledger ourselves."
That night, while the house buzzed and murmured, I sat in my chamber and listened to Byron's quiet breathing. Celia came and stood at the doorway.
"You'll really make them return everything?" she asked.
"I will," I promised. "And then we'll choose who to keep near us."
Celia's relief broke into tears. "You mean it. You mean it."
"I do." I smiled. It felt honest.
In the weeks that followed, I changed the house slowly. I replaced fear with small mercies. I sat with Byron while he tried calligraphy. I let Juliette choose the embroidery for a new gown. I apprenticed myself to the medicine chest and studied again like the young woman I had once been, to blend modern tactics with old herbs. Word spread that the old madam had turned into something else—someone who could be smiled at but would bite if crossed.
There was the matter of Matteo Blanc and the tenuous friendship with Angela Ellis. The Shen family came to like us after we returned the real item and cleared a man's name that had been falsely accused. Driscoll Abe—the wandering doctor the city called 'the eccentric healer'—asked questions there were no books for. He became a friend in that quiet way doctors are when they measure out truth.
At the academy, there was a boy who pushed Byron down and told him he had no right to study. I went to the school myself and found the boy—the sort who thought he could bully a household into silence. He had been taught to trample on the weak. On the courtyard, with parents around, I did a thing that surprised even me: I held the boy's wrist and told him aloud what he'd done. He scoffed. Then a passing noble—Cedar Hart, the prince who had been seen in the city—stopped silent and asked to see. He found the boy had been lying.
"You don't have to be brave when you have power," I told the boy. "But you do have to be human."
He was stunned that someone would speak such a thing in front of a prince. The prince looked at me like a man who had found a strange map to follow later.
The bully's punishment was not violent; it was public removal. The child had to apologize in front of everyone and clean the courtyard for a month. The boy's father wrote a check and kept his son from the academy until he learned manners. It wasn't as graphic as Calder's fall, but it was right for a small thing—a lesson rather than a crushing.
Spring turned into the bold colors of festivals. I traveled to the markets with Juliette and bought a small blue box and a green jade Buddha that had been an old family trinket. I placed it in the parlor for Byron to see when the world threatened him. I kept a white porcelain bottle of medicine on my bedside table—three doses ready for the day someone needed them.
Weeks later, when the city whispered about me, a nobleman in fine linen—Matteo—ordered tea in my sitting room. Driscoll Abe came to see a patient here and stayed for supper. Angela Ellis and I sat on the veranda and laughed until tears came. Calder traced every movement I made with bitter eyes. He had his restitution paper and had signed it with hands that still shook. He had to watch me keep my word and make the house whole again. His collapse in public had turned him from a predator into a man with shame to carry.
"Jane," Celia said one dawn as we watched the mist curl over the gardens, "you changed everything."
"I only remembered I'm allowed to," I said. "Once you wake up in someone else's life, you either play the part they left to ruin, or you play it the way you should have. I chose the latter."
Byron came up on the porch with a wooden toy horse. "Mother," he said, in the voice he had as a child, "does the world always get better?"
"Not always," I said, and kissed his hair. "But sometimes it hurtles toward fair. And when it does, we must be ready."
A month later, at a public tea festival, Calder's name was still a cautionary tale. He kept his head down. Ford Bryant avoided our courtyard like a man with a fever. The cameras had kept the memory alive—he would not easily find an audience for his lies anymore.
I kept a jade Buddha on the parlor table. It winked at me in the sun. The porcelain bottle of medicine sat in my chest of herbs.
On the day I found a small folded note in the ledger—the old woman's handwriting, a tiny apology and a puzzle piece of truth— I smiled. I had the pieces and I had the tools. I would keep my family safe and teach them how to stand.
"Jane," Celia said at last. "What will you do next?"
I turned to her, and the sunlight poured on the jade Buddha, slanting green across the table. "We will plant an herb garden," I answered. "We will brew a tea that will help a thousand people. And when anyone tries to take our home, we will remind them: you cannot rob a house of its heart without being seen."
She laughed. "That's a long plan."
"It is," I said. "But this jade Buddha knows how to keep time. It will watch us as we do it."
The jade Buddha seemed to glow. Outside, the city moved on, as it must. But in our house, the night pot had been emptied by proper hands, the chestnut pastries had been returned to their rightful owners, and the porcelain medicine bottle—my own small talisman—waited clean and ready on the shelf.
We had been given a second start. I would not waste it.
The End
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