The regent, his mother, on the other hand, gloried in her position. She had the royal residence completely redone to her taste, at great expense to the kingdom, and moved ruthlessly to sweep away her detractors. Wives and concubines of the dead king were thrown out of the palace, and several of those who opposed her were sent away on missions of varying degrees of necessity and plausibility. Many did not return.
The regent tried to have me sent to the countryside as a laborer, but the young king would not allow it. Accordingly, she changed her tactics to try to drive a wedge between the two of us, a strategy that I unwittingly aided, just how it will soon become clear. I have no idea what poisonous things she had to say about me, but I could see, as the months wore on, that they were having an effect. The king began to view me with some suspicion, which usually, but not always, I was able to allay. Nonetheless, he continued to insist I remain in the palace, and indeed appointed me to a better position.
Shortly after the king’s death and her appointment as regent, Lady Si Sudachan began a scandalous and completely inappropriate dalliance with a heretofore minor court official, Phan But Si Thep, the guard of the front image hall. Phan But Si Thep had always struck me as an ambitious man of little ability. The regent, however, clearly doted on him, and he was a slave to her every command.
The liaison was certainly to his benefit. Shortly after he succumbed to the lady’s blandishments, for it was she who initiated the liaison, she appointed him Khun Chinnarat, guard of the inner image hall, demoting the former Khun Chinnarat to her lover’s former title of Phan But Si Thep. That elevated position in the inner court made it possible for the two of them to be together, all the more so when the queen regent promoted him to an even more important post as Khun Worawongsa, in charge of the Office of Registration.
The queen regent obviously had no care as to how others in the palace would view her actions, because soon after that, she built Khun Worawongsa an official residence where palace officials were required to submit to his wishes. She then built him a second official residence at the Din Gate, after which Worawongsa began taking a much more direct interest in the affairs of the kingdom and appeared regularly at the regent’s side.
There was talk, of course, but also fear of her wrath, and none objected, at least not in public. Indeed, all opposition to these measures was quickly quashed. One official, known to oppose Khun Worawongsa, was stabbed to death on leaving the residence at the Din Gate. It was increasingly clear that Lady Si Sudachan and her lover would brook no opposition; that to defy them meant, quite simply, death. Still, the gossip in the palace was, as you can imagine, considerable when it became evident that the regent was expecting a child.
So there I was back in the bosom of the Chaiwong family, and not entirely happy about it. Nor was the family, with the exception of Chat, any more thrilled about my presence than I was. Certainly there was no one making an effort to make sure I felt at home. Indeed, my host, Wongvipa, made no secret of the fact she’d prefer I wasn’t there. It was on the subject of my presence that Chat overruled his mother for the one and only time. He needed Jennifer to be near him, and she wasn’t going anywhere without me. Whether Wongvipa or I liked it or not, I was there.
Not that Wongvipa made her feelings known to me face-to-face. Her instructions were never delivered in person, but rather by Yutai. Through him she had declared Chat head of the company in his father’s place. According to Yutai, and as Chat had reported, Thaksin had made his views known to his wife before he died. No one argued, not even Sompom, who could be said to have a prior claim, given he was Thaksin’s firstborn, and indeed had worked for several years in the company before escaping to the world of academe. It was experience Chat lacked.
A Buddhist of Thaksin Chaiwong’s wealth and status might be expected to lie in state, as it were, for a considerable period, even months, but he was cremated three days after he died. His widow saw to that. Jennifer and I were not present at the cremation at Wongvipa’s request. Busakorn, the chosen one, was.
There were other immediate changes about the place that signaled the new regime. The two Fitzgerald portraits, one of Thaksin and his brother, the other of Sompom as a child with his mother, disappeared from sight. In their place were portraits of Wongvipa and the two boys, and Wongvipa and Fatty. The official explanation was that it distressed Wongvipa to see her husband so young and well. Sompom, Wan-nee, and Praneet, regular guests at the family dinner table, were no longer invited.
“We’ve been banished,” Praneet told me. “Our appearance is required at ceremonial occasions only.”
“I think your mother and Wongvipa perhaps do not get along that well,” I said, sympathetically.
“My mother feels that when my grandmother died, Wongvipa took advantage of Thaksin’s grief and managed to insinuate herself into the family and his life. Certainly she got pregnant with Chat right away. They got married shortly thereafter. That’s what I’m told, anyway. I was just a child.”
“Still, Thaksin and Wongvipa were together a long time,” I said. “Chat is what? Twenty-four or -five, I think.”
“Yes,” she said. “And I have a fair amount of sympathy for her. My mother was born into wealth and privilege, as I was. Wongvipa wasn’t. She grew up in a village on the outskirts of Bangkok. I think she was very poor. It can’t have been easy for her. She may have married well, but she is not without ability and charm. To tell you the truth, I’m just glad not to have to go to dinner there every week.”
Still, the suddenness of all this surprised me. I would have thought the widow would have waited a decent length of time to dump the portraits and the relatives, but Wongvipa did not seem to care about such things. Nor did she make any effort to disguise her liking for Yutai. While I had tried to persuade myself that the intimate scene I had witnessed between them on my arrival in Ayutthaya had been my imagination, it was clear that it was not. Yutai could regularly be found at her side, rather more than mere business would call for, and from time to time, I caught her looking at him with a glance that was nothing short of smoldering. I, on the other hand, found he was often watching me, and not, I thought, with any affection. Having said that, it rather quickly became business as usual, and business took the family and therefore Jennifer and me, to Chiang Mai.
In a sense, to travel the more than four hundred miles north from Bangkok to Chiang Mai is to journey back through history, pushing against the tide of ethnically and linguistically linked peoples who, about a thousand years ago or so, began to move south out of China’s Yunnan province into what was to become Thailand. It was a migration that was to take several centuries and to result in the formation of successive kingdoms, each a little farther south than the last. Chiang Mai was part of the earliest of five centers of power, the kingdom of Lan Na, which Thais consider to be the first of five Thai kingdoms. Lan Na was to be followed by Sukhothai, then Ayutthaya, then Thonburi, and finally Bangkok.
Now Chiang Mai is the principal city of Thailand’s north. The Old City is still surrounded by walls and a moat, although the town has spread way beyond them, a bustling place, noisy with the whine of tuk-tuks that buzz around the city by the thousands, their sound competing with the crowing of roosters and the cries of street vendors. The markets are crowded and colorful, the stalls piled high with fish and exotic fruits and vegetables.
But in all the noise there are oases of calm, perhaps even silence. One of them was the summer residence of the Chai-wongs. It was built of wood on a platform above the Ping River, and consisted of a main house with a huge veranda overlooking the river where the family took its meals, and off apart, a guest pavilion with three rooms and a sala that Jennifer and I shared.