“‘Oh thou mein Herr,’” Sylvia intones, pleased with her transgressions against the sacred, with her effortless stupid joke, “‘… what strange fish Hath made his meal on thee!’” She’s at the crest, the cists straight ahead in the dripping grasses, pocked and ruffled by lichen, encircled by a ragged crenelation of haphazard stones, all that remain after centuries of sightseers have carted off the rest for keepsakes. She guides Ariel around the perpendicular blocking stones that end the rows, taller and wider than the others, bright with the new sun beating their flat surfaces, and clears the perimeter of the curb circle, at the center of which the empty cists collapse upon themselves. The hollows into which the stone slabs were lowered have eroded with time, filling with bilberry and ferns, their sides disjoining, the stones folding like a deck of cards. Who had been buried here between these perspiring stones, their ashes now blown to the four winds, scattered over the desolate moor tops, the bleak sweep of empty heath and damp grasslands rolling luminous for miles all around, flying high above a blue misted valley that pours toward the northern horizon like an ocean? Her house is somewhere down there, secret as these heaped stones, sheltered by treetops, embedded into the vaulted hills beveling a foggy riverbed, the richly textured pasturelands glittering, sunlit, with barley and wheat and corn. She, too, could fly to it, right over the side of this hill, like the songbirds now waking, the linnets flitting erratically in the ling. She could fly to it like Ariel, who prances foot to foot and tosses her head, impatient with Sylvia’s restraint, piqued by the radiant, boundaryless expanse at the moor’s summit. This morning, another daybreak composed itself behind the wych elm. Bands of yellow light spread across the back courtyard from the kitchen window, flooding the frosted lawn suddenly broadcast, out of nowhere, with cornflowers and late red poppies. Poppies, the blessing after the battle. Flanders, Waterloo, the Iliad: ordinary fields gone scarlet, blood to flower, haunted by the memory of death. She could see them from her study window, the only other room alight in her somnolent house. Home. She loves it with a fierceness even now, miles beyond it, miles above. Sentimental? No—she’s a fighter, a warrior queen. A woman demanding her place among men. If they could see her now, holding her horse back, threatening to bolt down this grass-bright hill! She’s a fighter; she will flee nothing. She has entered the deed to Court Green in her name at the bank. Her poems come to her like truths, every word taut and hard. Ariel dances beneath her, eager to go, light on her forelegs, impetuous. This new life is hers to make. The old one was nothing but a role, a mask to cast off. “Oh love,” she mutters, high on her impatient horse, strands of hair lashing her forehead, her eyes, “you don’t know how tough I am.”