The villagers were kind to me, and I helped them through the day with their stalls of exotic fruit and speckled fish, and at night the men filled their pipes and sat on the sea wall and asked me where I had come from, and why.
I did not tell them the strange means of my arrival, but I explained the destination of my heart.
The world is full of dancers,' said one, blowing the smoke in circles round my head.
'And you have seen this one only by night,' said another.
'And escaping down a wall,' said his wife, who was scraping crabmeat into a pot.
The philosopher of the village warned me that love is better ignored than explored, for it is easier to track a barnacle goose than to follow the trajectories of the heart.
There followed a discourse on love, some of which I will reveal to you.
On the one side there were those who claimed that love, if it be allowed at all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms the hearth but does not burn down the house.
On the other there were those who believed that only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing hare and following it until sundown could a man or woman sleep quietly at night.
The school of heaviness, who would tie down love, took as their examples those passages of ancient literature which promise that those driven by desire, the lightest of things, suffer under weights they cannot bear. Weights far more terrible than to accept from the start that passion must spend its life in chains.
What of the woman who finds herself turning into a lotus tree as she flees her ardent lover? Her feet are rooted to the earth, soft bark creeps up her legs and little by little enfolds her groin.
When she tries to tear her hair her hands are full of leaves.
What of Orpheus, who pursues his passion through the gates of Hell, only to fail at the last moment and to lose the common presence of his beloved?
And Actaeon, whose desire for Artemis turns him into a stag and leaves him torn to pieces by his own dogs?
These things are so, and may be laid out in a solemn frieze to run round the edges of the world.
Then I stood up and reminded the company of Penelope, who through her love for one man refused the easy compromise of a gilded kingdom and unravelled by night the woven weight of a day's work to leave her hands empty again in the morning.
And of Sappho, who rather than lose her lover to a man flung herself from the windy cliffs and turned her body into a bird.
It is well known that those in the grip of heavy enchantments can be wakened only by a lover's touch. Those who seem dead, who are already returning to the earth, can be restored to life, quickened again by one who is warm.
Then, it being night, and the twin stars of Castor and Pollux just visible in the sky, I spoke of that tragedy, of two brothers whose love we might find unnatural, so stricken in grief when one was killed that the other, begging for his life again, accepted instead that for half the year one might live, and for the rest of the year the other, but never the two together. So it is for us, who while on earth in these suits of lead sense the presence of one we love, not far away but too far to touch.
The villagers were silent and one by one began to move away, each in their own thoughts. A woman brushed my hair back with her hand. I stayed where I was with my shoulders against the rough sea wall and asked myself what I hadn't asked the others.
Was I searching for a dancer whose name I did not know or was I searching for the dancing part of myself?
Night.
In the dark and in the water I weigh nothing at all. I have no vanity but I would enjoy the consolation of a lover's face. After my only excursion into love I resolved never to make a fool of myself again. I was offered a job in a whore-house but I turned it down on account of my frailty of heart. Surely such to-ing and fro-ing as must go on night and day weakens the heart and inclines it to love? Not directly, you understand, but indirectly, for lust without romantic matter must be wearisome after a time. I asked a girl at the Spitalfields house about it and she told me that she hates her lovers-by-the-hour but still longs for someone to come in a coach and feed her on mince-pies.
Where do they come from, these insubstantial dreams?
As for Jordan, he has not my common sense and will no doubt follow his dreams to the end of the world and then fall straight off.
I cannot school him in love, having no experience, but I can school him in its lack and perhaps persuade him that there are worse things than loneliness.
A man accosted me on our way to Wimbledon and asked me if I should like to see him.
'I see you well enough, sir,' I replied.
'Not all of me,said he, and unbuttoned himself to show a thing much like a pea-pod.
'Touch it and it will grow,' he assured me. I did so, and indeed it did grow to look more like a cucumber.
'Wondrous, wondrous, wondrous,' he swooned, though I could see no reason for swooning.
Put it in your mouth,' he said. 'Yes, as you would a delicious thing to eat.'
I like to broaden my mind when I can and I did as he suggested, swallowing it up entirely and biting it off with a snap.
As I did so my eager fellow increased his swooning to the point of fainting away, and I, feeling both astonished by his rapture and disgusted by the leathery thing filling up my mouth, spat out what I had not eaten and gave it to one of my dogs.
The whore from Spitalfields had told me that men like to be consumed in the mouth, but it still seems to me a reckless act, for the member must take some time to grow again. None the less their bodies are their own, and I who know nothing of them must take instruction humbly, and if a man asks me to do the same again I'm sure I shall, though for myself I felt nothing.
In copulation, an act where the woman has a more pleasurable part, the member comes away in the great tunnel and creeps into the womb where it splits open after a time like a runner bean and deposits a little mannikin to grow in the rich soil. At least, so I am told by women who have become pregnant and must know their husbands' members as well as I do my own dogs.
When Jordan is older I will tell him what I know about the human body and urge him to be careful of his member. And yet it is not that part of him I fear for; it is his heart. His heart.
Here at Wimbledon we have a French gardener named Andre Mollet who has come specially to teach Tradescant the French ways with water fountains and parterres.
Like most Frenchmen he is more interested in his member than in his spade and has made amorous overtures to every woman on the estate, with the exception of myself. In honour of his tirelessness we are to have a stream shooting nine feet high with a silver ball balanced on the top. The cascading torrent will mingle with a wall of water like a hedge, dividing the fish-ponds from the peasantry.
The fish-ponds are circles and squares filled with rare waters, sometimes salt, sometimes still, containing fabulous fishes of the kind imagined but never seen.
In the largest pond are a shoal of flying fish that toss their glittering bodies in one leap from one side to the other. Do they dream of tree-tops buffeted by the wind?
In another, a curious pool shining with its own radiance from a holy well in the East, are a group of spotted toads notable for their singing. These toads do not croak, but engage in madrigals and set up an anthem more fair than any choir in church. Even the palace of the Sun King in France has nothing so rare and wonderful, though I am told he has a dancing weasel given in exchange for a hundred pear trees. For myself I prefer the running stream that leads from the bank planted with cherry and makes a basin in the grotto with the statue of the hermit. The stream is shallow, its bottom crowded with tiny pebbles, its sides sprouting watercress. Underneath the stones are freshwater shrimps feeding on creatures even smaller than themselves. There is a rock near to its source and I very often hide behind it at evening, singing songs of love and death and waiting for the sun to set. When the orange bar i
s straight across the horizon the kingfisher comes with blue wings beating and dives in one swift streak. Ascends like a saint, vertical and glorious, its beak crammed with shrimp.
At sea, and away from home in a creaking boat, with Tradescant sleeping beside me, there is a town I sometimes dream about, whose inhabitants are so cunning that to escape the insistence of creditors they knock down their houses in a single night and rebuild them elsewhere. So the number of buildings in the city is always constant but they are never in the same place from one day to the next.
For close families, and most of the people in the city are close families, this presents no problem, and it is more usual than not for the escapees to find their pursuers waiting for them on the new site of their choice.
As a subterfuge, then, it has little to recommend it, but as a game it is a most fulfilling pastime and accounts for the extraordinary longevity of the men and women who live there. We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent.
In the city the inhabitants have reconciled two discordant desires: to remain in one place and to leave it behind for ever.
On arriving there for the first time I made friends with a family, and after dinner promised to call the next day. They urged me to do so, and I did, and was upset to find that the little house had been replaced by a Museum of Antiquities. The curator was sympathetic and pointed me in the right direction. I had it in mind to go back to the museum and look at the skeleton of an extinct whale. It seemed unlikely to me that a public building would feel the same need to escape as an ordinary individual.
I was mistaken. The museum had gone back to its original site by the docks, and in its place, with room to spare, was a windmill. As I watched the blades churning the air and wondered what kind of an element air must be, to seem like nothing and yet put up such a resistance, the miller came to his round window and yelled something I couldn't hear. I caught hold of one of the blades as it passed by me and swung myself up beside him.
He asked me if I knew the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. I said I had heard it, and he told me they were still living just down the road, though of course they were quite a bit older now. Why didn't I go and see them?
Thinking that one dancer might well know another and that a dozen of them must surely know one I took a catch of herrings as a gift and banged on their door.
THE STORY OF THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES
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Ibanged on the door and heard a voice behind me asking my name.
'My name is Jordan,' said, though not knowing to whom.
'Down here.'
There was a well by the door with a frayed rope and a rusty bucket.
'Are you looking for me?'
I explained to the head now poking over the edge of the well that I had come to pay my respects to the Twelve Dancing Princesses.
'You can start here then,' said the head. 'I am the eldest.'
Timidly, for I have a fear of confined spaces, I swung over the edge and climbed down a wooden ladder. I found myself in a circular room, well furnished, with a silver jug coming to the boil with fresh coffee.
'I've brought you some herrings,' I said, awkwardly.
At the word 'herring' there was a sound of great delight and a hand came over my shoulder and took the whole parcel.
'Please excuse her,' said the princess. 'She is a mermaid.'
Already the mermaid, who was very beautiful but without fine graces, was gobbling the fish, dropping them back into her throat the way you or I would an oyster.
'It is the penalty of love,' sighed the princess, and began at once to tell me the story of her life.
We all slept in the same room, my sisters and I, and that room was narrower than a new river and longer than the beard of the prophet.
So you see exactly the kind of quarters we had.
We slept in white beds with white sheets and the moon shone through the window and made white shadows on the floor.
From this room, every night, we flew to a silver city where no one ate or drank. The occupation of the people was to dance. We wore out our dresses and slippers dancing, but because we were always sound asleep when our father came to wake us in the morning it was impossible to fathom where we had been or how.
You know that eventually a clever prince caught us flying through the window. We had given him a sleeping draught but he only pretended to drink it. He had eleven brothers and we were all given in marriage, one to each brother, and as it says lived happily ever after. We did, but not with our husbands.
I have always enjoyed swimming, and it was in deep waters one day that I came to a coral cave and saw a mermaid combing her hair. I fell in love with her at once, and after a few months of illicit meetings, my husband complaining all the time that I stank of fish, I ran away and began housekeeping with her in perfect salty bliss.
For some years I did not hear from my sisters, and then, by a strange eventuality, I discovered that we had all, in one way or another, parted from the glorious princes and were living scattered, according to our tastes.
We bought this house and we share it. You will find my sisters as you walk about. As you can see, I live in the well.
'That's my last husband painted on the wall,' said the second princess, 'looking as though he were alive.'
She took me through her glass house showing me curiosities: the still-born foetus of the infamous Pope Joan who had so successfully posed as a Man of God until giving birth in the Easter parade. She had the tablets of stone on which Moses had received the Ten Commandments. The writing was blurred but it was easy to make out the gouged lines of the finger of God.
'I collect religious items.'
She had not minded her husband much more than any wife does until he had tried to stop her hobby.
'He built a bonfire and burned the body of a saint. The saint was very old and wrapped in cloth. I liked him about the house; he added something.'
After that she had wrapped her own husband in cloth and gone on wrapping the stale bandages round and round until she reached his nose. She had a moment's regret, and continued.
'He walked in beautym,' she said.
'His eyes were brown marshes, his lashes were like y willow trees. His eyebrows shot together made a between his forehead and his face. His cheeks were steep and sheer, his mouth was a volcano. His breath was like a dragon's and his heart was torn from a bull. The sinews in his neck were white columns leading to the bolts of his collar-bone. I can still trace the cavity of his throat. His chest was a strongbox, his ribs were made of brass, they shone through his skin when the sun was out. His shoulder-blades were mountain ranges, his spine a cobbled road. His belly was filled with jewels and his cock woke at dawn. Fields of wheat still remind me of his hair, and when I see a hand whose fingers are longer than its palm I think it might be him come to touch me again.
'But he never touched me. It was a boy he loved. I pierced them with a single arrow where they lay.
'I still think it was poetic.'
My husband married me so that his liaisons with other "omen, being forbidden, would be more exciting. Danger as an aphrodisiac to him: he wanted nothing easy or gentle. His way was to cause whirlwinds. I was warned, we always are, by well-wishers or malcontents, but I chose to take no interest in gossip. My husband was handsome and clever. What did it matter if he needed a certain kind of outlet, so long as he loved me? I wanted to love him; I was determined to be happy with him. I had not been happy before.
At first I hardly minded his weeks away. I did not realize that part of his sport was to make me mad. Only then, when he had hurt me, could he fully enjoy the other beds he visited.
I soon discovered that the women he preferred were the inmates of a lunatic asylum. With t
hem he arranged mock marriages in deserted barns. They wore a shroud as their wedding dress and carried a bunch of carrots as a bouquet. He had them straight after on a pig-trough altar. Most were virgins. He liked to come home to me smelling of their blood.
Does the body hate itself so much that it seeks release at any cost?
I didn't kill him. I left him to walk the battlements of his mined kingdom; his body was raddled with disease. The same winter he was found dead in the snow.
Why could he not turn his life towards me, as trees though troubled by the wind yet continue in the path of the sun?
You may have heard of Rapunzel.
Against the wishes of her family, who can best be described by their passion for collecting miniature dolls, she went to live in a tower with an older woman.
Her family were so incensed by her refusal to marry the prince next door that they vilified the couple, calling one a witch and the other a little girl. Not content with names, they ceaselessly tried to break into the tower, so much so that the happy pah-had to seal up any entrance that was not on a level with the sky. The lover got in by climbing up RapunzeFs hair, and Rapunzel got in by nailing a wig to the floor and shinning up the tresses flung out of the window. Both of them could have used a ladder, but they were in love.
One day the prince, who had always liked to borrow his mother's frocks, dressed up as Rapunzel's lover and dragged himself into the tower. Once inside he tied her up and waited for the wicked witch to arrive. The moment she leaped through the window, bringing their dinner for the evening, the prince hit her over the head and threw her out again. Then he carried Rapunzel down the rope he had brought with him and forced her to watch while he blinded her broken lover in a field of thorns.