After that they lived happily ever after, of course.
As for me, my body healed, though my eyes never did, and eventually I was found by my sisters, who had come in their various ways to live on this estate.
My own husband?
Oh well, the first time I kissed him he turned into a frog.
There he is, just by your foot. His name's Anton.
On New Year's Day, walking through the deep lanes slatted with light, I saw my husband on horseback, wearing his pink coat. He held his hunting horn to his lips and stood in the stirrups. The hunt rode off; soon they were only as big as holly berries hidden in the green.
I walked on, away from the path, through bushes and brambles, frightening partridges and threading a route between the patient cattle whose hooves in the mud were braceleted with beads of water. My boots were thick with mud. Every step was harder and harder to take. Soon I was lifting my feet as you would to climb a ladder. I was angry and sweating. I wanted to get home but I couldn't hurry. I had to get home to fetch the punch into the great hall and fire it with bright blue flames.
Coming with much difficulty to the top of a hill I looked across the widening valley and saw where the snow still patched the fields like sheets left out to dry. I love the thorn hedges and the trees bare overnight as though some child had stubbornly collected all the leaves, refusing to leave even one for a rival.
I saw my own house, its chimneys smoking, its windows orange.
Another year.
Then a stag and five deer came out of the wood and across the fields in front of my eyes. The fields were fenced and the stag jumped over, turning his head to bring the others. Just for a second he remained in the air, but in that second of flight I remembered my past, when I had been free to fly, long ago, before this gracious landing and a houseful of things.
He disappeared into the dark and I turned my back on the house. The last thing I heard was the sound of the hunt clattering into the courtyard.
I never wanted anyone but her. I wanted to run my finger from the cleft in her chin down the slope of her breasts and across the level plains of her stomach to where I knew she would be wet. I wanted to turn her over and ski the flats of my hands down the slope of her back. I wanted to pioneer the secret passage of her arse.
When she lay down I massaged her feet with mint oil and cut her toenails with silver scissors. I coiled her hair into living snakes and polished her teeth with my saliva.
I pierced her ears and filled them with diamonds. I dropped belladonna into her eyes.
When she was sick I wiped her fever with my own towels and when she cried I kept her tears in a Ming vase.
There was no separation between us. We rose in the morning and slept at night as twins do. We had four arms and four legs, and in the afternoons, when we read in the cool orchard, we did so sitting back to back.
I liked to feel the snake of her spine.
We kissed often, our mouths filling up with tongue and teeth and spit and blood where I bit her lower lip, and with my hands I held her against my hip bone.
We made love often, especially in the afternoons with the blinds half pulled and the cold flag floor against our bodies.
For eighteen years we lived alone in a windy castle and saw no one but each other. Then someone found us and then it was too late.
The man I had married was a woman. They came to burn her. I killed her with a single blow to the head before they reached the gates, and fled that place, and am come here now.
I still have a coil of her hair.
We had been married a few years when a man came to the door selling brushes. My husband was at work so I let the man into our kitchen and gave him something to eat. I asked him to show me his bag and he spread out, as you would imagine, a layer of polishing cloths, a pile of round soaps, combs for the hair, combs for the beard of a billy goat, ordinary household things. I bought one or two useful pieces, then I asked him what he had in his other bag, the one he hadn't opened.
'What was it you wanted?' he asked.
'Poison...'
'Yes, for the rats.'
'No, for my husband.'
He seemed unsurprised by my intention to murder and opened the other bag. I looked inside. It was full of little jars and sealed bags.
'Is your husband a big man?'
'Very. He is very, very fat. He is the fattest man in the village.
He has always been fat. He has eleven brothers, all of whom are as slender as spring com. Every day he eats one cow followed by one pig.'
'You are right to kill him,' said the man. 'Put this in his milk at bedtime.'
Bedtime came and I stirred my husband's vat of milk and put in the powder as directed. My husband came crashing over to the stove and gulped the milk in one draught. As soon as he had finished he began to swell up. He swelled out of the house, cracking the roof, and within a few moments had exploded. Out of his belly came a herd of cattle and a fleet of pigs, all blinking in the light and covered in milk.
He had always complained about his digestion.
I rounded them up and set off to find my sisters. I prefer farming to cookery.
He called me Jess because that is the name of the hood which restrains the falcon.
I was his falcon. I hung on his arm and fed at his hand. said my nose was sharp and cruel and that my eyes had He said my nose was sharp and cruel and that my eyes had madness in them. He said I would tear him to pieces if he dealt softly with me.
At night, if he was away, he had me chained to our bed. It was a long chain, long enough for me to use the chamber pot or to stand at the window and wait for the late owls. I love to hear the owls. I love to see the sudden glide of wings spread out for prey, and then the dip and the noise like a lover in pain.
He used the chain when we went riding together. I had a horse as strong as his, and he'd whip the horse from behind and send it charging through the trees, and he'd follow, half a head behind, pulling on the chain and asking me how I liked my ride.
His game was to have me sit astride him when we made love and hold me tight in the small of my back. He said he had to have me above him, in case I picked his eyes out in the faltering candlelight.
I was none of these things, but I became them.
At night, in June I think, I flew off his wrist and tore his liver from his body, and bit my chain in pieces and left him on the bed with his eyes open.
He looked surprised, I don't know why. As your lover describes you, so you are.
When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me.
He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me.
It would have been better if he had hated me, or if he had abused me, or if he had packed his new suitcases and left.
As it was he continued to put his arm round me and talk about building a new wall to replace the rotten fence that divided our garden from his vegetable patch. I knew he would never leave our house. He had worked for it.
Day by day I felt myself disappearing. For my husband I was no longer a reality, I was one of the things around him. I was the fence which needed to be replaced. I watched myself in the mirror and saw that I was no longer vivid and exciting. I was worn and grey like an old sweater you can't throw out but won't put on.
He admitted he was hi love with her, but he said he loved me.
Translated, that means, I want everything. Translated, that means, I don't want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don't know what to do, give me time.
Why, why should I give you time? What time are you giving me? I am in a cell waiting to be called for execution.
I loved him and I was in love with him. I didn't use language to make
a war-zone of my heart.
'You're so simple and good,' he said, brushing the hair from my face.
He meant, Your emotions are not complex like mine. My dilemma is poetic.
But there was no dilemma. He no longer wanted me, but he wanted our life.
Eventually, when he had been away with her for a few days and returned restless and conciliatory, I decided not to wait in my cell any longer. I went to where he was sleeping in another room and I asked him to leave. Very patiently he asked me to remember that the house was his home, that he couldn't be expected to make himself homeless because he was in love.
'Medea did,' I said, 'and Romeo and Juliet, and Cressida, and Ruth in the Bible.'
He asked me to shut up. He wasn't a hero.
'Then why should I be a heroine?'
He didn't answer; he plucked at the blanket.
I considered my choices.
I could stay and be unhappy and humiliated.
I could leave and be unhappy and dignified.
I could beg him to touch me again.
I could live in hope and die of bitterness.
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.'
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1649
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At 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.<
br />
'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.
It was stacked to the roof with broadsheets.
'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.'