This is their view. There is another view, toward pastureland with a female countenance, fertile, curvaceous, and full; toward their apple-orchard hillside that modulates, over the course of two miles, into the northern boundaries of Dartmoor. But accessing that view is somehow harder. On that easterly side of the house, the Hugheses are mostly earthbound—protected from their neighbors by their triple-trunked elm to weed, to plant, to dig the last owner’s forgotten potatoes, to lift dripping laundry from a basket and pin it to the line, to follow windfall apples as they drop with a crack from the trees and roll away. On this side, the sober churchyard—the granite church itself and its floors of primordial cold, its eight-belled tower, the black supplicant arms of the yew—commands their eyes. So elated over the house when they found it and the succeeding month of elaborate homemaking fantasy prior to their move, Sylvia had hardly remembered the church and its elevated grounds. Yet it has followed her weirdly, like those ghastly rolling-eye portraits of Jesus, as she composes her multifarious domestic liturgy since they arrived. She has noticed how heedful she’s become of the ritual church bells tonguing their carillons as she unpacks boxes of housewares and books from the towers stacked in the parlor, or scrubs years of ash from the fireplace, or cuts out play smocks and baby nightgowns with her wedding scissors in the playroom. She has been torn between answering and shrinking from the bells’ regular Sunday assault—the weekly rumor of her disinclusion. This morning, she feels her poles magnetized by the pull of that churchyard, that moon, and that yew.

“Put it at the top of the list or the bottom?” she asks, gazing.

“Why don’t you put it at the top, while it’s fresh,” Ted says.

Sylvia watches the moon throbbing white behind its vaporous garments and wringing its platinum hands. “I may just try to write it this morning and dispense with custom,” she says.

“Not give it a day to gestate?” Ted asks.

“I’m already gestating,” she answers, with an exaggerated shrug. She turns from the window and rifles the foot of the bed for her robe.

“Is there any apple pie left?” Ted asks, scrabbling for his trousers in the shadows.

“Just enough, if you get to it before Frieda,” Sylvia says, striking a match to the candlestick on the bedside table, gentling the room’s cold light to a mild glow. “I’ll warm it for you while I make my coffee.”

*   *   *