The Red Queen (17 page)

Our household, at this time, expanded, as others joined us in our exile. My youngest brother, Fourth Brother, who had always been a close friend of the Grand Heir, came to stay with us; the two boys shared a room in the guest wing for eight or nine days, where Fourth Brother did his best to comfort his young nephew. In strict protocol, the Grand Heir should have done penance for his father’s crimes by kneeling in the open air on a straw mat awaiting punishment, and two buffoon officials actually came to suggest that he do this, but we did not pay them any attention. Why should the child suffer more? He was suffering unendurably as it was. We compromised by keeping him in the part of the house with low eaves, as a symbolic gesture of disgrace, a gesture that cost us nothing and which I like to think he, poor child, hardly noticed.

And so we waited for news of the end. Day followed day, and each day my mind was filled with images of death. Of his death, but also of my own. Fasting, drowning, stabbing, self-strangulation: which method should I select? It was my wifely duty to accompany my husband to the Yellow Springs, as his sister Hwasun had followed her husband, and yet it was also my duty to protect the Grand Heir and the future of the dynasty. I prayed to the gods and the spirits for an early death for Sado, and I believe that I hoped he would find some way, inside the rice chest, to hasten his own end. But he did not. Embattled, anguished to the last, he lingered stubbornly on. On the last day, in the afternoon, there was a heavy summer storm, with torrential rain and thunder. The memory of the prince’s terror of thunder tormented me, and it is my belief that he died in mortal fear during that storm. I am told he was responding to voices until that storm broke, but that, after it, no sound came ever again from the rice chest.

What were they saying to him in those final hours, those petty warders and pitiless officials who were monitoring his slow decease? Were they taking minutes, attempting to extract confessions?

The
Sillok
records, sparely and bleakly, that the prince was locked in the rice chest, and died there eight days later. It apportions no blame, gives no cause of death. No postmortem was performed.

As soon as his son was safely dead, King Yŏngjo composed a new edict restoring his grandson the Grand Heir to his former title. My son was now allowed to emerge from the shadow of his father’s disgrace. King Yŏngjo also renamed the dead prince as Crown Prince Sado, the Prince of Mournful Thoughts. Thus he tried to absolve his conscience, and reshape the past.

I think much about parricides and also about the murders of sons by fathers. I do not think there is a recognized noun in your language for the latter crime. That does not mean that it is a crime that is never committed. Parricide, matricide, infanticide – these are common crimes in myth and in history. But the murder of a grown son by an ageing father? Language hesitates to invent such a word for such a deed. I suppose ‘filicide’ would serve, but it sounds strangely, and I have yet to find it in any dictionary.

Queen Agave in the
Bacchae
murdered her son Pentheus, but she was deranged at the time, and took him for a lion. The Thracian King Lycurgus killed his son Dryas with an axe, mistaking him for a vine branch. King Yŏngjo was sober when he ordered the death of his son. He knew he was killing his own son.

At least King Yŏngjo does not have the unique distinction of being the only monarch in modern times to have murdered his son. I have recently discovered that Peter the Great of Russia murdered his son Aleksei in July 1718. That, too, was a hot month. Princes die in the dog days. Peter the Great’s son had been accused not of madness, but of treason. Some said that Aleksei, having refused to drink the poison his father offered him, was decapitated in his prison cell by a marshal. Some say Peter himself struck off his son’s head with an axe. It is then said that one of Peter’s mistresses undertook the unpleasant task of stitching the head back on again, so that the appearance of the corpse could substantiate the official view that Aleksei had dropped dead from a stroke on hearing his death sentence pronounced. The Romanovs do not seem to have shared the Yi dynasty’s objection to the shedding of blood, but they were devious enough in their own ways. At least Sado had never requested me to do any head-stitching. Body substitution, perhaps, but not body stitching.

After these brutal events, our family embarked upon a period of prolonged mourning. As you can imagine, this was a demanding exercise, full of unknown and unprecedented difficulties. Confucian ritual and court precedent had failed to establish the proper manner of mourning for a royal prince judicially murdered by his own father. Despite the fact that we were a nation unhealthily obsessed by ancestor worship and by protocol, and spent much of our leisure time traipsing around the shrines and monuments of past monarchs and princelings; despite the fact that our history (like all histories) was littered with episodes of treachery and fratricidal and patricidal violence; despite the fact that the tragedy of this particular death had been gathering for years like a slow thundercloud on a distant horizon – despite all these facts, nobody was quite sure what to do, and yet everybody, including, I admit, I myself, was desperately intent upon doing everything ‘correctly’.

The simple truth is that never before in our annals had a father so coldly, so brutally, so cruelly and so openly murdered his only son. This horrific crime stands alone in our story, and bears comparison with the most monstrous crimes of the world’s story. (As you can see, I read about these crimes, now, obsessively.) So what were we to wear, to placate it, to mourn it, to grieve for it?

The king, immediately after Prince Sado’s death, ordered his residence to be raided. The crypt, the underground chambers, the sleeping apartments were ransacked. The servants discovered military paraphernalia of all kinds – flags, weapons, daggers – and mourning staffs with concealed swords within them. These, in my view, were all evidence of Sado’s dementia, but the king seemed to construe them as proof of conspiracy, not of madness. He ordered them all to be burned. I cannot blame him for his horror. I, too, was horrified, had long been horrified by these objects. The king also ordered the execution of many of the prince’s associates – a courtesan, a eunuch, a Buddhist nun, several palace servants and craftsmen, and some shamans. I had at the time but little regret over the deaths of these characters, for I thought they had led the prince astray and encouraged him in his lunacies.

I had hoped that the court officials would be allowed to wear mourning costumes appropriate for the mourning of a prince regent, as Prince Sado had served the state as prince regent for fourteen years. But this King Yŏngjo forbade. The attendants and eunuchs had to make do with mourning garments of an unattractive, second-rate pale blue. We were to be sufficiently grateful that Sado’s title as crown prince had been restored, for he had died, technically, as a deposed commoner. King Yŏngjo suggested that the coffin be laid at Yongdong Palace, but my father persuaded him to have it carried to the Crown Prince Tutorial Office, which he deemed a more appropriate resting place.

My father, at this time, was in an extraordinarily delicate and dangerous position. He dreaded the consequences of this tragedy for our entire family, but his chief aim was the protection of his grandson the Grand Heir, who was now, in effect, the new crown prince. The king, who had so many times violently dismissed and capriciously reinstated my father, was still in a state of extreme mental volatility, and might have been blown in any direction, but I think, nevertheless, that on one level even at this time he depended on the steadying influence of my father’s advice and judgement. My father, by appearing calm, loyal and dutiful, managed to form funeral committees, governed by precedent and law (in so far as there was any precedent), and he undertook to oversee these personally, as president, in every detail.

I know that there are those who believed that my father, rather than Lady SŏnhŬi, was the prime mover in the death of Prince Sado, and that it was he who suggested the rice chest. Some truly believed this, others found it expedient to say that they believed it. I suppose I cannot wholly dismiss this possibility. He left no account of his actions on earth. Had he arranged Sado’s death, he would never have told me: he would have taken the guilt of it upon himself, in order to spare me. It may be that he was implicated, for he had for some years been a witness of the effects of Sado’s clothing phobia, and of his violent outbursts. He would have put me, his daughter, and his grandson Chŏngjo first, and preferred our survival to that of his son-in-law. We were his flesh and blood, his stake in futurity. But, whatever his putative involvement, there was no mistaking his distress and grief during these terrible events. At the end of the long last day of Sado’s long death, and having arranged for the prince to be laid in his coffin at the Crown Prince Tutorial Office, he came home at dawn to me and, holding my hand, wept bitterly. He wished me a long life – which I have indeed enjoyed, if that be an appropriate word to use – and assured me that, with the Grand Heir at my side, I might yet find peace and happiness in my later years. I thought, at that time, that I was more likely to find sudden death. There were many who wished me dead.

That morning we set off for the palace, the Grand Heir and I, for the formal funerary rites in Simin Hall and KŬndŏk House. The Grand Heir let down his hair and wailed, and his little girl bride stood at the women’s side of the hall with me and his sisters, and we all wailed as we called out for the soul of the departed. I could not bear the sound of my son’s cry. It was more than a cry; it was a loud shriek of protest and despair. It was not the sort of noise you expect to hear from a child of nine years.

The body of the Prince of the Rice Chest had been washed with wet towels and laid upon a box of ice upon a coffin table. The nose and mouth, the eyes and the ears had been covered and tied, and he had been clothed in a complete suit of burial garments. I was not able to approach until all these observances had been completed, and although I had been told that the body, despite the heat of the time of year, had suffered little decomposition, I was not able to verify this unlikely assertion with my own eyes. It is very likely that I was told this for my comfort. Nor did I permit my son, his wife or my daughters to see the body before it was enclosed in the coffin. Such sights are not for children. And it was only on that first day of mourning that I allowed them to wail with me. I could not bear to hear a repetition of those terrible cries.

Somehow, we managed to make our way through the days of ritual offerings, each one of which caused new anxieties. Rituals are designed to comfort, but what comfort can be found when each stage of mourning is without a hallowed precedent, and is overshadowed by disgrace? Prince Sado’s mother, Lady SŏnhŬi, who never truly recovered from this disaster – she died two years later of a malignant tumour – came to see me as I sat by the coffin, and could not control her grief. She beat her breast, and banged her head against the coffin, and wailed like a madwoman. She was growing old before my eyes. Perhaps it is worse to lose a son than a husband. I have lost both, and I should know. But yet I cannot say. At least my sons died of natural causes. That is a comfort.

I did not know how to look to the future at this point. No clear path lay before me. I had lost my role and my purpose and my status at court. I had been exhausted by my vain and prolonged efforts to conceal Sado’s derangement. My father, always a practical man, seemed to be doing his best to restore favour to and smooth the progress of the Grand Heir, who was formally instated as crown prince in a matter of weeks. I did not think that I could ever look my father-in-law in the face again. How could I ever forgive him his cruelty?

But when King Yŏngjo came in the eighth month to the lower palace for the bimonthly sacrifice at the Ancestral Shrine, I made myself go out to meet him and greet him. It was a strange and emotional encounter. I expressed my humble gratitude for the safety of myself and my son, using conventional phrases that said nothing of the turmoil within me, and the king seemed shaken by my words. Perhaps he was as afraid of me as I was of him. We fear those we have injured, even when we retain power over them. To my surprise, he even thanked me for being so gracious, and said he had dreaded seeing me after what had happened. He told me that it was ‘noble’ and ‘beautiful’ of me to put him at his ease. What odd things we can say at these dire moments. Face to face with him like this, with so much suffering behind us, I remembered the well-meant and kindly advice he had given to me when I was a newly betrothed little girl of ten. He had taught me court manners. And look where these court manners had led us both.

The king looked old and shrunken, and so, no doubt, did I. Looking at the king, and contemplating the powerlessness to which I had been reduced, as the widow of a deposed and ruined prince, I suddenly heard myself saying that the king should, if he would, take my son to live with him in the upper palace. I had not premeditated this offer: it came to my lips spontaneously. I think I sensed that my son would be safer if he were under the immediate protection of the king, for, with me, he risked contamination. The king seemed at first surprised by my suggestion, and in a diffident and curiously humble tone asked me if I was sure I could bear to part with him. I think the guilt over Prince Sado’s death was a crushing burden to him, and he wished to placate me, as I wished to placate him. I think we both felt inadequate. Even kings can have such feelings. I assured him that my son’s well-being and the superior instruction he would receive in the upper palace were of more importance to me than my own happiness. And this was true, in its way.