The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  Sado came home in discontent, and soon resumed his military games and equitation exercises in the garden, in a hopeless, desultory yet persistent and superstitious manner. Meanwhile, during all this period, the king was paying more and more attention to our son Chŏngjo, the Grand Heir, clearly now depending on him for the future of his dynasty. And Chŏngjo, being mature and bright, responded well to these attentions. He devoted himself eagerly to the royal lecture sessions, and answered his grandfather’s questions with a wisdom beyond his years. He was a serious child who expected a great deal of himself, and, unlike his father, he actively enjoyed the intellectual challenge of a cross-examination. Unfortunately, King Yŏngjo was not satisfied simply to accept the good fortune of Chŏngjo’s aptitude and eagerness, and could not restrain himself from praising the grandson at the expense of the father. These ill-judged remarks and signs of discriminatory preference were transcribed into the accounts of the royal lecture sessions that Sado ordered to be recorded. This favouritism was very stupid of King Yŏngjo, but who was in a position to tell him to desist? I was so frightened that these reports might enrage Sado against his son that I persuaded the eunuchs in charge to delete any prejudicial comments from the copies of the proceedings that were shown to Sado. On the whole, this discreet system worked quite successfully, and I managed to moderate the tone of Yŏngjo’s praises so subtly that Sado did not suspect that I was censoring the reports. But this deceit required incessant vigilance on my part.

  It was during this period that Prince Sado began to leave the palace compound at night in disguise. This was completely forbidden, and very dangerous, but what could I do to prevent it? He could no longer be contained. He was a grown man, in the prime of life, and used to indulgence as well as to severity. I know that my father tried to speak to him, but without success. There was nobody who could manage the prince. I had despaired of my own influence over him, but I still had some faith in Lady Pingae, who for some time now had been the only person whom he permitted to attend him when he was getting dressed. I saw her as my ally, and considered that we had a common cause. I think she shared this view. I think she was my true friend. It may seem strange to some, this friendship between legitimate wife and favoured mistress, but, believe me, it was not so strange. Such alliances were not infrequent. I have to confess – I have already indirectly confessed – that I found Pingae attractive. She was beautiful.

  Then, suddenly, one evening, in the first month of the sinsa year of 1761, as he was getting ready to go on one of his incognito outings into the town, Prince Sado was seized with one of his violent tantrums, and he attacked Lady Pingae as she tried to remonstrate with him. After that first death, the death of the eunuch Kim Hanch’ae, this was the greatest shock our circle had suffered. I was not a witness to this scene, but I had heard terrible cries across the moonlit garden, and the news of his assault on Pingae came to me swiftly. I do not know if he knew that she was dying when he stormed out into the night, but she died soon after, within hours. I reached her before she died, but she was already speechless and insensible from head wounds and loss of blood. I was not able to bid her goodbye. Despite my grief and shock, and the knowledge that Sado might return at any moment, I kept my presence of mind and managed to behave rationally. As soon as the night was over I had her body removed to Yongdong Palace, where I arranged for her funeral to take place. This was as correct and dignified a ceremony as I could manage, within the limits of discretion and finance. I felt I was becoming Sado’s undertaker as well as his wife.

  When Prince Sado returned from his rampage, two days later, he said nothing. He did not mention Pingae, and he never asked after her again. It was as though she had never been. This was the woman he had loved above all others, the woman for whom he had braved his father’s fury. I never mentioned her again, of course. Did he know what he had done? I cannot tell. The news of the murder spread, despite the silence of myself and Sado, and I think it was no coincidence that the three chief ministers of the State Council – the President, the Minister of the Right, and the Minister of the Left – died in quick succession in the second and third months of this dreadful year. It was not a question of poisoned mushrooms. I believe they died by their own hands, in recognition of their inability to control Prince Sado, or to save him from himself. They saw it as their duty to die. Our culture had, at least in principle, a high regard for the dutiful suicide. My father was appointed to replace one of them on the State Council, a place that he accepted despite his deep misgivings. He had not sought advancement: he had had it imposed upon him, and for Sado’s sake, and for my sake, and for my son’s sake, he dared not refuse.

  Sado continued his nocturnal wanderings, dressed in common clothing, consorting with blind fortune-tellers, prostitutes, kisaeng, nuns, monks, shamans and other lowlife and expendable characters. At the end of the third month, he went on a longer excursion, to the province of P’yŏngyang, in the north-west – we had tried to dissuade him from this in the previous year, but he had clearly set his heart on it. Although Prince Sado was travelling under a false identity, the governor of the province – Governor Chŏng, who was the uncle of Madame Chŏng’s late husband – knew perfectly well who this mysterious and troublesome stranger was, and took it upon himself to wait on him and make sure that he had proper provisions. Governor Chŏng dared not report Sado’s whereabouts to King Yŏngjo, but he kept in touch with my father, who found himself in an insoluble dilemma. My father was equally reluctant to alert the king to his son’s transgressions because he feared the consequences for the rest of our family, in particular for the Grand Heir. So he, too, had to play a double game, concealing Prince Sado’s absence and his increasingly uncontrollable dementia. We were all compromised by Sado, all complicit in his crimes.

  The Outcast Prince, the Prince of Rags, the Prince of Mournful Thoughts. His fate was closing in upon him.

  At the palace, in the prince’s household, we played a new double game. We had to disguise his absence somehow, so we pretended that he was indisposed through illness. The head eunuch, Yu Insik, a clever and faithful friend, lay in the inner room, speaking and giving orders in the manner and voice of the prince, while another tended to him exactly as though he were the prince. Perhaps it is better not to discuss the terror and shame this duplicity produced in each of us who participated in it.

  Others, less loyal to the Hong family, and playing for different stakes, were not slow to pick up on and to report the prince’s aberrations. Denunciations and critical memorials, particularly about the visit to the north-west, were presented one after another to the prince, by those who quite rightly insisted that it was their duty to admonish him. The king did not come across these official memorials in the Records of the Royal Secretariat for some months, so there was a period of respite after Sado’s return to the palace from the north-west – he had only been away for some twenty days, but these had been days of constant anxiety for us, knowing as we did that his father had not approved his absence. How different from the happy days of the permitted journey to Onyang! And yet, mysteriously, the secret P’yŏngyang visit seemed to have had a more calming effect on Sado. On his return, he seemed quieter, more in control, and he conducted himself in a more decorous way during his regular audiences and lecture sessions. How pitiably we searched for signs of improvement! We still thought that maybe, if he could lead a more normal, a more active life, he might yet recover. He even managed to make himself pay his first visit to offer his respects to his parents at their new residence in KyŏnghŬi Palace, a visit that, despite my apprehensions, passed without mishap. A few days later, I too went to KyŏnghŬi Palace to pay my respects to His Majesty and Lady SŏnhŬi, taking with me the Grand Heir, their grandson. It was an awkward encounter. There was so much on all our minds, and so little we could say.

  Inevitably, King Yŏngjo soon discovered about the unauthorized trip to the north-west. It was in the ninth month that he read the official records that mentioned it, and, predictably, he at on
ce flew into a violent rage, ordering the banishment of certain eunuchs and the demotion of various tutors and royal secretaries. My father was at this time stripped of his post, though he was later reinstated. His Majesty threatened to descend in wrath upon Sado in the palace, and we fully expected his arrival and some dire consequences because on this occasion he had every right to be angry, for he had been deliberately deceived by all of us. Sado confided his fears to me. He said that he knew that his father wished to get rid of him. He believed his life was in danger. I tried to reason with him, telling him that the king loved the Grand Heir and would never harm the Grand Heir’s father: ‘He who respects the son must also respect his father, for father and son are bound together and share the same destiny,’ I reminded him, deploying an old Confucian platitude. But the prince, with much prescience, declared that it would be easy for his father to depose him and declare the Grand Heir the adopted son of his half-brother who had died at the age of ten, before Sado was born. Thus the succession would be assured, and Sado himself would be annihilated and written out of the record. There were plenty of precedents in our history for such strategic false adoptions.

  I protested that this was impossible, even while it struck me that it was horribly possible, but Sado said, ‘Wait and see! Even though you belong to me, he has always treated you and the children well. You will all survive, all of you. It is me that he hates, and me alone. His hatred has driven me into this illness, and now, because of this illness and his hatred, he will not let me live.’

  He spoke prophetically, with the clear wisdom of despair.

  However, the threatened royal visitation to our palace was suddenly cancelled. It seems that his inconsistent Majesty, who could fly into a rage about the tying of a pair of trousers, had as yet no stomach for dealing with a real confrontation over a serious issue. So we were spared this crisis, at least for a while.

  The next drama involved the selection of a wife for our son the Grand Heir, and another miserable story of a jade headdress. It was time for Chŏngjo to be betrothed, and, as was customary, various names were put forward for the first selection for a child bride, including that of one young person much favoured by my father and by Prince Sado. The daughter of Minister Kim, she was persuasively described to me as ‘a beautiful and elegant young girl’ – poor child. Sado was too ill and too much out of favour to attend the selection process, so of course I could not go either, which seemed very hard to me. Luckily, the girl was chosen anyway: unluckily, both children contracted smallpox soon after the second selection. My father, now fully reinstated in King Yŏngjo’s favour, was asked by Yŏngjo himself to stay with their grandson during his illness, to attend to him and see to his needs. My father was indispensable. He had made himself indispensable. Both of the children recovered, but it was an anxious time.

  So all seemed well, and the final presentation approached. It even seemed as though Sado and I would at last be allowed to meet our future daughter-in-law. I was full of apprehensions about how Sado would conduct himself, and I was right to be so. Sado found it almost impossible to decide how to dress for this important event, and, when he had finally settled on a suit of clothes, he could not find an acceptable cap. He would not wear a hat suitable for his princely status, but instead he elected to put on a large and heavy cap of a military cut decorated with jade beads of the third rank. Even I have to say it was neither flattering nor appropriate, but nevertheless there was no call for His Majesty King Yŏngjo to become enraged by the very sight of this cap. He ordered Sado, in front of everybody, to leave the room. And Sado left, as it were, in disgrace.

  I should have left with him, I suppose, but I was overcome by a natural desire to see this girl who was to be one of my family and the bride of my son, so I stayed. But I knew that Sado must be wild with humiliation and disappointment. I quietly suggested to Madame Chŏng and Lady SŏnhŬi that there might be a possibility of taking the bride-elect to visit Prince Sado privately in our palace, which was on the way to the bride’s pavilion. This unorthodox proposal threw them into a panic, and they were still discussing the issue, in much confusion, when I decided to cut through their hesitations. I took the liberty of ordering an attending eunuch to make sure that the bride’s palanquin and mine were brought into the palace together. And so we two veiled and hidden women were carried through the gate, and entered the adjoining lower palace to which my husband had been banished.

  When we arrived, my daughter-in-law elect and myself, we found poor Prince Sado lying in great dejection and depression, nursing his sense of grievance and a small warm bowl of clear ch’onju wine. He had taken off that hideous helmet, and was dressed in an embroidered black silk gown. I entered the room boldly, with a theatrical flourish, followed by the poor little mite of a girl – how well I remembered my own terrors, and how justified were hers! – and announced with as much panache and respect as I could summon, ‘Here I am, ready to present to you the royal grandson’s consort and future bride!’ Sado was pleasantly surprised, and struggled to his feet to pay his respects to the little lady. He was smiling foolishly all over his face. Goodness knows what she made of the somewhat dishevelled grinning figure of her future father-in-law, but she did her best to greet him in a proper manner, and somehow we managed to pass a pleasant hour or two together. Sado was very reluctant to see her go, and tried to detain her: he was on touchingly good behaviour with her, trying to make her laugh, and pressing her to take a sip of his wine. She struggled bravely with her natural shyness and terror, and endeared herself to her future father-in-law by speaking well of the Grand Heir. ‘Such a fine young person!’ she said. ‘And so handsome, just like his father!’ Sado, who had at times such childlike innocence, smiled with naive delight at this diplomatic remark, and paid her many compliments in turn. So pretty, a face like a flower, skin like fine porcelain, hair like the raven’s wing, and such lovely dark eyes – and how fortunate that the smallpox had left no mark upon her lovely complexion. (Actually, she was still slightly scarred, but one can do wonders with cosmetics, and Sado was not very perceptive about such matters.)

  One would never have thought, watching the two of them together, exchanging compliments, that Sado was a psychotic and a murderer. At such moments, I found it hard to believe myself. But within an hour of her departure, he was again reviling his father and shouting blasphemies.

  I hoped and prayed that he would manage to control himself well enough to be able to attend the three days of the marriage ceremony at the beginning of the imo year of 1762. He was struck down, in the first month of the year, with another attack of very severely inflamed tonsils, and I did not know whether to wish for a timely recovery or not. Maybe, I unworthily thought, it would be as well if he were kept out of sight. In fact, with the help of acupuncture and moxibustion, he did get better quite quickly. The wedding itself took place on the second day of the second month, and Prince Sado and I were both able to be present for all the processions and the ceremonies. Grandfather and father were able to put on a show of unity as they saw the Grand Heir off on his way to present a carved duck wrapped in a dark blue embroidered and ribboned cloth to the little bride.

  Sado was very anxious to be allowed to spend all three days of the celebration in King Yŏngjo’s residence in the upper palace, near the newlyweds, and indeed spent one night there before his father ordered him to return home to the lower palace – an order Yŏngjo issued as soon as strict protocol permitted. I would have been allowed to stay on in Ch’angdŏk-gung, but I thought it was unfair (and unwise) to be so favoured, so I managed with many excuses to slip away. I was relieved, in a way, to leave the presence of King Yŏngjo’s most recent wife, the young Queen Chŏngsun: I am sure the sight of her there with his father had exacerbated Sado’s resentments. I am afraid Sado often used to shout abuse about the young queen, his new stepmother, in his drunken outpourings, though he made efforts to behave decently in her presence.

  Sado had taken more and more heavily to alcohol after Lady Pi
ngae’s death. Having been unjustly and publicly accused six years earlier by Yŏngjo of excessive drinking, he had now taken up drinking in earnest, as if to fulfil his father’s prophecy. And after the wedding of our son, after his brief attempt to behave correctly and in accordance with protocol, he again began to sink into real excess. He drank both wines and spirits: he was particularly addicted to a fierce form of fired liquor which is still marketed under the name of soju. He found a companion in his drinking bouts in his sister, Madame Chŏng, with whom he held many disreputable parties within the palace compound, in the T’ongmyŏng Pavilion or outdoors in the gardens. Madame Chŏng, who was, you may remember, a young widow, was at this period widely lampooned as the incestuous partner of her brother. I do not know if they ever slept together, but they certainly drank together. At the end of the orgies, late at night, everyone, highborn and lowborn alike, would fall asleep over the tables, which were covered in leftover food and overturned bowls. These were scenes of unparalleled abandon and indulgence and excess.

  Prince Sado’s own residence now looked more like a funeral chamber than a home for the living. He had red flags made that looked exactly like funereal flags, and had them set up in every room, including his bedchamber. Obsessed by fear and the expectation of his own imminent death, he summoned blind fortune-tellers to his macabre court, and, when he did not like what they foretold, he ordered them to be executed. Many medical doctors, astronomers and servants were also killed or injured. Dead bodies were carried from the palace nearly every day. His paranoia increased as the killings continued, and, in the fifth month of the year, he ordered the construction of a kind of living tomb in an excavation beneath the palace. It had three small rooms with sliding doors between them, just like the inside of a grave, and there was a passage to the outside world through a small door in the ceiling. The door was nothing more than a wood panel of the same size, which had earth and grass planted over it, so that there was no sign that there was anything underground. The prince spent many hours alone inside this subterranean chamber, which was lit by a hanging lamp of jade.