She holds the reins tight, ankles pressing into the girth, the mare’s neck arched, jaw flexed, hindquarters tensed, her body compressed like a spring. Fog churns and dissolves on the moors; the world foams below. A wisp of distant gray marks the route of a westbound train; a pinpoint necklace of headlights traces the roadbed of the A30. Her heart is poised, the blood beating loud in her ears, pounding against the insistent whipping breath of the wind, the shock of dew, its spray, glazing her warm skin. Ripeness, she thinks, is all. Ariel rears. Sylvia lets her go, striking off in a bounding canter, a gallop, all four feet in the air at once, momentum snatching her, propelling her forward. The rush, the drive, the muscular inevitability of it, the throb of the horse’s motion under her too late to stop, her body lit, sparking at every nerve, flying—her body, this heedless pounding speed. She believes in what she feels. She belongs to no one.

She is no daughter, no mother, no wife. She is herself, held by nothing under the pure blue dome of sky, attended by granite and sheep and curious ponies, trilling warblers drunk on sloes in the bushes. It is her birthday. She is thirty years old. She is sitting at her desk, her toes buried in the red wool plush of an Oriental rug, a cup of hot black coffee smoking at her wrist. Free. Daylight rises like a curtain beyond the curtains of her study. Her children sigh in their sleep, stir under their blankets, in the room beyond the wall. A purple dawn, a toppled graveyard, a vision she bows her head before. Blue cornflowers, red poppies mouth her name, cascade across the stage at her feet.

16. “Death & Co.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Death & Co.”

DECEMBER 17, 1962

A.M.

LONDON

It’s ringing.

It’s ringing.

It’s ringing.

It’s ringing and it wakes her up.

She opens her eyes. It’s still ringing. The shrill tandem bleat of a telephone. She opens her eyes: shadows, black and blacker, the edges of furniture, dark heap of Nicholas in one of the cots. Frieda is curled up against her, steamy, back to back on the mattress on the nursery floor. The phone continues its urgent ring.

Light floods the upstairs hallway, loitering along the edge of the cracked door. She rolls onto her knees and the palms of her hands, up off the awkward mattress with its desultory bedding spilling loose over the hardwood planks, up toward the sound.