The Red Queen Page 15

  Somehow, we managed to make our way through the days of ritual offerings, each one of which caused new anxieties. Rituals are designed to comfort, but what comfort can be found when each stage of mourning is without a hallowed precedent, and is overshadowed by disgrace? Prince Sado’s mother, Lady SŏnhŬi, who never truly recovered from this disaster – she died two years later of a malignant tumour – came to see me as I sat by the coffin, and could not control her grief. She beat her breast, and banged her head against the coffin, and wailed like a madwoman. She was growing old before my eyes. Perhaps it is worse to lose a son than a husband. I have lost both, and I should know. But yet I cannot say. At least my sons died of natural causes. That is a comfort.

  I did not know how to look to the future at this point. No clear path lay before me. I had lost my role and my purpose and my status at court. I had been exhausted by my vain and prolonged efforts to conceal Sado’s derangement. My father, always a practical man, seemed to be doing his best to restore favour to and smooth the progress of the Grand Heir, who was formally instated as crown prince in a matter of weeks. I did not think that I could ever look my father-in-law in the face again. How could I ever forgive him his cruelty?

  But when King Yŏngjo came in the eighth month to the lower palace for the bimonthly sacrifice at the Ancestral Shrine, I made myself go out to meet him and greet him. It was a strange and emotional encounter. I expressed my humble gratitude for the safety of myself and my son, using conventional phrases that said nothing of the turmoil within me, and the king seemed shaken by my words. Perhaps he was as afraid of me as I was of him. We fear those we have injured, even when we retain power over them. To my surprise, he even thanked me for being so gracious, and said he had dreaded seeing me after what had happened. He told me that it was ‘noble’ and ‘beautiful’ of me to put him at his ease. What odd things we can say at these dire moments. Face to face with him like this, with so much suffering behind us, I remembered the well-meant and kindly advice he had given to me when I was a newly betrothed little girl of ten. He had taught me court manners. And look where these court manners had led us both.

  The king looked old and shrunken, and so, no doubt, did I. Looking at the king, and contemplating the powerlessness to which I had been reduced, as the widow of a deposed and ruined prince, I suddenly heard myself saying that the king should, if he would, take my son to live with him in the upper palace. I had not premeditated this offer: it came to my lips spontaneously. I think I sensed that my son would be safer if he were under the immediate protection of the king, for, with me, he risked contamination. The king seemed at first surprised by my suggestion, and in a diffident and curiously humble tone asked me if I was sure I could bear to part with him. I think the guilt over Prince Sado’s death was a crushing burden to him, and he wished to placate me, as I wished to placate him. I think we both felt inadequate. Even kings can have such feelings. I assured him that my son’s well-being and the superior instruction he would receive in the upper palace were of more importance to me than my own happiness. And this was true, in its way.

  So the young Crown Prince Chŏngjo went off to live with his paternal grandparents. Lady SŏnhŬi became devoted to him, in the two years of life that were left to her, and looked after him very tenderly, transferring to him all the affection she had once felt for his poor father. I felt more warmly towards her than I had done in earlier years, when she had seemed to be attacking both Sado and myself, or to be taking sides against me and in his favour. She seemed defeated by the weighty tragedy of her life, and I felt sorry for her. She was growing older – she was now nearing seventy – and she lived in self-reproach, blaming herself for her part in her son’s death. She used to say that, when she died, no grass would grow upon her grave. Flies would be her company, in the words of the old song, and heavy rain would fall upon her grave. No turf would cover her; no grass would grow over her. These were her laments.

  (Two hundred years later, I sent my ghost to seek her tomb in Seoul. It is in a university campus, near the tennis courts. The young men play tennis near her memorial tablet. The children picnic near the tomb of King Yŏngjo and his queen.)

  My son Chŏngjo did not forget me, despite his elevation to the upper palace. Every morning he would write me a note of greeting, and send it down to the lower palace by a messenger before he started the morning study session. I remember how eagerly I would reach for my tortoiseshell glasses to read these affectionate little missives, and how carefully I would store them in one of the drawers of my precious little lacquer writing cabinet. Whenever he could, he would come to meet me and greet me at the postern gate that divided the palaces. He would arrange for physicians and medicines to be sent to me, for I am afraid that during these years I was almost continuously ill. My constitution, although it was naturally strong, had suffered a near-fatal blow. And, in case you are wondering, let me assure you that during these hard middle years my illnesses were not illnesses of convenience: I was on the verge of breakdown, unable to sleep and unable to keep my food down. Lumps of my hair fell out – I wept when I remembered how cleverly Pingae had dressed my hair, and the happy evenings we had spent together talking of ladies’ fashions and of poetry. I had not thought myself happy at the time, but I looked back on these evenings with mournful regret. Would I ever be happy again?

  And where was Pingae now? Was she reunited with Sado in the other world, and had she forgiven him? In death, did they remember me, or was I banished from their thoughts? Did they suffer after death? Did they make love after death? Was Sado now at rest? I was restless, tormented, and when I slept I had bad dreams. The time hung heavily, in my disgrace, in my long hours in the mourning chamber. I thought of writing an account of my wretched life, but I had not yet the spirit to begin it. I continued to sew and embroider, but I sewed without love. I sewed to stitch my way through time. The needle pierces the cloth; the iron crushes the cloth. I thought of Pingae, safe and dull in the sewing chamber. She should have stayed within, and lived. Ambition killed her.

  In those early years after Sado’s death, my son missed me sadly, for he was still a child. When he was permitted briefly to come to visit me for a few hours, he could hardly tear himself away to return to his grandparents. Our partings on these occasions were very distressing to both of us. I remember his clinging and his crying. Seeing him weep, I remembered how lonely and frightened I had been at the time of my betrothal and my removal to the palace. I had to harden my heart and behave coldly towards him in order to drive him away. It was difficult. He was too young to be separated for such long periods from his mother. I was afraid that King Yŏngjo would be offended by this all-too-natural and filial partiality for me, and I pretended to Yŏngjo that when my son was with me in the lower palace he longed to be with his grandfather in the upper palace – like a true child, I said, he always said he wanted to be wherever he was not. King Yŏngjo gullibly accepted this explanation, but of course it was not so. At this time, my son still wanted to stay at home with me. I think he may have felt he could be a comfort to me. He was also morbidly anxious to pay proper respects to his dead father, and there was something very disquieting in the way he wailed in the mourning chamber, before Prince Sado’s tablet. I wonder how much he knew at that time of his father’s crimes, and if such knowledge made him mourn the more. I fancied in my madness that the poor, lonely tablet glowed with light when my son abased himself before it. Was Prince Sado’s ghost somewhat appeased by the sight of the Grand Heir’s tears?

  You would think no worse could happen to us, and in a way the worst was over, but bad consequences continued to flow from that bad act, and some of them were inexpressibly painful to me. I will spare you all the details of my further humiliations, and of my son’s estrangement from me, but some I must recount. I had already lost my royal rank and been declared a commoner, but now, two years after Prince Sado’s death, I was also declared a non-mother. A royal decree was issued proclaiming Prince Chŏngjo to be the posthumously ado
pted son of Sado’s brother, that brother who had died as a boy of ten, before Sado’s birth. Prince Chŏngjo was no longer to be his father’s son; he was now declared to be the son of a long-dead ten-year-old uncle! This was exactly what Sado himself had foreseen. I was demoted, my status as crown princess and legal parent of the future king denied. I was no longer my son’s mother. This, surely, was a form of matricide. The decree was made for reasons of state, evidently, in order to secure the succession: there had certainly been doubts raised in some quarters about the propriety of allowing the son of an executed criminal to inherit the throne and the kingdom. I can see that now, but during my lifetime I found it hard to be so calm and so objective. The atmosphere was too thick with suspicion and paranoia for me to see clearly, and I was in much mental distress. I saw insults and danger everywhere. I think I was going through some kind of mental breakdown. But I maintain that I was right to be suspicious. There was much real hostility towards me. Factions were already busily manoeuvring against the Grand Heir and his maternal family: there were other candidates eager to seize or usurp power.

  I believe that Prince Sado’s sister, Madame Chŏng, was the prime mover behind this royal decree of 1764, the so-called infamous ‘kapsin arrangement’ that undid me as a mother in the eyes of the world. She was, as I have hinted, an ambitious woman, competitive, jealous and obsessed by power. During Prince Sado’s life, she had seen him as her road to power, but, after his disgrace and death, she latched upon the next and most obvious candidate for her own preferment, the Grand Heir. I was often to wonder whether I had been wise to permit, indeed to suggest, Chŏngjo’s removal to the upper palace. I had hoped to forestall trouble by meeting it halfway, but maybe, I thought at times, I thought increasingly, I would have done better to keep him close to me for as long as I could.

  At first, as I have said, my son was intensely loyal to me, even in separation, and while his grandmother Lady SŏnhŬi was still alive there was still some natural affection and dutiful respect flowing between the upper and the lower palace. But when Lady SŏnhŬi died in 1764, Sado’s sister Madame Chŏng moved quickly into the space she had vacated.

  I must spare a thought here for Lady SŏnhŬi, my mother-in-law, once known as the Bright Princess. She died an old and sad and defeated woman, who never recovered from the death of her son Sado. King Yŏngjo lamented her death with more than conventional sorrow, I thought, and wrote one of his better verses as a memorial for her, recording the thirty-eight years of their long journey together. He recorded that in the troubles of the imo year, it was she that had saved the state.

  On the twenty-seventh day of the ninth moon of the year kapsin, she left me and took her long departure. For thirty-eight years we had journeyed together, and now it is all a dream. Who knows what life means? On the last day of the eighth moon I wrote this inscription and got some relief from my sorrow. On the twenty-seventh day of the ninth moon we buried her here by the YŏnhŬi Palace in a tomb that faces a little west of south.

  That is what he wrote, according to one source. Another version gives the twenty-sixth day of the seventh moon as the day of her death, but it makes no great difference. Myself, I was there at the time, and I cannot remember. How can historians be accurate, when even earthly witnesses and immortal ghosts forget?

  It did not take long for Madame Chŏng to move into the dead grandmother’s shoes. She took over the maternal role, and flattered the Grand Heir Prince Chŏngjo, wooing him with gifts of quilted clothes and fancy shoes and beautifully crafted toy swords. She also played on his suspicions. She abused my family, and managed to alienate him from his wife, the harmless little Grand Heir Consort. In retrospect, I see that she did everything she could to prevent him from producing an heir. Prince Chŏngjo was growing into adolescence now, and his aunt was beguiling and seductive towards him. She was also very possessive: remarks relayed in all innocence to me by Chŏngjo revealed that she seemed to be jealous even of the books he was studying. She flew into a rage on one occasion over a book about the Sung dynasty that he had been reading, and disparaged it, saying it was prejudiced, inaccurate and unsuitable for a boy of his years. She tried to invade his mind. She was one of those women who think the whole world revolves around her: she could take offence at a glance or a gesture. She was perverse and wilful and violent. The king adored her, and, now that Lady SŏnhŬi was dead, he relied on her more and more.

  Madame Chŏng herself had no children, and when her husband died without an heir, she had adopted as her son a nephew from her husband’s family, as was the custom. (This child, Chŏng Hugyŏm, you may recall, was the boy whom Prince Sado had taken hostage and locked in a cellar when he was pleading to be allowed to take his trip to the hot springs of Onyang.) She saw this boy as another means of wielding power, and she trained him to ingratiate himself with my son, who was two years younger than he. Chŏng Hugyŏm was a corrupting influence. My father did his best to intervene, and so did Third Brother. Even I tried to court Chŏng Hugyŏm, against my better judgement, and to placate him by finding him safe preferment. This was a disastrous error.

  And trouble came not only from that quarter. After the Lady SŏnhŬi’s death, the new young queen, King Yŏngjo’s teenage bride, revealed herself openly as our enemy. She had at first displayed due deference to me and I to her. Although I was so much older than she was, never for a moment did I presume to hint that I had been in the palace longer than she and therefore deserved more respect. I did not stand on precedence. Prince Sado had abused her in her absence, but even he had been respectful in her presence. And my father, ever the diplomat, had always taken care to keep on the right side of her and of her father. Open confrontation with her was not a possibility. We had to play a careful game. The young queen’s father, once a private scholar but now elevated in rank, had been instructed in court etiquette by my father, but he had picked up too many court tricks, and he began to stir up animosity against us.

  In short, we were surrounded by intrigue, and my son’s accession to the throne was by no means certain. Under the erratic rule of an ageing king, coterie fought with coterie, and the Hong family continued to arouse much resentment. As I have said, some historians have reduced the whole of this period to this single sentence: ‘there was a power struggle between the Hongs and the Kims.’ I suppose there may be some truth in that reduction. Hong and Kim, Genji and Heike, York and Lancaster, Montagu and Capulet – that is the way the world goes. In my lifetime, I tried to write true records of this period and its dangers, but it would be wearisome to repeat now all the details of the power struggles and the successive favourites and pretenders that threatened us. It is enough to say that many people, including Madame Chŏng, including even my own daughter’s husband, attempted to alienate my son from me, and to gain control of his growing mind. At times they succeeded, and I think I myself erred in judging his adolescent escapades too harshly. I suppose I was afraid that he would inherit his father’s weaknesses, and I dreaded any sign of indulgence on his part, or any suggestions from others that he might be open to bad influences. I feared that he was showing signs of a fondness for low life, for the company of courtesans and palace servants, and I reacted angrily to Madame Chŏng’s hints that he might be following in his father’s footsteps. ‘Bad blood will out,’ she would mutter. On one occasion, she even dared to say that she feared a repetition of ‘that incident’ – but even she dared not give the Imo Incident a name. I was frightened and humiliated by her insinuations, and occasionally I reacted rashly, indiscreetly.

  For fourteen long years the old man Yŏngjo outlived his murdered son Prince Sado, and these years were packed with every kind of attempted subversion. Madame Chŏng was a clever and devious woman, and she tried many ways of seducing my son. She permanently estranged my son from his wife, the Grand Heir Consort. It is true that the Grand Heir Consort had thus far been unable to produce an heir, but it was not true, as Madame Chŏng hinted, that my son was impotent. Nor is it necessarily true, as she also hin
ted, that the Grand Heir Consort was infertile.

  I felt sorry for my daughter-in-law, the Grand Heir Consort. Never very strong, she had now developed some kind of eating disorder – a kind of disorder that was prevalent in our neurotic society – and she lost much weight. She grew very thin, and seemed to survive on a sparse diet of nuts, mushrooms, and jasmine or ginseng tea. She ate like a mouse, poor child. And she never, in all her life, spoke a word against her father-in-law, Prince Sado. I think she never recovered from the confused impression of her first night-time encounter with him, when he was so unexpectedly gallant towards her, in such unorthodox circumstances. Sado was a charming man, when he chose to charm. I think the little princess was half in love with him, and she idolized him as a martyr after his death.

  It may be that she was the one who was afraid of consummating the marriage. I do not know. She did not confide in me: I think she was afraid of me. I was a daunting figure, wearing my white mourning robes and my widow’s crown of tragedy. I suppose I hoped that Prince Chŏngjo would take a secondary consort, in a relationship free of the long shadow of ‘that incident’ – and this indeed is what happened, though not for some years. Chŏngjo was over thirty before he produced a surviving heir. It seemed for years that he might die without issue.

  Madame Chŏng defamed the little princess, and bore herself in an insulting manner towards me. Our enmity deepened. There were unbecoming scenes at court when we chanced to meet. I remember one confrontation, at the time of the death of the little princess’s father, which descended into abuse more fit for common people than for women of royal blood. I accused her of being drunk (and she was indeed a heavy drinker), and she accused me of hypocrisy. She even accused me of conniving at Sado’s crimes and forcing him into unnatural behaviour. Had I been a better wife to Sado, she said, he would not have taken to murder and debauchery. She blamed the infamous Imo Incident on me. I retaliated, I regret to say, by blaming her for his excesses, and I also accused her of spreading disgraceful slanders about the little princess.