by June Hur
So why, in Shim’s memory, did he recall Inspector Han wearing only white?
Was it possible that Shim had only seen Inspector Han in the white robe? This meant he couldn’t account for Inspector Han’s presence at the House of Bright Flowers until dawn, long after the murder had occurred.
Then who could say Inspector Han had been present at the House just before midnight—the time of Lady O’s death? The only possible witnesses were the gisaengs, the keepers of secrets.
Blue robe. White robe.
Perhaps these letters would prove my worst fears correct. Perhaps this was why Inspector Han was so determined to collect all evidence, so that he might burn it.
“No, no,” I whispered to myself, trying to shake off the feeling that snaked around me. Suspicion. It had returned, and this time, it coiled around me in a death-tight grip. Even then, I wanted to believe, I wanted to give Inspector Han the benefit of the doubt. “Please, don’t be involved.”
My hands shaking, I skimmed through the opened letters and was bombarded by shapes I did not understand, and for the first time, I felt it deeply—the anger and frustration of not being able to read. The feeling of being kept away from the truth by an impenetrable wall called ignorance.
There was nothing I could do. For half a second, I considered setting the letters back down. I’d give them over to the inspector. He might be lying about his alibi, but surely he had his own reasons for making Officer Shim give a false testimony. I wavered, yet it was the memory of Inspector Han that held my wrist still.
The truth is far more important, he’d told me. Do not have feelings involved when investigating a crime.
I grabbed my sash belt and untied it, tugged at the collar of my uniform. A light breeze came in from the doors, which had been left open, tickling my bare collarbones as I tried to loosen my breast band, desperate to shove the letters inside. Letters that might shine a light on what Inspector Han was hiding, if he were indeed hiding anything at all. I’d find someone to read them for me.
“What are you doing?”
The letters fell from my grasp and slapped onto the floor. It was Hyeyeon, staring at me with an arched brow.
“I—I was—” I stammered, my mind racing. “A bug crept into my uniform.”
* * *
The search was completed with my discovery, and Hyeyeon declared that there was nothing else of value to the investigation to be found.
Once we were all gathered in the courtyard of Matron Kim’s mansion, Inspector Han opened the letters I’d discovered, four of them in total, positioned so that he could observe them all at once. “Three of the letters must have been written by Scholar Ahn. But this letter…” He briefly raised it up to Senior Officer Shim. “This last letter was the one Maid Soyi delivered to her mistress, which led to her death.” He studied the letter again. “The writing style is certainly different.”
As the inspector studied the letters, Hyeyeon walked forward and bowed her head. She said something to him under her breath. I couldn’t hear anything. Whatever she said made him walk slowly down the line of officers and damos. He paused before me. I stood frozen. Inspector Han sized me up for long, agonizing moments. Then he moved on.
TWELVE
BLUE ROBE, WHITE ROBE.
My great fear was that Senior Officer Shim had lied for Inspector Han. He’d told the commander that he’d been with the inspector at the House of Bright Flowers before midnight—the time when the murder had occurred. But Shim had gotten the color of the inspector’s robe wrong. This had to mean something.
Shim’s possible lie filled my thoughts as I hid by the gate the following day, observing Inspector Han in his office. All the sliding doors were open, allowing the cool summer breeze in and out of the pavilion. I stood straighter, alert, as he looped strings around his ears, which secured over his eyes a pair of circular glasses framed by wood. Spectacles. I had heard about such contraptions before but had never seen them. They made him look peculiar.
Inspector Han then laid out on his desk four crinkly pages, which he flattened out by adding a stone weight to each corner. Then he leaned forward and observed the calligraphy, studying it closely. It must have been the letters we’d found in Lady O’s chamber. Why did a frown wrinkle his brow?
Ever since the discovery of those letters, I had lost sleep wondering about them. No longer could I restrain my curiosity. I arrived by the steps that led up to the pavilion and bowed. “Excuse me, sir. But…” I reminded myself that I had the right to know. I had told Inspector Han about the Catholic connection to the murder. I had accompanied him on the journey to Mount Hwa, fighting off bandits for him. “Is it true that the last letter was not written by Scholar Ahn, but someone else?”
Silence.
I tried again, clutching my skirt, trying to hold on to my courage. “I heard that everyone’s handwriting is unique. Will you be looking for someone with a similar handwriting, sir?”
“You have no business asking.” He was still studying the letters, not bothering to give me his attention. He shifted the spectacles higher up the ridge of his aquiline nose. “For you have no business knowing.”
“But, sir—”
He removed the spectacles and stared at me with his pale, spooky eyes. “Should you continue to meddle in my investigation, it will trouble me, and should I be troubled, you will get hurt. Your family would not wish that.”
Surprise tightened my chest. I remembered Hyeyong whispering something to him. Perhaps she had told him that I’d tried to steal the letters …
“In fact, from what I have managed to quickly gather, your sister has no children, but one night she had a dream that she would have a son in the new year. If I want, I could learn far more about your sister—her weaknesses and fears, her darkest secrets. I am sure she would not wish this.”
Everything in me went still and silent. For a moment, I couldn’t even blink. “How do you know this?”
“I have people in different parts of the kingdom. Their business is to do my bidding.” With unnerving calm, he rolled up his sleeve and reached for a calligraphy brush, which he then examined with the keenness of a soldier admiring a sharpened blade. “Everything has a consequence. With a stroke of this brush, I can determine your fate. But it is up to you to decide what I shall write.”
Even when faced by suspicious evidence that pointed an ugly finger at Inspector Han, I had fought my way to maintain my loyalty. I had always tried to understand him. Yet how quickly, how easily, his own suspicion frosted over his trust in me.
I wanted to charge up the steps and slap the brush out of his grasp. Maybe grab him by the collars and shake him until every crooked secret fell out of him—
Then I saw it. A smooth, pinkish scar covering the side of his lower right arm.
“You are dismissed,” Inspector Han said, but the sight of the wound pinned me down as a memory drew so near, almost graspable. As I turned and walked toward the gate, I couldn’t stop frowning, the sensation still there. Beneath the murky waters of my present, a memory waited for me, its silver scales rippling, so close to my reach.
For a moment, I almost managed to forget the terror Inspector Han’s threat had sent into my soul. The cost of curiosity would be not only my own life, but the lives of my family, and the little one that would one day grow in my sister’s belly.
* * *
Later that day, rain rushed into the capital in a black cloud, pounding and drumming on the earth and rooftops, but it left almost as soon as it had arrived. It had been a sonagi, a quick shower. Silence returned to the servants’ quarter, the stillness occasionally broken by a raindrop falling from the eaves. Silence, spack. More silence, spack.
“Hyeyeon has been watching you like a hawk,” Aejung said when we were alone. “What happened yesterday at Lady O’s mansion?”
The memory of Inspector Han stayed with me, a chill that bit deep into the bone. Yet my calm pretense surprised me. I continued to work on the police robe in my hands, pu
lling the thread in and out to mend a tear. My fingers were trembling, though. “I’m not certain myself.”
“Inspector Han has changed too. The way he looks at you … it sends a chill of fear through me.”
“He does not like anyone,” I snapped. “That is why they call him Gosan, lone mountain—”
The needle pricked my finger, and the sudden pain startled a gasp from me. A crimson dewdrop formed. Sucking the blood away, I returned my attention to the torn fabric and said, “Inspector Han confides in no one else but Senior Officer Shim.” I held myself back from adding, Shim, the alibi, the maybe-liar. “I wonder … how did Inspector Han and Shim become as close as brothers, despite their difference in status?”
Aejung, sitting before a low-legged table, ground a stick of ink into an inkstone. She paused, glancing at the screened door. “Do not tell anyone I told you this.”
I laid the needle and thread down. “I promise.” My voice sounded strangled, tension knotting my throat.
She returned to grinding the ink and said, “An uncle on his father’s side tried to kill Inspector Han. The uncle had returned from exile, formerly condemned for a crime associated with the inspector’s father. I hear the uncle lost everything: family, wealth, status. His mansion was burned down, too. So out of this long-held grudge, he attacked the inspector, but Shim protected him.”
“That was why Inspector Han recruited Shim despite his seoja status?”
“I believe so, even though it went against regulations. Inspector Han is someone who will move heaven and earth for those loyal to him.”
Except me. The thought came at me like a bitter stab. He had not tried to rescue my life from the bandit’s dagger.
“No one knows much about Shim, and he does not talk about his past at all,” Aejung added. “I did hear rumors, though, that Shim’s hometown is a village called Myeonmok, wherever that is.”
Pushing down my bitterness, I maintained enough calm to ask, “How do you know all this?”
Aejung added water to the crushed ink, then spread out a sheet of paper on the table; she was always writing home to her family in the late afternoon. I had never felt the urge to ask someone to teach me how to read and write until yesterday, when I’d held the unreadable letters in my hands.
“I overheard Officer Kyŏn talk about it a year ago,” Aejung explained. “He seemed to have a keen interest in Inspector Han’s life, including those close to him like Officer Shim. And what I didn’t learn from Kyŏn, I learned from local gossip.”
She rolled her sleeves up to her elbow, her wrists moving with grace as she wrote.
I couldn’t look away, and neither could I breathe, seeing a movement almost identical to that of earlier, when Inspector Han had rolled up his sleeve to write, exposing a part of his history. The side of his right arm, a burn from long ago, as though he had once tried blocking himself from scalding hot liquid.
Something in my mind clicked. I saw myself, a young girl, peering in through the cracks of our hut. Older Sister was hissing, “Go to the capital then, that place of terror. We are not family. We are finished.” Her cruel hands tore our genealogy book, the history of our family. My brother slapped her face, shocking them both. But Sister was too proud and no one had dared hit her before, so she hurled at him words of hate, as well as a pot filled with boiling tea. He had tried blocking it with his arm.
The memory disappeared in a few seconds. And those seconds left me drenched in cold sweat.
“Are you not feeling well?” came Aejung’s voice. “You look ill.”
I looked up at Aejung. She was watching me, her hand still holding the calligraphy brush. Desperation ravaged me. I had to write to Older Sister, demand answers from her. She had withheld too many secrets from me.
Who is our brother? What made you scared?
I moved quickly to Aejung’s side. “Is it very difficult to write?”
“No…” There was uneasiness in her voice, as though frightened by the gleam in my eyes. “It is so easy to learn that a fool can know it in a day.”
“Could you teach me how to write? Then I can write to my sister as often as I need.”
Aejung scratched a corner of her lips. “I wish I could help you … but I must study for the medical exam—”
“I’ll do your chores, as many as I can. I’ll sweep and mop, I’ll sew, I’ll do your laundry. Then you’ll have plenty of time to study!”
She hesitated, and her long silence chipped away at my longing. Not for me, the voice said as it pulled me away. Literacy is not for me. Knowledge is not for me.
I pressed my fingers against my eyes until I saw stars. What madness had drifted into me? Was I truly suspecting that the blood flowing through Inspector Han flowed through me as well? I needed only approach the inspector to confirm that I was sick. Only a sick person would dare assume blood connection.
Whatever Aejung saw when she looked my way compelled her to change her mind. “Even if the chief maid asks me to bring water from the well,” she said gently, as one would to a wounded bird, “you will go for me?”
I did not have the strength to answer, too stunned by the workings of my mind.
“Come, sit closer.” With a sigh, she took out another fresh sheet of paper. “This is how I was taught when I was a girl.” With long strokes, she drew a large square, dividing it into columns and rows, and in the boxes she drew shapes. I took this all in with a stare filled with tears, my mind still whirring.
“Fourteen consonant letters are on the vertical side; ten vowel letters are on the horizontal side. One must assemble the two together to create a word.” She dipped the brush into the ink and dragged it across the paper, another black stroke across white. “And when you write, every brushstroke must be decisive, with no going back.”
“It is like life,” I said under my breath, as a warning prickle ran down my spine. “There is no going back.”
* * *
The other damos were asleep by nightfall. I crept out of the servants’ quarter, holding my breath. I dared not wake anyone. No one could know where I was going. The House of Bright Flowers, the place this entire investigation had circled back to yet again.
Once outside, I inspected the inside of my sleeve. It was still there, a blank paper folded into an envelope, which Aejung had given me to write home to my sister. Instead, I would find a servant at the House to bring me to Madam Yeonok and say that Inspector Han had sent me to personally deliver a letter to her. But hopefully, instead of her, I would be guided to her maid, from whom I might collect secrets more easily.
There is no going back, I reminded myself as I strode out of the police bureau. My heart pounded loud in my ears and my dress clung to my perspiring body as I passed by patrolmen prowling two by two, unmindful of the women who wandered the streets with their paper lanterns. For women were not considered threats to the capital, as men were, when darkness fell.
And I was a girl, and thus harmless in the eyes of the patrolmen.
Gods. They had no idea what I was about to do.
My sweat felt like ice water, the weather having cooled considerably. My limbs trembled by the time I crossed the stone bridge over the trickling Cheonggye Stream, closer to the wild and windy desolation of Mount Nam.
And yet the memory of Older Brother’s radiant smile burned. The brightness of his memory chased after me like a ghost in flames as I ran down the muddy path, shadows of grass and trees swaying. Field crickets chirped and leaves rustled, and soon, the nocturnal hum gave way to woodwinds whining over the beating of a drum and the rumbling of laughter.
I saw the House of Bright Flowers. Its roof, illuminated by hundreds of hanging lanterns, rose into a peak, then curved into flared eaves, in harmony with the rolling slopes of Mount Nam in the background.
I repeated the words, gathering every ounce of courage in me, “There is no going back.”
A true police officer would have come to this place determined to find evidence that would bring down the inspect
or, determined that an inspector who blackmailed truth seekers into silence ought to be brought down. Yet it was not so with me.
The desperate roots crawling through my soul longed for something more than justice. I wanted to know who Inspector Han was. And his story crouched hidden in the House of Bright Flowers, perhaps a story of anger accumulated over a decade. Or a perverse hunger that would reveal many dark deeds strung throughout his past. Or something about his family—who they were, where they lived, and why no one had mentioned their existence.
Wiping the sweat from my face, I walked along the wall, then stopped at the side gate. A maid entered through it, balancing buckets of water on a shoulder pole. I clutched my lantern tighter and followed her into the servants’ courtyard.
Large brown pots lined the wall, filled with soy sauce, soybean paste, and pickles. Servants strode in and out of the kitchen, from which steam drifted, oiled with the scent of pork boiling in ginger and other herbs. Within, maids cut vegetables into piles of colorful slices—carrots, spinach, eggplants, cucumber, radishes, clumps of garlic cloves. Straw baskets lay piled with fried scallion and zucchini patties.
“Are you lost?”
I whirled to see a maid with graying hair along her temples, perhaps a senior-ranking servant. With tight lips, she held my gaze, and I could sense her refusing to look at the mark on my cheek. It often made other servants uncomfortable, reminding them we were property.
“My master sent me with a letter,” I said. “I’m not sure where to go.”
“Who are you looking for?”
“Madam Yeonok,” I said. “But I realize now she must be occupied. Her maid will do.”
She nodded. “Leave your lantern.”
I was ushered into a large courtyard, crowded with men and women garbed in brightly colored dresses and robes, shimmering fabric and sweeping curves. Everyone looked in one direction. I followed their gaze toward a gisaeng sprawled at the center of the courtyard, her skirt hiked up, baring her white undergarment. I glanced at the old servant, wondering if such disorder was a usual occurrence here at the House.