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, pulling 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.