The Red Queen Read Online Free Page A

days, to the Hall of Clear Thinking, and I tried to think clearly, but it was not easy. His Majesty King Yŏngjo came and patted me, and flattered me, and pressed improving reading matter upon me. I felt sick, and could hardly control my bowels. Strange foods were offered to me, but I could not eat. I was robed in stiff and uncomfortable court clothes of green and violet, and a slave of the bedchamber painted my child’s face into an adult mask with unfamiliar cosmetics. I did not recognize myself. I longed to go back to my parents and my nurse, but, when at last I was released from these tortures, I found that my palanquin was being carried home by palace servants, and I was attended by one of the queen’s own women, robed entirely in black. In homecoming there was no escape.
My home itself was transformed: my parents were waiting for me in new robes, their manner subdued, anxious and unhappy, and they now addressed me in formal speech, not as their daughter, but as their mistress. They had prepared a formal and symbolic meal, laid out on a red cloth, of which the royal entourage was to partake. (Was there rice, cooked with chestnut and jujube, signifying long life, such as I ordered to be provided, years later, for the unhappy betrothal of my son? I cannot remember for I was half-blind with dread.) My father seemed to have sunk into a state of panic and fear. He sweated profusely in his unfamiliar ceremonial garments. He smelled of fear. Why had I been offered up to this strange fate? To appease what gods, to gain what advantage? I overheard my parents, full of doubts, talking about me, and whether they had been right to present me. In these last days, before I left my parents’ home for ever, my father was full of advice and foreboding. I was allowed to sleep in my mother’s bed, for the last time, and I lay there sobbing, hiding my head beneath the kingfisher quilt, listening to the low murmur of their adult anxiety and grief. I wished to die, and so to avoid my fate. I cannot describe the intensity and the terror of my apprehensions. I felt like a criminal, though I did not know what offence I had committed. I cried and cried, and would not be comforted. I was only a child and had not learned the arts of concealment.
But fate marched towards me, with an army of regulations, and, as I have said, new garments, including the consolation of that red silk skirt, which came too late to bring me any joy. Rather, it reminded me of the obscure and relatively carefree youth that I was about to lose for ever. The codes of the court, its customs and rituals, were drummed into me. I was a quick learner, but I did not then understand the rationale that had constructed these elaborate performances, and I like to understand what I am doing, and why. I was only ten years old, but maturity had been thrust suddenly upon me. I could tell from my father’s manner and his elaborate and often repeated warnings that a false step or a rash word would mean disgrace, perhaps death, not only for myself, but also for my family.
That red silk skirt has much to answer for. I ordered another one like it, for my adult body, when I thought I was my own mistress. It gave me no pleasure.
I say that my husband was mad. And so I believe he was. But his son and my son – our son, the son who became king – could not admit this. Nor could we admit the manner of his death. Our lives have been full of so many denials. Intricate, politic denials. Our son devoted much of his adult life to the rehabilitation of the reputation of his mad father. But I lived through that madness. What and whom do I blame for it? Do I blame his father, my father-in-law the king, King Yŏngjo, for his excessive demands and excessive expectations? Do I blame King Yŏngjo for so oddly and unnaturally favouring several of his daughters and thereby deliberately and openly humiliating his only son? Do I blame the unnatural rigour and ceremony of court life? Do I blame the factional