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Seven Years Married. A Six-Year-Old Secret
Novelix
Completed
For seven years, I believed my husband Adrian, the crown prince, loved me enough to give up having children. He'd defied his father to marry me and promised I was the only family he needed. Then I discovered his six-year-old son—and the woman he'd kept hidden in another house. She was pregnant again. The royal family knew; I was the last to learn. Adrian expected me to accept a schedule in which he divided his time between us, as though half a husband were a gift. Instead, I asked to end our marriage. He never imagined I'd choose myself over the crown.
Chapters (3)
第1章
My husband had a six-year-old son.
For seven years, he had let me believe he didn't want children.
The boy's name was Tomas. His mother lived in a house outside the capital, where the Crown Prince of Aveland spent the nights he told me he was sleeping at the royal palace. She was pregnant again. The queen had sent her a nurse, two maids, and a physician who'd never once been too busy to attend her.
I learned those details in pieces. A household payment entered under the wrong name. A carriage journey a groom couldn't explain. Then a letter from the nurse, thanking the palace for supplies.
I'd read it three times before I sent for Adrian.
Now he stood by the drawing-room fire, waiting for me to finish being upset.
My parents had arrived an hour earlier. They sat on the other side of the room, dressed as carefully as if we'd invited them for dinner.
“He's the heir to the throne, Elinor,” my mother said. “What did you think would happen? The royal line has to continue.”
“He told the king he didn't need a child.”
“He was young.”
My father looked at Adrian and then at the carpet. He was one of the king's most trusted ministers. I'd spent my whole life hearing how much his opinion mattered.
Tonight, he seemed to have none.
“Seven years,” my mother continued. “You have been the only lady of this house for seven years. Many wives would consider themselves fortunate.”
I looked at the man I'd married.
Adrian was thirty. I'd known his face when it was all elbows, freckles, and badly concealed schemes to get out of lessons. At twenty-three, he'd come home from war and married me. I'd thought I would get to know every version of him.
This one wouldn't look at me.
“The boy can live here,” I said at last. “He can be educated here and provided for. But she doesn't move into my home.”
It was a bargain I didn't want. I offered it because some frightened part of me still thought there must be a version of this in which I didn't lose everything at once.
Adrian turned from the fire.
“You'd take a child from his mother?”
I stared at him.
“I'm asking you not to bring your mistress into my house.”
“Mira has spent years making no demands.”
“While I didn't know she existed.”
“She is the mother of my son. I won't have her treated as something shameful.”
He walked toward the door. As he passed me, he unfastened the little greenstone clasp at his collar and set it on the table.
Two swallows, carved facing each other. He'd made the first rough cuts himself before taking it to a jeweler. I'd worn its matching piece under my gowns for ten years.
It made almost no sound when he put it down.
“If you can't accept her here, I'll spend the first half of each month at the other house,” he said. “The second half, I'll come home. That ought to satisfy everyone.”
He looked at me as though he'd solved something difficult.
I looked at the clasp.
“No,” I said. “It won't.”
第2章
Adrian stopped with his hand on the door.
“What do you want, then?”
My mother's fingers tightened around her handkerchief.
I had spent the whole evening trying to find a price I could bear to pay for keeping my marriage. He'd offered me half a husband and expected thanks.
There was nothing left to bargain over.
“A dissolution,” I said. “I want to end the marriage.”
The drawing room became very quiet.
Adrian turned toward me fully.
“Do you know what you're saying?”
“Yes.”
“You're the Crown Princess.”
“I'm aware.”
“I've kept this household for you alone. No other woman has had a place here. For seven years, Elinor. Haven't I given you enough?”
I heard a maid draw in a breath by the wall. My mother shut her eyes.
“You have another household,” I said. “Apparently the distinction matters a great deal to you.”
“Because I need an heir.”
“Then you should have told me the truth before you married me.”
His face reddened.
“You couldn't have given me one.”
I'd been a sickly child. There had been whole winters when a walk in the garden left me coughing for the rest of the day. At nineteen, physicians had warned my parents that pregnancy might put me in danger.
Adrian had heard them. He'd been there when I asked whether he still wanted to marry me.
He'd said there was no one else.
By our first anniversary, the physicians thought my health had improved enough to discuss the risks again. I'd asked him to. He'd said there was no reason to revisit a promise he'd made for my sake.
“You said you could live without children,” I reminded him.
“And I have kept you from having to risk your life. You think that means nothing?”
“It means you found a way to do what you wanted and call it kindness to me.”
“Mira is your age. She's had none of your advantages. Her brother died serving me, and she's never used that to demand a crown or a palace. She's cared for our son quietly. Now you want to drag him away from her because you can't tolerate the fact that somebody else could give me what you couldn't.”
My mother began, “Adrian—”
He looked at her. She stopped.
He wasn't arguing about what he'd done. He was describing the person he needed me to be so he wouldn't have to regret it.
“I won't take her child,” I said. “Keep them together. I'll leave.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Why?”
He had no answer ready.
The anger shifted, just for a moment. He looked at my hands, locked together in my lap, and his expression softened.
“Ellie,” he said. “You're cold.”
He used to notice that before I did. In drafty rooms, he'd take my hand and tuck it under his arm, talking all the while so nobody would notice why he was standing close.
I didn't let him touch me now.
“It's better this way,” he said, more gently. “Father and Mother have stopped asking things of you. There's already a child. You don't have to be frightened anymore.”
I looked past him at my parents.
Neither of them said that I might be frightened of him.
“Did the queen know from the beginning?” I asked.
His silence told me enough.
第3章
He left me sitting by the fire.
My parents stayed long enough to tell me not to make a decision in anger. Then my father said he would speak to Adrian when things were calmer, and my mother kissed my cheek as if I were ill.
I didn't ask them to stay.
In the morning, I went to the library Adrian had built for me.
The shelves reached higher than I could climb without a ladder. There were travel accounts from the northern kingdoms, books on gardening, and a whole shelf of household law. He'd said that if I couldn't go everywhere I wanted, he'd bring the world to me.
I had thought it was a loving thing to say.
That morning, I found a book with a specimen marriage release in the back.
I carried it to the reading table and sat beside the window where we'd spent our first married winter making plans.
We'd been so certain those plans belonged to both of us.
Before the war, Adrian had asked the king for permission to marry me. The physicians' reports were discussed in council as if I were a damaged horse somebody had unwisely offered to buy.
Adrian stood in front of the ministers and said he'd have no children of his own if that was what marriage to me required. There were other branches of the royal family. A cousin could follow him. He wanted me.
The king had him punished for that defiance. It was weeks before he could stand straight without pain.
At the time, I thought no one could doubt a love that had cost him so much.
When the border war worsened, he asked for a command. He was twenty. I was nineteen.
He came to my parents' house the night before he left and climbed through the side window because my mother thought a proper farewell would be easier if we had an audience.
He brought the two greenstone swallows.
“Three years, if it takes three years,” he told me. “Will you wait?”
I took the piece he offered.
“If you come home.”
“I'll come home.”
He did. He brought back a signed peace and the king's permission to marry.
I was twenty-two when I stood beside him in the royal chapel. Afterward, in our rooms, I asked him again about children.
“I made a promise,” he said. “Don't make yourself sick worrying that I'll change my mind.”
The queen welcomed me warmly after that. She never asked about a grandchild. I thought he'd persuaded her.
Now I knew she'd been expecting one from someone else soon enough.
I looked down at the book. The ink had blurred where my sleeve rested against the page. I hadn't realized I was crying.
Our marriage had been made under Aveland's civil charter as well as blessed in the chapel. It could be dissolved. A mutual release had to be entered at Chancery; a royal marriage also needed the sovereign's seal. Without agreement, there was a longer petition and a hearing before the crown's justices.
It wasn't a promise that leaving would be easy. It was proof that wanting to leave wasn't madness.
I called Nora, my maid, and asked her to bring fresh paper.
“What shall I tell His Highness?” she asked.
“Nothing yet.”
I copied the form, slowly enough to keep my handwriting steady. When it asked for the names of the parties, I wrote mine first.
