Chapter 10: The Weight of a Mentor’s Concern

Senior Scholar Choi Byung-ho had been at the Hongmungwan for twenty-three years.

He had survived three kings, two purges, one period of forced retirement that he had spent writing commentary on the Book of Rites with the focused energy of a man who intended to return and did, and approximately forty-seven young scholars who had passed through the office with varying degrees of brilliance and varying degrees of judgment.

Hwang Joon-seo was, in his considered assessment, the most genuinely gifted of all of them.

Which was precisely why he closed his study door on Wednesday morning and sat down across from him with the expression of a man about to say something he would prefer not to have to say.

Joon-seo saw it coming.

He had known Choi Byung-ho for two years. He knew the closed door. He knew the specific quality of the senior scholar’s stillness when he was organizing difficult words. He folded his hands in his lap and waited with the patience Dosan had given him and said nothing.

Choi Byung-ho looked at him for a long moment.

“Lady Choi’s companion,” he said finally. “Madam Park.”

“Yes,” Joon-seo said.

“She was at Lord Bak’s garden yesterday morning.”

“Yes.”

“She has been,” Choi Byung-ho said carefully, “talking.”

“I expected she would be.”

The senior scholar looked at him with the expression of a man who had hoped for a different response and had not received one. He was sixty-one years old, broad-shouldered, with the kind of face that had started serious and deepened into gravitas over six decades without ever losing the underlying warmth. He had taken Joon-seo under his particular attention in his first month at the Hongmungwan and had not regretted it until approximately this moment.

“Joon-seo,” he said.

“Sunsaengnim.”

“The widow Im Seo-yeon.”

“Yes.”

“She is thirty-eight years old.”

“She is.”

“You are twenty-five.”

“I am aware.”

Choi Byung-ho looked at the ceiling briefly with the expression of a man requesting patience from whatever was up there and receiving an ambiguous response. He looked back at his most gifted scholar.

“She is the widow of Im Dae-jung,” he said. “A man of — complicated reputation.”

“A drunk and a womanizer,” Joon-seo said pleasantly. “Yes.”

“Joon-seo—”

“I am not insulting the dead, Sunsaengnim. I am being accurate. Lady Im spent twenty years in a household that did not deserve her. I do not think clarity about that fact dishonors anyone worth honoring.”

Choi Byung-ho was quiet for a moment.

“She has no family position to speak of,” he said. “Her late husband’s family tolerates her presence in the outer wing as a matter of form. She has no prospects, no—”

“She reads classical Chinese,” Joon-seo said. “She has the best working knowledge of the pre-Tang commentaries I have encountered in or outside the Hongmungwan. She identified a grammatical error in my Mencius commentary that I had been making for three years. She reads brushwork.” A pause. “She reads brushwork, Sunsaengnim. She looked at my annotations and told me which ones I wrote when I was tired and which ones I wrote when I was frustrated and which ones I came back to after sleeping.”