“Courtiers cackled at her appearance until she fell off her horse in front of a crowd, displaying her magnificent legs. One awestruck witness marveled that ‘limbs of such exquisite beauty could belong to Miss Churchill’s face.’ Though forced by the fashions of the time to conceal her most comely attributes inside yards of heavy skirts, Arabella often displayed the quick wit and lively intelligence which bound James to her through ten years and four children.”

– Eleanor Herman (2004) Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge, p.52.

That day

I tumbled from my horse

face red with blushes

limbs akimbo and knickers

to the wind. That is the moment

I remember.

And though I lived

for four and sixty years longer than that,

it is the moment I will remember

forever for you with all those bumpings

and moving furniture and cold

patches about the house.

And the occasional visitation

when the chafed fancy takes me.

*

They say that you are resurrected

at your prime of life. Well that’s

all bosh. Not true, or not, at least, for the likes

of those of us who are ghosts. Sometimes

I come back as a spiteful little girl,

at others as a tetchy old maid.

Sometimes a sullen adolescent,

others that vampire crowing over a conquest

in her dreamy twenties who seduced the king

to be. At times in labor, others in wrath,

often the shrewish wife, or sat in rapture

at the beauty of the sunlight on garden flowers

or threshed corn; or thrashing in the throes

of orgasm under the king when queen’s away,

thinking of jack and the pot of gold. Thinking

of all the patronage due and coming our way.

Sometimes stern matriarch. Sometimes the satisfied

trad-Cath country wife. Often a little smug.

*

But I am here and there and everywhere

and always will be, remembering that day,

pointing a finger at whoever you are

this time, remembering that day those fellows

mocked my reddened face and unclothed and dismounted

legs. Remembering for ever that day

for all the souls I haunt for ever and a day.