No more.

Sylvia lowered herself into a chair. She felt old. She felt so old. She didn't want to remember anymore.

She closed her eyes, she gripped the arms of the chair with palsied fingers, she worried her lip until she tasted blood—anything, anything to anchor herself in this moment. This book-lined room with the pallid light of dawn beyond the windows. This barren house where she had passed her life. This now.

But it was too late for that, wasn't it? She should have known better. Open Pandora's box and anything could fly out. Anything at all.

She remembered pushing her plate away and climbing the stairs. The moon peered through the window on the landing, and she paused a moment to look at it, feeling the pull of some ancient, inescapable tide.

Up then, to her chaste maiden's bed, to her thrashing, sleep-tossed sheets. She slept or dreamed she slept, and woke to a hum of shrill expectancy, a silence like a shroud. The moon looked in upon her, and in the breath of wind among the trees she could almost hear a whispered summons. Even before she swung her legs from underneath the covers, even before she threw on her clothes and unlocked her door, she knew with a stark and unremorseful certainty what she was going to do. Anticipation sang in her blood like the sea.

Down the stairs, then, and barefoot into the night. She remembered that, too, didn't she? The moon-frosted street and a gossamer veil of mist in the air and the old man, John, looming up before her from a shadowed crevice in the inn's facade.

She clapped a hand across her mouth to stifle a scream, the sound breaking into muted hilarity when she recognized her assailant.

"You scared me—"

"Go back to your room," he entreated her.

"What?"

"Go back!" He closed upon her, his hands clutching at her shoulders. His breath gusted in her face, rank with beer and cigarettes. "For your own good, I'm telling you. You should leave here. You should take the next coach to York."

How lean he was! How dreary and familiar—his face the cratered desolation of some airless moon, his voice the voice of Sinai, gravid with its prohibitions. Why Father! she might have said. An effervescent blurt of laughter escaped her at the thought. She felt giddy as a schoolgirl, apprehended in some harmless prank.

His fingers dug into her. "Listen to me, you don't understand what you're meddling in—"

Sylvia wrenched herself free of him—how strong she had become!—and fled giggling up the street, past the church with its stately hedge of yews and into the neighboring churchyard. She had never felt so alive, so deeply immersed in the world's rich pageant. The fragrant grass caressed her feet, the starry void wheeled above her, the wind bearing down upon her wept with the scent of new-leaved trees. Goosebumps erupted on her arms. Her nipples tightened into hard knots. She lifted her hands to the sky and sighed for the pleasure of the air against her face.

The tombstones in their ordered rows, the ring of grass, the cemetery inside the cemetery—she passed them by all unawares, hesitating at last and for a moment only in that gap that might once have been a gate, when there were gates and borders and passages between, that gap that was now only a gap, a broken place in a bastion that few cared anymore to cross. Yes. She had hesitated. She had hesitated as at the edge of a precipice, encountered unexpectedly in some wild and hidden place. She had hesitated, with the church at her back and the wood before her, her hands outstretched to the stone pillars at either side, drinking in that line of cold demarcation, that wall.

An owl called softly among the trees.

"Yes," she whispered to the sky, and the grass curling at her ankles, and the beckoning line of trees standing dark against the sky. "Yes. I'm coming."

She let go the wall.

She stepped into the wood, the ground beneath her feet buoyant and lush as though someone, expecting company, had unrolled a carpet to receive her. She stepped into the wood, the twilight sanctity beneath the trees. With his name upon her lips—

"Are you here, Jack Bramble?"

—she stepped into the wood.

"Aye, I'm here," he said, and for a moment—surely it must have been an illusion—it seemed that his voice came not from one place, but from many places: the dark ranks of oak and the moss between her toes and the perfumed earth itself.

But no, he was here, here, an emerald shadow moving to embrace her, and she lifted her arms to receive him as she had known she would. There were no words, nothing to say, only the feel of him, this lean strength and the play of muscle under his flesh and his lips upon her lips. Her shirt came open beneath his fingers. Her trousers pooled at her ankles. For the first time in her life she stood naked in the outer air, with only Jack Bramble and the incurious moon to gaze upon her.

"Jack, no—"

"Shhh. There's nothing to be afraid of."

That done, her protest duly noted in whatever celestial almanac such things were recorded, Sylvia abandoned herself to the moment at last. She let him lower her upon a bower of moss—how soft and welcoming it was, the softest bed she had ever known—and then even that awareness evaporated, there was nothing in the world but his mouth at her breasts, his hand between her thighs.

Yes. She remembered. She felt a single flaring instant of pain as he entered her—such pain that she had by reflex torn free a lock of his hair—and then a slow-rising swell of pleasure, world-girdling, tidal, until at last it overwhelmed her, crested, broke.

She remembered.

And then, only then, with his seed still drying on her thighs and her legs flung open like a common whore's, only then did she understand what she had surrendered, the sole and only gift that was hers alone to bestow, and that to some common stranger.

Sylvia closed her eyes and began quietly to weep.

"Ah, now, lass," Jack Bramble said.

He touched her face, but she would not be consoled. She could not find the heart even to stand and dress herself. She just lay there, clutching his bloody lock of hair in her fist and staring blindly into the trees until at last the character of the darkness overhead changed and she realized she had slept.

A stone was gouging her back.

It was morning. She was alone.

She stood to dress herself, tucking Bramble's lock of hair unexamined into the pocket of her trousers. As she slowly buttoned her shirt, only half-awake and shivering in the cold gray air, she remembered a dream that had come to her in the night.

In the dream, she had flown, panicked, through a thick and perilous wood. Her muscles screamed. Her breath clawed in her lungs. At last, exhausted, she had stumbled, fallen. Jack Bramble knelt beside her. Jack Bramble extended his hand. "Come away with me," he said. "Come away and be my wife."

And even then—even in the dream—Sylvia had understood that this moment, this single instant in her whole long span of years, was the pivot upon which her life would turn.

A wild longing had risen up within her—to hold his face between her hands, to taste the fragrant verdure of his breath, to feel once and always those enormous swells of pleasure crest and break within her.

But the world she had known beckoned her home. The wood was wild and desolate.

In short, she was afraid.

"I can't," she'd said.

The words had echoed inside her head as she made her way through the broken gate and the cemetery beyond. They seemed to boom through the thin mist clinging to the church spire, to radiate from the slick pavement of the road as she trudged barefoot back to the inn. I can't. Two solid, declamatory syllables of renunciation, prideful and afraid. Yes, afraid. Why not face it after all these years?

Sylvia glanced at the book, still open in her lap. A few powdery remnants of the leaf clung to the pages. Staring at them, she felt a final memory dredge itself from the muddy river bottom of her mind. She had been slumped inside the coach to York, dozing, her head tilted against the chill pane of the window, the big diesel motor throbbing in her bones. Scant hours had passed, but already the memory—

—no the enchantment it was an enchant—

—the memory of the previous night had taken on such a hazy, dream-like quality that, in that strange hypnagogic state between sleep and full waking, Sylvia had more than half-convinced herself she had dreamed it. Bottomless relief welled up inside her. That's how the forgetting must have begun. Her father had been right. She'd been playing at rebellion, that's all, and finally, there in that nameless cemetery, it had all become too real. So she had fled. From York, she had caught the next train to London, from London the next plane home. It was safer that way. Safer to run, safer to forget, safer to bind it all into orderly measures of verse. Language could contain it.

And events had conspired with her. The coach had lurched, jolting her half-awake. As she sought once again the oblivion of sleep, she had screwed her hands into her trouser pockets, where her questing fingers brushed something unexpected. Opening her eyes, Sylvia had retrieved not the bloody hank of hair she had for some reason—

—why?—

—anticipated, but only a leaf, an oak leaf, bruised and bleeding sap.

She remembered gazing at the thing in dull curiosity. It seemed to pulse with some enigmatic significance, but she couldn't say why. She tucked the leaf into her pack—she must have kept it for some reason, after all—and closed her eyes. When she woke again, she was in York.

So that's all it had come to in the end, an old woman alone with her memories, one slim volume of verse, a handful of dust.

I can't.

She could hear those words even now, in the creak of an attic joist expanding or the solemn cadence of the hall clock, measuring out the morning tick by tick. All the empty sounds a house makes when there is no human noise to fill it up.

She thought of Daphne—

—maybe I choose to be alone—

—and felt a circuit close inside her, illuminating a single sustaining idea.

What kind of choice was it, after all?

The clock chimed ten o'clock. It was Friday. Daphne was coming for dinner. She had too much to do to sit here woolgathering. Sylvia stood and began digging through her desk. When she found the faculty directory, she picked up the telephone and punched in a number.

"Professor Green," she said.

The evening started badly.

Daphne had been right about overdoing it. The household chores alone wearied Sylvia. By the time she returned from the market, lugging three swollen sacks of groceries, she felt dizzy. Her heart was beating in a strange swift rhythm and the air shimmered with a glaring, over-illuminated brilliance. She had intended to start dinner immediately. Instead, she went upstairs to nap, woke late, and spent the afternoon trying to catch up.

To top it off, Robin Green arrived early—only ten minutes or so, but enough to catch her putting the final hasty touches on dessert. Clad in jeans and a white shirt, his sleeves rolled back to the elbow, he stood by the sink and gazed distractedly into the lengthening shadows while she iced the cake.

She was obscurely relieved when the doorbell rang.

"That'll be her, I suppose," Robin said, drumming his fingers on the countertop.

"Relax. Dinner among colleagues, what could be more pleasant?" Sylvia smiled. "I'll get the door. Why don't you find something for us to listen to? The stereo's just in here."

Sylvia left him looking at CDs in the living room, and went along the corridor to the front of the house.

"Jeez, I thought you'd never come," Daphne said as soon as Sylvia opened the door. She brushed by in a hurry, a bustling whirlwind of energy that seemed to have touched down in a shop somewhere, snatching half a dozen packages into the maelstrom. She nudged the door closed with her heel, and looked at Sylvia over her laden arms. "I picked up some wine. The doctor didn't say anything about wine, did he?"

"She."

"What?"

"The doctor's a woman. And no, she didn't say anything about wine."

"Well, good, cause I brought some. Can you give me a hand with these? My arm's about to break." Daphne shoved a bag at her. "I got red and white both. I can never remember which one goes with fish."

"We're not having fish."

"Well, that's why I got both. And some of the bread you like. And videos. I thought you might want to see a movie."

"We'll see. Let me get that, too," Sylvia said, snatching a video tape that was slipping out of Daphne's hand. "You brought your briefcase? You were planning to work?"

"I'm always planning to work, but in this case, I got a couple things from the library I thought you might enjoy. Hang on a sec—" She dug into the leather satchel swinging from her shoulder. "How are you feeling, anyway? I meant to call, but students were in and out of my office all day. And Robin Green, I don't know what's gotten into—"

"Why don't you get the books later, we need to talk—"

Daphne looked up. "You aren't feeling well, are you? I knew dinner was a bad idea."

"I feel fine, I took a nap. Look—" Sylvia nodded at the briefcase. "—put that down. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Rob—"

Music started up in the living room, something complex and refined, with lots of strings. Daphne dumped her briefcase and purse unceremoniously on the floor. "Who's here?"

"That's what I wanted—"

But Daphne, still clutching the loaf of bread like a football, was already moving down the hall. Sylvia couldn't see the expression on her face when she came into the living room, but the tension in her shoulders was unmistakable. So was her tone: unimpeachably polite and cold all the way to bone. "Why, Robin," she said. "Sylvia didn't mention you were coming."

Robin Green, standing by the stereo, looked stricken. "Hi, Daphne," he said uncertainly.

Sylvia dropped the videos atop a stack of books she hadn't gotten around to shelving. Robin turned a CD case nervously in his hands. Daphne pursed her lips in a way that indicated a witticism was in the offing, something bright and cutting. "Well—" she began, raising her eyebrows, but Sylvia cleared her throat.

Daphne and Robin regarded her expectantly.

"So you're interested in the baroque composers, Robin?" she found herself saying.

"Oh, that." Robin glanced at the CD case he'd been holding. "Boccherini, is it? It's all right, I guess."

"I think Robin's more post-modern," Daphne said.

"No, no, classical's fine." And then, when no one said anything: "I've always preferred jazz, actually."

Sylvia hesitated, uncertain how to respond.

"Charles Mingus?" Robin added hopefully. "And Sonny Rollins, especially the stuff he did in the fifties. The later stuff …" The sentence died on his lips. He shrugged, as if his opinions on the later stuff were a matter of well-established record.

"I'm afraid Sylvia's interests tend to wane after the Renaissance," Daphne said dryly.

They contemplated Sylvia's antiquated tastes for a moment. Robin coughed. He closed the CD case and placed it on the end table.

"Well, dinner smells terrific," he said.

"Yes, Sylvia, what is for dinner?"

"We're having a roast," Sylvia said. "But it won't be ready for a bit. Why don't I get us all a glass of wine?"

"I think I'll help," Daphne said. "If you'll excuse us just a minute," she added, looking at Robin.

"Sure—" Robin began, but the door swung shut on his words.

In the kitchen, fluorescent light leapt from the linoleum and the freshly polished countertops. The clock over the sink chimed the quarter hour.

Daphne thunked the bread down on the kitchen table. "How could you? What on earth were you thinking?"

"I was thinking he might be lonely, he hardly knows anyone here."

"He has friends. He's been at Holman nearly—"

"Well, he can always use another friend, can't he?"

Sylvia held Daphne's gaze for a moment, and then she turned away. She took a bottle of wine out of the bag and nearly dropped it. She was shaking. She couldn't seem to get the corkscrew properly aligned. Daphne loomed in her peripheral vision, but she couldn't bring herself to look up. She didn't want Daphne to see the weakness in her eyes. She didn't want pity, she didn't want anything more to do with hospitals or doctors. "If you're going to help, help," she said. "Don't just stand there looking at me."

"I can't believe you," Daphne said, turning away to collect the glasses.

Sylvia steadied herself against the counter, and took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and swallowed. There. She opened her eyes and positioned the cork screw. This time, it went in perfectly.

Daphne put the glasses down beside her. "You could have told me. You didn't have to spring him on me like that."

"You're really angry, aren't you?"

"Well, wouldn't you be?"

"What if I had told you? Would you have come?"

Daphne grimaced.

"Well, would you have?"

"I already told you I didn't want any part of him."

"You can't even have dinner with him?"

"It's not just dinner, Sylvia."

"Sure it is. Like you said, he's not a bad looking man, he wouldn't have any interest in you."

The words, hurtful and cruel, slipped out before she could stop them. They found their mark, too. Daphne's mouth dropped open. Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. She turned her back to the counter and crossed her arms over her breasts.

"That's it, isn't it?" Sylvia said. "You're not afraid he's interested. You're afraid he isn't."

"That's not it."

"Then what is it?"

Daphne didn't answer. Sylvia started pouring the wine, the bottle chattering against the rims of the glasses.

"Well?"

"We work together. It could get awkward."

"And so it's not worth the risk?"

"It wasn't to you!"

Sylvia plunked the bottle down hard.

"Yes, and what has that brought me? You envy me? You want to have to hire someone to stay with you when you get old, just so you can live at home? Is that what you want, Daphne?"

"So I should marry myself off to the first man that shows any interest?"

"Has anyone suggested matrimony?"

Daphne rolled her eyes.

"All I'm saying is, it doesn't hurt to talk to him."

"Oh, come on, Sylvia."

"What?"

"Have you looked at me?" Daphne said in a whisper, her voice cracking. "How could he be interested in me?"

Sylvia turned, taking Daphne's hands in her own, and peered into the other woman's wide, untrusting face. Daphne had beautiful eyes, cobalt blue—Sylvia had always known that—but she had never noticed the pain in them, the fear and sorrow. How could she have missed it?

It was like looking in a mirror.

"How could he not be?" Sylvia said. She found her fingers, unbidden, rising to Daphne's cheek. "I'm not saying this is the right thing. All I'm saying is, give him a chance. Don't be so afraid all the time. There's nothing to be afraid of."

Daphne bit her lower lip. She stood rigidly as Sylvia embraced her. And then, abruptly, she sagged, snugging her face into the crook of Sylvia's neck. In that fleeting instant, holding this fragile young woman who could have been her daughter—who would have been, in another, better life—Sylvia understood what she had missed, what she had denied herself.

"You only get so many chances," she whispered. "I know. And when they come—" She touched Daphne's chin. "Look at me. When the chances come, you have to seize them. Do you understand me? Seize them."

The words came out with a fury she hadn't expected, and in the aftermath there didn't seem to be anything else to say. She clutched Daphne fiercely for a moment, and then she pushed her away. She held her at arm's length, drinking her in, trying to imprint this moment, this one human face—

—this poem—

—on every cell in her mind. Daphne. There was no sound in the kitchen but the steady tick of the clock hanging above the sink.

Daphne shook her head. "Come on," she said. "He's going to think we've forgotten him."

To be sure there had been a measure of awkwardness at the start. The conversation bounced from one obvious topic to another over the wine—how did Robin like Holman? what were his plans for the summer?—but things seemed to slip into a rhythm after Sylvia served the meal. Robin Green was so courtly and low key, so studiously oblivious to the tension in the air, and—yes—so attentive, that he soon dulled the edge of Daphne's anger.

More, Sylvia thought in the glamour of the moment, he charmed it utterly away. Daphne had never been more lovely. Her eyes glistened, her hair shone, she seemed less fat than magnificent, imposing as a goddess in her stature, or a strong young tree, its arms lifted in defiance to the wind. And her mind—Sylvia had never seen it so quick or elegant.

The evening flagged only once.

Over the second bottle of wine, the talk turned to work. Robin mentioned his dissertation, a study of Middleton, and Daphne said she'd been working on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, which led to a debate about canon formation. Sylvia—who'd come to criticism late, and not entirely by choice—found the whole thing dry as dust.

"But you wrote a book of criticism yourself!" Daphne protested.

"Yes, what was your book about?" Robin asked.

So she found herself talking about the Fisher King, the Jack in the Green, and the older underlying archetypes, the ancient vegetation myths of death and renewal that survived in the foliate heads carved on thirteenth-century cathedrals, in the Gawain poem and the annual May Day ceremonies still celebrated at Hastings and Rochester. "The pagan myths are everywhere once you know to look," she said, "even the ecumenical calendar. Easter is May Day in Christian garb, and All Saints Day falls right after Halloween, the Druid holiday of Samhain." She raised her eyebrows. "The old gods never die, they just put on new faces."

"Jesus," Robin said, "you are a poet." He gave an exaggerated shudder. "All this talk about ancient rites of renewal gives me the willies. Didn't the Druids used to sacrifice virgins?"

He chuckled, but the joke fell flat, too much an invocation to a guest unseen and uninvited, but always in attendance. Even the music took a funereal turn, adagio largo, a somber rolling cadence that swept back the curtain of years so that for a single exhilarating instant, Sylvia found herself at the edge of revelation, kneeling once again in that strange circle of graves, her fingers lifted to summon from the weathered stone the letters of a name so tantalizingly familiar that she could almost shape the syllables—

"Are you all right?" Daphne said.

And that abruptly the curtain fell back into place.

Sylvia forced a smile. "I'm fine," she said, "I'll just get dessert." She stood, folding her napkin, and by the time she reached the door Daphne and Robin were already talking again.

The kitchen was dim, lit only by the fluorescent bar recessed over the sink. Wind rattled the screen door as Sylvia reached for the overhead light. She paused, her hand lingering at the switch, and then she pulled it away. She crossed in darkness instead, the kitchen silent but for the faraway tinkle of music, and, once, a burst of laughter from the dining room. At the counter, she hesitated again, and then, for the first time all day, for the first time since the dream—

—it had been a dream it must have been a dream—

—she drew back the curtains. Her own face, greenish and wan in the glare of that one flickering light, floated disembodied atop the glass. With trembling fingers, Sylvia reached out and snapped down the fluorescent's switch.

Her face hollowed into darkness, ghostly and strange. Beyond it, like a photo swimming up through a tray of chemicals, the night summoned itself into being, a chiaroscuro of moonlight and gusting shadow: first the rigid black pillars of the porch, and then the moonstruck eye of the birdbath, gazing blindly from the garden's center, and finally the ragged fringe of woods, the trees stark against the opalescent sky.

Sylvia realized she'd been holding her breath. She exhaled, misting the window. As the foggy crescent evaporated, the trees materialized once again, clearer now—

—closer—

—and she sensed suddenly the magnitude of the forest, its weight and density, its dumb intent. It loomed there, encircling not just the house or the scant streets beyond, but the whole world: all the aggrieved forests girdling the earth, waiting to assert their dominion once again. Ah, but waiting for what, that was the question.

Sylvia leaned closer, so close she could feel a slight chill radiating from the glass. She sensed something else out there, didn't she? A green and piercing intelligence peering back at her from the trees. She stepped back. Her finger throbbed. She could hardly draw breath. The wind kicked up again. It sounded almost like a voice crying through the trees, the words indistinguishable. If she could only get a little closer—

The overhead light went on.

"Sylvia?"

She came to herself, her hand outstretched to the back door. She had no memory of crossing the room. Daphne stood on the other side of the kitchen.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"What are you doing in the dark?"

"The screen door was blowing," she said. It was all that came to mind.

"Oh." Daphne lifted her eyebrows. "Well. Let me help you with dessert."

"Yes," Sylvia said. "Do."

She cut the cake while Daphne got out plates, and then, Daphne holding the door for her, she slipped back into the dining room, the dessert tray held before her like an offering. Robin Green stood to meet her, smiling. Sylvia saw his eyes move past her to Daphne, brightening, and everything else fell away, these strange spells and the weed and the wood, all the burdens of history. The music brightened. Color flooded the room. Her feet seemed barely to touch the floor.

The cake was buttery and rich. Light shimmered in every surface. The air buzzed through her veins like wine. And though the conversation moved on to more mundane topics—funding and faculty politics and students held in mutual disregard—Sylvia could hardly follow it she was so intent on drinking everything in, on seizing it and holding it fast, this intoxicating pageant of the senses, this abundance. Outwardly everything seemed normal—she nodded, she smiled, she put in an occasional remark—but inwardly, inwardly she sang.

And then—too soon—it was late.

Robin Green left first. As they stood watching his car disappear beyond a screen of trees, Daphne said she'd help with the dishes. "Forget it," Sylvia said. "I'll do it in the morning." But Daphne insisted, and Sylvia succumbed—pleased, actually, at the prospect of a little more time. And this too was a small miracle of the senses: the hot, clean fragrance of the soap, and the shining dishes stacked away still warm in their accustomed cabinets. "This was my mother's china," Sylvia said. "I want you to have it someday."

"Don't be ridiculous," Daphne said. "You're not going anywhere."

They didn't say much after that, not until Daphne got ready to go. But on the stoop, with her purse slung over one shoulder and her briefcase over the other, Daphne clutched Sylvia fiercely.

"I'm sorry I was angry," she said. "This was a good night—"

"You don't have to—"

"I do. I felt something, a spark. I never would have given it a chance." She gave Sylvia a squeeze and stepped away. "You sure you're okay? You gave me a scare in the kitchen."

"I'm fine. I promise."

Daphne smiled. "Good. I'll call you tomorrow then. And thanks, Sylvia."

She touched Sylvia's hand, smiled, and went down the stairs. At her car, she turned around. "You ever find the word, Sylvia, the one you were looking for?"

Had she? Sylvia supposed not. But it was all too easy to imagine a world in which she might never have had to look in the first place. She looked at Daphne. "I found two of them," she said abruptly.

"Yeah? What are they?"

"Choose life."

Daphne laughed. "Not exactly a description of your state of mind, that."

"It could have been."

Daphne opened the car door, but she didn't get in. She stood there, gazing solemnly at Sylvia while she thought it over, and then she nodded. "Good night, Sylvia."

"Good night."

Daphne slid into the seat and closed the door. A moment later the headlights came on, dazzling Sylvia. The car backed into the street and pulled away.

Sylvia didn't go anywhere, though.

She just stood there, listening as the sound of Daphne's car faded into the distance. She just stood there, listening to the wind.

The night was dark and rich and cool, and though Sylvia knew that she should go back inside—she wasn't well, the evening had tired her—there was this matter of the wind. It swept down from the wood in a perfumed rush, laden with the splendor of the season, the spendthrift beauty of new-budding limbs, the promised languor of some woodland bower, mattressed thick and soft with moss. Yes, and there was a voice, too, just as she had thought in the kitchen.

Come to me, it entreated her.

She could hear it clearly now, this summons from the night wood, coaxing, earth-succored, drawing her down the crumbling steps of the stoop, and along the path to the back garden, the path she had made with her own hands, cutting away the turf and leveling the mulch and placing each white river-smoothed stone with the care of a poet, laying down a path of words. How they shone, those bordering stones, bright against the omnipresent dark.

The house rose above her. She glanced up, the yellow windows, foursquare and orderly, beckoning her back—back to the dishes stacked neatly in the cupboards, back to the carpets so freshly vacuumed that you could still see patterns in the nap where no human step had fallen. But she resisted. She focused her gaze on the path. She kept her feet moving until she reached the side gate.

The garden lay on the other side, a tangle too long unattended, flanked on three sides by a forbidding wall of trees. Had they crept forward or had she only dreamed it—the woods, the vile weed, and all the rest, vanguard of some encroaching senility? It was a frightening thing either way, yet she felt no fear, not anymore. She felt … what exactly? A bottomless yearning, that's all. A loneliness so deep and wide that she could hardly plumb it.

"Are you there?" she whispered.

The wind touched her face.

Sylvia lifted the latch and swung the gate open. She stepped through, thinking of that other gate, that gap that might have been a gate when such things still existed, gates and borders and travelers between, and she didn't bother closing it behind her. She didn't bother with the path either. She struck off across the garden instead, planting her feet firmly in the mulched beds and crushing flowers underfoot, so that fragrant eddies swirled around her and drew her on. The woods loomed closer, higher, deeper than she had ever known them, spilling across the lawn in bold profusion.

Holman's clocktower began to chime when she reached the edge of the trees, and there she hesitated at last, stealing a glance back at the house as the old fear rose up inside her once again. John Thistle had been right. She'd been afraid, she'd always been afraid. And of what? Life, that's all. Just life. All this time running away. She'd wasted all this time. The thought was like stumbling across a dark pearl on some broken shore, something so unexpected, so black and revelatory that it took your breath away. What a paltry thing it was, fear.

She turned away.

She looked up. She squared her shoulders.

The forest held its breath and listened. She sensed something peering out at her from the green darkness, something ancient and abiding.

"I'm coming," she said, and now, without looking back, she moved into the wood, past the ruined flower bed and past the snarl of thorns where the great seed pod rotted into earth, inward, gliding among the trees, her feet silent on the moss-grown earth, always inward, penetrating deeper and ever deeper into the emerald shadows that awaited her (they had always awaited her), so that when at last she stole a backwards glance not even the faraway gleam of the house was any longer visible.

She paused then (how her finger throbbed!), not knowing why but knowing that she had done her part in penetrating to this consecrated glade, knowing too that something there awaited her and drawing breath in silent expectation when it began at last, when a deliberate shadow—

—a man she had known it would be a man—

—but it was not a man nor had it ever been, it was a—

—shadow, detaching itself from that cathedral gloom, began to flow slowly toward her, attended by a musk of earth and leaf and sap but newly risen. Yet it was a man, after all, and she knew him, did she not? She had caressed that curving jaw, she had gazed into those eyes. Her mouth had kissed that mouth. Yes, and hungered now to kiss it yet again. Sylvia stepped forward to embrace him, she lifted her face to his, his name—

"John—"

—already taking shape and departing from her lips as air even as she realized her mistake. For there was a face beyond that face (it was Jack Bramble's face) and yet another beyond that and another and another (there were always more faces, there always would be), so many ephemeral masks and only one true face, as old as time and unwived in its season, and questing always for its vernal bride.

The old terror seized her then, words rising unbidden to her lips—

"No, no—"

—and she would have fled, but she did not have the strength. He was strong. He was too strong: the hands at her shoulders and the arms drawing her close and the lips pressing firmly to her own. Then she was kissing him back, eagerly, with all the pent-up yearning of a lifetime, and as she opened herself to receive him, she understood what she might have come to know all those years ago, in the green and hungry embrace of Jack Bramble, had she only permitted it: she did not want words, she had no need of them. And so she surrendered at last—life, words, everything—a green thought in a green shade, enrapt in green and leafy silence.