Lady Victoria
If you’re lucky enough to meet her, she’ll change your hithertofore average life. Meet her in my novel The Shady Grove.
John
The Lady Victoria does not come from this or any other time. Before you or I were born she stood on a beach in a gown made of saffron silk gazing out to sea with a seashell in her hand listening to her father’s voice. She posed on a cliff overlooking the Aegean and had her picture taken for Winged Victory. Lady Victoria stood impassive while two men took ten paces turned and fired at one another under a live oak in a field at dawn. She told the survivor he killed the only man she ever loved and walked away in conquest. Lady Victoria is putting her lips to the ear of her deadliest enemy through the bars and saying, “I love doing this to you.”
Lady Victoria has come to the Shady Grove in a weary decadent age gone mad on electronic and chemical stimulation.
In Bethlehem Lady Victoria heard the innkeeper her master tell an unwed couple he had no room. Lady Victoria watched her thatched hut burn in the Middle Ages. As a child in the Warsaw ghetto she huddled beneath floorboards while jackboots crushed her porcelain figurines overhead. Now the enemies of God have nearly killed her. The Shady Grove has become her last refuge and place of recovery from attacks so savage and brutally depraved they could only be perpetrated in an age as stupid and obscene as ours.
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One Hundred Roses
First Rose
Beauty came not
Within the petals
Of a red, parted
Bloom.
Luscious fragrance
Faded and withdrawn.
No thorn could
Stay the trembling
Hand from reaching out.
The essence of
This mystery is you.
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