The Suspiciously Suspicious Saintess - 6
I was still chewing through sushi and raw fish when my phone buzzed in my pocket.
It was a message from the Saint.
Given that she had asked to meet this late at night, I figured whatever she wanted to talk about had to be serious.
Better not overdo it, then.
Eat too much and the blood sugar spike would leave me foggy. Showing up to a conversation like that would be rude in more ways than one. So I finished at a measured pace, got up from my seat, and took a light walk around the hotel to settle my stomach. I even put in a little time at the hotel gym, trying to work off the fullness.
My phone rattled and buzzed on the table. I had just stepped out of the bathroom attached to my room.
An hour from now. Around ten at night—not so late that it was a problem. Any later and the rising tide of sleepiness would have had me yawning every other breath.
I changed clothes and killed time as best I could, fiddling with my phone or watching TV, since there was no computer. When the appointed hour drew near, I stepped out of my room and made my way toward the suite. Elevator, hallway. Just as the time was nearly upon us, I knocked on the suite door.
The latch clicked. The door opened onto the Saint’s apologetic face.
“I’m so sorry. Calling you up this late—I’ve put you out, haven’t I?”
“Not at all. You said you had something to tell me?”
“Yes. Please, come in.”
I followed her inside and found myself looking at a new landscape. The suite had been impressive enough by day. By night, it was something else entirely. Beyond the broad, immaculate windows lay the dark, and the square towers of the city—worn with the weariness of living—glowed here and there in a composition that was almost perfect.
“Please, sit here.”
She offered me a seat first. A table set near the window; the atmosphere was rather fine. If there had been a red candle and a bottle of wine, it would have looked like a movie set. I nodded and sat, and she took the chair across from me.
Henri, who was always at her side, was nowhere to be seen.
“What about the gentleman who was with you?”
“He’s resting in an empty room. I asked him to give us some privacy.”
Bodyguards were people too—they had to eat, use the bathroom, sleep. That much I understood. What stuck with me was the deliberate request that he leave the room.
“This is starting to sound serious… I’m a little worried I won’t be able to handle it.”
I put on a show of fretting first. Her lips curved into a thin crescent, and a soft laugh came with it.
“It isn’t that kind of conversation, so please don’t worry. Politics, economics, national security… I’m hardly in a position to discuss those, and I have no desire to.”
“Someone like you would be more than qualified, wouldn’t you?”
“It feels like sinking into a bottomless swamp. I find myself keeping my distance.”
A bottomless swamp. Even I couldn’t argue with that metaphor.
“I see. Then… what is it you wanted to say?”
I met her eyes and asked. She hesitated instead of answering. For someone who had just insisted it wasn’t serious, she looked every bit like she was about to drop something heavy.
I can’t even guess.
By her own word it wouldn’t be some grand matter of state. So what on earth was she winding herself up to say? Anxiety and curiosity set my heart racing, but I held myself still. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that would come out any faster if I pushed—and I was hardly in a position to hurry a Saint. A mere janitor snapping at the Saint and pressing her? I could find myself swept up like so much dust on the floor.
“Have you… ever heard the name Leo?”
A full ten minutes. Only after that long a pause did her lips finally open. Do you know Leo? For a question that had taken so much winding up, it was a strangely odd one—odd enough to make you wonder what she was even thinking.
“I have. It’s a fairly common name, isn’t it? I think it even came up in some drama…”
“A drama?”
“You probably wouldn’t know it. It’s been off the air for a while, and the setting was a little old-fashioned.”
Around the 1900s, roughly.
“I see… And in real life?”
She asked with a lukewarm smile. Anyone could see it wasn’t the answer she had been hoping for.
“None that I know. Ever since I became a janitor I barely meet anyone at all. My routes are pretty restricted.”
“Of course. That makes sense.”
There was a bitterness in her voice. The disappointment that had just begun to sprout seemed to deepen. I had bungled it. Caught between awkwardness and apology, I had nothing useful to say—and the silence pressed down on my shoulders until it was almost hard to breathe.
“I’m sorry. That was completely out of nowhere, asking something like that.”
“Not at all. You’re free to ask. But why that name—Leo…?”
Thank God. The moment her mouth opened again, the tightness in my chest eased a little. The awkwardness had been so thick I could barely breathe. Even if I could feel, thick as fog, that she was testing me somehow.
“He’s the person I love most. Then, and now.”
Then and now. The kind of love that survived a relationship ending—if it had ended at all.
“That’s surprising. I never imagined the Saint might have someone she had dated—or was dating. Is his name Leo, then?”
“Yes.”
She nodded and held my gaze, posture perfectly straight, her eyes as steady as her bearing.
“The night before the burning… before I was to go into the fire. God’s voice had gone completely silent. All that was left was to wait for death.”
She went on in a calm, gentle voice, like an old woman turning over a memory from long ago. A burning at the stake? Death? I had never heard a word about anyone trying to burn the Saint. If something like that had happened, it would have been all over the news.
“But that day, a man stepped out of the dark, opened that heavy, rusted iron door, and saved me. Even now the image is so clear I don’t think I could ever forget it.”
Even as I puzzled over it, her words didn’t stop. Part of me wondered if this was some kind of delusion—but I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt. Regret, longing, joy. The weight of the feelings braided through her voice was simply too heavy.
“I was truly happy. Grateful, too—to the person who gave a life back to someone who should have died.”
A new life. A life she had never expected. Her story sounded uncannily like mine and Joan of Arc’s. No—not like. It was that life. Could that story still be handed down? The people of Ystua would have known ours well, and knowing it, they might well have passed it on by word of mouth. Our ancestor was Joan of Arc? For a descendant, that was pure rocket fuel. A few years back, the Ystua family had proven their descent from Joan of Arc and drawn no small amount of attention for it.
“Ah… I see. That must have been something.”
“At first I wondered whether it would even work. Everything he said was so foreign to me.”
But the detail was too fine—as if Joan of Arc herself were sitting in front of me, turning over old memories.
“Still, once the work stabilized, word spread, and more people came… we found some breathing room. For a farmhand’s daughter, it was a life I never could have dreamed of.”
She didn’t even sound like someone retelling a story she had heard. She spoke as the one who had lived it—quiet certainty under the even tone. The question rose in me on its own. Could it be…?
“And then one day, I said this to him. Blasphemous as it was…”
You are like a god to me.
My eyes went wide. It was not something I could imagine Joan of Arc ever saying—borderline sacrilege, depending on how you looked at it. And I wasn’t hearing it for the first time. I knew it far too well. It was something she used to murmur into my arms.
Is this… actually real?
A current of electricity ran down my spine. Tension locked my shoulders. Without meaning to, I swallowed dryly.
“Back then… what do you think Leo would have said?”
At last the Saint, who had been unspooling only her own story, turned her eyes on me. Her gaze was so calmly settled that I couldn’t read a thing in it.
Thump. Thump. My heart felt ready to leap out of my throat. Under the table my hands trembled, urging me on. Doubt that the woman across from me really was Joan of Arc. Fear of giving the wrong answer. Every emotion crashed through me at once, and still I forced myself to go slowly—to steady my breathing and empty my head. With a mind this scrambled, even the right answer would come out wrong.
“I asked if that meant you wanted another baby.”
Only after several long breaths did I manage to get the words out—not in Korean, but in French.
A baby? Is this guy insane? That would be the natural reaction. And that was exactly why it was the right answer. At least, it was between us. Joan of Arc was a saint who had stepped over more corpses than anyone should ever see. I was the madman who had gone to save a woman he could easily have walked away from.
“And after that… what do you think happened?”
Her golden eyes began to tremble without anywhere to settle. Her face twisted the way a person’s does when the emotion is too much to hold. She, too, had slipped into French as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I nodded, certain now that Elodie the Saint was Joan of Arc—and I wanted her to be certain of me as well.
“On the nights after the guests left, we used to climb into the hot spring together and talk about things like that. Every time, I’d say children had to be planned carefully—that two was already hard enough.”
“…That’s right.”
“But we still couldn’t keep our hands off each other, and by accident we ended up with a third.”
“Do you… remember what that child was like?”
Of course I remembered. Even if the face and voice were a little blurred, as if a filter had been laid over them.
“A beautiful child with black hair like yours. When we teased her for being an accident, she wailed and wailed. When she grew up she was the one teasing us first—a young lady who loved her wine.”
Strangely, the more I spoke, the fresher the old memories became—as if I had been given a new life myself. The box buried under the tree in the shop’s back garden. The letters we had put inside it. Every kind of memory came spilling out of my mouth.
“It’s really you. It really is.”
The chair creaked as the Saint pushed back from it and came to my side. I rose as well. Our eyes met at close range—close enough that a reach of the arms would have been more than enough for an embrace.
“How did you know? It felt like you asked because you already thought I was Leo.”
She had been silent so long that I asked first. Certain now that she was Joan of Arc—Jeannette—I dropped into the familiar casual register of the old days. Jeannette had been her childhood name, and a pet name besides. Calling her Joan of Arc felt too stiff. Calling her Jeanne only made me think of a cup.
She wound her arms tightly around my waist and buried her face in my chest. The softness of holding her was exactly as it had always been.
Jeannette spoke.
“Because one day… God spoke to me.”