by June Hur
I looked over my shoulder, and it took seconds before I mustered up enough courage to lower my eyes. Inspector Han’s gaze stared out like windows opened onto a dark and empty expanse.
I fell onto my knees and dragged my fingers across the floor until I touched the tips of his. Cold and still.
The outside wind burst into the office as the physician, along with Commander Yi, rushed in. There was no more space for me now to remain. Through the blurring of my vision, I turned to look at Inspector Han one last time and I smiled—twisted and crooked, but a smile all the same.
His little sister, Jeong Jeong-yun, had been loyal to him in the end.
TWENTY-THREE
FIVE MONTHS HAD gone by.
I could still remember the way Inspector Han had said those two words to me: Tomorrow, Seol. His tone had reminded me of a near-ripe persimmon, bitter and yet slightly sweet. Had I known that he would pass away before sending me home to Inchon, perhaps I would have encouraged him to speak more during our time in Mount Yongma—about our history together. Perhaps I would have been less afraid of what he might have said. Less afraid to know him.
“The inspector’s request to send you home was granted,” Ryun had explained to me, after telling me to pack my belongings. “The days will grow dark here—men, women, and children will run to the mountains during the Catholic purge. And the inspector knew that you have sympathy for those rogues. He didn’t have the heart for you to remain, Seol.”
Winter in Inchon was freezing when it came, the scent of snow and pine carried always in the wind. The snow fell until we were knee-deep.
Then the sun melted it away and I saw sprouts of withered green grass. The spring rain drizzled, the dried plants soaking it up. The pathway outside our hut was muddy now. Sandals squished. Carts got trapped. Oxen loaded with brushwood slogged heavily by, their hooves splattering muck from rain puddles. Nothing like the sound I would have woken up to in the great capital.
Life here in the province was slower, one of labor and tranquility. The work was toilsome, for I worked in the rice paddy with Older Sister and her husband, our backs bent and aching from planting seeds. And yet I was ever surrounded by the azure water flooding the paddy, the bright sun winking in the sky.
These calm days sedated my grief. And never did my soul shudder before the sight of murder victims.
On days when there was little to do, I kept my mind occupied by practicing my writing and reading, or visiting the stream where women rolled and beat their laundry. There, I would sit with my friends on a rock and dip a finger into the chilly flow and listen to the daily gossip.
This is the life I wanted, I told myself every day. I ought to be thankful.
And yet I missed the capital, something I was ashamed to confess to Older Sister. She would have shaken her head, saying, “Not even a year ago you tried running away and ended up with that terrifying mark on your cheek. Now you wish to go back?”
I missed the capital, the center of power, where the people were organized like the land, with its high mountains and low valleys, never a dull day when the air was tense with conspiracy. There in Hanyang, I had been more than an ordinary girl. The capital made me brave and useful.
But more than anything, I missed it because it was where Inspector Han had once been, and where the others I’d come to care for dwelled. Lady Kang and her daughter. Woorim. Madam Song. Even the lying Maid Soyi. What were they up to now?
* * *
More and more these days, my mind and my limbs groaned with restlessness.
I rose early one day, earlier than even the farmers, and made my way through the silent, dawn-lit paths up to Mount Gyeyang. I collected wood for fire; a reason to venture out alone. The repetitive motion of reaching and loading the birchwood onto the wooden A-frame was a peaceful distraction.
That night, I wandered off again to collect some more wood, returning home only when it was late and my tired limbs were trembling. I arrived at the hut only to discover that Older Sister was not sleeping, but sewing by candlelight. Waiting for me.
“You’re home,” was all she said.
Home. Yes, this was home. Pressing my fingers into my eyelids, I told myself this must stop. This restlessness. If I could not be happy, then for my sister’s sake, I ought at least to be content. But I could not stop hearing Inspector Han’s voice in my head.
You can be anything you want.
* * *
“Did you hear what Merchant Hong said?” my sister’s husband, Mr. Palbok, sat on the veranda of our hut, puffing on his tobacco pipe. He blew out a cloud of smoke that was hurled backward in the spring wind. His head turned sideways, just enough for me to see the irises of his eyes, ever watchful of my sister’s fragile mood. “A new edict has been passed by Queen Regent Jeongsun.”
I paused in my sewing and shifted my gaze to my sister. She sat cross-legged on a mat, rubbing her large stomach. She was seven months pregnant. “I heard,” she said.
“Catholics are being arrested, one after another,” he continued, shaking his head. “Commander Yi used torture to make the Catholics confess the whereabouts of the priest. Had Inspector Han lived, he would have led this purge.”
I knew why Mr. Palbok was telling her about this. He thought it abnormal, as did I, that Older Sister had stopped asking about Inspector Han. On the first day of my return to Inchon, I had explained the entire story about Inspector Han to her, our blood ties to him, his death. She had asked so many questions, her eyes wide and bright, but when she’d learned that before his passing, he had refused to visit home, her mouth had clamped shut.
“The inspector’s dream was to find the priest,” I whispered. “But perhaps it is better that he is not found.”
“He has been found,” Mr. Palbok said.
A heavy weight dropped down into my stomach.
“Apparently the priest was hiding in the Defunct Palace. The two banished royals, Princess Song and Princess Sin, converted to Catholicism long ago and chose to be his last guardians. But the police took their palace maid and interrogated her until she confessed. I hear Priest Zhou Wenmo could have escaped again, but he knew the Catholics were being killed because of him, so he surrendered himself to the police bureau.”
Older Sister sighed, then muttered, “It was our brother’s dream to kill the priest? When did he become so ambitious and hard-hearted?” She rubbed her belly in wide circles, as though trying to warm the child curled within her. “Father always told him, ‘We must not harm others, or we will harm ourselves.’ And this I do know—our brother wasted away in the capital.”
A few days after learning about the priest’s capture, I learned that he had been put to death and not deported. The queen regent had changed her mind—inspired by cunning advice to disguise the priest’s death as an “accident.” Her Majesty had therefore sent a special envoy to China to present evidence to the Chinese court, a statement claiming that the Joseon authorities had not known Priest Zhou Wenmo was Chinese at the time of his execution, for he looked like a Joseon person, dressed like a Joseon person, and had spoken the Joseon language.
His death was all anyone talked about. I learned by listening to them that his execution had taken place outside the West Gate at Saenamteo, near the Han River. People had struggled to watch the beheading due to the heavy rain shower, but they had clearly heard his voice. It was said that before his execution, he’d said, “The only reason I came to Joseon, despite dangers I may face at the border, was because I love the Joseon people. The teaching of Jesus is not evil. But I no longer wish to do harm to the people or the kingdom of Joseon.”
I had seen his face before, so clear before my mind’s eye now, the little scars marking his tanned face, his hair tied back into a queue. And now as I repeated in my mind what he had said to the crowd, I imagined I heard his voice waver, as though he were about to weep. It was strange how sadness reached so deeply into my chest for a man I had never spoken to.
As for Lady Kang, I’d never lear
ned whether she lived or died. I did hear that the Heretical Virgin Troupe she’d led had all been decapitated, beaten to death in prison, strangled, or poisoned for refusing to apostatize. A part of me hoped that she had fled her mansion to the mountains and was hiding somewhere safely.
But I knew she was gone. She was no coward.
* * *
I decided to write to Aejung one day, asking about how her life fared in the police bureau, and if she’d learned anything new about Inspector Han after his passing. Every day afterward I took to the habit of sliding open the screen door, peering past the brushwood gate surrounding our hut and out at the road. I waited to see dust rise into the air. I waited to see a messenger approaching with a letter addressed to me. But whenever the dust rose, only a farmer with his oxcart passed by, or a group of middle-aged women came to gossip with Older Sister. Soon, dried leaves blew into the yard, and no matter how often I’d sweep them out, they would return in piles.
Mid-autumn, five months after I’d written to Aejung, I paced around the veranda, my socks quieting my steps as I piggybacked my sleeping nephew in a wraparound blanket. I’d promised to watch him while Sister and her husband went to sell vegetables in the village. Then I heard hoofbeats pounding on the hard road. A sound rare to hear in the province, for only nobles could afford horses, and there were not too many nobles in these parts.
I shaded my eyes and saw a young man garbed in a white tunic and trousers, strands of his black hair flying over his sunburnt face. The horse came to a prancing halt a few feet away from me, startling me to take a few steps back. My nephew awoke, his piercing cry sharp in my ears, and yet I was too stunned at the sight of Ryun to notice.
“It’s been a long time,” Ryun said, leaping down from his horse. “You look the same.”
I observed the young man before me, and as he swept his hair aside, I noticed his drawn cheeks and the shadows beneath his eyes. “You look beat up.”
“Heh.” He walked past me, and as he tethered the reins to a nearby tree, I told him I would return shortly.
Hurrying off to the kitchen, my nephew still bawling in my ears, I pulled down an earthenware jar from the shelf, then poured rice wine into a bowl. I brought it out on a tray to find Ryun pacing the yard, kicking the ground now and then. He stopped when he saw me.
“Thank you,” he said, and gulped down the drink in two swallows.
I waited for him to pull out a letter.
“What have you been up to?” he asked instead, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve.
“I help around the home and take care of my nephew.”
“That is all you have been doing these past months?”
“I help in other ways.”
Ryun placed his hands on either side of his waist as he looked around, his gaze taking in the mountain burnished gold, the blue sky above. “A very tranquil life you seem to be living here.”
“Tranquil enough.”
“Dull?”
I kept quiet.
“Do you have a sweetheart?”
I scrunched my face, confused and wary. “No.”
“Your sister has her husband, and now a son, too. You have no sweetheart. You’re not much needed here, it seems. There’s nothing holding you down. Commander Yi wishes you to return to work at the police bureau. He came and asked me specifically, as he knows we are acquainted.”
“Me? He wishes for my return?”
“Well, he cannot demand it of you. His respect for Inspector Han is too deep to do so. He is aware of your blood ties to the inspector.”
“But why does he want me back?”
“He has lost most of the capable damos. Hyeyeon and a few others passed the medical exam and have become palace nurses again.”
I bit my lower lip as I rocked my nephew back and forth on my back. To say that I had not thought of returning to the capital would have been a lie, and now the idea of chasing after another mystery skipped in my pulse. But that skipping beat slowed and turned into a heavy weight, remembering that Inspector Han was gone.
“It will be different. A new inspector, a new case,” Ryun said. “Inspector Han told the commander that detectives are born, not made. A good detective is one who is inquisitive and full of fight, which you are—he said so, these precise words. This is the main reason why Commander Yi wishes for your return, though he seemed reluctant to admit it. No military official will openly admit that they need the help of a girl.”
I almost smiled, but it was difficult to feel complete joy these days. “A new inspector…”
“Yes, a new one.” Ryun swallowed hard and a shade of gloom passed over his countenance. “Sometimes I forget that Inspector Han is really gone. But he is, Seol. And he would have wanted you to move on. Don’t look back for him too long.”
* * *
I lived a walkable distance to the sea.
I inched cautiously alongside the edge of a cliff, the sea spray soaking my face and ragged dress, until I found the trail that descended all the way down. The pebbles crunched beneath my steps as I landed on the shore, and I stumbled across and crawled onto the rocks that reached far into the waters. I stretched out my arms on either side of me, and after a few cautious steps, my balance grew steadier. The mist lifted and I stood before the sea, which lapped against the rock where starfish and clams clung. A black crab skittered by.
I unclenched my fist and stared at the crumpled letter in my hand. Ryun had given me a black-lacquered document box, the one I’d seen before in Inspector Han’s office. “My master must have felt vulnerable,” Ryun had explained when I’d asked him why the inspector hadn’t given the box to me himself, for he’d had the chance to do so. “The letters within, they are his heart, and he has never been good at sharing his innermost being.”
I had brought with me the most recent page Inspector Han had left behind. As I stared at it, I wondered if my memories of the capital were all a dream. I wondered if I had ever known the inspector, or if I had even found the haunted mansion where our history had met in the form of an old pine tree bent into the shape of a river.
I waited. It took a while for him to appear in my mind, and when he did, I saw his long and thin face, his high nose, his brown eyes that were filled with light. What were his eyes seeing and witnessing now?
I looked out at the expanse and knew where he had gone.
He had sunk into the sea of rebirth, into the rushing of ten thousand rivers. Closing my eyes, I prayed to the heavens that in his next life, orabeoni would be surrounded by people whose hearts brimmed with kindness. And I would brim with kindness to those around me, because my brother could be anywhere. His life could be hidden in the form of a child, an ant, or a blind turtle adrift in the waters.
Perhaps, if I listened closely, I might even hear his heartbeat come from the depth of the sea.
TWENTY-FOUR
INSPECTOR HAN’S LAST LETTER TO THE DEAD
The great rainy season continues. I traveled through the mire and went to Inchon Prefecture to speak with Older Sister, to see where you had grown up, but I turned back at the gate of her hut, deciding that I could not face our past. You want and need from me what I do not know how to provide. I can do so through my imagination by writing this letter to you, but not in person. I would not know how to be the brother you long for.
I turned to travel back to the capital, where I am wanted. On the way, I looked to the east, and can you imagine what I saw, Little Sister? I saw the memory of you during our journey to Suwon, laughing and shaking as you rode through the overflowing grassland. I was glad to see you so amused and grateful to see how you had grown.
Older Sister and I did not think you would live past your tenth winter. When you were a child, every time I left to collect wood, you fell ill. You were so weak and your stomach so sensitive.
It bewilders me how you returned so capable and clever. Now you are taller than most men in the bureau. Your bones still look brittle enough to break, except you know how to protect
others. It is hard to believe, but you are not a child anymore. You grew up and now you are strong without me.
Perhaps much later when Older Sister is sixty and you are forty-seven, we will greet each other again and our hearts will brim with fullness.
Until then, I will be on my way home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The first major persecution of Catholics in Joseon Korea was the Shinyu Bakhae of 1801, when approximately three hundred Catholics were beheaded. Thousands of others were arrested, tortured, and sent into exile.
When I first learned about this time in Korean history, there were two women who stood out to me: Queen Jeongsun, the regent with the fierceness of a general, and Lady Kang Wansuk, the noblewoman who moved beyond the domestic sphere and became a highly respected leader in a male-dominated Catholic community.
However, in order to understand these women, it’s important to know the political context of that time, which greatly shaped their lives.
In nineteenth-century Joseon Korea, there were four major factions, also referred to as the Four Colors: Southerners, Northerners, Old Doctrine, and Young Doctrine. Party affiliations were formed over generations, tied by family and teacher-disciple–based loyalty, and political power was monopolized as factions destroyed their rivals through imprisonment, exile, and even death.
During this period, the Old Doctrine was most powerful. They strongly supported the rigid, classical social structure that emphasized the importance of bloodline purity and the preservation of tradition. As a result, they were determined to prevent foreign influences from entering the royal court. In contrast, the Southerners were barely surviving and turned to new influences in their attempt to regain political power. They were therefore associated with Western ideas of philosophy, religion, and science. As Southerners brought Western teachings from China into Joseon, the Old Doctrine accordingly hardened their stance, and the contention between the two factions increased over time.
