The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  I have since discovered that what I then in my ignorance took to be portrayals of the cruel ceremonial castration of a royal male baby were in fact portrayals of the circumcision of Christ, a subject for some reason particularly dear to the Jesuits. I knew nothing, when I was alive, of the religious significance of these images, but, as a mother of boys, I did not like the way the sharp metal instruments hovered over the infant’s small and tender parts. Nor did I like the way that fat and naked cherubs improbably hovered in the sky, looking complacently down upon this unpleasant event. (In our country, in those days, the custom of circumcision was unknown, though I believe it is now very widely practised. It is one of our more curious twentieth-century American imports.) The only Western image which pleased me was a lacquered portrait of a royal mother and child, painted on gold-dusted wood and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I liked this image of maternity, and I approved of the power invested in the mother figure.

  I do not deny that we had our own atrocities. We had our decapitations and our castrations. But we did not celebrate them in art. Our aesthetic was fastidious. Our court art may have lacked the art of perspective, but it was refined and it was delicate. It did not portray gross carnal acts or crude painted idols. It was an art of flowers and fish and birds and butterflies and blossoms.

  I was brought up in much bodily ignorance, and I dreaded the moment of consummation. I dreaded failure and rejection. Princesses who failed to conceive were often condemned to a hard and lonely life. As my fifteenth birthday approached, my mother and my aunt had tried to tell me the rituals of the marriage bed, and our slave Pongnyŏ and my wet nurse Aji had whispered and giggled and sniggered about these secret female matters to me. My mother told me my duty, and told me that it would be fulfilled if I were to submit silently to the act, and to continue to respect my husband. My mother respected my father. I had been witness to this. I knew my duty. It was my duty to conceive and to bear an heir. My small, soft, nubile body within its cocoon of silk and brocade was a sacred vessel, and it must be filled with the royal sperm and bring forth a son. The body of my husband in those early days was as shiny and smooth and yellow as a grub. What a dreadful metamorphosis awaited us both!

  I think Prince Sado feared the event as much as I. Already he lived in fear of his father – not the violent terror of his later adult years, but an anxious, fretting, nagging fear of failure. His father’s admonitory spirit accompanied us to the marriage bed. But we performed our duty to the satisfaction of all, and I duly conceived and bore my first son, to the rejoicing of the court and, I am told, the common people – though who can tell what the common people think or feel? They may have nourished hatred rather than joy. I never saw the common people living their common life. I glimpsed them through the curtains of my palanquin when I was sixty years of age, as they lined the roads of my royal progress, and I was curious about them. But it was too late. Too late.

  The act of sex seems to give pleasure to most men, and they seek it, sometimes to their peril. My father-in-law the king had more than one wife: this was his duty. (His first wife and primary consort, Queen Chŏngsŏng, one of the three Gracious Majesties who loomed over my marriage bed, was childless.) But I think the fact that he took a young consort quite late in life, and a young consort of a lower caste who bore children who were the age of our children, was deeply unsettling to Prince Sado. (Sado was very attached to the childless Queen Chŏngsŏng, his stepmother, who always took his part.) It must have seemed to Prince Sado that his father would live and procreate and dominate and criticize his son for ever. He would never be free of his father. This is what he must have thought. And he was right.

  Prince Sado, after our marriage, took secondary wives and concubines, as was customary, and he also lay with nuns and prostitutes, which cannot have been his duty. It is even said that he slept with his younger sister, Madame Chŏng, the favoured daughter of their father. It may have been so. Certainly their relationship was unnaturally intense, and some of the events towards the end of Sado’s life might best be explained by such an involvement. But the rumour of incest may have been a malicious fabrication, like the story of fratricide. Such stories are common in royal circles, in all countries. It was clear that this sister hated me, but she had many other reasons to hate me. All I wish to say in this context is that the act of marital sex gave me no pleasure at all. Maybe it pleases some women of other social orders, or in other lands. But for me, the act was so bound, so circumscribed, of such a deadly importance. It was like an examination – like those examinations over which my father and my brothers slaved so diligently in the search for advancement and enlightenment. I passed, but at what cost?

  I have observed, in the animal kingdom, that the female of the species seems to receive little delight from coitus. Who has not seen a cockerel mount a hen, or a dog a bitch? The female endures the indignity, shakes itself, and moves off. There is tenderness and fidelity, I am told, between some species of birds, and even of fish, but I have never observed it. Mandarin ducks are an emblem of marital fidelity and appear on many a painted screen, as well as on the one my father-in-law gave to me: they are said to pair for life and to grieve if a partner dies. I have not observed this phenomenon with my own eyes. I cannot read the expression of a grieving drake or duck. But the paintings are pretty enough. Indeed mine, as I have said, was more than pretty. It was a painting of paradise.

  When I was a girl of about twelve years old, a married princess but still a maiden girl, I had a pet kitten. She was a gift from some emissary from a foreign kingdom of the west; I forget its name. Siam, perhaps, or Burma? We were not distinguished as a cat-loving or cat-worshipping nation, but I was allowed to keep this kitten as a pet. She was such a pretty creature, cream and beige in her colours, and gentle and soft in her ways, and affectionate towards me. One day, as we were playing in the palace compound, a large, wild, black-and-white tomcat leaped down from the roof tiles into the courtyard, and chased her and cornered her and mounted her.

  I cried because I thought he was killing her, but Pongnyŏ told me that no harm was being done, though the act had appeared to me to be an act of aggression. And indeed there was no harm, for the cat conceived and bore three of the most charming kittens you could ever have seen. The expression and demeanour of bored and subdued indifference with which she had endured the tomcat’s crude and rude assault was succeeded by such purring, such delight, such pride, such pleasure! Even as she gave birth, she purred in ecstasy. She nudged and licked and caressed her little blind blunt-headed babes, and taught them how to nurse from her teats. She was the most tender and gentle of mothers, although she was little more than a kitten herself. Her motherhood gave both her and me great delight, and watching her kittens play was one of the happiest memories of my early married life. The kittens would chase one another round the garden amongst the stalks of the chrysanthemums, and climb up the cherry trees and the gnarled junipers, and hide behind the big leaves of the foxglove tree. They would stalk sparrows on the gravel, and try to pounce on butterflies. They were fastidious in their manners, cleaning and grooming themselves diligently. They would neatly bury their small messes in the earth. They were so clean that I allowed them to sleep upon my bed in a small bundle, and they would nestle in the silver ewer or the white porcelain vase in my chamber. They charmed even Pongnyŏ and Aji. I smile now, to think of them. Who taught their mother to teach them? My little cat was gentle, motherly and wise. She loved her kittens. Her love was inborn. It was her nature.

  I was that mother cat. When my first son was born, in 1750, such a passion of adoration and love broke in my breast, like the breaking of the waters of my womb. I was suffused with warmth. I reached out my arms to him and wept with joy. I was very young. I was in my sixteenth year.

  I tell you this because it has been said that my love of my sons was politic. It has been said that all my conduct was governed by personal ambition and family pride, and by a selfish will to survive. And so in part it may have been, for
it was indeed my duty to survive. I had to survive for my son. How could I separate myself from him? He was of my body; he was of my lineage; he was my future; he was the future of his country; he held in his fists the future of his maternal grandparents and uncles and aunts. Both the Hong family and the Yi dynasty depended upon him. He was the heir to the heir. But it was not for this that I loved this poor, helpless little scrap of being. I protest that I loved him with a love that was pure and spontaneous and unselfish, as my little cat loved her kittens. He was the first joy and the first love of my life. He was my own.

  And his father loved him, too. I could weep now as I remember the broad smile of paternal pride on Prince Sado’s face, as he picked up the little tightly swaddled bundle and gazed into its sleepy, half-closed eyes. Prince Sado, now formally designated the prince regent, was like a child in his delight. He hoped that the birth of little PrinceŬiso would conciliate his father the king, and prove a new bond between them. He attended the ceremony of the ritual burial of the placenta and navel cord, and reported that it had been attended by many good omens. He was full of hope. He was sure that his father would relent and treat him more affectionately. He was aware that he had been a disappointment to his father, and hoped now to win his trust. I, too, now hoped for better times.

  But things did not turn out as we expected and desired.

  His Majesty King Yŏngjo was not appeased by the birth of my first-born. His irritability and fits of anger with Sado continued. I think this anger was connected with the recent death of his third daughter, the much-favoured Princess Hwap’yŏng, who had died in childbirth a little more than a year earlier, but whose death he still bitterly and very publicly mourned and lamented. It had been a hard year for the whole nation, the year of her death, a year of famine and epidemics, during which many of the common people died. The birth of our sonŬiso merely rekindled his grief over this earlier loss, and not one word of good will or congratulation did he send to his only son or to me on the birth of our first child. I concealed my sense of indignation, but Prince Sado was deeply hurt, and had a right to be so.

  Princess Hwap’yŏng had always been kind to her little brother Sado, and to me, his child bride, and had tried to mitigate the effects of her father’s marked and unusual partiality for her. She had spoken up boldly for her little brother on many occasions, but to little avail. She had been motherly to me, and would have been my friend had I not been so much in awe of her. Her death had caused terrible distress to her father King Yŏngjo, who went into deep mourning. He had himself been in ill health this year, there had been unrest in the court, and he had been threatening after twenty-three years on the throne to abdicate.

  I believe his threat was rhetorical, for he loved the flattery of those who pleaded with him to remain at the helm of the ship of state, and made many empty threats of this nature. But I concede that there was an exhaustion in him in these times, and I observed that the death of Princess Hwap’yŏng exacerbated his tendency to asthma. Nor do I believe that the traditional medicinal concoctions of blue-flower campanula root prescribed by his secondary consort, Sado’s mother Lady SŏnhŬi, were beneficial, but that is another matter. Asthma, in my view, is often a temperamental affliction, and responds poorly to medicines. I do not wish to suggest that the Lady SŏnhŬi was a poisoner, despite my grievances against her at this time, but by this stage in my court life I was beginning to suspect that she might be a dangerous influence. It is in the nature of courts to be full of suspicions, and it is in the nature of a daughter-in-law to distrust her mother-in-law. Relations between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law in our country have always been notoriously difficult, and I believe remain so.

  I could have survived the neglect of littleŬiso by his grandfather had it not been for my growing sense that this tiny and beloved first-born child of mine was not robust. The birth was easy enough, for a first delivery – my mother was able to be with me, although she was seven months pregnant herself, and was soon to give birth to Fourth Brother – and I benefited from her help and her experience. But then she had to leave the palace, for her own confinement, and I was left to make my own decisions. The baby seemed to do well in his first two months, but after this period he failed to thrive. I hired a new wet nurse, having formed suspicions about my first appointment, and for a while he seemed a little better, but I could tell that there was something amiss. He was given to little shaking seizures, and often vomited up his food. His bowels became affected, and he did not gain weight. I protested against the administering of dried frog broth, which was considered a sovereign remedy for malnourished infants, but in the end I was overruled, and spoonfuls of it were fed to him. I do not suppose it did him either harm or good.

  How to tell of my despair at his sickness? I cast my mind back through the annals of the royal house, seeking precedents, and naturally I found them. There was evidence of both physical and mental disability in the Yi dynasty, and it is my belief that King Yŏngjo’s brother, Sado’s uncle, the King of the Poisoned Mushroom, had suffered from a mental condition that had unfitted him even for the brief rule he enjoyed. (To be frank, I believe he was even madder than his near contemporary King George III of England: some of his reported utterances suggest a complete lack of grasp of reality, though of course, as he was king, people did not like to contradict him.) And although Prince Sado’s mother, Lady SŏnhŬi, came from stronger stock, she had lost two brothers in infancy. There was sickness also in my family line. The Korean aristocracy and gentlefolk – the yangban class, as we were called – were naturally much inbred, as a result of our policy of national isolation. We on our peninsula were almost an island folk. Hereditary illnesses were common. We loathed the Japanese, who had invaded us, and we had no respect for the usurping Ching dynasty of China, who had overthrown the Ming. (We remained devoted to the memory of our earlier allies, the gracious and cultivated Ming, and considered ourselves to be their true and only heirs.)

  I think now that my first babyŬiso suffered from a weakness of the immune system. We did not then know that such a system existed. There was nothing that could then have been done to save him. Even had this diagnosis been possible, no cure would have been available. Cures for these weaknesses are not readily available now, even though so much more is known about genes and heredity. Even in this age of transplants and gene therapy, some weaknesses remain incurable.

  It is now my belief thatŬiso inherited his weakness from his paternal side.

  I spoke to nobody of my fears forŬiso, for I did not wish to alert jealous and vindictive attention to my son’s delicate state, but within myself I nursed a deadly fear. I would hold him against my breast and feel the beating of his frail heart against mine. His little chest was so small and thin, and his heart beat and fluttered against his ribs. His ribcage was like the ribcage of a starved rabbit. He smelled of sour milk, poor thing, however often his clothes were changed and freshened. I had a premonition that he was not long for this world. I would whisper poems and lullabies to him, and sing little songs of my own composition, and croon him to sleep in my arms. His soft black hair grew from a whorl on the back of his head, in a concentric circle. So sweet, so neat, so perfect. I had bad dreams, in which I saw the jealous ghost of the late princess, falsely smiling. She came to my bedchamber during the night to claim my child, to carry him away to the Yellow Springs of the underworld. She had died in labour, and she envied me my son.

  I think I was somewhat paranoid, at this time, imagining harm even where there was none.

  PrinceŬiso was a sad and serious infant. His fingers were long and thin and delicate. He rarely smiled. But he would gaze at me intently when I spoke to him. His eyes were very large in his small face. He seemed to question me, as he gazed at me, but I did not know the answer.

  He survived his hundredth day, and we celebrated it in the correct manner, but I was not sure that he would reach his second birthday, which would mark the next landmark in his life. I tried to hide my fears from him, but I
think he could see into my thoughts.

  A little after this hundredth-day ceremony, when PrinceŬiso was about five months old, his paternal grandparents King Yŏngjo and the Lady SŏnhŬi unexpectedly came to my quarters to visit the baby. King Yŏngjo, who rarely left Seoul, was about to depart on a diplomatic and ceremonial visit to the celebrated hot spring resort of Onyang, forty miles south of the capital. He seemed at this time to wish to be reconciled with Sado and myself. I wished to protect my darling from them, hoping they would not notice his weakness, but they insisted not only on seeing him, but also on stripping him of his clothes to examine his body. Their reaction to what they saw was curious and wilful, although in some ways not unwelcome. PrinceŬiso had distinctive birthmarks on his body – one on his shoulder and one on his belly – which I had noticed while I was bathing him. These were marks of no great import, and in my view of utter insignificance in comparison with the sadness of his wasted little frame, which weighed less than that of many a month-old child. But the king and his lady, in their ignorance and their stupidity and their superstition, did not notice his bodily weakness – no, they seized upon these as signs that he was a reincarnation of his aunt, the late Princess Hwap’yŏng, who, they claimed, had borne similar marks upon her body! Have you ever heard the like of such nonsense?

  From this moment, however, their attitude to the baby changed, and he became much favoured. This was not to my advantage. He was moved from my apartments to the Hwan’gyŏng Pavilion, which was lavishly refurbished to receive him, and every attention was showered upon him. When he was ten months old, PrinceŬiso was designated Grand Heir and Royal Grandson by Yŏngjo. I was dismayed when this was announced, but I was obliged to mouth my gratitude. I knew this elevation spelled ill luck, and so it proved. My baby was doomed. In their folly, they ignored the symptoms of his frailty and continued blindly to promote him as a royal marvel. The mother cat in me could have scratched out their eyes.