The Red Queen (11 page)

He had not troubled me with sexual demands for some months when this first killing took place. As his primary consort, I had by now borne him four children, three of whom had survived, including the all-important son, the Grand Heir Chŏngjo, who was at the time of this first killing some five years old. (Pingae by now also had a child by Sado, and was to bear him one more.) I had done my duty to the Yi dynasty and to my husband, and he had done his duty to me. He treated me always with respect, as the mother of the heir. I think he treated me with more than respect. There was a guilty pleading sorrow at times in his demeanour, as though something in him remembered the days when we were two married children, playing seriously together at being man and wife, at being prince and princess. I had known him as a child, and he had known me as a child, and together we had been frightened of the future. Never in his life, even until the last days, did he threaten me with death, though he did on one occasion injure me. I think he relied on my support and my understanding. Or do I mean that he relied on my collusion and my collaboration? Was I a party to his crimes?

When I describe us as ‘two married children’, I seem to be sentimentally invoking your pity. But in truth I do see us, as from afar, like two dolls in a distant pageant. Two small, overdressed, unhappy, innocent dolls.

At this stage, at the time of this first killing, I did not speak up about his crime. I did not think of approaching either his father or his mother. I spoke only to Pingae and, in secret, to my older brother, who at that time, having passed his examinations, had become a court official – he was eventually to be appointed as tutor in the Office of Lectures to my son Chŏngjo, the Grand Heir. My father was at this time far away: I think it was in the preceding year that he had been appointed magistrate of the province of Kwangju. Pingae, of course, knew the true state of affairs, for the ladies-in-waiting spoke openly to her. My older brother was appalled when I told him of the murder, and at first wanted me to leave the court altogether. But how could I leave my children? They needed me and my protection, I told him, and he could see the force of this argument.

First Brother and I would talk into the night, discussing my plight and Prince Sado’s illness. First Brother was himself an austere, cold, clever man, the very opposite in temperament from Sado, and he was able to look with a detached eye upon the bizarre pattern of behaviour that I described to him and of which, of course, he heard unconfirmed rumours from others. By now, there was no concealing Sado’s illness. First Brother and I agreed that though the killings (and one followed another) were the most horrific manifestations of his illness, the clothing phobia was the most mysterious. I find it very hard to write about it, even after all these years. I think it fills me with shame as well as with anxiety.

As I have said, Sado had increasing difficulty in dressing every day. Some days he would order me to have ten, twenty, thirty outfits to be laid out for him, and then he would reject them, one after the other. At first it seemed like a monstrous parody of childish pique or girlish indecision, but soon it took on a more sinister light, for he started to burn the rejected garments, or to slash them to pieces. With his finely honed sword he destroyed them, and with other lesser weapons. His chamber would be full of rent cloth, of soft mountains of ribbons of black and of red. Then he would order these rags to be bustled away out of his sight, or burned, as he mumbled about ghosts and demons. And fresh suits would be brought, until at last one pleased him – and then he would don it, and wear it perhaps for days, sometimes for weeks, until it was filthy and began to fall to pieces. His servants and valets were in mortal terror of this strange behaviour – with good cause, as it proved, for he began to turn on them, and to attack them if anything went awry in the elaborate robing process. Some were even killed, I regret to record.

You are wondering if the clothing allowance of even a crown prince could provide endlessly for such destruction, and you are right to ask because the answer is that it was not easy. Such reckless consumption stretched his allowance and gave rise to much malicious speculation – for, of course, those near to him tried to conceal his madness. My father would secretly obtain bolts of cloth in the city, and supply them to his tailors, hoping to guess what fabrics, what colours would please, and trying to substitute cotton for silk. But this had been a great expense for my father, and moreover it was impossible to guess right, for Sado’s sudden loathings and likings were capricious and irrational, or so they seemed to us. When Father left for Kwangju, it was even harder for us to conceal the problem, for Sado took to raiding the palace supplies, and there was much comment.

First Brother and I speculated in vain about this phobia. I think I voiced my view that Sado was reacting against the over-regulation of court life, and against his father’s strictures, but First Brother thought this was an overly psychological interpretation (though that is not the word he would or could have used, of course).

We were past fearing for Prince Sado’s reason: we knew he had already lost it. He was not only murderous: he was also suicidal. We felt helpless. Our only relief lay in the imminent return of Father from the provinces, though there was not much he could do either.

The emotional state of the court at this time was extraordinarily tense. Our house had become a house of horror, a charnel house, where everyone feared for his life. And it was not only Sado’s madness that disturbed the dignity and tranquillity of the court. His father King Yŏngjo also was in a highly unnatural state, which came to a head several months later, at the winter solstice. King Yŏngjo had at last discovered, as we knew in the end that he must, that Sado had taken Pingae from the royal sewing room to be his concubine. He was outraged, and summoned Sado into his presence at Kongmuk House, where he was staying for the duration of the period of mourning for the Dowager Queen Inwŏn. He berated his son, and, more dangerously, he demanded that Pingae be brought to him at once. Sado refused, with violent oaths and violent abuse, and I hit upon the device of deceiving the king with a substitute. I sent in her stead another lady-in-waiting from my own sewing department, a young woman of much the same age as Pingae, and sent Pingae away to Sado’s sister’s residence outside the palace, where I advised her to stay hidden for a while. The king vented his wrath on the false Pingae, and arranged for her to be sent into exile.

At least he did not chop off her head. Well, perhaps he did, but not to my knowledge, and not in my sight. I absolve myself. As far as I know, he did not order her execution. She disappeared. So many disappeared.

I had saved Pingae, my rival and my friend. For a while, at least.

Then, for the first time in my life, the king turned on me, and shouted at me in a most undignified and uncontrolled manner, banging at the ground in his fury, and demanding to know why I had not let him know of what he described as a shameful and prohibited liaison. I defended myself as best I could, saying that it was not my wifely duty to inform on my husband. He went on shouting about Pingae, and about Sado’s earlier concubine (that court lady of the Lower Second rank), and about Sado’s insubordinate attitude, and about my deceit. Then he insisted that Sado return to see him and that I depart from his presence.

What happened next I did not witness, though my father did, and so did the whole bureaucracy, including the wretched president at that time, the devious and two-faced Kim Sangno, who was always critical of my husband. There ensued, it seems, another violent and blustering shouting match between father and son, which ended in Sado’s rushing from the building and throwing himself down the low stone-bordered well in front of Yangjŏng House. He might have been killed, but for the fact that there was very little water in the well, and what there was, was largely frozen. Sado was rescued by the palace guard Pak Se-gun, who managed to climb in and carry him out on his back. Sado was dreadfully bruised and soaked when he was heaved out, but the public humiliation was worse than any injury. The king became angrier than ever, and, when my father tried to intervene on Sado’s behalf, Yŏngjo turned on him, too, stripped him of his ministerial office and sent him to await his punishment at a place outside the city. What a night! I prudently removed myself to the servants’ quarters, where I hid myself away for some days, waiting for the storm to blow over.

Eventually King Yŏngjo forgave me, and summoned me back to my apartment. I expressed excruciating gratitude and prostrated myself before him, but alas, Prince Sado did not follow my diplomatic example. He refused to see his father and left me to do all the work of a go-between. They did not meet for many weeks, and in the end it was left to the father to descend to seek the son in his apartment. He cannot have been pleased by the grim and squalid conditions in which he now found Sado to be living, but some paternal feeling was left in him, and he shortly summoned him to a meeting in Sungmun Hall, at which the strangest of exchanges took place. Both father and son gave me their own accounts of this bizarre encounter, which took place in the spring of 1758, and to some extent they tallied. I believe this to be more or less the truth of what happened.

According to Prince Sado, his father now asked him directly about the killings, and, being unable to lie to his father. Sado confessed to them. According to King Yŏngjo, however, Sado began to speak of them of his own accord, believing his father knew all about them anyway. I do not know which of these versions is more accurate. Whoever spoke first, the outcome was the same.

Prince Sado explained himself to his father in these words:

‘It relieves my suppressed anger, sir, to kill people or animals.’

‘Why is your anger aroused?’

‘Because I am so hurt.’

‘Why are you so hurt?’

‘Because you do not love me, and also I am terrified of you because you constantly reproach and censure me. These are the causes of my illness.’

Then, by both their accounts, Sado began to outline the killings – of eunuchs, attendants, prostitutes, ladies-in-waiting – and his father listened to this catalogue of crimes in horrified silence. I do not think Sado spoke of the clothing disorder. How could he have found the words to describe it?

It seems that Yŏngjo was moved as well as horrified by this catalogue because he promised to be more lenient and considerate towards his son in the future. Yŏngjo even came to me, in some emotion, and made the same professions of concern. I confirmed the view (which I also believed) that it was the king’s lack of loving care that had so disturbed his son. The king then asked me to report on Sado’s health, and to take good care of him. I did believe for a while that his heart had been touched and that he intended to try to show more affection to his son. I encouraged him with smiles and tears to be good to Sado. All our lives, literally, depended on some kind of rapprochement between king and heir. But it was too late, it was far too late.

There was such an accumulation of sorrow in our court at this time, such rivalry of grief. It was during the period between the surrendering of the supposed Pingae and Sado’s confession that yet another of the princesses died, and by her own choice. Lord Wŏlsŏng, Princess Hwasun’s husband, died of a fever, and Princess Hwasun starved herself to death in order to follow him. She died thirteen days after her husband, like a dutiful model Confucian wife. But instead of admiring the exemplary devotion of his second daughter, a devotion which the history books have praised so highly, King Yŏngjo did his best to dissuade her from fasting, and when she died he refused her the proper honours, on the grounds that she had been unfilial – in short, he accused her of preferring her husband to her father. No vermilion gate was erected in her memory. She was expelled from her father’s affections. I wonder if her death played any part in Yŏngjo’s attempted reconciliation with Prince Sado?

It was clear by now that the succession to the throne was in serious doubt. Nobody thought Prince Sado fit to rule, although there were some who supported him for their own ends. I was almost the only person, apart from Pingae, who witnessed his moments of sanity and remorse. To others, he appeared by now to be wholly demented. The idiot President of the Council flattered Sado to his face, but schemed against him behind his back. He plotted and whispered and scribbled secret messages in the dust. Lady SŏnhŬi stuck by the king night and day, trying to keep guard and to prevent the president from poisoning Yŏngjo’s mind about her son, Sado. The mood in the palace was one of dire uncertainty: nobody knew what would happen from day to day. I lived in terror that some harm would be plotted not only against Sado, but also against our son, now proclaimed the Grand Heir. This proclamation was made in the third month of 1759, amidst much rejoicing, but I feared for the future. Prince Chŏngjo was only a child of seven. And three months after this proclamation, King Yŏngjo remarried.

The king embarked on this new marriage correctly, according to protocol, through the three-stage selection process, and with the apparent approval of Lady SŏnhŬi, but this time he married a woman very much younger than himself and from a family that had always been enemies of my family. This did not bode well for us. The bride was only fifteen. I knew that no good could come of this marriage, though, of course, like Lady SŏnhŬi, I was obliged to express delight. And I have to say that Prince Sado in public managed to behave in a proper manner towards his new young stepmother during the three-day wedding ceremony, which was soon followed by the Grand Heir’s formal investiture.