Free The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson

can find it in Boccaccio. You can find it in Dante. You can find it here.
    My father’s castle is built of stone. The stone is thick as darkness. Darkness is to the inside what stone is to the outside of this castle; impenetrable, unscalable, a stone-dark, heavy as thought.
    The dark stone weighs on us. Our thoughts bear us down. We roll the dark in front of us down the icy corridors, and in the rooms the darkness accumulates, sits in our chairs, waits. We wait.
    The castle is a pause between dark and dark. It fills the space between a man’s thoughts and his deeds. My father made the design for the castle himself. It is as though we are living inside him.
    Inside the castle, the furniture is black oak from Spain. In the one room where we keep a fire there is a long black table with candlesticks. At this table, for the first time, I saw Paolo.
    Paolo il bello …

    My father Guido had long been at war with Malatesta, Lord of Rimini. A marriage was planned as a condition of peace, and Paolo rode in retinue to wild Ravenna to fetch me.
    We lit the dark hall with candles, which forced the darkness off a little, made it crouch in strange shapes, like a thing whipped.
    We dressed ourselves in black, my mother and I, for my father told us that every day is a day of mourning. I wore no adornment, but my hair is as loose and flowing as the cataract that roars under my window, and just as the cataract is tamed to the waterwheel, my hair is tamed to the braid, but both escape.
    I bound myself as tightly as I could and went downstairs.
    There was a curious light in the room. It was not the fire nor the candles nor the effect of the storm outside. I did not dare raise my eyes to discover the source, but walked mute and downcast towards the table, where my father presented me to Paolo.
    I did not look up. I offered him my hand and he kissed it and placed a ring on my finger.
    Through our meal my father talked only to the envoys and said nothing to Paolo or myself. I heard Paolo’s voice talking to my mother, and the music of it was like a flute or a pipe. I wanted to see him, but I had not the power.
    At the end of our meal my mother and father and all the envoys and servants left the room abruptly. None of the dishes had been cleared and the wine was left spilt on the table. I could sense Paolo looking at me.
    There was a low rumbling noise, like a scaffold being wheeled out, and from the shadow on the floor, I understood that a great canopied bed had been pushed into the room.
    I did not raise my eyes, but my skin was as cold as wax.
    I heard Paolo get up and, coming round to my side of the table, he took my hand and bade me stand up.
    ‘Francesca,’ he said, ‘let me see your breasts.’
    I could not move, but his hands were sure as falcons and he soon had me pinned under him.
    We lay on the bed and he kissed me—nothing more—one hand on my breast, the other gently stroking himself, until he felt my kisses meet his, and then he took my hand to where his own was active, and now freed, began to open my legs.
    The pleasure was as shocking as the thought of pleasure.
    The next morning, both dressed in white, we passed through the walls of my father’s castle as easily as ghosts. In my whole life I had never been beyond the shadow of the castle. The shadow-tip of the flag marked the limit of my walks and my own shadow followed me wherever I went.
    Today was not like that.
    Today was sun and sky and birdsong and open faces, and I blessed my father’s war, which had made this love.
    As we rode, the light went with us. He was the light.
    Paolo il bello.
    My lover, my loved one, my love.

    I need not tell how we passed our days as we rode in splendour along the coast. There was such lightness in me that I had to be tied to the pommel of the saddle to keep myself from bird height. I was bold as a starling. You fed me from your own plate. My eyes were always watching you. I thought you were one of the angels from the church window. We