“It is a little embarrassing to name the illness outright…”

Baek Seungjo listed a number of symptoms. But they were all so vague that I could not guess what the illness might be.

Had he shown such symptoms?

It was the first I had heard of it, but then I had only known this man for two days, so there was no reason I would. I kept quiet and took small sips of the rich ssanghwatang.

“Hmm… in that case…”

The owner, who had been listening with a grave expression for some time, made a quiet suggestion.

“Would you like to try a flower?”

A flower? There was no shortage of flowers used as medicinal herbs. I had no way of knowing which flower he meant, but Baek Seungjo seemed to understand.

“I have already tried it, and it did nothing for me.”

“Then what has shown results?”

“Wild ginseng.”

At that one calm word, I nearly dropped my teacup.

Ginseng!

Going to the provincial office and pleading with the governor for a single root was one thing, but demanding ginseng from a private apothecary like this. Could his chronic ailment be madness? What else could explain such recklessness?

Ginseng was a medicinal herb under strict state monopoly, and anyone caught buying or selling it privately faced severe punishment. And yet here was a man who drew a government salary committing such a serious crime… Well, he was not an official at the moment, more of a man of leisure, but still.

The owner could not hide his flustered expression and let his words trail off.

“Oh my… that is something even I cannot…”

“My situation is desperate. What can I do when that is the only thing that works? A man must live first. I will pay whatever price you name. In fact, I will pay upfront.”

Baek Seungjo drew a pouch from inside his robe and set it on the table with a thud. The owner blinked at the heavy sound and loosened the drawstring.

Good heavens. What gleamed inside was not copper coins but silver. The owner’s narrow eyes flew open.

“As it happens, I have exactly one…”

That much wealth could make ginseng spring up from the ground even where none existed. Not that it worked that way, of course. The thought that Baek Seungjo had known from the start exactly where to find a black market for wild ginseng sent a chill down my spine.

The owner stepped out and returned a short while later carrying a wooden box. He lifted the lid to reveal a dried ginseng root wrapped neatly in hanji¹traditional Korean paper.

Baek Seungjo gave it a single look and immediately furrowed his brow, then snapped at the owner.

“You scoundrel, how dare you try to deceive me! This is cultivated ginseng.”

So it was not wild ginseng at all but farmed ginseng grown in a field. The owner stared at him in shock and asked.

“B, but how can you tell the difference?”

I was just as curious. A shriveled dried root was a shriveled dried root.

Someone like me, who had barely laid eyes on medicinal herbs, would have believed him if he handed me a dried bellflower root and called it ginseng. How could this man tell at a glance whether it had grown on a mountain or been raised by human hands?

“I have spent enough on ginseng over the years to buy several tiled-roof houses. Of course I can tell at a look.”

No wonder everything about how he had come here felt too practiced. He had done this kind of black market dealing more than a few times.

The owner scratched his head and confessed now that his scheme had been found out.

“Well, I’ll be… it was grown deep in the mountains, so once dried it looks just like the real thing. Even seasoned herb hunters get fooled… you have a supernatural eye, my lord. Ha ha…”

How could this man feel not a shred of shame after being caught trying to swindle someone? Then again, perhaps you had to be that shameless to make a living through black market dealings.

The black marketeer licked his lips as he eyed the pouch of silver he was about to lose, but in the end shook his head.

“Even so, wild ginseng is something I truly have no way of obtaining.”

“When I come back, you will have it ready.”

Even a man well fed on black market ginseng was not easy to push around. Only someone who understood the workings of this trade through and through could carry himself with such nerve.

He slid the pouch of silver across the table toward the apothecary owner.

“This is for the cultivated ginseng.”

The man who had come looking for wild ginseng was now buying the cultivated kind instead. Both the owner and I stared at Baek Seungjo in bewilderment, and he gave me a brief sideways glance.

“It may do nothing for me, but it should do something for this one.”

He intended to feed ginseng to a mere courtesan. Even cultivated ginseng was a restricted and precious commodity with a price set at whatever the seller demanded. No man anywhere in all of Joseon would feed such a thing to a courtesan, no matter how much he favored her.

I stood there dazed, on the receiving end of a generosity unlike anything I had ever seen or heard of, when Baek Seungjo picked up the wooden box with the cultivated ginseng inside and rose from his seat.

“I hope you will have wild ginseng next time.”

The owner tucked the silver away deep inside his robe without hesitation, then bowed so low his head nearly touched the ground as he saw us to the front of the shop.

“Then I shall wait for your return on the day spring rains fatten the grain, my lord.”

He was telling him to come back at Gogu²One of the 24 solar terms, falling in late April..

Only now did I understand what Baek Seungjo had in mind when he paid wild ginseng prices for cultivated ginseng. By saying he was feeding ginseng to a lowly courtesan, he had put his wealth on display. And by paying an absurdly generous sum for whatever the man first offered, he had earned the trust of a suspicious and difficult black marketeer.

Truly remarkable skill. And a sign of the times, too. How could a man who drew a government salary be so practiced at breaking the law of the land?

He was not the Seungjo I had known, and I felt disappointed, yet I could not bring myself to condemn him outright.

How grave must his illness be for him to go this far. He wanted to live, and so he had sold even his conscience as a man of the scholar class and taken the hand of a criminal.

When death closes in, things like principle and conscience tend to disappear from view. And so I also felt a pang of sorrow for him.

It was the same feeling that kept me from hating him outright, even though he had betrayed my father. He had only been trying to survive then, too.

In any case, Baek Seungjo’s wealth truly seemed to flow like a spring that never ran dry.

“Why do you go about without even a veil over your face?”

“I have none to wear.”

He clicked his tongue and took me to a silk shop. When we came out, I had a veil on my head, thin and light as mist. It was the kind of thing I had never dared to think of buying for myself.

At the next shop, he pressed several pairs of fine silk flower shoes in various colors into my arms as well.

I wanted to ask why he was buying me such things, but I held back. I did not want to be accused again of falling into delusions above my station.

Then again. A man who had reportedly drunk down the worth of several tiled-roof houses in ginseng might consider this a trifling sum, not too dear to spend on the courtesan warming his bedchamber.

The next shop Baek Seungjo led me into in silence was a jewelry shop selling ornaments. He was finally going to buy me the hairpin, the whole reason I had come out with him today.

“Welcome. What are you looking for?”

“Show me the rings.”

…Rings? Why rings?

He slipped onto my finger a jade ring the color of the crystal grapes I had tasted exactly once as a child, then on another finger he placed a silver ring painted with flowers in glazed colors.

“A perfect fit for your lovely hands.”

Once he finished selecting the rings, he bought a coral-branch norigae³A traditional Korean ornamental accessory worn on the hanbok., a trembling hairpin with golden butterflies in flight, and all manner of other ornaments, picking them up the way one picks up pebbles from the roadside.

Dressing up a courtesan, and a government courtesan at that, with such extravagance. It went beyond burdensome and edged toward frightening. I finally could not hold back and asked, bracing myself for another misunderstanding.

“My lord, why do you buy such precious things for a girl like me?”

“Buy? I am lending them to you. You must return everything when I leave.”

“……”

I could not tell if he was joking or serious. I had no idea what to make of any of this. After being dragged around by this man for the past few days with my mind working itself ragged, my head had begun to throb. From that point on, I stopped resisting and quietly accepted whatever my lord chose to lend me.

The only one who was truly delighted was the shop owner. He pounced on the opportunity like a starving beast that had spotted prey after a long winter, recommending one thing after another, until…

“My lord, does this trembling hairpin not pair beautifully with this hairpin here?”

He produced the largest and most elaborate gold hairpin in the shop. His face wore the cheerful certainty that a generous customer like this would of course buy it too.

“No, thank you.”

He refused without even looking at it.

Was even lending it too excessive? The flustered owner quickly brought out a different hairpin.

“Then what about this silver hairpin?”

“No, thank you.”

“In that case, this cloisonne hairpin…”

“That one does not suit my eye either.”

The owner showed him silver hairpins, jade hairpins, every kind of hairpin he had, and Baek Seungjo turned them all down one after another.

“There is nothing here worth buying.”

He had just pressed a box filled with every manner of gold and silver treasure into my arms, minus the hairpins, and now had the audacity to say there was nothing worth buying.

“My lord… I need a hairpin to put my hair up.”

He looked over my hair with an indifferent eye and spoke in a tone that suggested he could not understand why I was troubled.

“Use the one you have in for now.”