A heavy misting rain all the day, and by midafternoon, I feel I might stifle inside. Mother sits restless, as far from the fire as she can, complaining of fits of heat. Susannah walks and walks, to the fire and back, then around the room, around the room, her steps keeping pace with time advancing, until she grows near elemental in her motion. However, when I look up and catch sight of her eyes, they are soft and hopeful, as though she sees, spinning by her in the air, the glass ball containing her future, that pretty trinket garlanded all round by love and bonaventure.

Haven’t I a heart? Don’t I imagine also a happy, glowing chamber into which I enter and find love? Though no man before this one has shown me any interest, I, too, have my visions.

I have a vision, yes, of a comfortable room and of a man who sits near me while I write. When I look up, he is there across the table, looking down, absorbed in his own affairs. We are mutual.

7 December

I was aware of his legs against the back of my chair as he bent over and reached his hand down to cover my own where it rested on the page.

“Put up your pen and kiss me.” He gentled me, pulling loose the pen from between my fingers and softly laying it down before he took both my hands in his, turning me round in my seat. I looked up at him, directly into his smile, his happy eyes, which drew now down to my own level as he knelt beside me, and loosing my hands, slipped his arms about my waist and tipped me to him, pulling my face down to his waiting mouth. Down, away down in my chest, a trapdoor opened and a warm light flooded into this newfound chamber.

After a time, he pulled me from the chair and we lay alongside, our lips still seeking. I closed my eyes then and wandered with him, his hands stealthy guides into this terrain, and my hands, too, loosed their moorings, slipping lightly cross to open waters. On and on we sped, past harbor to the ocean, until at last I cast off the lovely twining fabric that bound me to my shore. In that moment, I opened my eyes and saw the shape of this new land—wide and free, he calling and I an answer, as if I were cavern ringing round.

For a moment after, I thought I still heard my name in the open air, but listening, I found instead it was him breathing beside me, his lips now caught in my hair like a strayed bird. I pressed my cheek against his. He smelled to me of new grasses and tobacco.

8 December

He has gone.

(87 drops)

11 December