(no subject)
I do not know if I run from ghosts or after them. My walks grow stagnant and always lead away, circle about the crossroads where the head was found and the block remains. I know it is there, for I have dared twice since to look upon it, and though the visible stain of the queen's blood is gone from the dirt and absorbed into the bitter wet brown palette of the block, the knowledge of its seeping into grain and ground sits so palpably still within me that I cannot look upon the spot without fearing to see red. And so today I have chosen instead blue. England's hoofs thunder fit to beat the waves themselves, even so ceaselessly as they are batted back and forth by the wind. It is fierce, inwardly whipping at clothes and hair and brush enough to make travel afoot most troublesome and inconvenient. Here at the shore, though, it is a driving gale along the white sand, so much that I have taken the linen and gauze from my veil and wrapped it about my face as an Arab, a pale and ghostly Moore running swiftly down the wind. I could be the faded spirit of a warrior queen, in trousers and stomacher and jeweled belt. In this place, perhaps that is precisely what I am.
Even plowing into it, England's speed is unimpeded. His breadth and strength is stopped by nothing, and in the single-minded aggression of our race, against whom I dare not let myself too softly nor deeply think, I push him down the soft white sands into hard packed wet stuff, and farther still into the water, up to the thick strong knot of his knee. I laugh into the wind, losing the sound of it, and I swear I can hear Robert's laugh behind me, or Raleigh's. I reign England up the sand, turning us about. There is nothing behind us but sand and sea, as far as I can imagine, and no love of mine waiting at its end, nor the spectre of my sins. The makeshift hood comes loose at one side and whips before my like a pendant of surrender. How strange to see no hoof prints.
Even plowing into it, England's speed is unimpeded. His breadth and strength is stopped by nothing, and in the single-minded aggression of our race, against whom I dare not let myself too softly nor deeply think, I push him down the soft white sands into hard packed wet stuff, and farther still into the water, up to the thick strong knot of his knee. I laugh into the wind, losing the sound of it, and I swear I can hear Robert's laugh behind me, or Raleigh's. I reign England up the sand, turning us about. There is nothing behind us but sand and sea, as far as I can imagine, and no love of mine waiting at its end, nor the spectre of my sins. The makeshift hood comes loose at one side and whips before my like a pendant of surrender. How strange to see no hoof prints.