The silence that followed unpacked the sharpness I’d felt, unfolding before me something I must have forgotten, which returned to me now. I remembered finding a wild dog too wounded to run away from us, and later Older Sister fighting with Brother, telling him we needed meat for the winter. He had kept refusing to stoop so low.
My sister had pretended to back down, and without him knowing, she dragged the wild beast to the backyard. The creature whimpered, as though sensing its end, right before Older Sister knocked it unconscious. She used a large blade to make an incision along its jaw, severing arteries and veins, cutting across the throat, until I heard the blade scrape its spine. The still-pumping heart squirted blood all over the snow, and I made sure to crouch far away while watching the blood drain.
“How could you…,” a voice had said behind me. I looked over my shoulder, and there he stood, my brother, frozen and staring at us.
“Orabeoni!” I’d called out, clueless, and as though my voice had broken the spell, he turned and stumbled away. At the back of the hut, I later found him curled up into a ball, breathing hard and sweating like he’d run for a hundred li in distance. His fingers had frightened me the most, all cramped up.
Several more incidents came to mind. Times when I had found my brother crippled by fear after a bloody incident, of which there had been many while living on the unforgiving island of Heuksan. Blood made him panic, the death of women made him faint. And now Officer Shim had confessed that the inspector also feared these things, after keeping this truth a secret for so many years.
“Officer Shim confessed all this?” I shook my head. “His loyalty to Inspector Han was unshakable. What made him confess now?”
“He learned of how you’d attacked Inspector Han and of your accusation that he had abducted Maid Woorim. This news weakened him, and then Officer Ky?n confronted him and told him that Commander Yi had summoned Madam Yeonok and a maid named Misu to the police court. Shim realized that he had been blinded by loyalty.”
“So Shim too will be under arrest,” I said.
A pause, and Lady Kang murmured, “That is what I found odd.” She paced around before us, concern knitting her brows. “Councillor Ch’oi joined in and convinced Commander Yi to show Officer Shim leniency. Shim will be spared punishment if he is able to use Inspector Han’s investigation to capture the priest. For everyone knows that there is no one more capable of finding the priest than Han, and if not Han, better to make use of his closest ally.”
“What…?” Confusion whirred in my head. “Commander Yi would never overlook an offense of that magnitude. It makes no sense.”
“You do not understand the turmoil our kingdom is in.” Lady Kang moved to sit down on the veranda. “Already there is word about a Silk Letter.”
I waited for an explanation, but she kept silent. Sunh?i stepped closer and whispered to me, “It is rumored that this letter will be smuggled to China, demanding military help to protect us … Catholics … from being murdered by the queen regent. But, mind you,” she quickly added, “we think this Silk Letter is dangerous.”
Military intervention. Did this mean the West would invade Joseon? All this caused by a priest who was spreading heretical teaching. I touched my forehead, feeling feverish. I had followed the thread connecting Lady O’s death to Priest Zhou Wenmo, and never would I have thought it’d lead me into a web of conspiracy and rebellion among heretics, as well as to so much suffering. I remembered that Inspector Han’s father had been beheaded, his corpse later laid out in the open. A father bewitched by the priest’s teaching.
This priest had wrecked so much.
How often, I wondered, had Inspector Han woken at night with unthinkable memories alive in his mind? Was he so wrong in wanting the priest dead? All because of him I had lost my home and family, and I could not even mourn my loss, for I had been deprived of everything at so young an age.
“Priest Zhou Wenmo is a troublesome man,” I said, words I knew I ought not to say aloud, yet they brimmed over. “So troublesome.”
Lady Kang looked at me. “You think you know about the priest, when in fact, you know naught at all,” she