“How do you know she had knowledge of this?” Lady Kang asked.
“The police officers found out that the victim had been baptized by the priest himself,” I explained, and I was about to add that the police also knew Lady Kang had converted Lady O herself when it clicked.
My lips parted and shock set in. The priest had baptized Lady O, so someone must have introduced him to her, someone with authority in the Catholic community and with enough power to protect the priest. Lady Kang. It had to be her. Leader of the Heretical Virgin Troupe, and furthermore, an aristocratic lady immune to police attention. Woorim had disappeared because, as a servant living in Lady O’s household, she must have possessed valuable information about the person hidden there.
“You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.” Lady Kang watched me steadily, and I felt that she’d witnessed her secret unfold before my eyes. There was a strained caution to her voice as she said, “Seol, remain here with my daughter, and do not leave the premises. It is safer for you within.”
Sunh?i rose with her mother. “Where are you going, eomeoni?”
“We cannot lose Woorim,” she whispered.
* * *
Alone in the middle pavilion, I looked again at the crack in the screen, the hole through which I had once seen the middle-aged gentleman. I remembered his dark hair, tied back, revealing a broad face covered with small scars. It felt bizarre, knowing that in my memory was the face of Priest Zhou Wenmo, the man the entire kingdom was hunting for. As was the killer.
This could mean my death sentence.
I shifted and sat in the spot where I had last seen the priest. Cross-legged, I looked around, wondering if I could find a trace of him. A strand of hair. A shred of fabric. But all I saw was an empty cleanliness, as though Lady Kang had ordered the entire quarter to be swept and scrubbed. The priest must have been sent away to hide elsewhere, perhaps when the rumor of the anti-Catholic edict had first circulated. Where was his new hiding place?
Maybe Woorim knew the answer.
* * *
“You can sleep here tonight,” Sunh?i said. “For however long you need.”
We arrived before a humble pavilion where four screen doors lined the veranda, its tiled roof held up by beams of timbers. A fishy scent drifted around, rising from the squid left to dry on pegs hammered to the wall outside. A bamboo broom lay abandoned, resting against the stone steps. A typical quarter in which servants slept, but there were no servants occupying the space, only shadows cast by the darkened sky.
Following Sunh?i, I stepped into a room. There were two mats and a stack of folded blankets. Setting the paper lamp down, Sunh?i gestured around. “Whatever you need from outside, do tell me, and I will find a way to retrieve it for you. It will be wise of you to stay hidden.” Her eyes then landed on my cheek. “All the police officers will recognize your scar too easily.”
“Your mother once said I could burn it off,” I remarked. “I don’t intend to ever return to the police bureau.”
“For now, should you feel compelled to go beyond the mansion walls, it will be better to conceal it. I have the perfect idea for you!”
Sunh?i left the room, returning with a tray of little porcelain pots. “First you must clean your face.” Like a sister, she helped me wash the grime off, even cleaning the corners of my eyes, crusted with dried tears. She ground peach-toned powder into a thick consistency, then painted several layers over my cheek.
“There,” she said, gesturing at the little mirror propped up before me. “This will do.”
In the mirror, next to the flickering lantern, was the face of a girl unmarked, unscarred, free. But something had changed. She did not look like the Seol I knew from Inchon Prefecture; her eyes had seen too much. Death had blown out the lights, the shimmer of childhood. I had grown out of myself and into a stranger, just like my brother.
“I don’t like change,” I whispered. “I despise it.”
“Hmm?”
“I do not like change,” I repeated, forgetting momentarily our difference in status. Perhaps it was the way she was looking at me, so open and accepting, or the fact that she was touching me, adding more layers of paint onto my branding. “Change in people, in circumstances, in anything.”