The Dead of Covent Garden

The dawn awoke as a child awakes and hugged her knees and rubbed her eyes, and yawned and stretched and spread her arms across the eastern sky. She leant over Strawberry Hill and trailed her fingers through the treetops in Regent's Park: she sat on the roofs of office blocks: she put her hand, in passing, on the gables of Bloomsbury. At the stern grey ziggurat of London University she threw a line of rose and gold across the windows, and steam rose around them like the smoke of sacrifices.