Sexing the Cherry (9 page)

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.

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.'

'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.'

'We have,' said Jordan, 'every mile a torment.'

The soldiers turned aside and conferred amongst themselves, while I sweated for fear that they would make me stand up and thus see my size. Since my battle with the guards Tradescant had told me there was a warrant for my arrest.

'You may go in,' said one of the soldiers.

Then, please,' said I, rolling my eyes winningly, 'please, clear a path for us, for I will have to stagger up the steps into the gallery while my daughter catches any fluids that may flow from me. It is the stench of a three days' dead dog and not for the noses of the tender.'

I saw the soldier's lips twitch, but he said nothing and led us to the great doors leading up to the gallery. He pushed aside the queue waiting for admittance and waved us through.

Once the doors had thudded behind us I leapt from the barrow, picked it up and ran to the top of the stairs where I immediately jumped back in and recommenced my groaning and calling out to Jesus.

The trial lasted seven days, and it was no trial but a means to an execution. The King in his velvet hat, with no jewels about him but his Star of the Garter, bore up proudly in the face of Bradshaw, the chief prosecutor. He won sympathy even from his enemies. On Sunday, when religious folk were at church, Obadiah Sedgewick denounced the King as usual from his pulpit in Covent Garden, and met with silence.

On the seventh day the gallery was packed with goggle-eyed ruffians all in their Puritan clothes come to hear sentence. The clerk stood up and read through all the King's misdeeds, including that of refusing to plead guilty or not guilty because he would not recognize the authority of the court. At length this stick of a man with a spotted youth's face and the balding skull of an ancient read out, solemn as he could, 'Charles Stuart, Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy, you shall be put to death by the severing of your head from your body.'

Then all the commissioners who had signed the death warrant, sixty-eight of them, stood up to signify their agreement.

The King tried to speak, but Bradshaw would have none of it and motioned for him to be led away. The King was already dead in law, and a dead man cannot speak.

We watched the King leave the chamber, his back straight, his cane in his hand. At the doorway to the street he saw crowds of his followers, flouting the ban on their presence, too many for the guards to arrest but still unable to reach the courtroom. They were weeping. Charles turned to his gaolers and said, in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear, 'You may forbid their attendance, but not their tears.'

In winter the frost at midnight brightens the ground and hardens the stars. We kept vigil all night, the three of us, huddled together, watching the execution platform being built by the light of a dozen flares. The carpenters wore black masks and kept looking about them as though they expected a troop of demons to ride through the darkness and claim them. It is bad luck to kill a king.

The executioner himself stood underneath a torch in the wall, sharpening his axe with a whetstone. He sharpened, and the sparks flew in orange spikes. He tested the blade with his thumb, and we saw it run red. There was a sheep in a cage near-by. It was the custom to try out the axe beforehand for those of noble birth. Two men took the sheep struggling from the cage and held it, its legs buckled underneath itself, while the executioner with a single straight swing whistled through the fleece and the muscle and the bone and did it so clean that I fancied I might pick up the head and sew it back on and let the sheep run off.

There was a half-hearted cheer from the crew, who ran a skewer through the animal's body and put it to roast over their fires. The head and the fleece were given to a beggar.

It was not until the afternoon that the King appeared in his linen shirt, his beard trimmed and nothing of him shivering, though many a spectator had fainted with cold. He knelt down and rested his head on the block, and I saw Tradescant's face stream with tears that froze at once and lay on his cheeks like diamonds. The King gave the signal, and a moment later his head was wrapped in a white cloth and his body was carried away.

In the Crown of Thorns that night Tradescant made plans to take ship and leave us. I saw the look on Jordan's face and my heart became a captive in a locked room. I couldn't reach him now. I knew he would go.

I went outside and walked until the lights of the inn were specks in the distance and I was alone with the river flowing out to sea.

At a dancing school in a remote place, Fortunata teaches her pupils to become points of light.

They begin with her as early as six or seven and some stay for the rest of their lives.

Most, she releases like butterflies over a flowering world. Bodies that could have bent double and grown numb she maintains as metal in a fiery furnace, tempering, stretching, forcing sinews into impossible shapes and calling her an nature.

She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly. She says that light burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve us at any moment. How else can we account for so many of us who disappear?

It is her job to channel the light lying in the solar plexus, along the arms, along the legs, forcing it into fingertips and feet, forcing it out so that her dancers sweat tongues of flame.

To her dancers she says, 'Through the body, the body is conquered.'

She asks them to meditate on a five-pointed star in the belly and to watch the points push outwards, the fifth point into the head. She spins them, impaled with light, arms upraised, one leg at a triangle across the other thigh, one foot, on point, on a penny coin, and spins them, until all features are blurred, until the human being most resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar. One after the other she spins them, like a juggler keeping plates on sticks; one after the other she runs up and down the line as one slows or another threatens to fall from dizziness. And at a single moment, when all are spinning in harmony down the long hall, she hears music escaping from their heads and backs and livers and spleens. Each has a tone like cut glass. The noise is deafening. And it is then that the spinning seems to stop, that the wild gyration of the dancers passes from movement into infinity.