Chapter 24: I Never Loved Her

“I killed her.” 

I stand there, frozen, watching his face, watching his eyes.

"There never was an accident, she never drowned at all. We had an argument here, in the cottage. I was very angry, I pushed her, and she fell. She struck her head against the edge of the table." He points to the dust-covered table behind me. "She lay there very still. I called and called her, but she just lay very still. I did not know what to do..." His voice falters, and he passes a shaking hand over his eyes.

"So I called Woo Bin." He swallows. "He came at once. He took her pulse, and said that there was no heartbeat, and she was dead. He had come in a motorised cart. We carried her body to the cart, and Woo Bin drove the cart to the lake, and sank the body in there, where they found it the next day. There was a hole in the back of her head, where she had struck the edge of the table. He left the body under the pier, and pressed the wound in the back of her head deep into an iron hook, until the hook went in, so it would appear as though she had entangled herself in the fishing net under the pier, and embedded the back of her head in the hook."

It is very quiet in the cottage. The only sound comes from the loose wooden board that is used to bar the window on the outside, rattling a little in the wind. I stand there by Hyuk's side, his cold hand in mine  and oddly, feel nothing at all; no pain, no fear, no horror, nothing at all. I wonder idly, what time it is, whether Mrs. Kim has prepared my tea and my favourite chocolate cake, and is waiting for me to come home, and whether the gardener has trimmed the rose bush outside my window; it is getting too bushy and unruly, of late.

This then, is the memory I have of that day, that moment, when Hyuk told me that he had killed So Hyun: the sound of the wooden board rattling in the wind, the thought that Mrs. Kim was waiting with tea for me, and a mild curiosity as to whether the rose bush outside my window had been trimmed by the gardener - normal everyday things, really.

When people suffer a great shock, I believe they don't feel it at first. It takes time for the mind to process the shock, and react to it. I am surprised at my lack of distress, at my detachment from emotion. Soon, I will begin to feel again. Soon, I will feel fearful, perhaps, or hysterical. Soon, I shall understand. The jigsaw pieces of the puzzle are coming together, and soon, a pattern will emerge, and all the questions that have been plaguing me for so long will be answered. All I have to do is to be patient and wait, and soon, feeling will stir in me again. Soon, I will be able to think again. Soon, my heart will beat back to life again.

But, at this moment, right here, right now, I am nothing. I feel nothing. My heart is dead. My mind is dead. I am dead. I am not flesh and blood anymore. I am dead. I am nothing.

He begins to kiss me. He has never kissed me like this before. I stand still, and shut my eyes.

"I love you," he whispers. "I love you so much."

This is what I have longed to hear him say for so long, every day and every night, and he is saying it now, at last. This is what I imagined him saying in London, in France, in Italy, in the palace. He is saying it now.

I open my eyes and look at the little patch of sky through the open window. There's a little blot of grey on the far right. It looks as though it is going to shower soon. We had best hurry back. He goes on kissing me hungrily, desperately, murmuring my name, "Sunny," and once more, "Sunny." But the dead thing that is me, this strange wooden thing, keeps on looking at the little patch of grey in the sky, and wondering whether it is going to shower soon.

How calm I feel. Here I am, looking at the sky, and Hyuk is kissing me. For the first time ever, he is telling me that he loves me.

He stops all of a sudden, and steps back, away from  me, his hands falling to his sides.

"I was right," he says. "It's too late. You don't love me anymore. Why should you?"

At his words, I stir slowly back to life. My hands are no longer cold. They are warm, clammy.

Hyuk killed So Hyun. He killed her accidentally in the cottage in the woods. He had not meant to kill her. It was an accident. It was a of bad luck that she had fallen, and struck her head against the edge of the table. Hyuk is not a murderer. He is a good man, a kind man, a man who loves me. His close friend, Woo Bin helped him to cover up the killing. He carried her body to the lake, and left it under the wooden pier, with a rusty iron hook embedded in the back of her head.

The jigsaw pieces are fitting together. Disjointed pieces flash one by one through my mind, like moving images from a flashing projector. Hyuk sitting in the car beside me, staring ahead, his face shadowed, his eyes haunted. Hyuk's silences, Hyuk's moods. The way he never talks about So Hyun. The way he never mentions her name. His dislike of the cottage, his avoidance of it. "If you had my memories, you would not go there either." The way he strode through the trees at breakneck speed to get away from my questions, my mention of the cottage. Hyuk pacing up and down his room after So Hyun died. Up and down. Up and down. Snippets of conversation in the back room of the theatre. "They say he can't get over his wife's death." "He never talks about her." The Inauguration Ball, and I, dressed in So Hyun's red gown, looking like So Hyun, my hair piled up high, like So Hyun's, with a sprig of yellow freesias, her favourite flowers, perched on top of my hair, standing at the top of the grand staircase, like a ghost. So Hyun's ghost. Hyuk's face, a mask of white, the horror in his eyes, staring at me, the image of his dead wife, risen from her watery death, to confront her husband, the man who had killed her and snuffed out her life.

Hyuk stands, his eyes wide and staring, looking in front of him, blindly, unseeingly, remembering, re-living the horror again, over and over, again and again.

“Does anyone know, apart from Woo Bin, anyone at all?”

He shakes his head.

“No one knows, except for Woo Bin – and you.” he says.

“No one knows, except for you, me and Woo Bin?”

“No one else knows,” he says. “There was nobody there that night, but myself and Woo Bin. It was dark...”

"He stops, and sags against the wall. He puts his hands up to his forehead and covers his eyes. I put my arms around him, and hold him tight. I take his hands away from his eyes.

“I love you,” I say. “I love you. Will you believe me now?”

He kisses my face and my hands. He holds my hands very tightly, like a fearful child seeking comfort, reassurance.

“I thought I would go mad, day after day. Sitting down at the desk, replying all those letters of sympathy. All the rituals, the condolences in the papers, the discreet questions, the kindness, the pitying looks. Eating and drinking, trying to be normal, trying to be sane. My mother, my sister, my brother, the servants...keeping up an appearance, putting on a mask, day after day after day after day, so that they would never know, never suspect...”

“Woo Bin by my side, always by my side, solid, dependable, saying to me, “Why don’t you take a break, take a vacation? Get away from here, get away from it all...” So Jin, poor So Jin, tactless as always, blundering, saying to me, “You look dreadfully ill, why don’t you go to see a doctor?” I had to face all these people every day, every single day, knowing what I had done, knowing that I had killed her.”

I hold his hands very tightly. 

“I nearly told you once,” he says, “the day you went to the cottage. We were sitting in the library, and then Mrs. Kim and a palace maid came in with the tea.”

“Yes,” I say, “I remember. Why didn’t you tell me? We wasted so much time when you could have told me, all these weeks and days, all these years...”

“You were so aloof,” he says, touching my face softly. “You were always wandering off by yourself, into the gardens, the woods.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you were unhappy, bored,” he says. “I’m so much older than you. You seemed to have more to say to Woo Bin than you ever had to me. You were funny with me, awkward, shy.”

“How could I come to you knowing that you were thinking of So Hyun?” I say. “How could I ask you to love me, knowing that you love her still, that she was always in your heart?”

“What do you mean?” he says. “What are you talking about?”

“Whenever you touched me, I thought you were comparing me to So Hyun,” I say. “Whenever you looked at me, or spoke to me, or walked with me in the gardens, the woods, ate with me, slept beside me, I thought that you were saying to yourself, that you had done all of these before, all these things that you did with me, you had done with her before...”

He stares at me, and his eyes are bewildered, confused.

“That’s what I thought...” My voice trails off to silence.

“Oh God,” he says, his eyes agonized, tortured. “Is this what you thought all this time, all these years?” He draws a shuddering breath. “You thought that I loved her, that I killed her, loving her?”

His eyes are wild.

“I hated her,” he says hoarsely. “Our marriage was a sham, a mockery, from start to finish. We never loved each other. We never had one moment of happiness together. She never loved me, and I never loved her...”

“When I first set eyes on her, I thought she was the perfect woman. She was beautiful, accomplished, witty. Everyone adored her, everyone worshipped her, she thrived on their adoration, their worship, and she was kind, and sympathetic, and generous to everyone she met, it was important to her that she was loved, and admired, and worshipped by everyone that she met, that crossed her path.”

“I found out what she was like hardly a week after we were married,” he says. “I walked into her cottage to surprise her, after coming home from an official trip to Tokyo, a day earlier than I was supposed to. I pushed open the bedroom door, and she was in bed, , with a man, a stranger that I had never seen before.”

His face is white, and his eyes are bleak, remembering.

“I stood there, stunned; I could not believe my eyes. My bride of hardly a week old was in bed with another man.”

“She was very calm. She was not flustered at all. She told her lover to leave, and she dressed herself calmly, and said that we should go for a drive, and talk.”

“I drove to the rocky outcrop, where I brought you that day, before we were married. She stood there, her black hair flowing in the wind, and she said that she did not love me, she never did. She had married me because I was the Emperor of Korea, and she wanted to be the Empress. It was not me that she wanted, but power and wealth and position.”

“She said that she had lovers, more than she could count, and that the man I saw with her was nobody of significance, and was someone to pass the time. She said that one man alone would never be enough to satisfy her, and that was the truth that I had to accept.”

“She said that she would make a deal with me, that we would live as husband and wife in name only, and that, in private, we would lead separate lives. She would go her own way, and I would go mine. Neither of us would interfere in the other’s life, and in return, she would be the finest Empress of Korea that ever lived. She would bring fame and glory to the Grand Palace, and make it a splendid, incomparable icon known throughout the world. 'I'll make us the envy of every other royal couple in the world,' she said, laughing, 'I'll leave poignant traces of our love everywhere, so that one day, someone would stumble upon my little notes, wedged deep in a drawer somewhere, and weep, and sigh, over this great, wonderful, eternal love of ours.' And she threw back her head and laughed mockingly. 'You'd never find a woman who adored a man as much, or a wife who was more devoted to her husband than me, darling Hyuk,' she said, and I hated her then, I hated her, with a hot, helpless rage; a cold, impotent fury, and I wanted nothing more than for that hated, mocking, laughing face of hers out of my life: obliterated, annihilated in a swift lightning , and for my life to return to nomalcy, to the way it had been before I had met her, and married her."

“I could have killed her that day if I wanted, one push, and it’d be over, but I didn’t; I stood there and listened to what she had to say, and then I said, “Why should I make a deal with you? Why shouldn’t I divorce you, you filthy , you dirty , and throw you out of the palace and into the gutter where you belong?”

“She said, ‘It’s very simple, Hyuk darling. You won’t divorce me, because of your precious palace, and that ancient, honourable pride of yours.’ She laughed, and said softly, ‘Admit it, Hyuk. Admit it. You couldn’t bear the taint of scandal, the utter disgrace and shame and humiliation, if the story of my – dalliances gets out. Because, darling, you know, as well as I do, that the only thing you truly love is that palatial mansion of yours, and that your good name is the one thing that you revere, more than anything in your life. A scandal would destroy everything in your life: your mother, your brother, your sister, your sister’s family; it would destroy everything that your father spent his entire life building. Honour and pride are your weaknesses, darling, and for honour, and that foolish pride of yours, you would be prepared to give up everything.’ “

“And she was right. She knew that I would sacrifice everything, rather than stand before the world and announce, after a week of marriage, that my marriage had failed, and failed in such a degrading way. She knew that I could never bear the shame and the humiliation of having people point their fingers at me, whispering about me, about all the sordid little details, all the curious gawkers trooping to the palace, peering through the gates, and saying, ‘That’s where he lives, that emperor, the one whose divorce came out in the papers. His wife was sleeping with another man...’ “

“I could not bear it, the shame, the humiliation...I would not be able to live with it, to hold up my head in public anymore...that was how I felt then, at that time, and she knew me, she knew how I felt, she knew that I would agree, that we would carry on, as if nothing had happened, and it was all because of myself, my cursed pride, my public image that was so important to me...”

“But,” I whisper, “you were ready to divorce me, to let me go...”

“That was because I had changed, after I married you...it wasn’t important to me anymore what people thought of me, or said about me...” He looks at me, and smiles wistfully. “You see  I love you so much, and I wanted you to be happy once more, it didn’t matter to me anymore, what they thought of me, because what mattered more, far more than me, than myself and my foolish pride, was you, and all I wanted was for you to be happy, once more...”

“Hyuk,” I whisper. “Hyuk...”

He kisses me very tenderly, very gently.

“My darling,” he says. “My sweet...”

“Do you understand how I felt, what I felt then?” he says. “Do you understand why I carried on with that charade?”

“Yes,” I say, and kiss him back.

What does it matter whether I understand him or not?

For the only thing that matters, the only words I hear are, “I never loved her.”

He has never loved So Hyun. 

He had hated her.

And he had killed her.

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Author's Note: I'm having problems uploading the next few chapters here.

You can go to this link in the meantime.

Chapter 25: Secrets

Chapter 26: The Truth Revealed

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/188690157-the-last-empress