Seoul

“Youngbae,"  Yejin said, nervously pacing the length of the drawing room. "Do you suppose I made a mistake in not hiring a younger woman to teach Dara how to go about in Society?"

Turning from the mirror, where he had been needlessly rearranging the intricate folds of his pristine white neckcloth, Youngbae smiled sympathetically at his grandmother's last-minute panic over Dara's debut tonight. "It's too late to change that now."

"Well, who could possibly be better suited than I to teach her how to behave properly? I am," Yejin reminded him bluntly, reversing her earlier opinion, "regarded as a paragon of proper behavior by Society, am I not?"

"You are indeed," Youngbae said, refraining from reminding her that he'd told her at the outset Dara shouldn't be taught to emulate a woman of seventy-one years.

"I can't go through with it," Yejin remarked suddenly and sank into a chair, her expression positively dire. Youngbae chuckled at her unprecedented display of doubt and uncertainty, and she sent him a glowering look. "You won't be laughing a few hours from now," she predicted darkly. "Tonight, I will attempt to persuade the Society to accept a female without fortune, family connections, or ancestry to recommend her. The chances for disaster are mind-boggling! I'm bound to be found out and exposed for a trickster."

Youngbae approached the stricken woman whose blighting eye, razor tongue, and cold demeanor had intimidated Society and her entire family, with the exception of Jiyong, for five decades. For the first time in his life, he pressed a spontaneous kiss to her forehead. "No one would dare oppose you by ostracizing Sandara, even if they suspected her origins. You'll carry this off without a hitch. A lesser woman might fail, but not you, Grandmama not a woman of your enormous consequence."

Yejin digested that for a moment and then slowly inclined her white head in a regal nod. "You're entirely correct, of course."

"Of course," Youngbae said, hiding a smile. "And you needn't worry that Sandara will betray her background." "I'm as concerned about her revealing her mind as I am her background. I can't think what her grandfather could have been about when he filled her head with bookish nonsense. You see," she admitted anxiously, "I so wish for her to have a wonderful time at the Masked Ball Launch Party, to be admired for herself, and then to make a splendid match. I wish Minho would be there, I think he is still single, he can be suitable for Dara. How about Donghae is he back from Japan?”

"If those are your hopes, Grandmama, you're bound to be disappointed," Youngbae said with a sigh. "Dara has no interest whatsoever in having a party for her in being admired by any of the town boys."

"Don't be absurd she's been working and studying and looking forward to this for months!"

"But not for the reasons you evidently think," Youngbae said somberly. "She's here because you convinced her Jiyong wanted her to take her rightful place in Society as his wife. She's been working all these months for one reason only that she may be worthy of that honor. She has no intention of remarrying. She told me that last night. She's convinced herself that Jiyong loved her, I think, and she fully intends to 'sacrifice herself' to his memory."

"Good God!" said Yejin, thunderstruck. "She's barely twenty two years  old! Of course she must marry. What did you say to her?" "Nothing," Youngbae replied sardonically. "How could I tell her that, in order to fit in with Jiyong's crowd, she should have studied flirtation and dalliance, rather than drawing-room conversation and etiquette book."

"Go away, Youngbae,"  Yejin sighed. "You're depressing me. Go and see what's keeping Sandara” it's time to leave." In the hall outside her.room, Dara stood before a small portrait of Jiyong which she'd discovered in an unused room when they first came to Seoul, and which she'd asked to have rehung here, where she could see it every time she passed. The painting was done the year before last, and in it Jiyong was sitting with his back against a tree, one leg drawn up, his wrist resting casually atop his knee, looking at the artist. Dara loved the lifelike, unposed quality of the painting, but it was his expression that held her like a magnet and made her pulse quicken because Jiyong looked very much as he had often looked when he was about to kiss her. His eyes were slumberous, knowing; and a lazy, thoughtful smile was hovering about his mobile lips. Reaching up, Dara touched her trembling fingertips to his lips. "Tonight is our night, my love," she whispered. "You won't be ashamed of me I promise."

From the corner of her eye, she saw Youngbae coming toward her and hastily snatched her hand away. Without taking her eyes from Jiyong's compelling features, she said, "The artist who painted this is wonderfully talented, but I can't quite make out his name. Who is he?"

"Kiko Mizuhara," Youngbae said curtly. Surprised by the notion of a female painter and by Youngbae's abrupt tone, Dara hesitated, then she shrugged the matter aside and pirouetted slowly in front of Youngbae. "Look at me,Youngbae. Do you think he would be pleased with me if he could see me now?"

Stifling the urge to give Dara a taste of reality by telling her Kiko Mizuhara painted that picture while Jiyong was indulging in a torrid affair with her, Youngbae took his eyes from the portrait and did as Dara asked. What he saw stole his breath away.

Standing serenely before him was a dark-haired beauty wrapped in an alluring, low-cut gown of shimmering aquamarine chiffon. It draped diagonally across her full s and clung to her tiny waist and gently rounded hips. Her gleaming blackhair was pulled back off her forehead, falling in waving swirls over her shoulders and partway down her back. Diamonds nestled in the burnished waves, twinkling like stars on gleaming satin; they lay at her slender throat and sparkled at her wrist. But it was that face of hers that made it hard for Youngbae to breathe.

Although Sandara Park Kwon was not beautiful in the classic tradition of fair hair and pale skin, she was nevertheless one of the most alluring, provocative creatures he had ever beheld. Beneath her sooty lashes, eyes that could enchant or disarm gazed candidly into his, completely unaware of their mesmerizing effect. Her rosy, generous mouth invited a man's kiss, yet her poised smile warned one not to get too close. At one and the same time, Dara managed to look seductive yet untouchable, al yet sensual, and it was that very contrast that made her so alluring that, and her obvious unawareness of allure.

Some of the color drained from Dara’s high, delicately carved cheekbones as she waited for the silent man before her to tell her Jiyong would have been pleased with her appearance tonight. "That bad?" she asked, joking to cover her dismay.

Grinning, Youngbae took both her gloved hands in his and said truthfully, "Jiyong would be as dazzled by the sight of you tonight as the rest of the ton is going to be when they clap eyes on you. Will you save me a dance tonight" he added, gazing into her huge eyes.

In the car on the way to the Masked Ball Launch party, Yejin issued last-minute instructions to Sandara: "You needn't worry about your waltzing, my dear, nor any of the other social amenities you'll be expected to perform tonight. However," she warned in a dire tone, "I must remind you again not to allow Youngbae's ” she paused to cast him a severely disapproving look "appreciation of your intellect to mislead you into saying anything tonight which could make you appear bookish and intelligent. If you do, you will not take at all, I assure you. As I have told you time out of mind, gentlemen do not like overeducated females."

Youngbae squeezed Dara's hand encouragingly as they alighted from the coach. "Don't forget to save me a dance tonight," he said, smiling into her bright eyes.

"You may have all of them, if you wish." She laughed and tucked her hand in the crook of his arm, as unselfconscious of her beauty as she was unaware of its effect on him.

"I'm going to have to stand in line," Youngbae chuckled. "Even so, this is going to be the most enjoyable evening I've had in years!" For the first half hour of the party, Youngbae's prediction seemed to come true. Youngbae had deliberately preceded them into the ballroom so that he could watch his grandmother and Dara a make their grand entrance. And it was worth watching. Yejin marched into the ballroom like a protective mother hen shepherding her chick her bosom puffed out, her back ramrod straight, and her chin forward in an aggressive stance that positively dared anyone to question her judgment in lending her enormous consequence to Sandara or to consider ostracizing her.

The spectacle literally "stopped the show." For a full minute, five hundred of the ton's most illustrious, languid, and sophisticated personages stopped talking to gape at Korea's most respected, most dour, and most influential woman, who seemed to be hovering solicitously over a young lady no one recognized. Whispers broke out among the guests and monocles were raised to eyes as attention shifted from Yejin to the ravishing young beauty at her elbow, who no longer bore any resemblance to the gaunt, pale girl who had appeared briefly at Jiyong's memorial service.

BesideYoungbae, Wooyoung Jang lifted his arrogant brows and drawled, "Kwon, I trust you'll enlighten us about the identity of the dark-haired beauty with your grandmother?"

Youngbae regarded Wooyoung with a bland expression. "My late cousin's widow."

"You're joking!" Wooyoung said with the closest thing to surprise that Youngbae had ever seen displayed on Wooyoung eternally bored face. "You can't mean this entrancing creature is the same plain, pathetic, bedraggled little sparrow I saw at G dragon’s's memorial service!"

Fighting to suppress his annoyance, Youngbae said, "She was in shock and still very young when you last saw her."

"She's improved with age," Wooyoung observed dryly, raising his quizzing glass to his eye and leveling it at Dara, "like wine. Your cousin was always a connoisseur of wine and women. She lives up to his reputation. Did you know," he continued in a bored drawl, his quizzing glass still aimed straight at Dara, "that G dragon's beauteous ballerina has not admitted any other man into her bed in all this time? It boggles the mind, does it not, to think that the day is here when a man's mistress is more faithful to him than his own wife."

"What is that supposed to imply?" Youngbae demanded. "Imply?" Wooyoung said, turning his sardonic gaze on Youngbae. "Why, nothing. But if you don't wish Society to reach the same conclusion I'm drawing, I suggest you cease watching Jiyong's widow with that possessive look in your eye. She does reside with you, does she not?"

"Shut up!" Youngbae snapped. In one of his typical mercurial changes of mood, Wooyoung grinned without rancor. "They're about to begin the dancing. Come introduce me to the girl. I claim the right of her first dance." Youngbae hesitated, mentally grinding his teeth. He had no justification to refuse the introduction; moreover, if he did dem ur, he knew perfectly well Jang could and would retaliate by cutting Dara dead or worse repeating the innuendo he'd just made. And Jang was the most influential member of Youngbae's set.

Youngbae had inherited Jiyong's title, but he was well aware he did not possess Jiyong's bland arrogance and the unnerving self-assurance that had made Jiyong the most influential member of the haute ton

.Yejin, Youngbae knew, could force the entire ton not to cut Dara, and she could guarantee Dara's acceptance by her own age group, but she could not force Youngbae's generation to fully accept her. Neither could Youngbae. But Wooyoung Jang could. The younger set lived in terror of Jang's biting tongue, and not even Youngbae's own set had any wish to become the object of Jang's scorching ridicule.

"Of course," Younbae agreed finally.

With much foreboding, he introduced Wooyoung to Dara, then stood back and watched as Wooyoung made her a gallant bow and requested the honor of a dance. It took Dara most of the waltz before she began to relax and stop counting off the steps in her head. In fact, she had just decided that she was not likely to miss a step and tread on the well-shod feet of her elegant, bored-looking dancing partner when he said something that nearly made her do exactly that. "Tell me, my dear," he said in a sardonic drawl, "how have you managed to blossom as you have in the frigid company of Yejin”

The music was building to a crescendo as the waltz neared its end, and Dara was certain she must have misunderstood him. "I beg your pardon?"

"I was expressing my admiration for your courage in having survived a full year withthat old women. I daresay you have my sympathy for what you must have endured this past year."

Dara, who had no experience with this sort of sophisticated, brittle repartee, did not know it was considered fashionable, and so she reacted with shocked loyalty to the woman she had come to love. "Obviously you are not well-acquainted with her sir."

"Oh, but I am. And you have my deepest sympathy." "I do not need your sympathy, sir, and you cannot know her well and still speak of her thus."

Wooyoung stared at her with cold displeasure. "I daresay I'm well enough acquainted with her to have suffered frostbite on several occasions. The old woman is a dragon."

"She is generous and kind!" "You," he said with a jeering smile, "are either afraid to speak the truth, or you are the most naive chit alive." "And you," Dara retorted with a look of glacial scorn that would have done credit to Yejin  herself, "are either too blind to see the truth, or you are extremely vicious." At that moment the waltz came to an end, and Dara delivered the unforgivable and unmistakable insult of turning her back on him and walking away.

Unaware that anyone had been watching them, she returned to Youngbae and Yejin, but her actions had indeed been noted by many of the guests, several of whom lost no time in chiding at Wooyoung of his lack of success with the Dara. In return, Wooyoung retaliated by becoming her most vocal detractor that same night and expressing to his acquaintances his discovery, during their brief dance, that Sandara was a vapid, foolish, vain chit and a dead bore without conversation, polish, or wit.

Within one hour, Dara innocently verified to the guests that she was certainly excruciatingly foolish. She was standing amidst a huge group of elegantly attired people in their twenties and early thirties. Several of the guests were enthusiastically discussing the ballet they'd attended the night before and the dazzling performance given by a ballerina named Sulli Choi. Turning to Youngbae, Dara raised her voice slightly in order to be heard over the din, and had innocently asked if Jiyong had enjoyed the ballet. Two dozen people seemed to stop talking and gape at her with expressions that ranged from embarrassment to derision.

The second incident occurred shortly thereafter. Youngbae had left her with a group of people, including two young dandies who were discussing the acceptable height of shirt-points, when Dara's gaze was drawn to two of the most beautiful women she had ever seen. They were standing close together, but with their backs to one another, and they were both minutely scrutinizing Sandara's features over their shoulders. One was a coolly beautiful women in her late twenties, the other a few years younger.

Realizing that Mr. Warren had been speaking to her, Dara begged his pardon for her lack of attention, and inclined her head toward the two women who had distracted her. "Are they not the two loveliest females you've ever beheld?" she asked with a smile of sheer admiration and no jealousy.

The group surrounding her looked first at the two women, then at her. Brows shot up, eyes widened, and fans lifted to conceal amused smiles. By the end of the ball, four hundred people had heard that G dragon's widow had been admiring two of his former paramours, Jessica and Sohee. So diverting was that tidbit that even Sohee and Jessica whose friendship had long ago been destroyed by their mutual desire for the same man heard about it. And for the first time in years, they were seen laughing uproariously together, like the best of friends.

Dara was blissfully unaware of her latest gaffe, but she was acutely aware as the evening progressed that people seemed to be laughing at her behind their hands. On the way home in the car, she pleaded with Youngbae to tell her if something had gone awry, but he merely patted her shoulder and soothingly told her she was "a great success," while Yejin remarked that she had given "an excellent account" of herself.

Despite that, Dara knew instinctively that something was very wrong. During the following week of social gathering sidelong glances directed at her became almost unendurable. Hurt and bewildered, she sought refuge among the Yejin's acquaintances who, although decades older than she, did not seem to eye her as an amusing, peculiar, pathetic creature. Moreover, with them, she could repeat some of the wondrous stories of Jiyong's skill and daring which she'd heard from Hawthorne's head servant and chief groom, such as the time he saved the head groom from drowning.

On rare occasions, Dara was asked to dance, but only by men who mildly interested in sampling the body of the young woman who had been married to one of Korea’s most notorious libertines. Dara sensed, without knowing why, that none of these gentlemen truly liked her and she did the only thing she could think of to hide her confusion and misery: She put her chin up and with cool politeness made it infinitely clear she preferred to remain with the Yejini's set.

As a result, Dara was dubbed the ice princess. Jokes circulated amongst the ton which implied that Jiyong Kwon may have thought drowning was preferable to being frozen to death in his wife's bed. It was recalled with considerable relish that Jiyong had been seen emerging from the lavish lodgings he provided for his lovely ballerina on the very afternoon the announcement of his marriage appeared in the Times.

Moreover, it was remarked upon at length and with much derision that Jiyongs's mistress had laughingly told a friend that very same evening that Jiyong's marriage had been one of "Inconvenience" and that he had no intention of breaking off their relationship.

Within two weeks, Dara was painfully aware that she was a hopeless social outcast, but as she did not hear the talk, she had no way of discovering why. All she knew was that the ton treated her either with patronization, amusement, or occasionally, outright scorn and that she had failed Jiyong miserably. It was the latter that hurt her most. She spent hours standing in the hall in front of his likeness, trying not to cry, silently apologizing to him for her failure and begging him to forgive her.

"Can you hear me, Kwon? Wake up, man!"

With an effort that nearly sapped his strength, Jiyong responded to the whispered command and slowly forced his lids open. Blinding white light poured in through tiny openings in the walls high above, searing his eyes, while pain again sent him plunging into the dark oblivion of unconsciousness.

It was night again when he came around and saw the grimy face of Tablo, another captive from the Lancaster whom he hadn't seen since they were taken off the ship three months ago. "Where am I?" he asked and felt blood ooze from his cracked, parched lips.

"In hell," the Japanese said grimly. "In a North Korean dungeon, to be more exact." Jiyong tried to lift his arm and discovered heavy chains were holding it down. His gaze followed the chain to the iron ring attached in the stone wall and he studied it in foggy confusion, trying to think why he was chained, when Tablo was not.

Understanding his bewilderment, his companion answered, "Don't you remember? The chain's part of your reward for swinging on a guard and breaking his nose, not to mention nearly slitting his throat with his own knife when they brought you in here this morning."

Jiyong closed his eyes, but could not remember fighting with a guard. "What was the rest of my reward?" he asked, his voice hoarse, unfamiliar to his own ears. "Three or four broken ribs, a battered face, and a back that looks like raw meat."

"Charming," Jiyong gritted. "Any particular reason they didn't kill me rather than maim me?"

His coolly dispassionate tone wrung an admiring laugh from Tablo. "Damn, but you’re from the South, don't blink an eye no matter what, do you? Cool as anything, just like everyone always says." Reaching behind him, Tablo dipped a tin cup into a bucket of slimy water, poured off as much of the mold that floated on top as he could, then held the cup against Jiyong's bloodied lips.

Jiyong swallowed, then spat it out in furious revulsion. Ignoring his reaction, Tablo pressed the cup to the helpless man's lips again and said, "Now I know it don't have the delicate bouquet of your favorite Madeira, and it ain't in a clean, genteel crystal goblet, but if you don't drink it, you'll deprive our guards of the privilege of killing you themselves, and they'll take out their disappointment on me.

Jiyong's brows snapped together, but he saw the other man was joking, and he took a few sips of the vile, dank liquid. "That's better. You're sure a glutton for punishment, man," he continued lightly, but he was worriedly binding Jiyong's chest with strips torn from his own shirt. "You could have spared yourself this beating if your man had taught you to be polite when addressing two men who have guns and knives and nasty dispositions."

"What are you doing?" "Trying to keep your ribs in one place. Now then, to answer your earlier question about why they didn't kill you, North are trying to keep you alive in case the South capture one of theirs, heard one of the officers say you was a trump card they intend to use in case they want a trade. 'Course you're not doin' your share, which is to stay alive not when you go around insultin' a guard and then rudely tryin' to steal his weapon. From the looks of you, I didn't do you any favors when I hauled you out of the ocean with me and onto that North frigate that brought us here."

"How bad do I look?" Jiyong asked without much interest. "I'd say one more beating like this one and you'll not find your two ladies nearly as amorous as they were when you left."

Unconsciousness was wrapping its tentacles around him, trying to pull him back into the familiar black pit, and Jiyong fought against it, preferring the pain to oblivion. "What 'two ladies'?" "I reckon you ought to know better'n me. One's named Sulli. Is that your wife?" "Mistress." "And Dara?"

Jiyong blinked, trying to clear his fogged senses.Dara. Dara "A child," he said as a dim vision of a dark-haired girl brandishing a pretend sword danced before his eyes. "No," he whispered in pained regret as his life passed swiftly before him a wasted life of empty flirtations and debauchery, a meaningless life culminating in his whimsical, impulsive marriage to a bewitching girl with whom he had truly shared a bed only once. "My wife."

"Really?" Tablo said, looking impressed. "Got a mistress and a wife and a child? One of everything." "No" Jiyong corrected hazily. "No child. One wife. Several mistresses."

Tablo grinned and rubbed his hand across his dirty beard. "I don't mean to sound censorious. I admire a man who knows how to live. But," he continued, thunderstruck despite himself, "several mistresses?" "Not," Jiyong corrected, gritting his teeth against the pain, "at the same time." "Where've they been keepin' you all this time? I haven't seen you since the North took us off their ship three months ago." "I've had private accommodations and personal attention," Jiyong sardonically replied, referring to the dark pit beneath the dungeon that he had inhabited between periodic bouts of torture that had nearly driven him insane with pain.

"Listen to me, Kwon," Tablo said desperately. "You were muttering about an escape plan when you came to a while ago. Do you have a plan?"

Another feeble nod. "I want to go with you. But Kwon”you won't live through another beating like this one. I mean it, man. Don't anger any more guards."

Jiyong's head dropped sideways as he finally lost the battle against unconsciousness. Sitting on his heels, Tablo shook his head with despair. The Lancaster has lost many man as it sunk.Few of them have survive and after hours of floating at sea they thought that they are save but instead a North Korean ship has fished them out of the water and used them as hostage. One of them had died of his wounds within a day. Tablo wondered if his cellmate was about to become a second casualty.