The Red Queen (6 page)

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.

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.