Old as time, Galatea.

The great city of London is a wondrous monster, full of strange sights, sounds and scents.

She expected just a larger settlement, like the one back home if you looked at it through a magnifying glass; just slightly pulled out of shape and distorted.

She is different too. Not changed, as such, but she's been given new frames, lustrous and amazing and it makes her feel small and grey, a stranger in a strange land, under a strange sky.

She's Rebecca now, an alien name that means her, a collection of sounds that become dear when spoken by a loving tongue.

John shapes and reinvents her, dresses her up in new clothes like a porcelain doll. The clothes are beautiful, but she longs for the feeling of grass on her bare feet.

The servants don't know what to make of her, a lady and a savage, a princess of a foreign land who runs barefoot around the garden like a child. She's an exotic creature to them, a bird locked up in a grande cage of a house, but she can't fly away like a bird would, the stars are different here and she wouldn't know how to find her way home.

She swims against the current of people passing her by and holds on to the arm of the one beside her, holding her up as much as he's holding her dear.

John is her only constant, an anchor pulling her into a safe harbor, but even he is different here. He carries himself like a stranger, his polite nods and bows are precise and measured, his words are held back and thought through. His boots are no longer dirty with mud, and his lips don't touch straws, don't touch her in quite the same way. Everything is grander in England, and the space between them sometimes seems like too much.

But darkness is the same everywhere, the comfort of the nights is like an old friend, familiar and dear. Outside, bonfires and candles light up the darkness, but here inside it's just a flicker of a single candle, lighting up his face.

Inside he doesn't call her Rebecca, doesn't say anything at all, inside he just holds her and just loves her and inside she's just herself.