The frozen breath of horses, smoking in the cold violet dark of a nearly deserted stable. A spray of fading stars, an argentine flake of moon melt in rectangles of glassy black on the icy cobbles of the open yard. It is nearly sunrise, the morning after a hard frost, low autumn fog packing the riverbeds and the cleaves of heath-covered hills and blanketing the sunken fields. Sylvia carries her saddle and tack over her forearms, lays the burnished leather saddle and stable rubber on the rack to the side of a turquoise stall door. Inside, assembling out of the blackness, the ears of a chestnut mare, gray muzzled, her blaze flecked with mud, pivot separately, then swivel in Sylvia’s direction. At the far end of the row of stalls another door is already open, a pitchfork leaning against the wall, a single bare bulb on a dangling cord glaring from the rafters of the pitched barn roof. There is a clanking of metal: grain canisters, water buckets. Horses nicker like gassy uncles, swish their long, coarse tails, crunch oats and sugar-beet pulp and hay suspended from nets in the corners of their stalls. Sylvia slides the iron bolt on the lower half of the Dutch door and nudges it open with the toe of her boot, holding cross ties and a halter in her hands, her tender left thumb heavily bandaged and stiff. Her regular horse stands in the indistinct light of the stall: a steady and mild-tempered cob, a cross of Dartmoor pony and farm horse, ruddy-coated and aging, wearing a green blanket, her winter coat long and her thick, short legs shaggy, unclipped for added insulation against the cold. A good teaching horse for a beginner. Always work the horse’s near side, the left. Sylvia steps into the stall, approaching the horse from the left, and stands at the animal’s shoulder, stroking the platelike disk of her cheek, her crooked white blaze, looking into her enormous, placid brown eye. This is old Ariel, the horse on which Sylvia takes her weekly riding lessons, this day’s Night Mare, not mythically perched in a yew tree, nested in the scattered jawbones of poets, but instead dozing in oat straw and crumbly fresh manure. A sharp ammonia stink rises from the floor of the stall, a green vegetal fragrance, granular and toasty, not unpleasant. She pats the horse’s jaw a last time, then fits the loose framework of the halter up over Ariel’s face.

Footsteps sound down the covered stableway. It is the teenage daughter of the riding instructor, holding a stack of loose flakes of oat hay in her arms, wearing tall, black rubber boots with a red seam running around the sole. “Going for a hack this early?” she asks Sylvia in a stage whisper, deferring to the early quiet, hugging the load of feed to her quilted jacket.