“Councillor Ch’oi and his son have ties to Lady O’s household, do they not?”
“Oh yes,” Woorim replied. “The young master was betrothed to Lady O. That’s hardly a secret.”
“And if it were a secret,” I said slowly, “I suppose you would know it.”
A small, quick smile. “Perhaps.”
“And if you did not?”
She paused to think, then pointed down the road in the direction of Mount Inwang. “Keep walking that way until you see an inn with a red lantern. The innkeeper was once a gisaeng, a female entertainer favored by Councillor Ch’oi. Their love was the talk of Hanyang many years ago. Her name is Madam Song, and everyone calls her the storehouse of information.”
I’d seen that inn before, on the day I had run from the bureau. I’d learned from an acquaintance visiting Hanyang that Older Sister had fallen deathly ill, that her last words before passing out had been, I cannot die in peace without seeing my brother Inho. So, desperate to comfort her, I’d run and had spent an entire day traveling from shop to shop, showing people the sketch of my brother. It was by the day’s end that I’d finally reasoned that an innkeeper would know roads and towns … and where the dead were buried on the road from Inchon.
And now, in the street, the weight of my brother’s unfound grave hung around my neck. Older Sister, fortunately, had recovered and my promise to her remained. In my robe, even the folded paper bearing his sketched face felt heavy, unbearably so. I carefully withdrew it and held it out for her to see.
“You said you know many people,” I said. “Have you ever seen this person?”
Woorim puckered her lips. “The sketch is so faded I can hardly see how he looks. Don’t you have another picture of him?”
“No, this is all I have.” I looked down at the drawing of him, and I wondered if he still looked as he had more than a decade ago, when he had been only a boy with the pudginess of childhood still clinging to his face. A face as round as the glowing moon, framed by long hair tied loosely at the back, and his puffy eyes filled with a youthful innocence. “He doesn’t seem familiar at all?”
Woorim shook her head. “There are some even I do not know.”
I fell quiet. The sketch of my brother always opened me up to a world filled with echoes, like a faraway stranger calling to me from a mountaintop. I missed his stories about home, a home I had been too young to remember, a home filled with the intensity of affectionate words and the texture of comforting arms around me. Those tales had vanished and had left me feeling hollow, as though I were a wandering spirit.
“So…” Woorim’s voice filled the silence that had opened between us. “How old are you anyway?”
“Sixteen.”
“I am, too!” She grinned. “Since we’re the same age, shall we lower our words?”
To lower our words meant to speak in banmal, “half words,” rather than in formal speech.
“If you’d like,” I said.
Her smile faltered. “Seol-ah, you know that feeling you get, when your skin goes all bumpy like chicken skin, because you sense someone is watching you?”
“Eung. I know that feeling.”
“I feel watched sometimes. No, not sometimes. All the time; whenever I leave the mansion.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know, but I feel it.” Then the concern flew off her face like a flighty bird. Her lips popped into a grin. “Maybe it is a ghost!”
Our conversation ended when we arrived at the residence, a stately mansion on the far edge of the Northern District. The spark of concern I’d felt for Woorim dissipated as I followed her across the courtyard and up stone steps, then took off my sandals.
Standing close to the hanji doors, Woorim called, “Lady Kang, the damo is here to see you.”
A smooth-soft voice replied, “Send her in.”
I stepped into the guest hall, and through my lashes I observed a vast and airy chamber. Blue-gray light shone through the translucent paper panels, framed by wood and used as sliding doors and room dividers. A few steps closer, and I smelled the lady before I even saw her: the warm and sweet scent of clove buds. The scent of nobility. I didn’t look up, yet I could feel her gaze as I prostrated myself.