Free The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson Page A

flew together, your wings in gold leaf from the sun. Time flew with us, and very soon we were in sight of your father’s lands.
    I noticed a change in you—a dampening and a quiet that I did not understand. I thought you were ashamed of me, but you shook your head, your beautiful head like an angel, and asked me to wait.
    I did wait. I had waited before now. Waited all my life, it seemed. ‘What is life,’ my father had said, ‘but a waiting for death?’
    Then there were trumpets and running feet and crowds gathering and pennants and a team of white horses in silver harnesses and the white horses drew a carriage and in the carriage was a strange swarthy misshapen man, dressed all in leather, his fingers full of rings.
    You turned to me and your voice was breaking as water breaks against a rock it cannot wear away.
    ‘That man is to be your husband,’ you said. ‘That man, my brother.’
    Oh Paolo,
il bello
, why did you lie to me?
    Say you are lying to me now.
    The wedding took place that afternoon.
    My husband was scarcely four feet tall and as twisted in body as Paolo was straight. These things need not have been laid to his fault, but his heart was his own making and his heart was as unformed by kindness as his body had been neglected by beauty. He cared for nothing but hunting and women, and he lashed his dogs and his whores with the same strap.
    The horrors of my nights with him might have been bearable if I had not been taught a different way. The grave of my childhood life and the grave of my married life might have crumbled into one another without distinction, if Paolo had not kissed me and raised me from the dead for those few wide-open days.
    Then, months later, when my husband was away, Paolo came into my room. He suggested we might read together to while away the time, and this was approved with a short nod from my waiting woman who was paid to be my gaoler.
    Every morning Paolo came to me, and we read together the story of Lancelot du Lac, and his love for Queen Guinevere.
    We read out loud, and there were many pauses, many broken sighs and swift glances, and as we bent our heads lower and lower over the page, to scribe a private world, our cheeks met, and then our lips, and he was honey in my mouth as I kissed him.
    There was no more time for reading that day.
    We contrived it—oh I don’t know how—to be together, alone with our book, though we never turned another page.
    Paolo, your love for me was a clear single happiness, and I would not give it up to save my soul.
    He caught us. You know he did. Perhaps he trapped us. He might have done.
    We were in bed together, naked, hot, Paolo inside me, when Gianciotto burst through the door with his men. I saw his face, triumphant, malign, and I saw him raise his terrible hand. He had a hand made of iron that he had fashioned into a spike. It was his hand that he ran through Paolo’s smooth back, and through into my belly and my spine, and into the flock of the mattress. The force was so great that it lifted him up and pinned him above us like a weathercock.
    I put my hands to Paolo’s bleeding body, and he said to me, so that only I could hear—
    ‘There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.’
    He was dead then, and I dead under him, and hand in hand our souls flew down the corridors and out of his brother’s palace as easily as our bodies had done when we left my father’s house.
    I have never let go of his hand.
    We are as light now as our happiness was, lighter than birds. The wind carries us where it will, but our love is secure.
    No one can separate us now. Not even God.

blame my parents
    Night. The window is open. Thousands of miles away your tears tap tap on the board. If your make-up is run-proof, my heart isn’t.
    ‘Is this how it ends?’ you said.
    ‘It isn’t ended yet.’
    ‘If only you could accept me as I am.’
    ‘This is where the wheel spins and spins.’
    ‘We just dig ourselves in deeper.’
    ‘We know all