The Woman In The Portrait

The person who came tumbling out of the status window, as though someone had shoved him through it, was a man with long silver hair, brilliant as moonlight. But for the sharp gray eyes and the cold smile, he was beautiful enough to be mistaken for a fairy, or an elf.

Thrown out of nowhere, he staggered a moment, off balance, then let out a heavy sigh and dropped onto the edge of the bed.

“Haah… Only sixty seconds.”

He lifted his right hand to inspect the back of it, and his brows, as neat as anything in a painting, crumpled together. A small hourglass floated above it, transparent, about the size of two finger joints. Instead of sand it dripped a glowing blue liquid down into the empty space below, and it stood perfectly upright, spinning round and round in place. Even in the time it took him to sigh, the blue ran briskly from the upper chamber into the lower.

“Haah…”

A third of the upper chamber was left now, and the sight of it drew one more sigh out of him. Then, as though there were nothing else for it, he huffed out a small smile and let his eyes wander around the room. Sunlight poured in through the window, and his hair caught it and shone as brilliantly as a work of art wrought in silver.

“Another sacrifice, is it…”

His face was beautiful enough to bewitch. His voice was cold past cold, cold enough to sting.

A status window no bigger than his palm blinked into being in front of his eyes.

A wry laugh brushed the man’s lips as he read the words written inside it. Clinging to a hope like that right up to the last moment was shabby, and pathetic.

— Sparkle, sparkle.

In the little hourglass above the back of his hand, the last drop fell from the upper chamber with a plink.

— Fssssh.

The moment the man cast one regretful look around him, the room was empty.

— Cheep, cheep, cheep.

A sparrow came flying back, sat at the window a while, then hopped down into the room.

When she shut the bedroom door behind her, a broad drawing room opened out in front of her. It was grand and old-fashioned, the sort of room you only ever see in an American drama set in the Middle Ages. Not one thing in it failed to catch Dong-hui’s eye, from the furniture to the sofas and tables to the ornaments set out here and there.

Wow, I bet just selling off the stuff in here would come to a decent pile of money.

Greed crept up on her in spite of herself at the sight of valuables she had never seen before, and Dong-hui swallowed hard and worked to keep her face unimpressed.

Halfway across the wide drawing room she stopped short and looked back toward the bedroom.

“Is something the matter?”

Delma asked in a fret, afraid Dong-hui might be about to change her mind. On the outside she kept a composed smile, but a capricious lord changing her mind was nothing new.

“Didn’t you hear a noise in the bedroom?”
“No? What sort of noise?”

Delma shook her head. Dong-hui tilted her head, puzzled, then set off across the drawing room again, the navy dress rustling along the floor behind her.

She had the strange feeling she had left something behind.

The moment Dong-hui stood in front of the drawing-room door, the great doors swung wide to either side as though they had been waiting for her. She had meant to push them open herself, and she flinched when they moved on their own, but she made herself breathe slowly and act as if nothing had happened. They were heavy and thick and glossy, polished and buffed for years by the look of them. Sneaking a glance up at how far they towered over her, Dong-hui walked through as naturally as she could manage.

Once she was outside, a pair of feet showed beneath the open door. Somebody must have been waiting out there and opened it at the sound of her coming. Picturing the two of them standing there, listening for any sound from inside, made her feel sorry. Guilt at enjoying what was not hers tangled up with discomfort at kindness she was not used to.

All of that vanished clean away at the magnificent sight that opened up in front of her.

“Wow…”

The mansion’s corridor called to mind a famous European art museum. She had never actually been to Europe, or to an art museum, but that was the impression all the same.

Dong-hui walked on with the rustling navy dress lifted slightly clear of the floor, unable to take her eyes off the paintings hung along the corridor. Most were portraits of people she did not know, though here and there hung a painting of some distinctive necklace, tiara or ring. In between them, in places, nothing was left but the trace of a frame that had once hung there.

“Where did the paintings here go?”

Dong-hui asked, pointing at a patch where the wallpaper pattern had stayed a little crisper than the rest. The marks left by the frames were big and square, like windows.

“Pardon? Did my lady not dispose of those herself?”

Delma answered with a wounded, aggrieved note in her voice. She had evidently been against it when the paintings were sold off.

Dong-hui could think of nothing more to say and moved slowly on. The paintings that were left were splendid even to her, who knew nothing about art, painted in such fine detail that until she came close she had half suspected they were photographs.

Every one of them drew her eye, but the one that truly caught and held it was a portrait of a woman. The canvas was about the same size as the others; the frame around it was something else entirely. Fine carving covered the whole border of the wood, as though the painting had been fitted inside a sculpture, and flowers and animals she could not name ran through it, so that the frame was a work of art in its own right.

Without meaning to, Dong-hui came to a stop in front of the portrait.

“Will my lady be paying her respects to the mistress today as well?”

The nanny asked in a matter-of-fact voice, as though it were not the first time her lady had stopped in front of the portrait. Dong-hui turned her head, not understanding, and there was Delma, her eyes damp, gazing up at the portrait with a sorrowful smile. For simple grief over a master she had once served, it was far too sad a face.

“Mother…”

The unfamiliar word slipped out of her without her will, and Dong-hui clapped a hand over her lips, startled.

Now that she looked, the woman in the portrait resembled Chloe to an astonishing degree. The only difference she could find was the mouth and the eyes, both a shade smaller on the woman in the frame. Chloe’s eyes tilted up slightly at the corners, like a cat’s; the woman’s drooped down at the corners, like a gentle puppy’s. She looked like a kinder version of Chloe.

Dong-hui remembered her mom’s face only from photographs. Her mom had died in a traffic accident when she was very small, and she was as vague as those old photographs, as unreal as somebody who had never existed at all. The few that were left had been hidden away somewhere when her father remarried, and when he died so suddenly there was no way left to find out where.

All at once her throat closed up with missing a mom whose face she could not even picture. And Chloe, whose body she was borrowing now, was just the same as her. The thought left her aching and unsettled.

“Delma.”

Dong-hui called to the nanny without taking her eyes off the portrait.

“Yes, my lady.”

Delma’s eyes stayed on the portrait too as she answered, as though steeped in old regret.

“Did Mother love me?”

“…”

Delma gave no answer. Maybe she had asked something she should not have. Dong-hui felt her heart drop with a thud to somewhere around her feet. It was not even her real mom, and still a needless sadness welled up in her.

“I was just asking…”

The mood was going heavy for no reason, so Dong-hui said it lightly and turned her head. Delma, who had been gazing steadily at her, pulled her into a fierce hug.

“Why?”
“My lady, the mistress loved you best in all the world. So no more blaming yourself. Do you understand?”

Blaming myself?
What is that supposed to mean?

Some story was clearly hidden behind it, but she could not go looking into it just now, so she decided she would find out little by little.

Delma, watching Chloe go quiet with her own thoughts, must have decided her lady was feeling low, because she started pouring out things nobody had asked about. Delma smelled of laundry dried well in the sun. Something in the smell deepened Dong-hui’s longing, and she found herself sniffing at it without meaning to.

“The mistress sang you a lullaby every night before bed, and on your birthday she gave you dolls she had made with her own hands, and she filled the garden with the flowers you loved best. You were far too young to remember any of it, I’m sure. To the mistress, my lady was everything.”

Delma’s voice, feeling its way back through old memories, was damp with tears. The hand patting and stroking her back was soft and warm.

— Ding!

Her eyes had gone red for no good reason, and she was pressing at the corners of them with her fingertips when the welcome sound reached her. Sure enough, a heart the size of a 500-won coin bobbed above Delma’s head, shining and glittering with red light. Unlike before, it did not burst the instant it appeared; it went on glittering, and then at some point it burst with a pop.

Anticipation crept up in Dong-hui.

That’s a whole twenty up from before.

All they had done was talk about her birth mother, and the favorability had climbed a full twenty. Which meant Delma held real affection for the woman. And very deep affection at that.

She ought to talk with Delma about her mother whenever she got the chance.

So my room was on the second floor.

Dong-hui went down the spiral staircase to the first floor, her eyes darting this way and that to take in her surroundings. The same staircase carried on up to the third floor as well. At first, faced with the sheer scale of the grand mansion, she could not see what was supposed to be poor about it, but the more she looked around inside, the harder it was to shake the feeling that something about it was bare.

Kind of a bleak feeling to the whole place?

The mansion was very clean, but it had no life to it, like a house nobody had lived in for a long time, and it felt empty.

“My lady, I think you had best hurry a little.”

Delma had reached the first-floor lobby ahead of her. She looked up at Chloe, still dawdling halfway down the stairs, and urged her on. From the look in her eyes, she was plainly convinced that Dong-hui was dragging her feet because she had no wish to go out and inspect the estate.