Chapter One: The Frost

He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a coconut. Orlando's father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.

Orlando was sixteen, the son of a noble house, beautiful, with shapely legs and violet-tinted eyes. He was a poet, too: he wrote tragedies and sonnets in a secret notebook, and dreamed, and climbed to the top of a hill where an oak tree grew, and lay under it and looked out over the whole of England.

From the top of the hill, on a clear day, he could see, it was said, the outlines of nineteen English counties; and beyond them the sea, and the ships on it, and the smoke of the towns. He would fling himself down under the oak tree, and feel the earth's spine beneath him, and the sap rising in the tree, and his own heart beating; and he would think of all the things he wanted to be: a great poet, a great lover, a great lord. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!

Queen Elizabeth came to visit the house. Orlando, a shy boy, held a bowl of rose water for her to wash her hands; and she saw, though she could not see much of him, his head bent; and she was old, and worn, and she liked the look of him. She sent for him to court. She made him her Treasurer and Steward, and hung about his knee the insignia of the Order of the Garter, and gave him the great house for his own. She was in love with him, a little, as old women are with beautiful boys; she wanted him for her old age. But one day, in her looking-glass, she saw him kissing a girl; and she flung the glass to the floor in fury; and soon afterwards she died.

Then came the Great Frost, in the reign of King James. The Thames froze to a depth of twenty feet and more; birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground; an old woman in Norwich was turned to ice in the act of crossing the road and blew away in a powdery dust. On the ice the King held a great carnival, with pavilions and bonfires and skating. And there Orlando saw a figure skating — a figure in loose Russian trousers and tunic, which he took at first for a boy, until he saw that it was a woman, and a princess: the daughter of the Russian ambassador. Her name was Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, and he called her Sasha.

One night on the ice, the court watched a play performed by common players on a stage built on the frozen river: it was Othello, the Moor of Venice. Orlando watched the black man in his rage, and the woman in her bed, and when Desdemona was murdered he felt that it was Sasha, and himself, and all lovers everywhere; the Moor's fury seemed to him his own. "Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse of sun and moon," he heard, and he thought of Sasha's eyes, and of the dark thing in her he could not reach.

He forgot his betrothed, the Lady Euphrosyne, and everyone else. He and Sasha skated together, ate together, talked together in French, which she spoke with an accent, and lay on the ice in each other's arms in the frost. She was like a fox, a melon, an olive tree, the snow; he could find no comparison for her. But there was something in her he could not reach — something hidden, wild; and once he saw her in the hold of the Russian ship, sitting on the knee of a common sailor, and he never knew what it meant. They made a plan to run away together: to meet at midnight at an inn near Blackfriars and fly to Russia.

He waited at the inn in the darkness. It began to rain. She did not come. The rain fell, and the frost broke; the ice cracked like thunder, and great blocks of it went rushing down the swollen river, with people on them crying out for help, and whole booths and their keepers. And Orlando, riding along the bank, saw the Russian ship standing out to sea, on the full flood, with Sasha on board. He stood in the water, hurling at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver. And the swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a little straw.