The Red Queen (9 page)

I had never seen the sea.

I told Pingae about the red skirt I had longed for as a child, and we sighed and murmured and smiled as we exchanged confessions of our little vanities. It had been dull for her, attending on the dowager, sewing and embroidering endless yards of cloth in the queenly wardrobe. Who could blame her for catching the eye of Prince Sado, and for wanting royal robes of her own? I did not blame her.

Was I jealous of the Lady Pingae? I do not know. The attitude towards wifely jealousy in our polygamous society was confused and confusing. On the one hand, jealousy was disapproved, for the wife was supposed to be entirely subordinate to her husband’s wishes; on the other hand, a total absence of jealousy was construed as an unseemly and disloyal indifference. Degrees of jealousy demanded subtle shading. (Two hundred years before our time, a queen had been so unsubtle as to scratch her husband’s face in a fit of possessive jealousy: she died for the offence.) I do not think I was envious of Pingae’s beauty or of her talents, and I do not think I resented Prince Sado’s attentions to her. But I have to admit that I coveted one of the gifts he gave her. You may remember that I mentioned the screen of
fleurs-et-oiseaux
that my father-in-law gave to me. Sado gave to Pingae a screen that was as lovely, and more strange. It was of
fleurs-et-rochers-et-papillons
, of flowers and rocks and butterflies, and it showed a sequence of strange little pointed rocks with sheer, sharp geometric edges, jewel-like, crystal-like, each rock accompanied by a different flower, and above each flower a pair of butterflies. The colours were bolder than in my subtle, muted screen: the tiny rocks were azure blue and malachite green, the flowers were crimson and yellow, the butterflies of a fantastic glowing brilliance of scarlet and tortoiseshell and yellow, with swallowtails and swirling patterns of ribs and veins and peacock eyes.

Maybe you have heard of the conceit we nourished, the conceit that these tiny crystalline rocks and pebbles, as small as the flowers that grew by them and the insects that hovered over them, could grow into mighty rocks and mountains? Pingae and I used to make little trays,
à la japonaise
, with miniature landscapes and seascapes, with silvered water, and amethyst hills, and coral trees hung with gem-like fruits. We designed forests of freedom, and lakes of deliverance, and mountains of escape, where our free and tiny spirits could wander in a miniature paradise.

When Pingae was in a good mood, she had such a winning way of dressing my long hair. She would wash it in water scented with the leaves of the
chang-po
plant, and brush and comb it. In those days, when it was loosened, it fell in a thick cascade down to my waist. I was proud of my shining hair. We would laugh, as we sat together of an evening, and she would brush my hair and smooth my brow and temples with her long, white fingers and long, pink nails. She would shape my hair and sculpt it into soft, dark raven wings. She used a magical perfumed lacquer, mixed from peony oil and wild sesame and some kind of resin, which made the structure keep its shape. Then she would polish my nails with an infusion of Lady Slipper and burnt alum, and tint my lips with safflower and cinnabar.

She had some fine cosmetic secrets, though she herself appeared to have little need of them. Her skin was like ivory. She glowed with a pale, rich, precious light. I assume this translucent glow was natural. If it was cosmetic, it was discreetly so. Discretion was then in vogue. In our day, the earlier fashion for bold, colourful and extravagant make-up had given way to a more refined and subdued look. We prided ourselves on our unassuming good taste, on our austere aesthetics. My little ceramic pots of oil were priceless, but they were of the plainest white.

There was a woman’s hour every evening, in our country, when women were allowed to walk the streets of the city, and men were forbidden by a strict curfew to leave their homes. After nightfall the women had the streets to themselves, and were free to walk and joke and wander. I, of course, as a palace lady, as a crown princess, was not allowed such licence, but I heard stories of this magic time of liberty from my sister, from my young aunt and above all, now, from Pingae. Pingae would tell me of the tearooms, and the sweetmeats, and the silk merchants, and the chestnut vendors, and the disreputable Buddhist nuns, and the washerwomen, and the gossip, and the little dogs, and the monkeys, and the smells of spring and autumn. She would speak, and I would stitch with my gold and crimson threads. Seoul was a great and busy city, and Pingae was a city lover, but she would also tell me of the river and the hills and the mountains beyond. She herself had paid a visit to the legendary temple of ten thousand peaks. She would tell me stories of the countryside and of the villages, of the games of kites and swings and seesaws, of the festivals and picnics and pleasures of country people. She had a quick eye and a quick tongue. I would have said that she was a born survivor. But it was I that lived on into old age.

I remember that Pingae was curiously and paradoxically fond of the melancholy story of Queen Min, otherwise known as Lady Inhyŏn, one of those popular true stories of a virtuous wife that our Confucian culture was much disposed to produce. Lady Inhyŏn was the wife of King Sukchong, who put her away from him because she was childless, and took a concubine, who produced an heir. He sent his wife into banishment, where she pined faithfully for six long years in a lonely, ruined house, or so it is said, until the concubine in turn fell out of favour and the king attempted to woo back his first and former love. Eventually, after much persuasion, she returned to court, but shortly after died, at the age of thirty-four, amidst much royal grief and penitence. I do not know why Pingae liked this story so much. One might have expected her to take the part of the wicked rival, Lady Chang, the upstart concubine, and maybe secretly she did. According to the ‘true story’, the jealous Lady Chang murdered Lady Inhyŏn by witchcraft. It is a grim, ghostly story of ground bones and buried skeletons and envenomed garments and portraits pierced by wicked arrows. A chamber of horrors story, a Jacobean story of palace villainy fit for one of your playwrights of revenge tragedies, a story that I would have thought fanciful had I not lived to see worse with my own eyes.

Lady Chang, accused of the murder of her reinstated rival, was forced to swallow poison. She said that, if she were made to die, she would kill her son the crown prince, too, and she and the heir would die together. But she died, and he survived.

Lady Chang was the mother of the crown prince who became the King of the Poisoned Mushroom whom King Yŏngjo supplanted. She was not the mother of King Yŏngjo himself: his mother was a woman called Ch’oe Sukpin. King Sukchong had many wives and many concubines. There is no need to remember their names. This is not a history book or a work of genealogy.

What a strange mixture our palace lives were, with their mixture of fear and violence, of boredom and elegant inertia.

It was perhaps wrong of me to have enjoyed the company of Pingae, and I know that there was malicious gossip about our association. The Dowager Queen Inwŏn, her one-time employer and my stepmother-in-law, would have disapproved of it because she had been very strict about these matters: she had introduced a new rule that concubines and the daughters of concubines should not sit together with the wives and daughters of princes, in order to try to prevent such friendships and liaisons. But the dowager queen was dead, and I was lonely.

I loved Pingae’s stories because she had seen something of the world. At times, how I longed to escape and to see this other world. I had been trapped young, and imprisoned. Women of our time and of my rank led claustrophobic, indoor lives: our gardens were large, but they were walled and indoor gardens. Outdoor exercise was considered unseemly, un-Confucian. It is said that the little girls of the court were fond of swings because, if they swung themselves high enough, they could glimpse the world that lay over the compound wall. I was too grand and too noble to play on the swings, but my daughters used to sail into the sky in their coloured butterfly skirts.

I watched the marker of the round bronze sundial, as it caught the slowly moving shadow of the sun.

I watched the wind streamer, as it fluttered in the breeze that blew towards us from the granite mountains.

I watched the ginger dragonflies, as they hovered over the grasses.

I heard the rain drops, as they fell on the broad leaves of the foxglove tree.

I watched the kingfishers, as they darted through the reeds.

I watched the white herons, as they stood on guard at the water’s edge.

I listened to the cry of the cicadas.

I gazed at the silent golden fish in the lotus pond in the secret garden, and wondered if they knew their confines. Occasionally a fish would leap, hopelessly, upwards, into the dangerous air.

I liked this verse, by a
kisaeng
poet of the past century, whose name I forget. I often thought of it.

Who caught you, fish, then set you free
Within my garden pond?
Which clear northern sea did you leave
For these small waters?

I have seen more of the world now, and it is confusing. But I will make sense of it before time itself dies.

Despite her bright and worldly ways, Pingae was more superstitious than I was, and occasionally she would ask me if I wanted to consult a wise woman about Prince Sado’s growing illness. It was forbidden for us to consult these women, but, of course, the practice lingered on, particularly amongst the lower and merchant classes, and it was not unknown for ladies of the court to make contact with them. (I am told the practice still survives, even in your time. I am told the great spirit grandmothers in suburban Seoul are still greedy for the sacrifice of food and dollar bills.) These approaches to the spirit world were made through shamans (or
mudangs
, or
mansins
, as they were variously described), and most of them were harmless. Not all court ladies were intent on murdering their rivals by smearing the cotton lining of their robes with poisoned pastes. Some merely sought remedies for complaints and sicknesses, and these wise women knew of good herbal remedies. But bad advice was also given: one former queen was advised to propitiate the evil spirits that were attacking her son by bathing daily in a cold stream. Not surprisingly, this did her and him little good, for as a result of this practice she caught cold and died. Or so the story goes.

I resisted Pingae’s suggestion that we consult a shaman because I had little faith in a cure through such means, and because I wished to protect Prince Sado from gossip, and to conceal his affliction. But as I watched him deteriorate, I began to think we had nothing to lose, and at times I think I would have tried any remedy, however wild or primitive, or unlikely. All who have loved a person driven into insanity will know where this desperation can lead. How can one minister to a mind diseased? One will try any witchcraft, any newfangled or old-fashioned form of healing. But by then it was too late. He was beyond reach, and it was dangerous to approach him.

They say that these wise women, these
mudang
, are themselves mad, or possessed. And Prince Sado was now mad. Can one mad person cure another? I suppose it may be so. Some say that one cannot understand the ways of our country without understanding the ways of the
mudang
. But you must understand that, although a woman, I was a member of an educated elite, and I believed in reason. The madder Sado became, the more I believed in reason. I took refuge in reason and in the life of the mind. Posterity is witness to my rationality.

I say I am not superstitious, and I have always been suspicious of these conveniently auspicious dragon dreams that we claim to have. I have never dreamed of a dragon in my life, despite the dominant dragon imagery of our culture. I think most of these dreams are politic fictions or literary conventions. The father of the ill-fated and faithful Lady Inhyŏn, of whose sad story Pingae was so fond, claimed that he saw shimmering lights hovering like a rainbow over her washbowl when she was an infant – a more original conceit than a dragon, I concede, but I fancy just as retrospective. My father even admitted, in later years, that he had embroidered the black-dragon dream he claimed to have had before my birth: he had based its graphic details on an old painting that used to belong to my grandfather, and which mysteriously reappeared in the Bridal Pavilion when I became betrothed to Sado. The reappearance of the painting was rather strange, I admit, but I am sure it owed more to human than to supernatural agency. Valuable objects did tend to wander round the palaces, disappearing and resurfacing without much official explanation, but we need not credit ghosts with these removals.

I must, however, confess to one common though by no means universal (nor indeed Korean) superstition, to which I have been subject all my life. I am afraid of magpies, and I say secret childhood rhymes to placate them whenever I see them. I think of them as birds of ill omen. I do not know why. I now know that in some cultures the magpie is feared, whereas in others it is treated with respect. Fear of magpies is neither innate nor universal, but it certainly afflicted me. Maybe I was already foreshadowing the Western superstitions of my Western ghost. In our culture, the magpie was seen as a harbinger of good fortune, as a herald of guests. It is strange that I felt this fear. Was I already moving out of the conditioning of time and place? Had some process of ghostly permeation already begun? It seems a trivial and harmless phobia, but it is not without its interest, and I have devoted some posthumous time to its study. I have not finished with it yet.