Sylvia checks her saddle, slips the stirrup irons down their leathers. Holding the reins in her left hand, she grips a shank of brown mane low on the horse’s neck and fits her left foot into the near stirrup iron, bracing her right hand on the saddle and taking a couple of hops before launching up and onto the horse’s back, amazed, as always, when she’s done it. Heels down, toes up, weight on stirrups. Reins in the near hand only. Settling into the saddle with the reins clear of her bad thumb, Sylvia gives Ariel’s sides a tap with her lower legs. The horse doesn’t move. Sylvia tries again, pivoting her heels and her knees exactly as she’s been taught, thighs tight to the saddle, giving the horse a squeeze with her calves. Ariel takes a step and begins to walk heavily down the muddy, leaf-strewn track.

The slow clumping of Ariel’s hooves on the damp grit reminds Sylvia of something: a hand clapped again and again over a telephone receiver. Head bobbing in sync with her dilatory gait, her mouth reluctantly sensitive to her rider’s hands, ears twitching independently to noiseless noises, the horse’s neck is the split frame for all that Sylvia sees. On either side the hedgerows slump, propped up by the stooping rowans and hazels planted behind them, as if exhausted by the effort of holding back the relentless winds of the moors. Despite the prickly deterrents of whitethorn and blackthorn and wild rose, some village sheep have scaled a hedgerow and stand stupidly at its summit. Their topaz, coin-slot eyes glint in their dull black faces. They stare after Sylvia vacantly, like mental patients, bleating their senselessness, clouds curling from their nostrils. Frosted hawthorn berries, protected by their blackened crowns of thorns, by the dying brambles of spent blackberry vines, hang over the trail: the prisms of a rare chandelier. Black eyed, red hawed, rime beaded—the fruit of the May tree. The fruit of May, the unlucky month for marriages: The month when her luck ran out. You could smell it in the flowers, the sickly sweet stench of death. Yeats was right, she thinks: Horseman, pass by! She was going to London on Monday, her baptism as a writer on her own. It had nothing to do with Ted; this would be her singular debut. She was to be interviewed at the BBC for a series called “The Poet Speaks,” followed by a recording of new poems. Perfect for her: what had she gained by Ted’s leaving but her voice? What did she do now but listen to the beat of her own words, feel them and hear them as they formed—audacious, supple, ruthless, dazzling—in her mouth? This was no dead meter, no finger count learned by rote from old men. Her poems were lifting off the page. They hung in the air like a risen soul.