Chapter 14: The First Snow

So Hee noticed that Ok-bun had been crying on the fourth morning after she learned she was carrying a child.

The girl came in with the breakfast tray as usual, just after dawn, and knelt to set out the little dishes as usual, and chattered as usual about the weather and the price of chestnuts in the palace market and the head maid’s new jacket, which was the color of a boiled shrimp and made her look like one. But her eyes were red and swollen, and her voice kept catching in odd places, and when she reached for the porridge bowl, her hands were not quite steady.

So Hee watched her for a while. She was thinking of the empty room on the morning after she’d told Lee Jun, and the veranda door she’d found standing open a crack when she came back from the stream. She was thinking of Baek’s voice in the closed room above the herb garden. Trust no one with it who doesn’t have to know.

“Ok-bun,” she said. “Come here. Sit.”

The girl froze with the bowl in her hands. “Sohun mama?”

“Sit down beside me. Please.”

Ok-bun set down the bowl and shuffled over on her knees, head bowed. So Hee reached out and took her wrist, the way she would take any patient’s, and felt the girl’s pulse leap and race beneath her fingers.

“You’ve been crying.”

“No, Sohun mama.”

“Your eyes are swollen, and your pulse is running like a frightened rabbit’s. You can’t lie to a physician about that.” So Hee kept her voice gentle. “The head maid says you asked for leave four days ago. To visit your aunt.”

Ok-bun’s face crumpled. For a terrible moment, So Hee thought she was going to confess to something.

“She’s so sick, Sohun mama,” the girl burst out instead, and began to sob. “My aunt. She’s been coughing for two months, and now she’s got a fever that won’t go away, and she can hardly breathe at night, and my uncle’s only a clerk in the household office, and no physician will come to a clerk’s house. They say they’re too busy with the ministers’ families. And she’s the only one who ever looked after me, after my mother died, and I went to see her and she didn’t even know me, she just lay there coughing, and I think she’s going to die, and I didn’t want to tell you because you’re a sohun now, and you have more important things than a clerk’s wife—”

So Hee sat very still, holding the girl’s wrist, while the child wept.

She felt the suspicion drain out of her all at once, and something hot and ashamed rushed in to fill the space it left behind. She thought of Namgok, and the lower village, and the families behind their sickness ropes whom no one from the county office would come to see. She thought of her mother walking into every one of those houses without asking anyone’s leave.

“Ok-bun,” she said. “Where does your aunt live?”

The girl looked up through her tears. “Near the Hyehwa Gate. Behind the tofu shop.”

“Then fetch my medicine box.” So Hee rose. “And tell the head maid that the sohun is going out.”

The aunt lived in two cramped rooms behind a tofu shop in the northeastern corner of the city, and she had a fever of the lungs that had settled deep into the lower right side of her chest. So Hee could hear it the moment she pressed her ear against the woman’s back, a wet, bubbling rattle beneath the ribs. She spent the afternoon there, setting needles and brewing a decoction of balloon flower root and apricot kernel over the family’s small brazier, and teaching Ok-bun’s frightened uncle how to prop his wife up with folded quilts so she could breathe more easily at night.

She went back the next day, and the day after that. On the fourth day, the fever broke. On the sixth, the aunt sat up and ate a whole bowl of rice gruel and asked who the pretty lady in the silk jacket was.

“That’s my mistress,” Ok-bun told her, beaming through fresh tears. “The sohun. The one who saved the Queen. She saved you too, Aunt.”

That evening, walking back through the palace gates in the early dusk, Ok-bun was uncharacteristically silent. When they reached the pavilion, she knelt on the veranda and bowed so low that her forehead touched the boards, and stayed there.

“Ok-bun, get up. You’ll catch cold.”

“I’ll never forget it, Sohun mama.” The girl’s voice was muffled against the wood. “Never, as long as I live. Whatever you need, whatever you ask, I’ll do it. I swear it on my mother’s grave.”

So Hee knelt and put her arms around the girl’s thin shoulders and held her, and felt a fresh wave of shame for ever having wondered.

“Then I’ll ask you for one thing,” she said quietly. “When you bring my meals, bring them yourself. Straight from the kitchen, and don’t let anyone else carry them for you. Not ever.”

Ok-bun sat up slowly. She looked at So Hee for a long moment in the dusk, her round young face very serious, and So Hee saw her glance, just once, down at the loose sash around her mistress’s waist.

“I will, Sohun mama,” the girl said. “I’ll carry them myself. Every single one.”