The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  News of her approaching end had reached the king, who, although long estranged from her, came that same morning to her chamber. His arrival had an appalling effect on Sado. Sado had been behaving with such courage and such proper and properly apparent filial devotion until that moment, but at the approach of King Yŏngjo he seemed to collapse. He retreated from the bedside and crouched on the floor in a corner, like a guilty child. He looked frozen with horror. His tears dried, and he was unable to speak or move. Nobody could have guessed from this dishevelled, unseemly bundle how correctly he had been behaving until that moment, nor how much genuine grief he had displayed. And, just as I feared, King Yŏngjo began at once to criticize his son. He criticized his behaviour, his silence, his crouching attitude – he even criticized the way the bottoms of his trousers were tied. It was a grotesque scene. There lay Queen Chŏngsŏng unconscious, breathing painfully upon her deathbed – she died between three and four in the afternoon on the following day – and all that Yŏngjo could do was to berate his son for the way he tied his trousers!

  Is it any wonder that Sado developed a clothing phobia, a clothing disease? I have searched the records for parallels to Sado’s obsession. I have pored over stories of mad kings and legends of crazed priests in the Occident and in the Orient, but so far I have found nothing in history to resemble his mania.

  ‘Himatiophobia’, I have seen it called, in English, in one of the translations of my works. But I do not think that this is a word commonly recognized in the medical or psychoanalytic lexicon.

  I had my own theory about Sado’s phobia. Its source lay in his father’s wrath. To me this followed, as the night the day. The craziness with which Sado slashed his clothes was caused by King Yŏngjo’s incessant criticisms of his son’s appearance. I suppose it is more common for mothers to demean their daughters over matters of dress, but in our court, as I have explained, the significance of apparel for both sexes was immense. Perhaps all courts have such rules, but I feel that ours was particularly exacting. Etiquette prescribed distinct clothes for distinct occasions. Sometimes, in one day, many changes of costume were required, and these were complex garments, not easy to don without assistance. Sashes and ribbons had to be tied in the correct order and direction, from left to right, and it was not uncommon to see the ankles of a pair of trousers so badly tied that the trouser legs became twisted in a ridiculous fashion. So the prince was not alone in making mistakes with his appearance when he was left to attend to himself. I myself, as Crown Princess, had a magnificent wardrobe of robes of many styles and colours, of rare silks and gauzes, in which I could not have encased myself without expert assistance. Teams of seamstresses laboured for me, week after week, month after month. Records of their toil survive, for we were a bureaucratic society, and liked to make lists and inventories. Clothes were made for me that I never wore, that no one ever wore. Where are they now? Do any scraps of those rich fabrics still survive?

  I know that small children have strong and what seem to be instinctive objections to some styles of clothing, to some textures. I never cared for a certain kind of embossed and shiny satin – it set my teeth on edge; I do not know why. (Nor do I much care for the coarse white gloves that the readers of manuscripts in the British Museum are obliged to wear.) Sado as a child is said to have preferred cotton to silk, but I am not sure if this was true, as the story was told to illustrate his natural princely modesty and dislike of ostentation. My own son, little Chŏngjo, never liked the obligatory white socks of childhood. They had to be forced over his reluctant feet. But he submitted because he had to submit. Children can form strong and seemingly irrational opinions about what they like to wear. But normal children grow out of these fads, not into them. A florid madness like Sado’s I have never known. Yet, when I witnessed Sado’s father’s incessant reproaches, when I saw him at the very deathbed of the queen shouting at Sado about his trousers, I was aware that I was witnessing an unnatural scene, one of many unnatural scenes, and I knew that these scenes would have an unnatural outcome. How unnatural, I did not yet suspect.

  After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that my husband would now, in your age, be likely to be classified as a paranoid schizophrenic. I mention this in passing. It is only a suggestion. I am no expert in these matters.

  The queen died in the afternoon of the following day, as I have said. I was present. But the formal announcement of Queen Chŏngsŏng’s death and the preparations for the mourning were delayed because King Yŏngjo was distracted by news of a rival death – by the death of his young son-in-law, the husband of his most favoured daughter, the dangerous Madame Chŏng, the daughter who hated me so much and loved Sado so unnaturally. The death of Madame Chŏng’s husband was an unlucky death for all of us. Had Madame Chŏng not been widowed so young, had she borne children of her own, she might have meddled less with my affairs. She might have kept herself at a proper distance from her brother Sado, instead of entering into that dangerous and possibly incestuous intimacy with him that was shortly to cause so much scandal. She might have left my son alone, instead of practising upon him and playing with him and making him dance to her tune. After Sado’s death, she transferred all her lust for power to her manipulation of my son, the Grand Heir. But that is another, later story. I will come to that.

  Death followed death. Shortly after the death of Queen Chŏngsŏng, the Dowager Queen Inwŏn also died, as I have narrated above. She was buried in the seventh month, in pouring rain. Prince Sado was a sad sight at this time, in his mourning robes of unbleached hemp, with his dishevelled hair and his wooden staff cut, as custom dictated, from the wood of the foxglove tree. The long process of mourning weighed heavily upon him. He wailed loudly and ostentatiously in the mourning procession, again as custom dictated, but the tears he shed in the courtyard at dead of night, gazing towards the shrine where the blue and white mourning tablet of Queen Chŏngsŏng was to be placed, were not mere ceremonial tears. ‘I wish I were dead,’ I heard him cry, again and again, unobserved by all but myself. ‘I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead…’ It was the repeating cry of a dreadful bird of night. He meant it. I feared for his reason. With reason, I feared for his reason.

  Death followed death. It was shortly after the deaths of the two Queenly Majesties that the killings began.

  I digress here for a moment. Leafing through an academic periodical the other day, in an attempt to refresh my aged and ageing memory about the composition of the eighteenth-century Chosŏn Court Orchestra, I came by chance across an article by a twentieth-century scholar on the subject of ‘Korea and Evil’. Koreans, he had concluded, after conducting some hundred or so interviews, do not believe in Evil. They believe in evil acts, but not in the abstraction of evil. His sample was small, and he interviewed through an interpreter, but nevertheless I think he had hit upon an interesting distinction.

  I can put off the evil moment no longer. Let me now try to describe the first killing.

  I find I do not know whether to aim for suspense or simplicity at this point in my narrative.

  I was reading, quietly, in my apartment, and intermittently stitching away at a panel of yellow satin: I remember the illustrated text I was reading; I remember the pattern of blossom and butterfly; I remember the gilt thread; I remember even the vermilion and turquoise of the cloth spool on which the thread was wound. It was a tranquil domestic scene. I enjoyed embroidery: I know that clever women all over the world were beginning, at this period, to revolt against the constraints of a life spent pointlessly embroidering useless hangings and useless garments, but I confess that I enjoyed the activity. Perhaps surprisingly, I much preferred it to bookbinding, which some of the princesses adopted as a hobby. I liked reading, which I have to say some of the princesses did not, but I was not overly particular about grains of paper and colours of inks. I preferred the content to the form. But embroidery was different – I found it soothing, harmlessly soothing.

  So picture me, innocently employ
ed, sitting on my low, silk-cushioned rosewood couch. Then suddenly my husband Prince Sado burst in, through the outer chamber, past the ladies-in-waiting, carrying before him a strange, round object stuck on the end of a short spike – it looked to be about the size of a large cabbage. I heard the muffled sounds of the consternation of the ladies as he passed, but was at first unable to identify the object he was carrying, as I was wearing my tortoiseshell-framed reading glasses (I was growing shortsighted by this time), and my eyes could not see what was in front of them. They had no focus. Trembling, I removed my glasses, and then I saw what I saw. Sado was bearing before him a severed head. It was not a papier-maché mask from a peasant puppet show, but a real head. My husband’s hands were red with blood, and red blood dripped on to the oiled wood of the floor. At first I could not make sense of what I saw, even when I could see it clearly, so horrible was the vision that confronted me. I do not remember if I screamed or not. Later, my ladies assured me I conducted myself with dignity, but I cannot remember what I did or said. I had never seen a severed head. I was to see many.

  I recognized the head. I knew its features. It was the head of Kim Hanch’ae, the eunuch who had been on duty that day. There were his full, broad cheeks, his shaven, domed pate, his slightly jaundiced eyes, his full lips. The grimace of death did not disguise him. The transfixed gaze of his dead eyes met mine.

  This was the first of Prince Sado’s killings. Of course, there was nothing in law to prevent him from killing a eunuch, for Sado was the crown prince, with powers of life and death. He could dispose of slaves and eunuchs as he chose, without much fear of reprisal. But I knew, and the ladies knew, that this was a terrible event. He had crossed a bridge into another kingdom. Why had he done it, and why, having done it, had he brought the head to us? What was he asking of us? What madness, what despair had possessed him?

  At the time, I was too stunned with horror to ask myself why he had selected Kim Hanch’ae as his victim. In fact, it is only now, two hundred years too late, that it occurs to me to wonder if Kim Hanch’ae had provoked or thwarted him in any particular way on that fatal evening. Eunuchs in our court, as in the Chinese court, could easily work themselves into positions of power, for they were privy to many secrets, and Kim Hanch’ae was an intelligent, academy-educated man. Had he been attempting to curb Sado’s excesses, or to offer unwanted advice? I do not know. I did not on that evening seek any rational explanation for this bizarre and barbarous act. My mind at once rushed to an unhappy conclusion – that Sado had killed for some kind of perverse pleasure. And I still think my first instinctive guess was right. Prince Sado was never a politic man. I do not think he killed Kim Hanch’ae through policy.

  You will remember that as a small child Prince Sado had played military games, unfortunately encouraged by Lady Han. As an adult, too, he had liked these games, and he had returned to them to play them on a grander scale. He enjoyed playing soldiers with parades of uniformed servants in the woods of the secret palace garden, and was sexually aroused by mock beheadings. He liked weapons and armour, and horses colourfully caparisoned in the finery of war. He had a fine sword made by a famous craftsman of which he was immensely proud. Its blade was sleek and curved and thin and dangerous. Even I could see that it was a thing of beauty, a work of art. And he had a little toy sword made for me, in imitation, a miniature sword such as ladies used to wear as a fashion accessory. At first I treasured it, as a gift, and wore it at my belt. But after this killing, I wore it no more.

  Never had I thought he would turn from play to the real thing, from art to execution. He had deeply disliked the occasions when his father had obliged him to preside at real trials and witness real punishments.

  I knew that he had behaved sadistically towards some of the ladies-in-waiting. He had threatened them with violence when they tried to refuse his overtures, and he had taken them without their full consent. Nobody spoke to me directly of these abuses, but I heard whispers, and I had eyes in my head. I knew these actions and tendencies were not good, but at this stage I had not known how far they had gone. Sado’s favours were much feared, and Pingae alone seemed able to control him. Towards her, he behaved with some discretion.

  He had not troubled me with sexual demands for some months when this first killing took place. As his primary consort, I had by now borne him four children, three of whom had survived, including the all-important son, the Grand Heir Chŏngjo, who was at the time of this first killing some five years old. (Pingae by now also had a child by Sado, and was to bear him one more.) I had done my duty to the Yi dynasty and to my husband, and he had done his duty to me. He treated me always with respect, as the mother of the heir. I think he treated me with more than respect. There was a guilty pleading sorrow at times in his demeanour, as though something in him remembered the days when we were two married children, playing seriously together at being man and wife, at being prince and princess. I had known him as a child, and he had known me as a child, and together we had been frightened of the future. Never in his life, even until the last days, did he threaten me with death, though he did on one occasion injure me. I think he relied on my support and my understanding. Or do I mean that he relied on my collusion and my collaboration? Was I a party to his crimes?

  When I describe us as ‘two married children’, I seem to be sentimentally invoking your pity. But in truth I do see us, as from afar, like two dolls in a distant pageant. Two small, overdressed, unhappy, innocent dolls.

  At this stage, at the time of this first killing, I did not speak up about his crime. I did not think of approaching either his father or his mother. I spoke only to Pingae and, in secret, to my older brother, who at that time, having passed his examinations, had become a court official – he was eventually to be appointed as tutor in the Office of Lectures to my son Chŏngjo, the Grand Heir. My father was at this time far away: I think it was in the preceding year that he had been appointed magistrate of the province of Kwangju. Pingae, of course, knew the true state of affairs, for the ladies-in-waiting spoke openly to her. My older brother was appalled when I told him of the murder, and at first wanted me to leave the court altogether. But how could I leave my children? They needed me and my protection, I told him, and he could see the force of this argument.

  First Brother and I would talk into the night, discussing my plight and Prince Sado’s illness. First Brother was himself an austere, cold, clever man, the very opposite in temperament from Sado, and he was able to look with a detached eye upon the bizarre pattern of behaviour that I described to him and of which, of course, he heard unconfirmed rumours from others. By now, there was no concealing Sado’s illness. First Brother and I agreed that though the killings (and one followed another) were the most horrific manifestations of his illness, the clothing phobia was the most mysterious. I find it very hard to write about it, even after all these years. I think it fills me with shame as well as with anxiety.

  As I have said, Sado had increasing difficulty in dressing every day. Some days he would order me to have ten, twenty, thirty outfits to be laid out for him, and then he would reject them, one after the other. At first it seemed like a monstrous parody of childish pique or girlish indecision, but soon it took on a more sinister light, for he started to burn the rejected garments, or to slash them to pieces. With his finely honed sword he destroyed them, and with other lesser weapons. His chamber would be full of rent cloth, of soft mountains of ribbons of black and of red. Then he would order these rags to be bustled away out of his sight, or burned, as he mumbled about ghosts and demons. And fresh suits would be brought, until at last one pleased him – and then he would don it, and wear it perhaps for days, sometimes for weeks, until it was filthy and began to fall to pieces. His servants and valets were in mortal terror of this strange behaviour – with good cause, as it proved, for he began to turn on them, and to attack them if anything went awry in the elaborate robing process. Some were even killed, I regret to record.

  You are wondering if the clot
hing allowance of even a crown prince could provide endlessly for such destruction, and you are right to ask because the answer is that it was not easy. Such reckless consumption stretched his allowance and gave rise to much malicious speculation – for, of course, those near to him tried to conceal his madness. My father would secretly obtain bolts of cloth in the city, and supply them to his tailors, hoping to guess what fabrics, what colours would please, and trying to substitute cotton for silk. But this had been a great expense for my father, and moreover it was impossible to guess right, for Sado’s sudden loathings and likings were capricious and irrational, or so they seemed to us. When Father left for Kwangju, it was even harder for us to conceal the problem, for Sado took to raiding the palace supplies, and there was much comment.