The Red Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

cautious about his overtures, and careful not to be tempted into overfamiliarity. They were right to be cautious. The field around the prince was red with danger.
His name was Prince Sado. I will use this name because you will remember it, and because it is the name by which history and his people remember him, though in fact it was conferred upon him posthumously. During Prince Sado’s lifetime, he had many names, reflecting his somewhat capriciously changing status. Prince Changhon was the best known of these, but Sado is the name that has endured. Korean nomenclature in the royal and affined families was very complicated. The names of the princesses his sisters are confusing to the Western eye, for they all begin with the letter H, and are difficult to pronounce, but Sado’s posthumous name is easy to remember. It signifies mourning. A sad name, for one who is mourned.
Prince Sado’s name, as I discovered long after his death and mine, also has a quite arbitrary connection with the name of the Marquis de Sade, and of the derivative noun, ‘sadism’. It is a meaningless and fortuitous connection, and as far as I know neither the Marquis de Sade nor Count Sacher-Masoch (who also was strangely obsessed with clothing) knew of the existence of the kingdom of Korea (or Corea, or Corée), let alone of the sufferings of my husband. Yet the connection provides a useful aide-mémoire.
So, remember Prince Sado. And remember his innocence. He was a child when we played these games of beheadings. He had not yet earned his title. He had not yet become the Prince of Mournful Thoughts, the Prince of the Coffin.
I have no name, and I have many names. I am a nameless woman. My true name is unknown to history. I am famous, but nameless. And I was never a queen in my lifetime, red or otherwise. I became a queen after my death. So much happens after death.
Sado told me once that he had thought my genitals would look like the udder of a cow, with four teats and four nipples. He was relieved by their neat simplicity, when he stole these covert, excited glances at them. Of course, in those times, I had no breasts. I was flat, and smooth of skin.
Children find the human body confusing. Even ‘liberated’ and well-informed children in the twenty-first century find the human body confusing. Even children reared naked in villages of baked earth find the human body confusing, and are shocked by the drama of the events, both natural and unnatural, that inevitably overtake it. Small wonder, then, that the Crown Prince and I, so swathed and so enveloped in such rich symbolic fabrics, should have had false images of what is hidden away. The laws governing physical contact between the sexes were, in a Confucian culture, very strict and very complex. Contact between the sexes, except within marriage and amongst close kin, was in theory forbidden, though of course contacts took place. Rules are one thing, practice another. But in theory at least women took one path, men another, and those paths should never cross. There were many elegant and time-consuming debates at our court on small, not to say ridiculous, points of principle – for instance, was a man permitted to soil himself and pollute his kinswoman by holding out his hand to save his sister-in-law from drowning? This popular moral conundrum was not dissimilar from the predicament of the heroine of Bernardin de St Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie , one of the sensational successes published in Europe during my lifetime, though of course we in Korea knew nothing of this small volume. In this curious work, the virtuous heroine Virginie refuses to undress to save herself from shipwreck, and thus drowns within sight of shore and of her lover. Clothing has much to answer for.
The colour red was the royal colour of Korea. (Yellow, we were told, was the colour of the Chinese emperor, the Son of Heaven, and we were subservient to him.) King Yŏngjo, my father-in-law, a man not without vanity,