Sexing the Cherry (8 page)

I took some things and left. It wasn't easy, it was my home too.

I hear he's replaced the back fence.

As soon as we were married my husband took me to his family home, far from anyone I knew. He promised me a companion and a library but asked me never to interrupt him during the day. I saw him at night for a few hours, over our dinner, though he never ate much. Nor did he seem anxious to decorate my bed with his body.

I asked him what he did during the day and he said he exercised his mind over the problems of Creation. I realized this could take some time and resigned myself to forgetting the rules of normal life.

One night, as we were eating a pigeon I had shot, my husband stood up and said, There is a black tower where wild beasts live. The tower has no windows and no doors. No one may enter or leave. At the top of the tower is a cage whose bars are made of bone. From this cage a trapped spirit peeps at the sun. The tower is my body, the cage is my skull, the spirit singing to comfort itself is me. But I am not comforted, I am alone. Kill me.'

I did as he asked. I smashed his skull with a silver candlestick and I heard a hissing noise like damp wood on the fire. I opened the doors and dragged his body into the air, and in the air he flew away.

I still see him sometimes, but only in the distance.

Their stories ended, the twelve dancing princesses invited me to spend the night as their guest.

'Someone is missing,' I said. There are only eleven of you and I have heard only eleven stories. Where is your sister?'

They looked at one another, then the eldest said, 'Our youngest sister is not here. She never came to live with us. On her wedding day to the prince who had discovered our secret, she flewfrom the altar like a bird from a snare and walked a tightrope between the steeple of the church and the mast of a ship weighing anchor in the bay.

'She was, of all of us, the best dancer, the one who made her body into shapes we could not follow. She did it for pleasure, but there was something more for her; she did it because any other life would have been a lie. She didn't burn in secret with a passion she could not express; she shone.

'We have not seen her for years and years, not since that day when we were dressed in red with our black hair unbraided. She must be old now, she must be stiff. Her body can only be a memory. The body she has will not be the body she had.'

'Do you remember,' said another sister, 'how light she was? She was so light that she could climb down a rope, cut it and tie it again in mid-air without plunging to her death. The winds supported her.'

'What was her name?'

'Fortunata.'

1649

A
t first the Civil War hardly touched us. Opinions were ugh, and there were those like Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace who would have taken any opportunity to feel themselves above the common crowd. But it was a quiet enough affair, local battles and the Roundhead mob sometimes descending on a lordly house and claiming it for themselves in the name of God. There was no real feeling that the King would not win as he had always won, as kings have always won, whomever they fight.

I like a fight myself, and enjoyed baiting Neighbour Firebrace. Indeed I sorely missed his crooked face while I was in Wimble-don. With everyone in accord, what merriment is there?

At Wimbledon we were sure that at any moment Queen Henrietta would return with allies from France or Italy or Spain and sweep away the snivelling Puritans dressed in starch. But she found no allies. Well-wishers in plenty, but no allies. And the navy was against the King and controlling the ports and watching the seas for any sign of help.

When the King's men came to the house and told us stories of "King Noll' as they parodied Cromwell, smashing the beautiful glass in our churches and closing up every place of distraction so that men and women might have nothing to occupy them but the invisible God, we grew to hate what had been only a joke.

I went to a church not far from the gardens. A country church famed for its altar window where our Lord stood feeding the five thousand. Black Tom Fairfax, with nothing better to do, had set up his cannon outside the window and given the order to fire. There was no window when I got there and the men had ridden away.

There was a group of women gathered round the remains of the glass which coloured the floor brighter than any carpet of flowers in a parterre. They were women who had cleaned the window, polishing the slippery fish our Lord had blessed in his outstretched hands, scraping away the candle smoke from the feet of the Apostles. They loved the window. Without speaking, and hi common purpose, the women began to gather the pieces of the window in their baskets. They gathered the broken bread, and the two fishes, and the astonished faces of the hungry, until their baskets overflowed as the baskets of the disciples had overflowed in the original miracle. They gathered every piece, and they told me, with hands that bled, that they would rebuild the window in a secret place. At evening, their work done, they filed into the little church to pray, and I, not daring to follow, watched them through the hole where the window had been.

They kneeled in a line by the altar, and on the flag floor behind them, invisible to them, I saw the patchwork colours of the window, red and yellow and blue. The colours sank into the stone and covered the backs of the women, who looked as though they were wearing harlequin coats. The church danced in light. I left them there and walked home, my head full of things that cannot be destroyed.

The trial began on 20 January 1649. Jordan and Tradescant and I had been in London for a week. Tradescant put up at the Crown of Thorns and Jordan and I went back to our old home, not visited for six years.

The smells were the same, the river was still filthy, the dredgers still bobbed about up to their necks in rubbish. In the middle of the river was a chicken on a crate. I felt proud and excited, wanting even to bump into my scrawny witch of a counterfeit friend, if only to tell her of our success in the world.

Jordan was nineteen and stood as tall as my chest, which was impressive for a man not come out of my body. He resembled me not at all, a thing which must have been a secret relief to him, though he never shuddered in my company as others do.

I was wearing my best dress, the one with a wide skirt that would serve as a sail for some war-torn ship, and a bit of fancy lace at the neck, made by a blind woman who had intended it to be a shawl. I had given her some estimate of my dimensions, but she would not believe me and so, although I have nothing to go round my shoulders save a dozen blankets sewn together, I do have a fine-worked collar. I had got out my hat for the occasion of our homecoming, and despite my handicaps I cut something of a fine figure, I thought.

As we neared our long hut I saw smoke coming from the hole in the roof and, getting closer, spotted Neighbour Firebrace and Preacher Scroggs standing together on my front step, deep in viperous chatter.

'Jordan,' I cried. 'Run as fast as you can, they are burning us away.'

I ran up to them and towered above them as Goliath over David, and they trembled, and Preacher Scroggs mumbled something behind his hand about my being dead.

'Who told you I was dead?'

Scroggs had no answer to that, and I pushed him aside as you would a ninepin and looked in the hut.

'We have requisitioned your house for Jesus and Oliver Cromwell,' said Firebrace, his cranesbill nose red with righteousness. These are papers denouncing the King.'

I snatched one from the top of the pile and found it to be a copy of 'A Perfect Diurnal', a foul and hackish screed written by Samuel Peck, a man well known for his knavery and misdeeds.

This Peck,' I said, seizing Firebrace by his jacket, 'this Peck is an enemy of mine, having taken two good dogs and never paid for them, and that some years back.'

Firebrace started his wriggling, so I lifted him clean from the floor and brought him to my eye level. He began to dribble.

This Peck,' I continued, mybreath as fiery as a dragon, 'is a bald-headed buzzard. A tall, thin-faced fellow with a hawk's nose, a meagre countenance and long runagate legs. Constant in nothing but wenching, lying and drinking.'

I called to Jordan to start throwing out the newspapers.

'Make a pile, Jordan, make it as high as you like and we'll have a full blaze and happen put Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace on the top in memory of Guy Fawkes.'

Then Scroggs comes up to me, his eyes oozing venom, his face as contorted as a spitfrog.

'You are in danger of Hell, madam.'

'Then pity me,' says I. 'I pity you, for you are in no danger, it being quite certain that you entered Hell a time ago and will not be returning.'

'Perhaps you should tell that to my men,' he says, and standing back with his twisted smile revealed eight sober Roundheads in their coats of no colours.

I went to the door and saw another three surrounding Jordan as he made the bonfire.

'Satan's league!' I shouted. 'Get thee behind me!'

Because I am a sinner the devils did not vanish as they did for Jesus; rather they took hold of Jordan and began to march him away while Firebrace set up such a farting and laughing that I feared he would explode before I had time to dismember him.

I ran straight at the guards, broke the arms of the first, ruptured the second and gave the third a kick in the head that knocked him out at once. The other five came at me, and when I had dispatched two for an early judgement another took his musket and fired me straight in the chest. I fell over, killing the man who was poised behind me, and plucked the musket ball out of my cleavage. I was in a rage then.

'You are no gentleman to spoil a poor woman's dress, and my best dress at that.'

I sat up and rolled up my sleeves, for it dawned on me that I must take these scurvy fellows seriously. But before I had managed my feet they had run away, leaving only Scroggs and Firebrace trembling the way they will on the Last Day.

'I will not kill you now,' I said, 'for I am tired after my journey and wish only to settle in my own house. Slink away with droppings in your pants and never come here again, not even if I go away for a lifetime.'

At my magnanimousness they were abashed, as even sinners must be in the presence of virtue. When they had gone Jordan and I piled up all the copies of'A Perfect Diurnal' and made a bonfire whose light blazed across the Thames in streaks of splendour. The very poor came and sat by it, and warmed themselves, and drank beer of mine. I fancied I had never been away and that all our adventures and troubles were a dream. I looked at Jordan and saw a little boy with a battered boat. And I thought, if only the fire could be kept burning, the future might be kept at bay and this moment would remain. This warmth, this light. But I fell asleep and woke shivering to see the early morning hanging over the water and the chars of our fire petrified with frost.

I was drinking with Tradescant when a boy slipped into the Crown of Thorns and put a broadsheet on our table.

The innkeeper was a Loyalist and had no truck with those po-faced, flat-buttocked zealots who had declared the King a traitor to his own people. A despot, they called him, a tyrant, a spendthrift, unwilling to accept a Parliament of the people for the people. London was awash with pamphlets telling anyone who could read them that the King had no Divine Right and should be called to justice for his sins. For myself, I would rather live with sins of excess than sins of denial.

The Puritans, who wanted a rule of saints on earth and no king but Jesus, forgot that we are born into flesh and in flesh must remain. Their women bind their breasts and cook plain food without salt, and the men are so afraid of their member uprising that they keep it strapped between their legs with bandages.

This week, the week before the trial, they are paying men to sit in public houses and overhear any loyalty to the King. This badly printed broadsheet with a message from the King and no publisher's name was a crime punishable by death for those who put it about. The boy had gone, seeped into the wainscot with a penny from Tradescant, and all of us who love the King crowded round to hear his words.

Tradescant has promised us seats in the gallery at the trial. We are going in disguise, though what disguise I shall assume is not yet clear...

There was an order in London during the week of the trial prohibiting the presence of Cavaliers, and Tradescant was in serious danger, being a chosen employee of the Royal house. Everyone anxious to attend the trial was subjected to a rigorous search and investigation, though the Puritans, concerned to uphold their public image, had promised an open trial, free to all, except supporters of the King. Tradescant and Jordan dressed themselves as drabs, with painted faces and scarlet lips and dresses that looked as though they'd been pawed over by every infantryman in the capital. Jordan had a fine mincing walk and a leer that got him a good few offers of a bed for the night.

I swathed myself about in rags, black as pitch, and put on an old wig we begged from a theatrical. Then I made myself a specially reinforced wheelbarrow and sat in it like a heap of manure.

In this way we made our entrance to the Cotton House and the trial of the King.

Two soldiers stopped us and asked if we had been given passes to the gallery.

'Oh, sir, passes we have,' I sighed, reaching into my filthy folds. 'We have been granted passes on account of our sinfulness.

Look, they are marked by Hugh Peter himself.'

It was true. Hugh Peter, a puce-stained pock-marked preacher who thought himself Christ's deputy, had offered passes to the gallery for any sinners who truly longed to repent and see the Rule of Saints begin. He had preached his sermon that week on the text, 'He shall bind their King in chains', and afterwards the hopeless and the damned had crept to him for solace. Jordan, in his costume as a drab, had felt Hugh Peter's oily hand slide under his skirts promising the freedom that only Christ can bring. Jordan had wept and moaned and begged two more passes for other friends of his. Common women, women in need of a pastor's touch.

And here we were.

The soldier squinted at the bits of paper and asked me to leave my wheelbarrow at the entrance to the gallery.

'I cannot, sir,' I cried, 'for I have the Clap and my flesh is rotting beneath me. If I were to stand up, sir, you would see a river of pus run across these flags. The Rule of Saints cannot begin in pus.'

Jordan and Tradescant stood behind me, each holding a handle of the wheelbarrow.

'My daughter and my niece, sir,' I said, waving a hand. These two have pushed me from Plymouth so that I can be redeemed.'