The Red Queen Page 8

  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.

  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 incid
ent. 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 h
ad 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.