Everyday life is out of sight, three miles away up the road. The whole world is still. There is no threat of intrusion. The children are asleep at home with Sue; no one will miss her. She’ll be back before breakfast. No one even knows she is gone—her mother’s anxious, sententious letters can’t find her here; Ted’s insults can’t find her. She’s inviolable, indestructible in a stonewalled Dartmoor stable. Sylvia draws the brush over the teeth of the currycomb, knocking loose the dirt and the shedding, auburn hair. She runs her hand reassuringly over the mare’s left flank as she crosses her broad hindquarters to brush the horse’s off side. No more of Ted’s pedantic directives: Study King Lear for an hour. Think for an hour. Write for an hour. Who was sentimental, the charge he’d condemned her with? She, stripping away all artifice and falsity, ripping history and familiar comforts to shreds, risking everything, or he, carrying the same life everywhere? His lumbering West Yorkshire mouthings, his rods and reels and fanatical fish visions. His chipped Beethoven records, over and over and over on that antiquated gramophone. When he left, he took all of who he’d been for most of his life; he hauled it off in a few boxes. All, or nearly, that he’d brought to their marriage. Good riddance. No one, ever again, will tell her what to do or who she is. Sylvia ducks under the cross ties once more to exchange the brushes for Ariel’s bridle. A rooster crows, disembodied in the limitless distance of bruisy dark. The high northern uplands of Dartmoor, a paddock’s length away on the other side of the Taw, are a firewall holding back the hot crimson flare of morning. Cawsand Beacon, over two thousand feet above the sea, broods above the shadowed village of Belstone. Its densely wooded foot and hillside common spread along the riverbed, not much more than a swift stream here, close to its marshy source, though the Taw widens and matures as it travels the forty miles through farmland toward Barnstaple Bay on the northwest coast of Devon. On a clear day, from the top of the hill, you can follow the river’s path all the way to the Atlantic, to Appledore and the sandy western beaches.