The wick had burned all the way down. It was just after dawn, so I didn’t want to stumble out of my chamber and disturb the entire household in search of another candle. My five-year-old brother Dae-hyeon was likely fast asleep, and as for Mother … Well, I always avoided her, reluctant to witness her tense stillness as she waited for Father. He rarely visited, preferring to split his time between his wife and his new concubine. Mother was unimportant to him.
Quietly moving my low-legged table closer to the window, I whispered to myself my mantra: “I will never be like Mother.”
I would not love, unless I was loved first and loved the most.
I would be nothing at all, if I could not be first.
I would not sit silently wasting away as the world passed me by, like Mother. I was determined to be heard, to have my thoughts considered. So I continued to write my letter to Commander Song, black ink slithering across the skylit paper, my writing neat and small. I kept my wide sleeves rolled up so as not to leave a smear.
I was on my fourth page, testifying to Nurse Jeongsu’s kindness of character and incapacity to kill, and I found myself stepping further and further into the past. I was eight again, shivering outside the Gibang House, left there in midwinter by my mother, who believed I could have no future other than that of a gisaeng, a female entertainer. She’d told me to wait until the madam—who’d turned me down—would reconsider and take me in. But the doors to the house had remained shut, and no one had come for me, until Nurse Jeongsu had crouched before me and cupped my frozen face.
“I am an uinyeo,” were her first words to me. “You aren’t alone now.” She’d carried me all the way to the Hyeminseo.
Nurse Jeongsu had only been eighteen then.
I was eighteen now.
After pausing several times to massage the aches cramping my fingers, I finally glanced at the window to find that the sky had brightened. It was my day off today, as I only worked every other day at the palace, like many of the nurses employed there. I’d have time to watch the police interrogation that would take place today, while the testimonies were still fresh.
I took a sip of my barley tea, now cold, and wrote down the final line in my long letter to Commander Song:
If you knew her as I do, sir, you would be convinced of her innocence.
I waited for the ink to dry before folding the letter up. After quickly freshening myself and changing out of my uniform, I set off at a brisk pace. Within a half hour, I arrived before the fortress gate.
A guard inspected my identification tag as I gazed up. High above on the fortress parapet, a red-robed soldier made his rounds, and I wondered what he saw from up there, whether the kingdom appeared different after such a bloody night.
The guard returned my tag. “You may pass,” he said, a cloud of steam forming in the cold air.
I strode through the gate at once, my senses sharpened and alert. Somewhere within this place, a killer still lurked. On either side of me stretched an endless line of huts, populated by tired-faced and hungry-looking people garbed in white robes as they smoked their pipes. Children shoved me aside as they ran by. I passed women with baskets on their heads and babies wrapped across their backs, some with an older child following them, laden with bundles of straw.
“Make way!” servants announced. “Make way for my master!”
It was protocol to kowtow in the dirt to passing nobles. So I took the Pimatgol alley, a narrow path people like myself used to avoid bowing and dirtying one’s clean skirt. Once I was near the police bureau, I slipped back out onto the main road, then paused.
A crowd swarmed in front of a public wall, catching my attention. It was difficult not to notice the whispers buzzing in the air, fingers pointing at a handbill plastered there. Anonymous handbills were only pasted on public walls when the oppressed wanted a voice. When they knew that speaking openly would result in an execution.
“What does it say?” a peasant asked.
“I don’t know,” the other replied. “I cannot read.”
“None of us can read! What does it say?”
I wove through the human cluster and looked. It was written in Hanja characters, writing meant only for the highborn, for the powerful. But I knew how to read classical Chinese, and so I took a few steps closer, and froze.
The Crown Prince killed—
The crowd suddenly split. Screams and gasps erupted as flashes of black hats and black-robed figures barged in, swinging their clubs. The police had arrived. One shoved me aside so hard my teeth clacked as I slammed into the wall. Yet I felt no pain, numbed by the words I’d read, and numbed by the sight of fear lighting the eyes of the police as they tore off the handbill.
I sunk against the wall as my legs turned to water. The Crown Prince’s dark chamber flooded into my mind, a chamber that had whispered of his absence. His Highness had left the palace in secret and had returned as a witness to a massacre.
The Crown Prince killed … whom? Whom had he killed?
I rushed into the police bureau to see an empty interrogation chair placed before the pavilion. At the center of the raised wooden terrace, Commander Song was seated. He was a great, growling old man with a wispy white beard. His elbow perched on the arm of the chair, his finger tapping against his cheek. He was waiting. The crowd of spectators, circled around the interrogation chair, were all waiting.
“You look ill.”
Startled, I glanced around to meet a pair of deep-set, hooded eyes. It was Nurse Inyeong, the palace nurse I had seen at the crime scene. She was a tall and slim young woman in her mid-twenties, with a face as pale as moonlit petals, or perhaps it was the jibun powder she wore thicker than usual. But as delicate as she looked, when she pulled me aside, away from a passing police officer, I felt strength in her grip.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Since the start of the interrogation.”
“It’s already begun?”
“All the witnesses have spoken, including family members of the suspect.”
She said the last word like she also didn’t believe Nurse Jeongsu was guilty. “You think my mentor is innocent?” I asked hesitantly.
“Your mentor?” She let out a breath, then shook her head. “I was a witness. I was the one who reported the crime scene.”
My brows shot up. “What happened?”
“It’s a long story,” she murmured. “Before curfew lifted, I realized my drunkard father was missing and went to fetch him from the gambling den he frequents. I didn’t want him to gamble away what little he has, as he is always prone to doing. But these days with the ongoing famine—” She shook her head. “I fetched him, and he was angry, so he walked off on his own. That’s when I saw her—Court Lady Ahnbi, running down the street. She looked terrified, constantly glancing over her shoulder and not stopping to ask the patrolmen for help.”
“And then she ended up dead,” I said, half to myself. “I suppose the police know that she was a court lady, and not a mere palace servant?”
“Yes, I told them so…” Her voice trailed off, as did the focus of her gaze, like she was looking back on the pre-dawn hours. “I followed Court Lady Ahnbi, as I knew it was forbidden for her to be wandering outside the palace walls. But then I lost her, and I searched for a short while before deciding to head home again. Which was when I heard a woman scream.”
Inyeong let out a shuddering breath. “It was quiet by the time I arrived. The gate was open, so I looked in. That was when I saw—” She looked about to faint as she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. “I have never seen anything so horrific in my life.”
Right then, the crowd burst into a frenzy of whispers. I followed their stares, and my gaze locked on to Nurse Jeongsu being pulled into view, no longer in her uinyeo uniform but in a plain white dress. Curls of snowflakes fell as quietly as her footsteps. Time slowed as I tried to recognize the woman who had mentored me for half my life, the woman whom I so looked up to. When I was a child, she had reminded me of a fairy maiden who had descended from the clouds—her face luminous as the moon, her eyes as bright as the stars on a cloudless night. But today she looked withdrawn and withered.
Tension gathered in the air, pressing against us, as everyone seemed to wait with bated breath. Two floggers stood on either side of her, thick wooden clubs held at the ready as she was tied to the interrogation chair.
I wanted to close my eyes. Police torture was notorious—so notorious that even King Yeongjo was always advocating to prevent the reckless beating done by police officials. His Majesty had tried to limit flogging to thirty strikes, and torture could not be repeated within three days. But it was common knowledge among us lowborns that the police did not follow His Majesty’s commands, and often beat suspects to death.
Please, I prayed to the heavens, protect Nurse Jeongsu.
“A little before curfew lifted, in the pre-dawn hours,” Commander Song’s voice rumbled from the raised terrace, “different witnesses claim to have heard screams coming from the Hyeminseo. The mothers of two of the murdered victims claim their daughters had left early to receive extra lessons from Head Nurse Heejin, who was also found dead.”
He turned now to Nurse Jeongsu. “You say that you, too, had gone to the Hyeminseo to assist with their studies?”
“Yeh,” Nurse Jeongsu replied, her voice strained. “That is so.”
“At what time?”
“We often open the Hyeminseo doors to student nurses an hour before curfew lifts.”
“So at four in the morning, during the Hour of the Tiger?”
“Yeh.”
“Then why is it that three neighbors claim to have seen you leave home at midnight and never return? Where did you go?”
Nurse Jeongsu stalled, her face pale. “It is no crime for a woman to be out late at night.”
It was true. Women were permitted to roam the streets during the curfew hours; only men were forbidden, for men were considered a danger to the capital at night. She had done nothing wrong.
“I repeat my question,” Commander Song said, his voice clipped. “Where were you between midnight and when you claim to have gone to the Hyeminseo, at four in the morning?”
She hesitated again, and this time for far too long. “I … I went for a walk.”
“For four entire hours?”
“I had much weighing on my mind, sir.”
The commander’s elbow remained on the arm of his chair, his finger still tapping his cheek. “Perhaps you spent those four hours planning the murder. Perhaps you met with your partner in crime, who was to assist with the massacre.”
“You have an abundance of imagination, sir, to believe this.” Her voice wavered, and I wasn’t sure whether it was from outrage or terror. “But I have no motive—”
“You were covered in blood when we found you,” Commander Song said. “Your hands were soaked red. If you are innocent, then tell me: Do you have an alibi that might confirm your testimony at any point during midnight to four in the morning?”
Her red-rimmed focus never wavered from the ground. “I do not.”
Nurse Jeongsu, I silently begged my teacher, defend yourself!
“I had no reason to kill the student nurses,” her voice rasped. “I was good friends with the head nurse. And as for the young court lady, I’ve never seen her in my life.”
“You are a liar, Nurse Jeongsu,” Commander Song snarled. “You are hiding something from the police. You claim to have fallen asleep, yet how does one remain asleep when witnesses from all corners of the capital heard the screams?”
A murmur of agreeing whispers rippled through the crowd around me.
“Officers collected evidence on scene, and one thing they found was a yakjakdu.” The commander gestured, and a clerk stepped forward, holding out a long, straight blade with a wooden handle—an herb cutter broken off from the cutting board, covered in blood.
“You could not have possibly killed those four women alone. And someone must have helped you lure that eighteen-year-old court lady out of the palace,” Commander Song continued. “Who was it? Who assisted you?”
Nurse Jeongsu clenched her teeth, a muscle working in her jaw. “I did not—” Her voice broke, as did my heart. “I harmed no one.”
Commander Song leaned forward, his hands on his knees, as though he were peering down at a little girl. “In a few days, if you continue to not cooperate, I will have the floggers beat you until you can no longer stand, until your bones splinter into pieces.” He added, softly, “You will speak then. The rogues brought before me always speak in the end. But it is up to you, how you tell the truth. Will it be by your own free will? Or through torture?”
“What is the point in speaking?” she snapped, at last raising her chin, her eyes as sharp as blades. This was my mentor. “I suspect you will not permit me to live long.” Fear flickered in her eyes and shook her voice, yet her hands, which were tied behind the chair, gripped into determined fists. “If I shall be remembered for anything, I long to be remembered for this. For this,” she repeated, her voice strangled.
What was she referring to? I had so many questions, yet Commander Song dismissed her with a sharp wave of his hand. “Get her out of my sight!”
Once the interrogation ended, I slipped into the servants’ courtyard and looked for a familiar face, someone trustworthy, whom I could task with the delivery of my letter to Commander Song. I initially looked for the police servant, describing him to others as “the young man with glowering brows who dresses like a peasant,” but after the strange looks I received while inquiring after him, I instead turned my attention to the damo stepping out of the kitchen. Her name was Sulbi; she was a student I had studied with at the Hyeminseo, and like all damos, she was here because she had failed her tests three times.
“Sulbi-yah,” I called out.
She turned, a strand of hair dipping across her ghostly face. “Hyeon-ah,” she said, blinking at me, seemingly dazed. “I can’t believe I had to lock Nurse Jeongsu in a cell. Nurse Jeongsu, of all the people.”
A burning ache tightened in my chest. “Do you think she is innocent?”
“I do,” she whispered. “We know her. She wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“That is my precise thought—”
“I am worried for her, though, Hyeon-ah. The commander has a personal grudge against Nurse Jeongsu.”
My stomach sunk. “What do you mean?”
“Many years ago, Nurse Jeongsu failed to save his wife and son during labor. He’s never forgiven her for that. He has especially not forgiven her for attempting to deliver an infant into the world with so little experience.”
“But we all begin with little experience,” I said.
Sulbi nibbled on her lower lip, then shook her head. “She lied to the commander that she was more skilled than she was. She wanted to prove herself to her peers.”
“But this was murder,” I breathed. “Surely the commander wouldn’t let personal feelings get in the way? He couldn’t possibly want the real killer on the loose.”
“Or perhaps he does.”
My brows knotted. “Why would he want that?”
Sulbi wiped her damp forehead, then glanced around. “Don’t tell anyone I told you this. Will you swear it? I trust you; I’ve always wanted to be your friend, knowing how … how perfect you are in all things,” she whispered, leaving me shifting awkwardly on my feet. “You never make mistakes.”
That was my life’s goal, to never err. My life had been a mistake—born a girl, and on the wrong side of wedlock. I had no room to make more errors.
“An anonymous handbill was put up all over the capital,” she said. My brows lifted, the memory of the crowd and the police flickering awake. “It claims the Crown Prince killed the women at the Hyeminseo.”
I held in a gasp, barely keeping my face composed.
“This cannot be true, of course,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Most outside the palace do not even know what the prince looks like. So how could he be recognized?”
But Court Lady Ahnbi, a palace woman, died in the Hyeminseo, I thought. Her death, surely, would leave a trail of blood leading into the palace somehow.
“Someone is trying to stir up a conspiracy, I’m sure.” Sulbi nodded, sounding convinced by her own words. “That is how it always is in the capital. Someone is always trying to bring someone else down. Maybe it’s a rival from the Old Doctrine faction. Besides, the prince is not permitted to leave the palace alone. It is forbidden, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I whispered, lowering my gaze to hide what I knew: The prince had indeed been missing from the palace on the night of the massacre.
I pressed my fingers into my eyes and let out a quiet breath, trying to ease the growing sense of foreboding. The Hyeminseo massacre now carried with it the sickly scent of a terrible royal scandal, one that would easily sweep Nurse Jeongsu to her death. I shook myself out of the unease and handed my letter to Sulbi. “Please, do me a favor and deliver this to Commander Song—”
“Baek-hyeon.” An icy, terribly familiar voice slid up behind me. “Deliver what?”
Sulbi’s eyes widened with panic—the same panic I felt—and when she bowed low and rushed off, I wished I could disappear with her, too. I did not need to look to know whose shadow it was stretching over me. My father, the person whom I was forbidden from actually calling “father.” In our kingdom, illegitimates belonged to the mother, not the man who had sired them.
“Lord Shin,” I whispered, slowly turning.
My father was garbed in a silk robe of deep crimson, his head crowned in a tiered gauze hat. It oughtn’t to have surprised me, seeing him here; he served in the Ministry of Justice—it was his duty to ensure that justice was properly administered.
Bowing low, I remained frozen.
“I saw you sneaking off, and so I followed you.” His voice drifted down to me, cool and edged with a hint of curiosity. “What are you doing here, so far from the crowd?”
“I…” My mind scrambled for the right answer. “I was searching for a servant to deliver a letter to Commander Song. I wish to assist Nurse Jeongsu,” I said, hoping to present myself as a loyal student. “She is innocent, my lord. I know it. If the commander truly knew her character, he would not—”
Father’s outstretched hand appeared in my periphery. “Give it to me,” he said quietly. When I did, his hand and the letter disappeared, and I listened to my heart pounding in my chest.
The morning chill crept into my bones as he perused my writing, and I dared not move. I was too afraid to even blink. Father frightened me more than a tiger. A tiger might eat me, but Father could crush my very soul.
And it had been five years since I’d last spoken with him.
I had spent those years catching glimpses of him around the capital; he, always on horseback or carried around on a sedan chair as his servants called out for us to make way for Lord Shin. Peasants would bow to him on the streets, including myself, mud flicking onto me in his passing. And it was fathers like him that ruled this kingdom. Men like him determined who was worthy and who was not.
At last, Father returned the letter to me. I waited, holding my breath. Did he approve of my words?
“This is not evidence.” His words pierced me. “The commander will only be persuaded by evidence, and what you have written is an abundance of emotions, crude and unintelligent.”
Gripping the letter tight, I wanted to rip it apart, to make it disappear from Father’s sight.
“There are far more important things for you to focus on,” he said. “I hear you’ve become a palace nurse.”
Beating down the hurt from my voice, I managed to say, “I have, my lord.”
“I will play your father this one moment, then, and give you a word of advice.” A breeze stirred his robe, red silk billowing around his leather boots. “Stop worrying about Nurse Jeongsu’s fate. She is not your mother. She is not your sister. You are not responsible for her life.”
I kept my stare pinned to the ground, my heart bruised and my stomach knotting at his words.
“You are a vulgar commoner, but have become a palace nurse. It is a golden opportunity for you, a one in a thousand chance. Do not let yourself be distracted. Do not meddle in police affairs. If you do, it will endanger your future.”
“Yeh,” I whispered.
Father turned to leave, and then paused. He gathered his hands behind his back, and I could sense his frowning gaze peering down at me. “Promise me you’ll keep your head low. Let the commander do his job, and know that there is nothing you—a mere girl—can do to assist him.”
I remained bowing until Father left. As soon as he was out of sight, I coolly tore the letter up and threw the shreds on the ground.
I had ached to be faultless before Father, a yearning that had driven me to look at young nobles as my competitors. It was why I had studied all the required books. In fact, if I’d been born a boy, I could have passed the civil service exam with ease. The Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects, and Mencius. I still tried to memorize those texts whenever I had spare time, to fill my mind with the knowledge that filled theirs, to be as like them as I possibly could.
To be a girl worthy of Father’s attention.
But today, I’d shown him only how inadequate I still was. This is not evidence, he’d said.
Then what was?
I didn’t intend to find the killer; all I wanted was enough proof to steer Commander Song’s wrath away from my mentor. And I would show Father that I was capable. I could not wait for love and acknowledgment to come embrace me. I had to go find it myself, to earn it through hard work.
I rested my hand on the side of the gate, looking around as I wondered where the prison block was, the shadowy place into which Nurse Jeongsu had been dragged. She knew something, that was for certain. But whatever the truth was, she was willing to die to keep it hidden. Hidden, perhaps, even from me.