The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  King Yŏngjo had tried to curb his nation from indulging in excesses of alcohol, imposing various laws to fine both nobles and commoners who drank intemperately, and prohibiting the unlicensed distilling of wines and beers. (We drank a lot, as a nation, and I am told we still do.) Of course, these laws were flouted, as such laws always are, in every kingdom on earth. The policy of prohibition has a bad record. And Yŏngjo himself was not at all certain about the wisdom of trying to implement his attempted reforms. He vacillated.

  I remember one incident, at court, during the era of the strictest prohibition, when King Yŏngjo manifested a characteristic and almost ludicrous inconsistency. It was the day of some annual ceremonial, to pay tribute to the longevity of the elderly – we were very insistent on paying tribute to the old. A feast had been ordained, to which all couples who had been married for more than thirty years were invited. Songs were composed in their honour, and long speeches about the acquiring of wisdom were delivered. Little gifts of carvings of turtles and cranes, and other suitable symbols, were handed out, with small, embroidered flags attached to them. Delicacies of rice and honey were prepared, and foodstuffs in the royal colours were lavishly displayed and indeed consumed. But, because there was a royal edict in force against the serving of wine, only herbal infusions were offered, in vessels usually reserved for wine. The king himself took one of these cups of anodyne liquid, thinking and evidently hoping that it was wine, and sipped from it, but, when he discovered that it was not what he expected, he flew into a terrible rage and threw the liquid to the ground, letting out a violent storm of abuse against the kitchen staff who had dared to insult the elders of his kingdom with such feeble, spiritless stuff. Nobody knew quite what to do – would it be safe to remind him that the feast lacked alcohol because of his own decree? A brave retainer bustled off towards the kitchens and returned with a great jar of strong, well-fermented liquor (for there was always plenty available), and poured a beakerful for His Majesty, proffering it to him, with some inspired phrase like ‘Your Majesty, please accept our newly created virgin brew, prepared especially for our new era!’ Yŏngjo sniffed at it, sipped it, and drank it back, with evident satisfaction, then asked for more, and authorized its lavish distribution to all the old folk, who enjoyed it as much as he did. It was, by all accounts, a very merry festival. I was not there, for it would not have been seemly for me to attend, but I heard many reports of the incident. My woman Pongnyŏ, who was something of a mimic, enjoyed recounting this incident immensely, and her rendering of the behaviour of some of the old ladies lost nothing in the telling.

  The retainer of the royal household who took this bold initiative risked execution, as did all illicit brewers. He gambled on the king’s connivance, and won.

  Looking back, in my old age, this tragic farce seemed to me to characterize the inadequacies of our despotic yet bureaucratic regime. After many years of watching the whims and vagaries and weaknesses of monarchs, I began to yearn for a more consistent, more enlightened, less petty system of government. Yet now that I am immortally old, I see that even so-called enlightened systems cling to absurdities and inconsistencies. The surviving monarchies of Europe offer a strange commentary on progress.

  Yes, the king could be personally inconsistent, as well as inconsistent in his office. Although he praised temperance, there were other occasions, even later in his life, when he himself was spectacularly drunk in public. He had a violent, erratic personality, as excessive in his privations as, on occasion, in his indulgences. But he had a reputation for abstinence, and, by and large, it was deserved.

  My husband Prince Sado, in contrast, was not by nature a temperate man. He was given to alcoholic excess, and to sexual excess. These are not uncommon faults for princes in all kingdoms in all time, and at first they were not harshly judged. Prince Sado, like his father, was given to excessive histrionic display: the rituals and ceremonies of court life encouraged this kind of behaviour. We were fond of pageants and processions, and moments of public drama. But Sado also had weaknesses of his own that were rare, and as far as I know, unprecedented. No physicians could rescue him from himself. I watched the growth of his symptoms with great alarm.

  You should know that, after the consummation of our marriage, Sado took two secondary consorts, by both of whom he sired children. There was nothing unusual in this: it was our practice. I will not say I did not suffer some jealousy and resentment, for I did, but I did not indulge them inwardly or reveal them outwardly. The first of these consorts was a lady of the court, but of the Lower Second Court rank, Lady Yim Sukpin, who did not present much of a personal threat to me – she was not very clever, and her two sons by Sado were, to be frank with you, quite stupid. I felt some contempt for this liaison. I suppose what one feels in such a situation is a jealous contempt for an unworthy rival. It is not a very dignified emotion, but it is not very distressing. Confucian doctrine forbids jealousy in wives, and in this instance the doctrine provided a good cover for my true feelings. The lady’s first son was born in 1754; the second a year later. Although it was beyond the call of kinship and duty, my father and I tried to protect these boys in later life, when they were left fatherless, but both came to bad ends.

  Much more problematic was to be the addition, a couple of years later, of Pingae, or Lady Pak, as she was sometimes known. She was a wit and a beauty. In taking her as a consort, Prince Sado caused much offence, for she had been a lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Queen Inwŏn, King Yŏngjo’s stepmother and the most favoured wife of Prince Sado’s grandfather. Pingae had worked in the dowager queen’s sewing department. The dowager queen had been a powerful presence in court during the early years of my marriage, and she was a handsome and intelligent woman: she was kind to me, after her fashion, when I arrived at court as a child, and I was fond of her, in my undemonstrative way. It was very shortly after the dowager’s death in 1757 that Sado took Pingae to his bed, though I believed he had had designs on her for some time. This caused much indignation because there was a prohibition against such intergenerational sexual relations: Pingae’s daily physical proximity to Sado’s late step-grandmother should have rendered sexual contact with Sado forbidden, for it was construed as a kind of incest, but Sado paid no attention to this taboo. Nor, I must say, did I see the force or logic of it, as they were not blood relations. Had I known Pingae’s eventual fate I might have pretended to great moral objections and invoked, for her sake, the strictures of palace protocol. But I was ignorant of the future.

  My husband set Pingae up in some splendour, in her own detached apartment within the palace grounds, with expensive screens and hangings, and ladies-in-waiting to attend on her. He gave her costly gifts of jewels and fans. On that level, at first, he treated her well. She had some influence over him, at the beginning of their affair.

  This new liaison was successfully kept secret from his father for some time. King Yŏngjo did not know Pingae personally, of course, and would not have recognized her had he seen her, but we knew that the very fact of this contact would enrage him. As, when he discovered it, it did.

  Pingae’s late mistress, the Dowager Queen Inwŏn, was much honoured during her lifetime and after it by her stepson King Yŏngjo, who showered upon her more weight of honorifics with more resounding syllables than any other woman in our recent history had ever bowed beneath. We were great counters of syllables in the palace. And I have to say that, as palace matrons go, she was an impressive character. She was also, by the time I knew her, a little deaf, but she always seemed able to hear me when we spoke together privately. I think sometimes she pretended to be more deaf than she was. I much preferred her, at this period, to my mother-in-law, Lady SŏnhŬi. I never forgot how kind she was to me when I knocked over the rice jar. I wept and wept, I was so ashamed, but she comforted me, and told me that she herself had once tripped over the corner of a carpet and nearly fallen in the presence of His Majesty, her husband. These were serious matters, at court, these small accidents and trifling m
isdemeanours.

  King Yŏngjo bestowed many titles upon her, and he also addressed to her a great deal of conventional and second-rate poetry. Composition was not his forte, but the composing of poems was a social necessity in our time. His calligraphy was impressive – you may still see examples of it adorning the gates of his palaces, as the guide books will tell you – but his literary ability was, I fear, limited.

  I believe the dowager queen was tolerably kind to Pingae, when Pingae waited upon her. Nevertheless, Pingae clearly had ambitions beyond the confines of a sewing chamber.

  I was ignorant of the shape of the future, and I respected Pingae when she entered Prince Sado’s life. Unlike the dismal and complaining Lady Sukpin with her everlasting crocodile tears and her foolish fondness for her plain and stupid boys, Pingae was clever, well read and sharp-witted. Her formal education was as sound as mine, though more directed towards the pleasing arts and the promiscuous arts of pleasing. Unlike me, she did not come from a respected family of scholars, but she had attended an academy before entering the palace. And she had an artistic talent. She taught me new embroidery stitches, which helped to pass the time pleasantly. (She knew a pretty and novel version of the Chinese knot.) She wrote poetry, and she would read me her sijo. Prose was to become my forte, and I was never happy with the constraints, economies and subtleties of verse, but Pingae was an artist in the shorter form. Unlike the king, she could write. I admired and envied her talent. She wrote mainly in the melancholy kisaeng tradition, short three-line pastoral lyrics of love and loss, of green willows and red leaves and blue mountains, of lakes and bridges and separations. They were conventional, derivative, elegant little pieces, elegiac and gentle in tone, but genuinely accomplished.

  But she also composed, unusually, some longer poems with urban themes, in which one could detect a strange note of what I would now describe as social protest. This was a period when the strict divisions of society outside the walls of the palaces were showing some signs of erosion, when rich merchants were beginning to buy their way into the great yangban families of the nobility, when even peasants began to dream of the possibility of a new freedom. Ours had long been a society that paid lip service to merit, to an education open to all, even though in practice it was so firmly closed against all comers. But there were now some signs of change. New notions from what was called the School of Practical Learning began to infiltrate orthodox Confucianism. New scientific theories from China and the West were being discussed, new construction and engineering techniques were being developed, and genre paintings of common life became popular, even at court. I see now that Pingae’s urban fairy tales spoke of the coming of a more open order. I liked her versions of the tales of the road sweeper who married the moon princess, the silk spinner who was snatched up into the Milky Way to live amongst the king’s sons in the heavens, the bird of the streets that perched upon the emperor of China’s throne and sang subversion in his ear.

  Yet she, like me, was dependent upon the favours of the Crown Prince. She, like me, had to watch her every step and every word. And by this time Prince Sado was deeply unpredictable and often violent in his behaviour.

  She was stylish, the Lady Pingae. She wore her silk jacket cut higher on the bosom than any other lady at court. I would never have dared to wear so extreme a fashion, yet I admired it. I can see her now, with her sloping shoulders, her long, elegant swan neck, her firm young breasts, and that pert, proud little silk jacket, riding high above the high waist of her long, full gauze skirt. She had a lovely line. Her eye for colour and weave was faultless: those years in the sewing department had not been wasted, and now that she had money lavished upon her she was able to command some beautiful and extravagant garments for herself. I remember in particular an enchanting little jacket of dull yellow-gold, a sandy gold, with a pattern of fishes, which she wore with a turquoise skirt with a moiré wave design woven into it. It was like a seascape. And the waistband was of thin, dark blue gauze, embroidered with flowing green fronds of seaweeds.

  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 al
l, 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.