Sexing the Cherry Read Free Page B

regularly assaulting me seemed to come from the very doors of Hell, and I am sure that on Judgement Day those who are not on the side of the angels will feel this same scorching on their faces and toes as a foretaste of their torments to come. I could scarcely step outside without sweating off me enough liquid to fill a bucket. These waterfalls took with them countless lice and other timid creatures, and being forced to put myself often under the pump I can truly say that I was clean.
    'Cleanliness is next to Godliness,' said a Puritan passing by.
    'God looks on the heart, not a poor woman's dress,' I retorted, but there was no stopping his little sermon, which he gave with his eyes rolled back as piously as a rabbit's.
    It is true that the ferment in the city is due not only to the heat, but also to the King seeming to turn Papish on us, and Parliament being in uproar, and Cromwell with his lump-shaped head stirring it and stirring it.
    Jordan had got up early one morning to sail his boats and I had promised him an apple after my duties with the dogs. Squinting against the light I set off to find him and saw him in the distance sitting on an eaten-up jetty, a gentleman beside him. I hurried myself, thinking it might be some smooth-faced rascal set to chivvy him away.
    As I got closer Jordan waved to me and the gentleman stood up and bowed slighdy, which pleased me a good deal, and said his name was John Tradescant. Then he gave a little pause and said, 'Gardener to the King.'
    He was a good-looking man in his thirties, and he gave no sign of fear that the wormy jetty might dissolve at any moment, with my weight swaying it as a crow would a wren's house. He asked me if I cared to sit down, and I took pity on him and trod back on to the bank. He squatted a while to fiddle in his bag and came out with three peaches. One he offered me, and one he gave to Jordan, who held it in both hands as though it were a crystal ball.
    'I grew them,' said Tradescant. 'You are eating from the King's tree.'
    And then he bit into his and spurted the juice right over himself. Cautiously I bit into mine, but in a more ladylike fashion. Jordan did nothing, and I had to remind him of his manners.
    Tradescant told me he had been walking the length of the river from Putney to Mermaid Dock, troubling himself with a problem. He had seen a little boat sail by and was so enchanted by its easy passage that he forgot his melancholy and relived in his mind his own days of adventure on the seas. For years, until 1637 when his father died, he had sailed to exotic places collecting such rare plants as mortals had never seen. These he housed in his father's museum and physic garden at Lambeth. On his father's death he was forced to return from voyaging in Virginia and take up the family post of gardener to the King. He liked it well enough, but sometimes he felt hollow inside, and on those days he knew his heart was at sea.
    'A man must have responsibilities,' he said. 'But they are not always the ones he would choose.'
    'Indeed not,' said I, 'and for a woman the Devil's burden is twice the load.'
    As Tradescant had stood on the bank watching the boat, his body like stone, his mind racing, Jordan had come running by, shouting encouragement to his little ship. His eyes were for his business, not on Tradescant's thighs, and in a moment the two of them were flat down on the bank and Jordan was torn between the terror of being walloped and the possibility of losing his boat As it was, Tradescant hauled him up, rescued the vessel and took the two of them to sit down on the jetty, where I found them.
    He showed Jordan how to lengthen the rudder so that the boat could sail in deeper water without capsizing. He told him stories of rocks sprung out of the ocean, the only land as far as the eye could see, and no life on that land but screaming birds. He said that the sea is so vast no one will ever finish sailing it. That every mapped-out journey contains another journey