As if she’d conjured it: two years ago, she happened upon a freehold for sale on this same street before they’d ever dreamed of Court Green, of its acres of volunteer daffodils and cool twelfth-century walls, of their son born in a gush under its birded thatch, of their gardens, their fingers stained red with Devonshire loam. Two years ago in London, she raced home with Frieda in the pram to their tiny apartment off Chalcot Square—just a block away from where she lies now in her cold bed—bursting to tell Ted: what a benediction (if they could have only afforded it) to live on Yeats’s street! Then three months ago in Ballylee, on the last shattering trip together, having climbed the spiral stair to the Irish poet’s tower and thrown three pennies for luck, casting them eyes closed into the river sluicing the bridge below, she’d wished for something she then didn’t know how to name—something, something she needed to fall into place, her life to right itself, her writing, her disintegrating marriage, something she needed to stop, Ted—she thought then it was Ireland for the winter that she needed. The far sea, its purifying salt and slow clouds, its ginger-scented turf fires in the grate, something equal to Ted’s plan of flight to Spain; that’s what she thought she’d been wishing for. But she was wrong. Their trip was a disaster. They left Ireland separately, Sylvia returning alone to Devon and the children. Ted wired her a few days later from London. For six years she had feared, even fantasized, shuddering at her garish imaginings, that someone would lure him away. Now someone had. He had come back just once to Court Green, to get his things; if she sued for divorce, he said he wouldn’t stop her. He had left her. Her marriage was over.

There is no doubt in her mind: it was this house she’d wished for, unknowingly, from Yeats’s tower. This house is going to be her salvation. God, she’s made it. She braces for the chill and peels the blankets back. Her mauve wool bathrobe is retrieved from its position of abandonment on the coverlet, tugged over the shoulders of her eyelet-edged floral nightgown; her feet pivot to the hardwood floor. The cold hits her footsoles like a slap. Appropriate, this robe, its color: as if wrapping herself up in a bruise. Her heart feels light enough on this day that she can snatch a quick glimpse of objectivity, even endorse a little self-mocking criticism. In the corner beyond the bed, out of the children’s reach, huddles one of the squat electric heaters she brought from Court Green. She tugs its cord out of the wall and scoots it, hugging her bathrobe to her, across the floor toward her desk.