Totentanz

The day's frivolities embraced a visit to the hill of Sir Francis Dashwood's Hellfire Club.  It is surmounted by a spire and golden bauble which we took to be a Gothick fane, but which turned out be St. Lawrence's Church, and by a folly which is fact the Dashwood mausoleum.  An extraordinary edifice:  a septagonal hollow crown, its Roman brow confronting from its steep a new-made Roman road which Sir Francis laid down to lead up to it, bedded on the chalk dug out from the caves in which--'tis whispered--he enacted nameless rites.  Just what the Devil would do, if he had the money.

After lunch, Phoxinus and I popped over to Beaconsfield for a non-wooden spoon and a jam-and-jelly skimmer.  (She bottles hedgerow fruit.). Quite the upmarket town, home in various quarters at disparate times to Disraeli and Pratchett, Enid Blyton and Edmund Burke, Wendy Hiller, G.K. Chesterton, and Alison Uttley.  (Which pleased me:  I had just remarked how the countryside looked Fuzzypeggish).  There's a splendidly melancholy obelisk in the churchyard, with carven fire leaping up from four stone torches, and a carven pall down-drooping on four yards of Latin, and--most glorious of all--a tetrarchy of winged skulls guarding it, as if Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John had been relieved by the graveyard shift.  When we went to puzzle out the Latin, the late lamented turned out to be Edmund Waller ("Go, lovely Rose...")

But the stunning thing, most wonderful because ephemeral, was earlier.  On our way from the morning's outing, we were stormed by a Walpurgisnacht of red kites.  All silent, black against a cloudcurled, eye-of-lapis sky, but hematite if sunstruck, wheeling.  They are rare; there were forty of them in a vortex, like November in Averno, Sibyl's leaves spelt out.

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Nine