by June Hur
“I don’t know. I woke up early to see if she had a good night’s sleep, but I could not find her anywhere, so I raised the alarm.”
“I see … And did she have any enemies?”
Her silence stretched on for too long. “I broke the rule.”
I had begun my questioning only because Inspector Han had ordered me, but now interest raced through me like fire over hot oil. Curiosity was the one thing I couldn’t resist. “The rule?”
“The rule taught to all servants.”
That I knew too well. I have a mouth, but I mustn’t speak; ears, but I mustn’t hear; eyes, but I mustn’t see.
“You heard something,” I said. “Or saw?”
“I saw. Something I shouldn’t have seen.”
“What was it?”
I waited a long time for her answer. She stared and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as she thought. “One night, without thinking, I opened my mistress’s door and looked in … there was someone else there. It was dark and I couldn’t make out the figure, but I knew it was a man. He jumped up and ran out through the back door. I was so embarrassed I ran away myself.”
“When did this happen?”
“A week ago,” she said. “And there was a letter.”
My thoughts swung around. “You read?”
“My mistress taught me.”
“And you were willing?” Not many indentured servants would be willing to learn, even if they had the opportunity. What was the point in becoming literate if the skill could never be put to use?
I studied the way she held her chin high and said, half to myself, “You don’t wish to be a servant.”
“I was satisfied with my position, but my mistress…” She hesitated again.
“You may tell me.”
“My mistress said, ‘I do not believe anyone is born to be an indentured servant. I look at you and I see a sister.’” The slightest tremor shook her lips, her eyes locked on mine. “Why are we talking of this? You came to investigate her death.”
I cleared my throat, curiosity still bubbling in my mind. A literate servant was unheard of. Even scandalous. “The letter. What did it say?”
“It was short. I remember it well.”
I waited. “So … what did it say?”
Her gaze did not waver from me, as though she’d summoned all her will not to look away. And in the steadiest voice, she recounted the words as though she’d recited it countless times. “It read, ‘Dearest, My loyalty to you is as solid as stone, and my love for you still unshakable. Never doubt it. Tonight, when it is the Hour of the Rat, come to me at our usual place.’ This is the letter she received yesterday morning before…”
In the silence, I finished her words. “Her death.”
“Yes.” She straightened her shoulders. “Please, if there is no more, I’d like to be alone.”
“I understand,” I said. Then, unable to stop myself, I asked, “What is your name?”
“Soyi,” she replied, giving me a long stare. Her eyes were like black pools that I didn’t want to look at, feeling as though something lurked beneath the stillness.
“Thank you, Soyi.” I shifted away, ready to find my way back. Yet I felt her behind me, as if we were not yet finished. I turned and asked, “Where is the letter?”
She didn’t look at me this time, speaking instead to the rain-wet ground. “The letter ended with a request. ‘Burn this.’”
* * *
Under the gathered clouds, I followed Inspector Han down the muddy street, reporting to him my interview with Maid Soyi. Or rather, not to him, but to his shoulders. They were like ancient rocks smoothed by blue silk. He was only twenty-seven years of age, yet something about his presence made him seem much older and wiser.
“And last, she shared with me a letter written to Lady O. A letter written by the lover,” I said, and recited the letter word for word. When I finished, I added, “I wondered how it was that Maid Soyi knew how to read, and she explained that Lady O had personally taught her. After that, we parted.”
“It is true, you do have a good memory,” Inspector Han said. “You will be expected to assist more often in collecting information from women.”
“Of course, sir,” I replied, barely able to contain my thrill. To be of use to a man like him! “How can you tell, sir, if someone isn’t telling you the full truth?”
“Why do you wish to know?”
“I’m curious, sir.”
“Curious.”
A single, curt word, and he said no more. His silence stretched, and a ball of nausea sank into the pit of my stomach. Do not speak to your superior without permission, Seol. How difficult is that? my sister had reprimanded me several times. I had felt the same knots of tension when in her presence; a weighty quietude packed with secret thoughts.
Our tense journey finally ended when we arrived before the Capital Police Bureau, an intimidating establishment I’d mistaken for the palace itself when I first laid eyes on it, with its elaborate pagoda gate, wooden beams painted red, and tiled rooftops.
“When you tell a lie, Damo Seol, how do you feel?” Inspector Han said unexpectedly.
It took me a moment to realize he expected a reply. “Extremely nervous, sir.” Just as I felt a moment ago.
“Anxiety is a potent trigger. It leaves clues all over you. The pattern of your speech, the color of your cheeks, the movement of your hands.”
I remembered Maid Soyi’s eyes, those black, unknowable pools. I dared myself to ask a last question. “What about the eyes, sir?”
“They break away sometimes. Hiding secrets makes an individual flighty.”
“What if they stare intensely at you in a very unusual way?”
He swung his leg over the saddle, and for a man of his height and build, he landed on the ground with the lightest crunch. “There is a special breed of liars who will lock their eyes on you. They are those who know how to manipulate and control.”
Before I could say anything more, he handed the reins over to a manservant, then strode into the bureau. I paused before it and felt myself fold up; my head lowering, my shoulders drawing in, one hand hiding under the other. I shrank into my shell every time I beheld the invisible warning on the gate: Be careful. Cross no one. Obey always.
Cautiously, I passed through the gate. Everyone was bustling about the courtyard. A servant boy with a dirty face pushed a cart, its wooden wheels whining; a line of maids passed him by, holding trays of side dishes, neatly arranged; two men appeared—Officers Goh and Kyŏn—carrying a wooden stretcher with a corpse hidden beneath a straw mat.
“Inspector Han! You have arrived!” Kyŏn said with a simpering air.
“What is it?”
“The commander wishes us to move Lady O to the examination room.”
“Do so.” Then Inspector Han looked over his shoulder. “Seol, assist them.”
I stared at the stretcher, at the sight of lifeless gray fingertips left uncovered. Keep it away from me, I wanted to say. But I kept silent before Inspector Han. His waiting gaze upon me, I wrung my hands as the odor of death reached my nose again, and at last dragged my feet forward, if only to show him my obedience.
I followed the officers into the drafty room filled with the scent of vinegar and decay. On a stand was an open book, an illustration of the human body. Next to it, a table with tools: knife, ruler, bowl, needle, a silver pin. My attention lingered on the pin. The last time I was in this room, a corpse had been brought in with witnesses claiming he’d died from drinking poison. I had watched the coroner’s assistant inserting the pin into the corpse’s mouth, then the anus. Apparently, the pin turned black in the case of poisoning.
“Servant!” Kyŏn called out. “Lift this corpse onto the table. The head needs to point south and the feet to the north.”
The moment I grabbed and lifted the stiff corpse, my skin crawled. I had carried people before, like when I’d piggybacked my friend while playing, but her weight had felt different. She
had felt alive. A corpse was nothing but a slab of meat. Death was heavier. When at last I dragged her onto the wooden table, I stepped back and waited for my stomach to settle.
“Get used to it.”
I looked over my shoulder and found that I was alone with Officer Kyŏn, the other man gone. “Neh? Get used to what, sir?” I spoke to him in honorific, using the polite form of the language, as if he were a venerable soldier. But he was a low-ranking police officer, hardly two years older than me.
“You saw all those corpses this week.” He picked the book off the stand and flipped through the pages of calligraphy and human body illustrations, stopping at the drawing of organs. “Commander Yi moved most of the corpses to another region to avoid autopsy. The rest were buried in surrounding hills, their killers acquitted or lightly punished. Do you know why?”
This was no trick question. I was always observant, watching everything from the corner of my eye. “The victims were all lowborn.”
He snapped the book shut, sending a cloud of dust into a ray of blue-gray light. “Come closer, and I’ll tell you a secret,” he said. I took a few hesitant steps toward him, and because he was taller than me, I had to tilt my head as he whispered close, “They were all Catholics.”
The hair on my neck rose. “Catholics…” I kept my voice as low as his, the word sounding too treacherous. They were followers of the Western teaching, and any teachings from the West were forbidden and could result in an execution.
“The victims were all Catholics, so no one in the bureau cared. But the killing of Lady O, now…” Officer Kyŏn shook his head, and a humorless chuckle escaped him. “You will suddenly find Inspector Han no longer so indifferent.”
I turned to Lady O, her unblinking gaze fixed upward, along with the staring hole in her face. Someone had killed her in the wide open, so close to the patrolling guards. This someone could have immediately run away to avoid any chance of capture, but instead had crouched before the corpse and had taken the time to cut off her nose. I took a step back.
I had hoped that Lady O would be the first and last murder victim I’d have to touch. But after what Kyŏn had said … Gods, would I have to handle more corpses?
TWO
THE NEXT DAY, on my errand to deliver a letter for a police clerk, I took the long way around until I found what I was looking for. It was still there, the wanted poster of Priest Zhou Wenmo pasted onto the clay wall of an inn. Straw roof thatching cast a shadow over his thin face and eyes drooped down at the corners.
Only two months ago, the drawing of him had portrayed a man with a pair of much smaller ears and a rounder face. His changing appearance was like a man’s trembling reflection on a puddle, never the same. No one knew how he truly looked, the artists who painted him guided only by floating rumors.
But his eyes had always stayed their same shape, the saddest eyes I had ever seen.
Now I could no longer look at the priest’s silent gaze without recalling the dead bodies of Catholics. Since the king’s passing, I had watched death swell and push its way through the gates of the bureau, and it had seemingly failed to shock Commander Yi. As though he had expected these killings to occur.
Two siblings starved to death, locked up in a storage hut by their own father. A drowned servant, pushed into his watery grave by his master. A missing girl, last seen collecting water from the well, only to be found lying lifeless under a thornbush, killed by her aunt. Following that, seven burned corpses piled in a cart, recovered from a hut that had burned down, right after the doors had been locked by the orders of an upper-class woman.
“To execute any person is a grave matter for the kingdom,” Commander Yi had said while interrogating the noblewoman in the police bureau. “Even if your servants were Catholic rebels, the fact that they are the ruler’s subjects should have prevented you from harming them carelessly.” Her case had moved up into the hands of the Ministry of Justice for a final appeal, yet I’d heard whispers of the already-made decision: the execution of the Catholic rebels had been necessary for the good of the kingdom.
What was it about this teaching called Catholicism that terrorized the culprits enough to kill their own servants, their own children?
After delivering the police clerk’s letter to a government office on Yukjo Street, near Gyeongbok Palace, I hurried back to the bureau to finish sweeping the main pavilion as the chief maid had instructed me. But once I retrieved my broom, I paused on the way and hid by the examination room door. I’d wanted to know more about the cause of Lady O’s death since yesterday, but police protocols and the state-mandated mourning period for the king had pushed the examination to today.
Once it seemed safe enough, I inched closer, then peered through the crack in the door, drawn to look inside by the sound of solemn voices.
I shouldn’t be here, I thought, but curiosity anchored me to the spot, as did the question: Was Lady O’s death related to the other murders? Had heresy from the West killed her too?
“The crown and the left side of the head look normal,” Damo Hyeyeon observed aloud, speaking to the men, who stood with their backs turned. She was their eyes, the only method they possessed to examine the naked victim. “There is an old scar a little behind the right side of the head, beanlike in shape…”
Hyeyeon explained every detail, however trivial, and the men trusted her observations. Unlike me, Hyeyeon and the other damos were educated girls, possessing vast medical knowledge and skills. Rigorously trained to become palace nurses, but having failed to achieve good grades, they had been demoted to the position of damo and would remain in this low position until they successfully passed the medical exam.
A harsh punishment indeed for bad grades.
But if Hyeyeon ever thought this unfair, not a ripple of irritation ever disturbed the surface of her countenance. Her cheeks hadn’t even flushed with anger when Kyŏn called her “a pretty face ruined by too-big ears.” At eighteen, she had the grace and maturity of those highly respected palace nurses who served the queen herself.
“There is a single knife wound across the throat, with no hesitation marks.” So calm was her voice, always so calm. “The nose has been cut off with a blade.” With a ruler, she measured along the wounds and offered the lacerations’ depths and widths in the measurements of ch’on and p’un.
“The knife wound was deep enough to be fatal,” the coroner’s assistant murmured.
“Based on the condition of the victim, and other factors like the rain and the late summer’s heat,” Hyeyeon explained, “Lady O’s death occurred around midnight. By morning, she would have been dead for several hours already.”
“Hmm. Then the murder occurred during the curfew hours,” the coroner’s assistant remarked, referring to the period that began an hour before midnight and ended at dawn. “Watchmen would have been patrolling nearby, yet the killer took the time to cut off her nose. Why do you think he did this, sir?”
He turned to a gigantic man standing in the room, who wore a wide-brimmed police hat that cast a deep shadow over his eyes. Only his long purple scar was visible, rippling down his red cheek, inflamed by a rash. It was Commander Yi.
“The murder was surely committed by someone with a deep grudge,” the commander said. “Let me see what it was she was clutching.”
My brows crinkled. What? She had been clutching something? I only remembered her fist, but had not looked closely.
A clerk presented Commander Yi with a wooden tray. A string the length of a man’s arm lay coiled there. As he examined it, I craned my neck to have a better look.
“One can see it was knotted,” Commander Yi said. “Inspector Han suspects it was a necklace, perhaps pulled off by the killer. I have officers searching the area for its ornament, if there was one.”
A restlessness rippled through my limbs. I wanted to run out and search for the ornament, which might identify the killer, but before curiosity could pull me away, I saw Hyeyeon spray lees and vinegar on the corpse. My lips par
ted as I watched the way the flesh reacted. Something in the substance made all the injuries more visible, making patches of purple and yellow and red blossom all over. I clutched the doorframe.
“There is a bruise around her mouth, purple in color, the shape of a hand,” Hyeyeon said.
“Someone tried to muffle her cries,” Commander Yi observed.
Since my first day at the bureau, life had turned strange. I didn’t know where I was heading, where I would end up, and I often walked around the capital without purpose. Each day ended like an unresolved case. While I could find no solution to my life, the tangle of frustration in me loosened as I watched Hyeyeon take the strangeness out of the corpse. There was a story behind every bruise and gash, evidence that—when pieced together—would surely return life back to normal.
I strained my ears, trying to better hear their low-voiced conversation. Then a flush burned up my chest and spread across my face as Hyeyeon examined the private parts. I spun around, hearing her declare, “She is not a virgin,” only to find myself standing before Inspector Han.
“What are you doing here?”
The tips of my ears burned. “I was j-just looking. Curious, sir.”
“Curiosity seems to be your perpetual state of being. Where exactly is the end of it?”
I hesitated to answer. “I never reached the end myself, sir, so I do not know.”
The slightest smile twitched at the corner of his lips. “Tell me, damo investigator, based on all that you’ve observed, what do you think led to her death?”
“I … don’t know, sir.”
He nodded. After a moment, he said, “There are usually only three causes for murder: lust, greed, or vengeance. Among these three, vengeance is the most common.”
“I never knew that,” I admitted quietly.
“No, you would not have. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was killed by her family or an intimate partner. I have worked for so long at the police bureau that I find very few things to be surprising or new.” Expelling a weary sigh, Inspector Han gestured to the door. “Announce me and go.”
