It is her birthday. She is thirty years old. She’s been waiting, watching this movie unreel in her head since she started her lessons two months ago. She’s going to ride to the top of the highest hill in southwest England, arriving with the sun on the anniversary of her birth. The morning of her rebirth: the start of another life, like a cat. The mare stands nearly free, halter unbuckled and refastened around her throat as Sylvia lifts the bridle reins over her keen ears and neck and eases the jointed snaffle bit into her tractable mouth. She smooths the felted cavesson, buckles the cheek pieces, the throat lash; attaches the curb chain. She collects the blue-and-white-checked rubber- and wool-stuffed saddle from the rack, carrying it back to Ariel over her arm, the hornless pommel at her elbow, and lifts it up over the horse’s withers and shoulder blades. Slide the saddle back, with the coat, not against. The children deserve security, her mother writes. You should come home. You should get a job teaching. You should be brave and ladylike and passive, be like your mother, make a martyr of yourself. Make sacrifices; control your emotions. Hold it in. Hold it in till you bleed. Your father took over the dining room to write his book on bees; every night for a year I diagrammed the arrangement of his papers before I moved them off the table for supper. Marriage is a compromise. It was infuriating. The children deserve plenty—but what do I deserve? Sylvia contests. Why is the woman always expected to give up on life? She’s a writer, not a teacher. She can; she does. She is the arrow, not him, nor him, nor him, these men who would have her be charming and quiet, reciting the names of insects in Latin, stirring something at a stove. Her mother is ashamed—her daughter’s marriage an unholy mess of adultery and mayhem, and now she’s turning up her nose at golden opportunities to slink meekly away, to be clutched to the suffocating bosom of her loving, sacrificing family—just as she was ashamed of Sylvia’s breakdown. She’d be even more ashamed if she knew it was Aurelia whom Sylvia had really wanted to kill: her nagging, selfless mother and the whole tribunal of faultfinders sitting in judgment of her, for whom she performed like a circus act. The lady on bareback, circling and circling for the kibitzers, the critics with their fat red pens, and getting nowhere.