And Sylvia is hanging, hanging by a thread. Like Arachne stripped to her waist, dangling, her forehead and shoulders gleaming with sweat, the purple bruise rising at her temple, and gray-eyed Athena breathing hard beside her, gripping her by the hair—sometimes one is so defenseless—tipping her vial of wolfsbane and yew into the dying girl’s braided crown, whispering into her ear, Seek all the fame you will among mortal men, but yield place to the goddess.

21. “Poppies in October”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Poppies in October”

DECEMBER 18, 1962

LONDON

Fog roils over the great carved porticoes and patinated mansards of the buildings, gushing out of Little Portland Street and Cavendish Place, lapping and curling in an opaque misted sheet down the broad sidewalk, banking the limestone architecture, swallowing traffic, insulating the headlamps and the street lamps in an aural haze. Fog has obliterated her London, rolling on forever, closing in. Only the obdurate spire of All Souls Church, needle sharp, perforates the opiate density.

Black silhouettes of approaching pedestrians erupt like bathers from a colorless ocean. Hunch-shouldered bowlers with their collars turned up. Red-mouthed women hugging their coats, averting their eyes. Averting her own, stumbling down the marble staircase out of the theater, over the lobby mosaic trampled unnoticed by how many thousands over time, soul after soul, which she must have crossed as well when she arrived and purchased her ticket. A horseman stripped bare, struggling with a serpent—THE LORD IS OUR STRENGTH the tiled message mocked her just inside the bronze doors, before she stepped out into a world where everything has disappeared. Cast out into darkness. Where did it all go?

Smears of red in the vaporous darkness: only paint on a diminishing bus. Christmas wrapping. The muted mouths of women. Where is the gift of conspiracy that had saved her, life giving her what she needed, numinous and real—poppies bowing their heavy heads at her feet? When did she step beyond grace?

Disembodied faces veer to either side, glance haltingly, dully, before they look away. The weeping, the keening, the mouths crying open. She lurches forward into mist and night, wrenching her bags and packages through the passing decorous crowd. Had they been only flowers, not what she had made of them? She had felt their truth in her cells, pumping through her veins. Where did it all go—the poppies she cut for her desk, her birthday: she’d held them in her hands. She’d lifted a lit match to their stems. Sealed them, burned them black. To make them last, to keep them from bleeding to death.

22. “The Courage of Shutting-Up”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“The Courage of Shutting-Up”

DECEMBER 19, 1962

LONDON