The Red Queen (10 page)

Magpies are a very adaptable species and, I note, increasingly widespread.
Pica pica
has colonized the world. They have become dominant in many neighbourhoods, including the one that my ghostly representative now inhabits. They have driven out many other species, including the small songbirds. I always feared them, in whatever numbers or manifestations they appeared. I know that in some parts of the East they were regarded as wise birds of good omen. They were famed in Korean legend for their benevolence in forming the Magpie Bridge that linked those star-crossed lovers, the herd boy and the weaving maid, on the Seventh Night of the Seventh Moon. I know that in China they are called the ‘birds of joy’. But from early childhood, I believed they were unlucky. Maybe a magpie threatened me in my cradle. They are large birds, and can be aggressive. Naturally, I cannot remember any such incident. I am somewhat ashamed of this small irrationality. I wonder what superstitions besieged Voltaire. None of us is immune to such weaknesses.

Even as I composed those words, one of these ill-omened birds came down and landed on the window ledge. It had its evil eye upon me. I saluted it with the rhymes, as one should, and off it flew. Had I neutralized its malice? What ill can one suffer beyond the grave? It was glossy and cocky, and it strutted boldly and offensively in my sight. Magpies are baby-stealers and jewel-snatchers. A gathering of magpies heralded the death of Prince Sado.

Prince Sado himself was deeply superstitious, despite his strict indoctrination into Confucian rationalism, and he consulted all manner of charlatans who nursed and encouraged his growing illness. In the year of the measles epidemic, there was a great storm, remembered in the countryside for many years, and it was at this period that Sado began to succumb to his terror of thunder. I know that many weak mortals fear thunder and lightning, and not without some cause, but in Sado the fear became utterly irrational. I am no mathematician, but I do know that one’s chances of dying in a thunderstorm are, in ordinary circumstances, remote. But Sado dreaded the thunder. He thought it was the voice of vengeance. It was at this time that he became obsessed by that dangerous and pornographic book,
The Jade Pivot
. This was in our day a very popular work, which described the god of thunder and the various punishments he inflicted upon sinning mortals. The god of thunder is a hideous blue creature, winged and clawed, furnished with a chisel and a mallet, and his role is to punish undetected crimes. This book was full of horrifying images and vivid descriptions of tortures and torments in various particularly violent forms of hell. It was a stupid book, fit only for superstitious simpletons amongst the common people, but Sado took it with a deadly seriousness. He began to tremble at any loud noise, and he imagined that he saw people that were not there. He thought that people were watching him, and would send his servants out to arrest these ghosts.

He also developed a fear of objects made of jade, which of course was in our culture (even more than in most cultures) a much-prized precious stone.

The August Personage of Jade rules the Court of Heaven. He is the father figure and emperor of the palace of the higher world. Or so the vulgar believe.

I did not fear jade. One of my favourite possessions in my life on earth was a beautifully carved jade duck, carrying in its beak a lotus bloom: I was fond of this solitary duck of soft green and russet tints. I liked the subtle colours of jadestone – the creams, the pale greys, the mauves, the browns and, above all, the greens. Apple green, spinach green, lettuce green, seaweed green, sage green. Jade was considered a lucky stone, and it was said to have healing properties. It would cure complaints of the kidney. In some countries it was known as the colic stone, or
lapis nephriticus
. I did not myself believe in its curative powers, but I was fond of my jade duck.

But Sado had quite other thoughts and fears. The very sight of the Chinese character that means ‘jade’ made him wince and cover his eyes in horror. At first I thought this was a pretence, an exaggerated reaction against the Confucian rigour of pragmatic, this-worldly rationalism, but I began to see that, even though it might have begun as a game, a real fear had taken a deep hold on his poor brain. There was a period when he avoided contact with all jade objects. When he had to handle one, or found that he had handled one inadvertently, he would then go through elaborate washing and cleansing procedures.

His father was not without some oddities in this direction – he was forever washing his ears and rinsing out his mouth after speaking to certain disfavoured family members – but in him the fear of such pollution had not reached the stage of an obsessive phobia, as it did with Prince Sado. But maybe Sado inherited the tendency. It may have been a genetic fluke, a family tic. I am ignorant about these matters. Most people are ignorant about them. These issues remain unresolved. The long march of enlightenment is slow.

King Yŏngjo was certainly what you would now call neurotic. He had several obsessive-compulsive disorders which verged on the ridiculous. The rinsing of the mouth and ears after speaking to Prince Sado was odd in itself, but even odder was the way he would then try to throw the dirty water over the wall into the courtyard of the Princess Hwahyŏp next door – it was a high wall, and the water often used to splatter back at him. This was not dignified or rational, and naturally it offended the prince. The king was also very particular about which doors he used for which purposes – he would go through one door on a pleasant enterprise, through another for an unpleasant one. Superstitiously, he avoided the words ‘death’ and ‘return’, and held it particularly unlucky to return to a room to retrieve a forgotten object. He would not even send a servant on such an errand. This, of course, caused him some inconvenience. And he, too, changed his robes compulsively, though not as frequently as his son was to do.

There was one day a dreadful scene about a jade helmet that Prince Sado was supposed to wear for some tedious and unpleasant ceremonial occasion – I think it may have been an interrogation or an execution. I should mention that Sado’s sadistic father never allowed him to undertake any pleasant official or ceremonial duties, such as attending archery contests or graduation parties, but insisted instead that he assist at various unpleasant public events at the Board of Punishment. He seemed to take a particular pleasure in summoning Sado to these events in winter, when it was snowing. (There were always conspiracy trials in progress in our country: we lived in a culture of denunciation and counterdenunciation.) The unfortunate effect that this had upon Sado was eventually, to my mind, all too clear, though his father never admitted the connection. In any case, on this occasion Sado reported for duty with his helmet lopsided and as if it were deliberately misplaced. His father mocked and sneered and shouted, and Sado grew defiant, and flung the helmet to the earth, with some stream of sad nonsense relating to his ill fortune and the powers of the accursed jade, and the gods know what demented rhetoric. This was one of the first episodes of the clothing sickness to be noted in public, though I in private had already begun to observe his extreme anxiety, his worse than anxiety, about his dress. There was to be a repetition of this incident before long, at the betrothal ceremony of our son Prince Chŏngjo. I will describe that when I come to it.

To be truthful, I find it hard to recollect the exact sequence of events that revealed the growing sickness of Prince Sado. During my lifetime, I wrote over a period of ten years four distinct memoirs, each time with a slightly different aim, each with its own revelations and evasions, each with its own agenda. I am trying to be truthful now, though I am not sure what agenda beyond truth a poor ghost might have. Perhaps even ghosts deceive themselves and others. However it may be, I find my ghostly memory is faulty and at times confused. Matters are made more complicated by my posthumously acquired awareness of psychology and psychological terms. I remain convinced, however, that my awareness of the nature of Prince Sado’s sickness was keen even during his brief life on earth: it did not depend on a posthumous vindication either of him or of my own actions during my own much longer lifetime. Evidence for my sympathy and understanding is there, in those memoirs, for anyone who troubles to read them in the right spirit. Of course, I may be represented as a manipulative survivor, promoting the fortunes of the Hong family and my offspring. You can think what you like about that. But I tell you it was not so.

The pursuit of truth is a noble aim. One lifetime is too short to discover truth. Therefore I persevere.

Many misfortunes had come upon Prince Sado in the year that he attached himself to the Lady Pingae. He was recovering from an attack of smallpox during which he ran a very high fever in a winter of bitter cold. (Smallpox, like measles, was an ever-present threat, and no respecter of persons or place: at this point in the eighteenth century, it was responsible for wiping out royal lineages round the world.) He had a subsequent bout of malaria, and his tonsils were inflamed. The death of the Dowager Queen Inwŏn, as I have recorded, was a blow to him, for she had always set herself up as his protector and tried to defend him from his father’s criticisms. (Thus, by extension, she was my protector also.) She tried to negotiate between father and son, between king and crown prince. But there was another death earlier in the same year that also affected him profoundly, and this was the death of Queen Chŏngsŏng, the childless first wife of his father, King Yŏngjo. This queen, the primary consort, had long been estranged from the king, and she, like the dowager queen, had also taken Sado’s part. These two Queenly Majesties had always done their best to support the young prince, and he had responded to them with a respect and devotion that showed how keenly he missed his father’s love and approval.

The death of Queen Chŏngsŏng was terrible. It was natural, unlike so many of the deaths that followed, but it was terrible. She had been ill for a long time, but the climax of her sickness was horrifying. Anticipating death, she had already moved from her usual residence in the Great Pavilion to Kwalli House in the western wing of the palace, saying that she did not wish to pollute the grandeur of the Great Pavilion by her death rites. There, her condition rapidly deteriorated. Her fingernails turned a deep purple blue, like nails bruised in a vice, and one night she vomited enough blood to fill a chamber pot. The blood was not the clear red of a patient suffering from lung disease: it was thick and black. It seemed to us as though many years of poison had been gathering in her body and were now being spewed out. Sado and I were present when this happened, and Sado himself seized the chamber pot and carried it off, in tears, to the administrative office of the queen’s residence to show it to the physicians. But it was too late, and they could do nothing for her. The queen herself urged Sado to go to bed and rest, and not to wait by her bedside, so with great reluctance he left her, and returned to his pavilion. During the night his stepmother fell into a deep coma. This was announced to Sado in the morning, and he immediately went round to her bedside, where he cried out to her again and again ‘I’ve come, Your Majesty, I’ve come!’ and pitifully attempted to raise a spoonful of ginseng tea to her crooked mouth. But she was past all response. She never opened her eyes again.

News of her approaching end had reached the king, who, although long estranged from her, came that same morning to her chamber. His arrival had an appalling effect on Sado. Sado had been behaving with such courage and such proper and properly apparent filial devotion until that moment, but at the approach of King Yŏngjo he seemed to collapse. He retreated from the bedside and crouched on the floor in a corner, like a guilty child. He looked frozen with horror. His tears dried, and he was unable to speak or move. Nobody could have guessed from this dishevelled, unseemly bundle how correctly he had been behaving until that moment, nor how much genuine grief he had displayed. And, just as I feared, King Yŏngjo began at once to criticize his son. He criticized his behaviour, his silence, his crouching attitude – he even criticized the way the bottoms of his trousers were tied. It was a grotesque scene. There lay Queen Chŏngsŏng unconscious, breathing painfully upon her deathbed – she died between three and four in the afternoon on the following day – and all that Yŏngjo could do was to berate his son for the way he tied his trousers!

Is it any wonder that Sado developed a clothing phobia, a clothing disease? I have searched the records for parallels to Sado’s obsession. I have pored over stories of mad kings and legends of crazed priests in the Occident and in the Orient, but so far I have found nothing in history to resemble his mania.

‘Himatiophobia’, I have seen it called, in English, in one of the translations of my works. But I do not think that this is a word commonly recognized in the medical or psychoanalytic lexicon.

I had my own theory about Sado’s phobia. Its source lay in his father’s wrath. To me this followed, as the night the day. The craziness with which Sado slashed his clothes was caused by King Yŏngjo’s incessant criticisms of his son’s appearance. I suppose it is more common for mothers to demean their daughters over matters of dress, but in our court, as I have explained, the significance of apparel for both sexes was immense. Perhaps all courts have such rules, but I feel that ours was particularly exacting. Etiquette prescribed distinct clothes for distinct occasions. Sometimes, in one day, many changes of costume were required, and these were complex garments, not easy to don without assistance. Sashes and ribbons had to be tied in the correct order and direction, from left to right, and it was not uncommon to see the ankles of a pair of trousers so badly tied that the trouser legs became twisted in a ridiculous fashion. So the prince was not alone in making mistakes with his appearance when he was left to attend to himself. I myself, as Crown Princess, had a magnificent wardrobe of robes of many styles and colours, of rare silks and gauzes, in which I could not have encased myself without expert assistance. Teams of seamstresses laboured for me, week after week, month after month. Records of their toil survive, for we were a bureaucratic society, and liked to make lists and inventories. Clothes were made for me that I never wore, that no one ever wore. Where are they now? Do any scraps of those rich fabrics still survive?

I know that small children have strong and what seem to be instinctive objections to some styles of clothing, to some textures. I never cared for a certain kind of embossed and shiny satin – it set my teeth on edge; I do not know why. (Nor do I much care for the coarse white gloves that the readers of manuscripts in the British Museum are obliged to wear.) Sado as a child is said to have preferred cotton to silk, but I am not sure if this was true, as the story was told to illustrate his natural princely modesty and dislike of ostentation. My own son, little Chŏngjo, never liked the obligatory white socks of childhood. They had to be forced over his reluctant feet. But he submitted because he had to submit. Children can form strong and seemingly irrational opinions about what they like to wear. But normal children grow out of these fads, not into them. A florid madness like Sado’s I have never known. Yet, when I witnessed Sado’s father’s incessant reproaches, when I saw him at the very deathbed of the queen shouting at Sado about his trousers, I was aware that I was witnessing an unnatural scene, one of many unnatural scenes, and I knew that these scenes would have an unnatural outcome. How unnatural, I did not yet suspect.

After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that my husband would now, in your age, be likely to be classified as a paranoid schizophrenic. I mention this in passing. It is only a suggestion. I am no expert in these matters.

The queen died in the afternoon of the following day, as I have said. I was present. But the formal announcement of Queen Chŏngsŏng’s death and the preparations for the mourning were delayed because King Yŏngjo was distracted by news of a rival death – by the death of his young son-in-law, the husband of his most favoured daughter, the dangerous Madame Chŏng, the daughter who hated me so much and loved Sado so unnaturally. The death of Madame Chŏng’s husband was an unlucky death for all of us. Had Madame Chŏng not been widowed so young, had she borne children of her own, she might have meddled less with my affairs. She might have kept herself at a proper distance from her brother Sado, instead of entering into that dangerous and possibly incestuous intimacy with him that was shortly to cause so much scandal. She might have left my son alone, instead of practising upon him and playing with him and making him dance to her tune. After Sado’s death, she transferred all her lust for power to her manipulation of my son, the Grand Heir. But that is another, later story. I will come to that.

Death followed death. Shortly after the death of Queen Chŏngsŏng, the Dowager Queen Inwŏn also died, as I have narrated above. She was buried in the seventh month, in pouring rain. Prince Sado was a sad sight at this time, in his mourning robes of unbleached hemp, with his dishevelled hair and his wooden staff cut, as custom dictated, from the wood of the foxglove tree. The long process of mourning weighed heavily upon him. He wailed loudly and ostentatiously in the mourning procession, again as custom dictated, but the tears he shed in the courtyard at dead of night, gazing towards the shrine where the blue and white mourning tablet of Queen Chŏngsŏng was to be placed, were not mere ceremonial tears. ‘I wish I were dead,’ I heard him cry, again and again, unobserved by all but myself. ‘I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead…’ It was the repeating cry of a dreadful bird of night. He meant it. I feared for his reason. With reason, I feared for his reason.

Death followed death. It was shortly after the deaths of the two Queenly Majesties that the killings began.

I digress here for a moment. Leafing through an academic periodical the other day, in an attempt to refresh my aged and ageing memory about the composition of the eighteenth-century Chosŏn Court Orchestra, I came by chance across an article by a twentieth-century scholar on the subject of ‘Korea and Evil’. Koreans, he had concluded, after conducting some hundred or so interviews, do not believe in Evil. They believe in evil acts, but not in the abstraction of evil. His sample was small, and he interviewed through an interpreter, but nevertheless I think he had hit upon an interesting distinction.

I can put off the evil moment no longer. Let me now try to describe the first killing.

I find I do not know whether to aim for suspense or simplicity at this point in my narrative.

I was reading, quietly, in my apartment, and intermittently stitching away at a panel of yellow satin: I remember the illustrated text I was reading; I remember the pattern of blossom and butterfly; I remember the gilt thread; I remember even the vermilion and turquoise of the cloth spool on which the thread was wound. It was a tranquil domestic scene. I enjoyed embroidery: I know that clever women all over the world were beginning, at this period, to revolt against the constraints of a life spent pointlessly embroidering useless hangings and useless garments, but I confess that I enjoyed the activity. Perhaps surprisingly, I much preferred it to bookbinding, which some of the princesses adopted as a hobby. I liked reading, which I have to say some of the princesses did not, but I was not overly particular about grains of paper and colours of inks. I preferred the content to the form. But embroidery was different – I found it soothing, harmlessly soothing.

So picture me, innocently employed, sitting on my low, silk-cushioned rosewood couch. Then suddenly my husband Prince Sado burst in, through the outer chamber, past the ladies-in-waiting, carrying before him a strange, round object stuck on the end of a short spike – it looked to be about the size of a large cabbage. I heard the muffled sounds of the consternation of the ladies as he passed, but was at first unable to identify the object he was carrying, as I was wearing my tortoiseshell-framed reading glasses (I was growing shortsighted by this time), and my eyes could not see what was in front of them. They had no focus. Trembling, I removed my glasses, and then I saw what I saw. Sado was bearing before him a severed head. It was not a papier-maché mask from a peasant puppet show, but a real head. My husband’s hands were red with blood, and red blood dripped on to the oiled wood of the floor. At first I could not make sense of what I saw, even when I could see it clearly, so horrible was the vision that confronted me. I do not remember if I screamed or not. Later, my ladies assured me I conducted myself with dignity, but I cannot remember what I did or said. I had never seen a severed head. I was to see many.

I recognized the head. I knew its features. It was the head of Kim Hanch’ae, the eunuch who had been on duty that day. There were his full, broad cheeks, his shaven, domed pate, his slightly jaundiced eyes, his full lips. The grimace of death did not disguise him. The transfixed gaze of his dead eyes met mine.

This was the first of Prince Sado’s killings. Of course, there was nothing in law to prevent him from killing a eunuch, for Sado was the crown prince, with powers of life and death. He could dispose of slaves and eunuchs as he chose, without much fear of reprisal. But I knew, and the ladies knew, that this was a terrible event. He had crossed a bridge into another kingdom. Why had he done it, and why, having done it, had he brought the head to us? What was he asking of us? What madness, what despair had possessed him?

At the time, I was too stunned with horror to ask myself why he had selected Kim Hanch’ae as his victim. In fact, it is only now, two hundred years too late, that it occurs to me to wonder if Kim Hanch’ae had provoked or thwarted him in any particular way on that fatal evening. Eunuchs in our court, as in the Chinese court, could easily work themselves into positions of power, for they were privy to many secrets, and Kim Hanch’ae was an intelligent, academy-educated man. Had he been attempting to curb Sado’s excesses, or to offer unwanted advice? I do not know. I did not on that evening seek any rational explanation for this bizarre and barbarous act. My mind at once rushed to an unhappy conclusion – that Sado had killed for some kind of perverse pleasure. And I still think my first instinctive guess was right. Prince Sado was never a politic man. I do not think he killed Kim Hanch’ae through policy.

You will remember that as a small child Prince Sado had played military games, unfortunately encouraged by Lady Han. As an adult, too, he had liked these games, and he had returned to them to play them on a grander scale. He enjoyed playing soldiers with parades of uniformed servants in the woods of the secret palace garden, and was sexually aroused by mock beheadings. He liked weapons and armour, and horses colourfully caparisoned in the finery of war. He had a fine sword made by a famous craftsman of which he was immensely proud. Its blade was sleek and curved and thin and dangerous. Even I could see that it was a thing of beauty, a work of art. And he had a little toy sword made for me, in imitation, a miniature sword such as ladies used to wear as a fashion accessory. At first I treasured it, as a gift, and wore it at my belt. But after this killing, I wore it no more.

Never had I thought he would turn from play to the real thing, from art to execution. He had deeply disliked the occasions when his father had obliged him to preside at real trials and witness real punishments.

I knew that he had behaved sadistically towards some of the ladies-in-waiting. He had threatened them with violence when they tried to refuse his overtures, and he had taken them without their full consent. Nobody spoke to me directly of these abuses, but I heard whispers, and I had eyes in my head. I knew these actions and tendencies were not good, but at this stage I had not known how far they had gone. Sado’s favours were much feared, and Pingae alone seemed able to control him. Towards her, he behaved with some discretion.