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 learned whether she lived or died. I did hear that the Heretical Virgin Troupe she’d led had all been decapitated, beaten to