At this the Queen laughed aloud. Then she looked thoughtful. At last she spoke. “Perhaps I will invite her to come here and show herself.”
“Majesty, I pray you will do so,” Sunia replied. “It is more diverting than a play to see her walk. Her feet are hidden and one would think she went hither and thither on wheels. And her waist, Majesty! It is small like this.” She measured a little circle with her two hands.
The Queen marveled.
“How can that be? Is she divided in two?”
Sunia had wondered for herself how it could be, and she had inquired privately of a woman servant in that home, who had told her that the lady Foote encased her middle in a steel-enforced box. So she told the Queen.
“She boxes herself in at the waist, to make herself small.”
Upon this the Queen could not restrain her curiosity, and the lady Foote was invited and the Queen sent her own palanquin to fetch her to the palace. Alas, as the bearers told everywhere, the lady could not squeeze into the palanquin because of her wide skirts.
“However high we raised the front of the palanquin,” they told, grinning at every word, “she could not get herself inside. Even her husband stood there laughing, and we all laughed. But she was not put off one bit and, laughing with us, she backed in like a mule between shafts. Then her skirts stood out so far that we could not put down the front curtain and so we carried her through the streets. The thousands stood to watch us, for word flew from mouth to ear everywhere and people ran out from their houses. Some even hid beneath the palanquin and we beat them out with bamboo sticks.”
Thus the foreigner was carried through the streets until they came to the palace. There she had new difficulty in descending from the palanquin and she must be pulled out and set straight, whereupon her skirts belled out in a vast circle, a pretty sight, Sunia said, for her gown was made of rich golden silk, long in the back like a tail, and the front was hung about with wide lace and there was lace falling from her sleeves over her hands. Only one part of her was unseemly, and this was her front, where her breasts stood out like hillocks under the silk. This, Sunia concluded, was the misfortune of the foreign women, that they had big breasts.
At this moment she paused and looked at Il-han sidewise. “And did all the women in America have such swollen breasts?” she inquired.
Il-han looked sidewise at her in return. “I did not look at them,” he replied.
So she went on with her tale.
When the King heard the female Foote was coming he declared that he too must see her, which he could not unless the Queen allowed. She granted his wish, however, and Sunia met the guest in the reception hall and led her through the antechamber and into the throne room, where the King and Queen sat on their thrones, with a nephew prince at their side. Sunia had taught the guest how to salute the truebone royal pair and she, though foreign, performed the salutations very well and then stood while the King and Queen rose. The King wore a long robe of dark red silk, the Queen wore a long flowing skirt of blue silk and a jacket of yellow silk most exquisitely embroidered with multicolored flowers and fastened with buttons of amber and pearl. Her long black hair was fastened in a smooth coil at her neck with pins of filigree gold set with jewels. Upon her nobly shaped head she wore an ornament also of jewels, and from her waist hung jeweled baubles fastened to bright silk tassels.
The King and Queen exchanged speeches with the lady, their guest, and she responded so freely and with such spirit in her simple language that soon they were laughing together. The royal pair then sat down again, and an ebony stool was brought for the guest since she could not sit upon a floor cushion, so upheld was she by her hooped skirts.
“The Queen,” Sunia told Il-han, “was by then so pleased with the ease and freedom of the lady Foote, that she declared she would make a fête champêtre for her in the palace gardens, and she invited her on that very day to return another day for this fête.”
“And did she so?” Il-han inquired, marveling at the ease with which Sunia had accomplished such a victory over the Queen.
“Never was there such a fête,” Sunia exclaimed and she described it, her hands flying like birds while she talked.
The fête, she said, excelled all fêtes that were ever heard of in the capital. Two hundred tall eunuchs in splendid uniforms escorted the Queen and the guest through the gardens. All the trees had been brought to blossom at the right day, apricots and plum and cherry, and great displays of chrysanthemums, out of season, glowed among gold-lacquered pagodas and pavilions. Fairy teahouses and miniature temples the Queen had commanded built for the occasion, and music sounded through the groves of bamboo and flowering trees and among willows drooping over ponds. Bright-hued birds the Queen had commanded to sing and fly had been brought from the southern islands and servants in garments as bright flitted everywhere like butterflies.
The guest wore new garments, Sunia said, the skirts wider than she had before and her arms were bare, but she wore gloves of soft white leather so long that they clothed her arms like sleeves. The court ladies clamored to try these gloves on their own hands, but their hands were like baby hands inside the gloves. These ladies played with the guest’s diamonds and felt her boxed-in waist and asked where she bought the creams that made her skin so white and smooth.
Thus the day wore on, for it took all day to see the many sights the Queen had commanded for the astonishment of this foreign guest. Musicians sat inside the pagodas and strummed their lutes and two-stringed violins, gongs sounded their mellow notes. Near the bank of a lake where lotus bloomed, a bud opened to reveal a small naked child whose waiting mother lifted him from his rosy bed. A sailing boat on another lake carried girls who danced old legends on the decks, acrobats swung from branches of the trees along the shores, and everywhere about the vast gardens troupes of actors made playlets for amusement of the Queen and her guest.
“Indeed we all went mad with merriment,” Sunia said, laughing at her memories, “and when the lady Foote parted from the Queen the two embraced as though they were sisters and the Queen could not bear to let her go. And a good lucky thing it was that the fête came first—”
Here Sunia’s face grew grave and she paused.
“What next?” Il-han inquired.
“You know how suddenly the Queen can change,” Sunia said. “One moment she is all kindness and gaiety and the next she is a cruel witch.”
He nodded. “So what did she do?” he asked.
“You know how many of the Queen’s kinsmen were murdered by the Regent,” she said.
Il-han nodded again.
“Well,” Sunia went on, “even before all this merriment the Queen made up her mind in secret that she would command the death of all those who had taken part in the return of the Regent.”
“No,” Il-han cried, aghast.
“Yes,” Sunia said. “As soon as you were gone she commanded them to be killed. Some had already fled beyond her reach and she commanded that their wives and children should be slaughtered.”
Il-han covered his eyes with his hands at this, but Sunia went on, her voice steady.
“Yes, she did, and it would have so been done except that I went to the lady Foote after the fête, when I heard of it. I went that same night and begged her to move the Queen’s heart.”
Il-han lifted his head from his hands. “Who told you?”
“Your man servant,” she said, “and he heard it from a eunuch in the palace, whose sister was among those doomed by the Queen. Upon that the lady Foote came in haste, uninvited and unannounced, only two days after the fête, and she faced the Queen.”