The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  The Grand Heir, poor little mite, died in the spring of 1752. For all his pompous titles and rich garments and prostrated slave attendants and subservient eunuchs, he died, as sick babies do. Mercifully, he died peacefully, in his sleep. I was by his side. As he lay on his crib, he breathed his last, a long, shuddering last breath, then passed silently away. I was plunged into silent and private grief, for I chose not to compete with the public pomp of desolation that greeted the news of his death. I had learned to conceal the depths of my emotions, and maybe my attendants thought me cold and unfeeling, but in truth I was in despair. Believe me, I mourned my little son, and not my place at court, or my status as mother of the Grand Heir. He was my baby, and the first great love of my life. My nature grieved, and not my dignity.

  Prince Sado said a kind thing to me at this sad moment. ‘My little Red Queen,’ he said, ‘you bear no blame for this sad event. You have been a good mother to our little one, whatever they may say of you, and our next child shall be blessed.’ Those were his very words. How could I forget them? How could I ever be made to believe that Prince Sado was nothing but a weak and evil man?

  Evil, in my view, is a word that has been much abused.

  Mercifully, Prince Sado’s prophecy was fulfilled. I was already pregnant whenŬiso died, and my second son, of glorious and majestic memory, was born that autumn. He was born on an auspicious day in an auspicious year, sixty years after the birth of his childless step-grandmother Queen Chŏngsŏng, who claimed that he was an answer to her prayer. Sado and I greeted his arrival with joy. We have all heard tales of mothers who have turned against their surviving children through the loss of one, and who have grieved rather than rejoiced over new births. And I understand these reactions, for the loss of a child is like no other loss and can drive one to irrationality, to wildness and despair. But my second son, Chŏngjo, was from the moment of his birth a joy to me, and a compensation for his brother’s death. I used to dream that the two little brothers played together in the garden, and these dreams comforted me. I induced these benign dreams. I learned to dream them at will. I was never to forgetŬiso – now, even in eternity, I remember him – but I did not turn my face or my breast from Chŏngjo. My bondswoman Pongnyŏ brought me rice and seaweed soup, traditional fare to build up the strength of a nursing mother, and I in turn nursed my baby. I nursed him myself for some weeks, which might perhaps have been considered improper, had it been widely known. A ceremonial presentation of the royal nipple was all that was usually expected of a princess, but I wanted to feel the baby at the breast, and now I have that memory, though it was soon, and for good reason, snatched from me. I had always suspected thatŬiso’s wet nurse, despite my careful choice of her, might have carried some infection to him, and I wished to avoid any repetition of this possibility. Maybe, I wondered, it had been worse than an infection – who knows what may happen in the jealous byways of a palace? My mother, who was able to be with me for some of this period, supported me in this decision – though I have to say that my mother’s mental and physical health were not good. She was always anxious, always sickly, always full of apprehensions.

  But I need not have feared for my second-born, for Chŏngjo was a sturdy and robust child from birth. He was as strong as his brotherŬiso had been weak. He latched on to the teat boldly and took his food greedily; he never regurgitated one drop or morsel. He was put early to the test. When he was only three weeks old, there was a serious health scare, for a measles epidemic broke out in the city and the palace. Measles, in those days, was a much-feared illness. Although strict etiquette forbade me or the baby to leave our quarters for twenty-one days after my confinement, the court physicians of the Medical Bureau insisted that the baby prince be moved, and he was taken to Naksŏn Hall, in another part of the palace compound. There I arranged for him to be tended by an elderly lady-in-waiting and by my own wet nurse: I was not too anxious for him, for already in his short life he had shown a firmer will to survive thanŬiso had ever manifested. That very day, despite our diligent efforts to appease the measles spirits with rice cake and herbs, Prince Sado himself was also taken very ill. (If you address the spirits of measles or of smallpox politely, as ‘distinguished guests’, and feed them properly, they are supposed to take pity on their hosts and move on to other dwellings – that is our superstition, and it is one that for some reason, rational though I am, I have always been tempted to observe. Why should we not be polite to microbes? We lose nothing by courtesy.)

  I, still weak from childbirth, caught the disease, too, though my case was not as severe as that of my husband. Baby Chŏngjo’s case was very mild, and he recovered before either of his parents. He was a tenacious child.

  My father conducted himself heroically during this epidemic, dividing his attention between Sado, myself and his new royal grandson Chŏngjo, on whom all our hopes depended. We were all housed in different residences in the palace compound, and the distances were not short: he was our go-between, tirelessly trudging from one to another across the lawns and up the steep steps and granite slopes. He always said that it was the crisis of the measles that made his beard turn white, but as far as I can remember, to be honest with you, it was prematurely white before this episode. Many of the palace servants fell ill and some died. I recovered first, and, in the absence of his usual attendants, I was able to go to nurse Prince Sado myself; I remember sitting by his bed with cool rice water and vinegar, and herbal infusions, as my father read to him, hour after hour, from the old Chinese histories, of campaigns and victories and defeats in centuries long ago. It was through such hours of eavesdropping that I acquired much of my knowledge of the past.

  Prince Sado’s sister Princess Hwahyŏp, the seventh daughter of His Majesty, died of the measles at this time – in fact, she had been the first to catch it, and she was blamed by some malicious gossips as the source of the infection. She had brought it into the palace from the town, and there were dark hints as to where she had contracted it. Measles was a killer then, as it can be now, and we knew nothing of vaccination. There was no such practice in our time. It is true that the Turks had long been acquainted with the practice of vaccination against smallpox, which was already being introduced to the West, but measles was still an uncontrollable disease. We were right to fear the illness. Princess Hwahyŏp, like Sado, had not been loved by her father. She was a great beauty, but for some reason her father was always cold towards her. Their disfavoured and rejected status had been a bond between brother and sister, and her death was a blow to Sado, leaving him more lonely than ever. Another sister, another ally gone.

  Our son Chŏngjo recovered from his illness rapidly, and put on weight fast. I always remember my little sister, who was then about six years of age, coming into the bedchamber and saying, when she first saw him, ‘What a huge baby! He’s enormous! He’s not going to cause you any trouble, I can tell you!’ (She was obliged to address me formally, as ‘Your Ladyship’, but she could be quite irreverent, even while employing the courtly rules.) Chŏngjo, who was then about three months old, smiled and chuckled when she tickled him, and all the ladies of the bedchamber laughed. And it is true, he was very plump. After the wasting illness of my first-born, this was a great relief, as you can imagine. I had feared, for a while, that I was a bad vessel, a transmitter of poor health.

  But I must also record that my little sister, who herself was also to meet a sad fate, had wept silently over her baby nephewŬiso’s death. I would not like to suggest that she was insensitive, poor girl. I fear that my fate overshadowed hers, and added to her sorrows, but that is another part of the story, which will not be told here. Then, she was young and bright and cheerful, though precocious for her years. We were a gifted and confident family. Our gifts attracted much resentment.

  Yes, our son Chŏngjo seemed set to reinstate his father and myself in the good books of His Majesty. He was a fine-looking baby, handsome and strong like his father. I watched over him carefully, for all our fates, as well as my ow
n happiness, depended upon him.

  But the birth of Chŏngjo did not reconcile Prince Sado and his father, as I had hoped and expected. After the measles epidemic, things grew even worse between them. I have often heard His Majesty say that it would have been better if Sado had died of the measles. He wished his own son dead. What cruelties there are in words! These words had a truth in them, but they should never have been spoken.

  At this time, a rumour began to circulate that Prince Sado had given new currency to that old story about the fratricide and the poisoned mushrooms, and was spreading slander about his father, and plotting against him. There was not a word of truth in this cowardly attack, but King Yŏngjo took it upon himself to go through a ludicrous parade of prostrating himself in denunciation at the Sŏnhwa Gate of Seoul, crying out against his son the prince regent and the accusing memorial sent by a censor to the court.

  It was by now bitter winter and the snow was deep. Our city is surrounded by steep mountains: their bare grey rocks look down upon us coldly even in summer, and in winter their peaks are clothed in white. Sado, compelled by court etiquette to attempt to outdo his father, went to the gate and awaited his punishment there in the open air, in an exaggerated display of remorse and penitence. He knelt on a straw mat, and beat his head upon the stones until it bled. The snow fell thick upon him, until he became a man of snow, white with rime, like a ghost from the mountains. And he had but lately recovered from the measles. My fury with both father and son was boundless. I despised their childish, empty, theatrical displays. I, of course, stayed at home in the palace, well wrapped in layers of padded garments and a fur-trimmed gown, with my feet tucked under the table and warmed by the comforting heat that rose through the smooth oiled stone slabs from the stoked furnaces below. The modest glow of a charcoal brazier kept me company: my attendants faithfully fed its soft dull red heart. I tucked myself into my bed that freezing night, ‘warm on my duck-embroidered pillow, beneath my kingfisher quilt’, as the old poet has it. I kept myself safe.

  I hid away in my warm winter retreat, and while Sado and his father played deadly games at the city gate, I, within, played childish games with my little boy. I rolled a pomegranate, and he crawled after it. The charms on the little golden bracelets round his dimpled, chubby wrists and ankles made a music that pleased us both. He laughed with delight when I hid my face behind my fan, then revealed it. These are the games of all children of all ages of all the peoples of the earth. The descendant kittens of my first little cat (she now being dead) would play with the little prince, and pounce and bounce around him. Let those grown men play their stupid games, I said to myself in the bitterness of my fearful heart, we in here, in this safe place, will try to keep ourselves warm, and guard our innocent spirits from the demons of pride and hatred.

  Ah, my little prince, how beautifully in the end you justified the promise of your boyhood! My heart’s darling, you were so gifted and so beautiful. It breaks my heart to think of the unmentionable tragedy and wickedness that you were forced to witness. You were exposed to horror, you were led into temptation and disgrace, you were manipulated by those you thought your friends, yet you survived and triumphed over them, and I am here to tell and to retell your tale, as I told and retold it upon earth.

  The dim glow of the charcoal, the oiled veneer of the polished floor, the gold-red sheen of the tender veins of the living rosewood, the soft secret road of the silk, the cool green of the jade.

  So your father Sado crouched in penitence in the snow, and the snow drifted down upon him and coated him and clothed him with the white robes of mourning. The flakes settled on his royal robes. He became a cold statue of grief. And still he was not forgiven. His father was a remorseless, relentless man. Has any father ever so tormented his son? And yet to the end of his long life on earth I had to sing the praises of this wilful old man, your grandfather. Our history remembers him as a great monarch, but he was also capricious, vindictive, unfatherly. Our society laid such stress on the filial virtues: the child must honour the parent, no matter how ill that parent has conducted himself towards his child. How could Sado not run mad? He was spurned and rejected and tormented. How could he honour such a cruel father? He was caught in a trap from which there was no escape. I thought bitterly of these paradoxes, as I watched you take your first steps. You were so eager to please, so full of unwary smiles. And I, too, more wary, was also eager to please. One false step, one unwise word, and you would be taken from me as too precious for my care. You tottered over the reed mat, and fell, and laughed, and heaved yourself up again, and tottered bravely on. I walked on ice, on knives, on dragons’ teeth.

  My father tried to be a comfort to me, during these difficult years, but he was delicately placed. He had to watch his every step. Intrigue surrounded him, and his motives were always suspect, for it was widely and not wholly wrongly believed that his first concern was not for the kingdom, but for the prosperity and survival of his own family line. How often in dark moments he must have regretted my selection as bride of the Crown Prince! Now I was learning to interpret the deep gloom which had overcome both my parents when I had passed through the last of those three bridal selection processes, when I had passed, as it were, the first grades of the examinations of my life. No wonder they feared for me and for themselves. But they had chosen to allow my name to be advanced, had they not? My fate was on their heads.

  Some of my family chose – or were forced to choose – to live as scholars of the cave and the mountain, hidden from the eyes of envy, tending their gardens and writing poems about herons and flowering reeds and moons and butterflies and waterfalls. But my father had a restless ambition and a desire for the glories of this world. And in me there had been a desire for that red silk skirt.

  Did my parents ever love me, as I loved my children? As I loved my dead little first-born, my surviving son and my two daughters? I cannot tell whether they did or did not. Politics intervened so early in our lives. For me, maternal love was a consuming passion, and in vain do the wise and the cynical point out to me that in my case the interests of maternal passion coincided with the material interests of myself and my family. Yes, it was so. But still, I remember the mother cat. Over the decades since my death, I have thought much of these matters, and I have made many comparisons of my fate with the fates and life stories of others. It now seems to me that it may be that all my passions were driven, as it were, into one narrow channel. Driven by circumstance of history, of family, of character. The force of my nature was very considerable. We human creatures are not born equal. We are not blank slates or lumps of putty. We are born with unequal passions and attributes. I was born with a powerful spirit, and it was dammed up in me. In other societies, it could perhaps have flowed more evenly, less violently. But in my time, in my lonely place, it could find no other object but my sons. I was driven back into a primitive maternal obsession, a fierce white cataract to which I gave the name of love.

  And yet it was love. I can still recall the distant sensations of earthly love. I remember watching Chŏngjo’s small, earnest face as he bent intently over his piece of rice paper, as he dipped his brush in the black ink or prepared his ink stone: I remember his childish grief and despair when his hand could not reproduce the beautiful imaginings of his brain and his eye. Again and again I had to comfort him for a botched page, for a human imperfection. He was such a fierce and serious little child, and my heart went out to him. He was as sensitive as he was strong. I yearned to him. My whole body yearned to him. This was love. Was it not?

  My nature was channelled, maybe, but it was not distorted. It was not broken, like a bound foot. We women in Korea did not bind our feet: much as we aped many Chinese manners and fashions, we never followed that absurd and dangerous practice. We did not adopt the embroidered lotus shoe and the provocative tottering step on the three-inch toe. A bound foot is an unnatural distortion, but maternal devotion is not. Do I make my point? Or am I revealing myself as a Confucian casuist, descended
from a dynasty of casuists?

  My little boy was doomed to see what he should not have seen, to hear what he should never have heard. I could not protect him from these things. He was caught in a chain of terrible consequence.

  As he grew and flourished, his father’s mental health deteriorated. This and other forces came between us. Other powers struggled for possession of my son, for it was clear, even during his father’s lifetime, that he, Chŏngjo, was to be the next king. No wonder that I look back to those early days of motherhood with a mixture of pleasure and grief. We were close, then. I had him to myself. We were surrounded by a small army of slaves and nurses and ladies-in-waiting, but I could still call him my own.

  I tried during my earthly life to describe the progress of Sado’s illness, and now I find I must address it again. As I have recorded, in my memoirs, his symptoms began to become noticeable round about the year 1752, at the time of the death ofŬiso, our first-born son. But maybe there were earlier signs? The illnesses of the great are often misleadingly recorded. There are strategic illnesses, and strategic concealments of illness. I myself often claimed to suffer from ill health when in fact I judged it diplomatic to withdraw from the public eye. I was occasionally ill, and surely had a right to take to my chamber from time to time, but in truth when young I had a remarkably strong and resilient physical constitution: how else, after so stressful a life, could I have lived so long and seen so much? It was only at the time of the great crisis of the Imo Incident that I succumbed, for a while, and even then I did not wholly surrender.

  Sado, too, unlike his older brother who died before his birth, unlike some of his sisters, had a strong constitution. In this, he resembled his father. Unlike his father, he subjected his naturally fortunate constitution to severe trials of indulgence and excess. King Yŏngjo was, by the time I came to know him, ascetic of body, if not of temper, and on the whole lived simply: he wore light clothing and preferred cool chambers even in our cold wintertime. He rationed the underfloor heating in his apartments, and complained if too much was spent on royal fuel. He visited the hot springs not for his health’s sake, but in order to placate and show himself to his people. He was notoriously sparing in his diet, eating little and cautiously, as though fearing every mouthful might be of poisoned mushroom. He was a skinny, stringy old man. He looks plump enough in his portraits, but portrait painters are always liars, and leave out the shadows. That is their trade. Yŏngjo was asthmatic, but I have always considered that his breathing difficulties were of the type that reflects troubles of the mind, not of the body. There were times when the very sight of Sado made him catch his breath in pain and anger.