The Apple-Tree Throne Copyright © Premee Mohamed, 2018
Appx. 28,000 words
ISBN 978-1-9994420-0-2
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For the unloved and the loved
THE APPLE-TREE THRONE
Premee Mohamed
It’s autumn, the time for ghost stories. Not the innocent skies and washed-out roads of spring; not the stifling heat of summer, nor less the dead of winter when sounds carry for miles. Autumn is when adventures begin, when the air is crisp and the paths are dry and the leaves whisper and the scent of smoke on the downs travels like a secret. It must be autumn, when everyone is held in abeyance between their home and their destination, when every trip is a journey.
I wake to tapping at the glass and spend a moment reckoning it: dash, dash, dash, dot. Dash, dash, dash, dot.
Two nines. Get out.
Shan’t. I roll out of bed and see the Major-General, still quite dead, as dead as the last time I saw him, hovering above the sill. The new electric street-lights, soft and golden in the fog, illuminate the gaping wound in his throat. Meeting my gaze with a look of hatred, he reaches out once more and strikes the glass of the window. Nine, nine.
I pull the curtains shut, muffling his outrage till I can drop off again. Perhaps he is still angry about the funeral.
***
“Major-General Theodore Wickersley was a good man,” I begin, but this statement is so contradictory to what is actually transpiring at his funeral that I trail off in embarrassment. In the silence, Wickersley’s mother emits one loud sob, sending crows yelping from the fawn sea of oaks behind us. Surely for her sake, if nothing else, I must continue.
Before I lose my nerve I describe his rapid rise through the ranks, his fairness as a leader, his loyalty as a soldier. I praise his brilliant military mind — stuttering into silence as another of Wickersley’s Irregulars gestures frantically at me to cut it out. I express my deep condolences to the Greater Republic of Britannia as well as his family, friends, and fellow soldiers. As I do so, several of my fellow soldiers simply leave, slipping past the rows of family with murmured excuses, as if a quiet slap to the face might be any less painful than a loud one.
I am the only one who has agreed to speak. It is over swiftly, and the spade-man walks bold as brass through the assembled mourners, who part Red Sea-fashion to avoid his dirty shovel. He nods briskly at me, as one professional to another, and begins to fill in the grave. Wickersley’s mother handed me a pink rose when I met them at the gates, which I had meant to toss upon the coffin, but the work is proceeding so swiftly that I feel it would be an intrusion.
In minutes it is done, and he switches to another tool with a flat, oblong head to tamp down the fluffed-up black dirt. Finally, the sliced squares of sod are replaced. They will catch again, put down roots long before winter comes. Funny that cemeteries always end up on the best farmland. Or is it the other way around? All those bodies turning the thin soil rich and black over hundreds of years. That old story they tell to scare children, about what happens to those who eat hazelnuts from a cemetery.
Wickersley’s father touches the spade-man’s elbow, and coins discreetly chime between them. Forelock tugged, tools gathered, the small man melts into the serried graves. We few remain, and the sun begins to burn off the fog, and heat seeps into our grateful backs. From the small hillock upon which eulogizers traditionally stand, I look down at the bereft family, and see replicated in its various forms the face of the man who almost killed me. The black hair, the pearly eyes, like high, far-off clouds.
The top brass wouldn’t permit a burial at Mossley, of course. Days ticked by while the family petitioned them, and finally the reply came: Take the body and go. But he cannot go where the others went; and not one shilling will we pay. And so here we are today, at St. Thomas. Fortunate he’s from money, I suppose. If it had been myself, there would not even be this modest ceremony, this modest headstone; it would have been a quick cremation overseas, and a little celluloid urn stamped with guesses at my vitals. Only the day of death might be accurate. In the battlefield we saw the endless racks of impoverished soldiers’ remains in those pitiable orange urns, cracking and warping in the sun— saw them ranked endlessly in my dreams, still marching, like their occupants. Still and ever on parade.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Braddock,” says Wickersley’s father, as we gingerly approach the reassembled rectangle of the grave. “We are grateful for your kind words. I thought perhaps no one would step up.”
And I have no reply to this, so I nod, and give his tottering wife my arm as she stoops to adjust the huge wreath they brought, pink and white roses. As surreptitiously as possible I place my own meager offering next to it— the single rose, one bullet. Wickersley’s brother stands stonily a few paces apart from us, as the other guests nod and exit with unseemly haste. Best escape the contagion, lest the respectable public think they are in some way connected with the dead man. Black backs, like droplets of ink, trickle down the slope towards the steam-tram line shining just beyond the cemetery gates.
There was more to tell, of course. I could have told the story he always told— about how he got the scar on his cheek, splendidly marring what everyone had to admit was a preternatural beauty. How it was clear that he had turned some little reckless incident into a heroic tale, and a badly-healed scratch into that dashing wound. How he had manoeuvred his charm and — yes, he wouldn’t lie about it — a few strategic family connections to be advanced again and again, till the unthinkable happened and he was made Major-General at twenty-five. How a few lucky sorties in Prushya, then Gundisalvus’ Land had cemented his unbelievable reputation.
And how he had made the classic mistake of believing that his promotions were proof of an unusually talented or even prodigious military mind, and how he had gotten nearly a thousand men killed not quite a fortnight ago. Perhaps in the old days this would have been less of a disaster — still a tragedy, surely, but not a catastrophe. Instead it had been transmitted in perfect, crisp black-and-white over the radioviz, and millions of people had watched as the enemy had captured Wickersley. They could not have known that we demanded his return, that the demand was countermanded, and… well. You know the rest.
The bazaar rumour bandied about is that he died a coward, but I will not call him such. I will say that he was a young man who made a mistake. Do not we all? Is that not our purpose, the God-given raison d’etre for young men? He made a bad judgment call and ordered a retreat in the wrong part of the battle, into the wrong valley, with the wind blowing the wrong way, with the entirety of battle’s invisible deck of cards, had he but paused for a moment to think, stacked against him, and he trapped us in the very mouth of Hell. He thought he was well above-board, thought he was making a good choice. He made the worst possible choice instead.
But we lived. We lived. A few of us. Our lives purchased with his death.
The brass was wrong to shun him so. Not legally, I mean to say, but morally — a moral disservice was done. And among others, it is for this reason that his family is in pieces, that unexpected cruelty flung at the last moment atop the cruelty of their chi
ld’s death. They are old military blood, like so many of us Grobbers; they have fought in a hundred wars; no rose blooms in this intemperate land but is watered handsomely by their heroic blood. More precisely, a Wickersley must die with courage and be interred at Mossley with full honours, or be wounded and return a hero, chest jingling with glint. That is the pain they know, that is the weight that they carry with such ease; it does not crush them. But this public humiliation has succeeded in doing so.
And now they have me, just scraping along, no Wickersley at all, with the medals and the newspaper articles, in my damp and wilting dress uniform of London smoke, instead of their beloved son. Now it is me above the earth that their family has died to preserve. They rarely look me in the eye.
I look obliquely at the brother — older, hadn’t he said? Yes, by five or six years. The same good looks but blurred somehow, as if viewed through an uneven or mediæval pane - coarser, heavier, a little stooped, the sable hair cropped nearly to the scalp instead of his younger brother’s shining mane. Wickersley had corrected us gently but repeatedly when we called him ‘Wicky,’ as fellow-soldiers are compelled to do with names. “That’s not me, chaps,” he would say. “That’s my brother.”
The elder seems sound enough — sturdier, if anything, than the younger, a certain pugnacious stiffness in his back that often bespeaks good soldiering material. How had he failed the draft? I had never asked Wickersley himself; now I dare not ask the brother in polite company.
“Lieutenant Braddock,” Mrs. Wickersley says, “you must come to supper at the house. I simply won’t have you returning to that dreary ‘flat.’ Not tonight.”
“I should be honoured, ma’am.”
“Eight o’clock,” she says, squeezing my arm. Both her sons clearly got their eyes from her— long-lashed, a pale blue-grey. Hers are somewhat swollen with tears, but still luminous, as if a match-head burns behind each one. “Cliff or Arthur will come pick you up, won’t you?”
Father and son murmur assent, and we shake hands, and they support Mrs. Wickersley as she stumbles down the slope, still trailing the rose petals that adhered to her skirts.
Someone touches my shoulder: Lt. Clark, in his dress whites like me, yawning. “I say, Ben, do you need a lift back? You’re favouring that right leg something fierce.”
“No, I’m all right,” I tell him; we’ve been friends for years, long predating the draft that declared us both Supreme-Class, and although our flats are on opposite sides of the town, I know he wouldn’t at all mind motoring me back to mine. But I want to take the tram, and not speak to anyone, friend or foe, mother or soldier, and warm my hands on the smooth wooden walls, and not speak another word about the dead general. “You go on, Clarkie; and give my love to the missus.”
“Of course.” He lingers a moment though, looking down at the neat maze of sod. “I wonder if he knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Oh, you know. He was barely real, Braddock, wasn’t he? He was a Boy’s Own Adventure book. Anything as flash as that isn’t long for this world.”
“I suppose not,” I say. “But I don’t think it was that, in truth.”
“No?”
“No. I think the brass that made him killed him. I think too many old men told him he could do no wrong, and he believed it.”
“A man makes his own decisions, Ben.”
“If a man’s his own man,” I say, finally turning from the grave. “Was he, do you think?”
“Of course he was.”
***
Dinner at Lindow House, the Wickersley family estate, is precisely as luxurious and gloomy as the previous two occasions. Mrs. Wickersley, having recognized my name from the Major-General’s letters as well as the news reports, ‘took me under her wing’ at once while they negotiated with the bureaucrats; and I have still not been able to politely extricate myself from its feathery smothering.
And in truth, I still find myself humbled to be eating somewhere with a name, if you know what I mean; everywhere I’ve ever lived was marked with a number. The house is tall and symmetrical, red brick and clean new mortar gone dove grey in the long twilight. It fronts the tip of their triangular estate, and is framed by swaying ornamental cedars and imported pines, their fragrance combining with the last roses of summer as I walk up the wide steps and ring the bell. I’m still in my dress uniform, the only presentable outfit I’ve got at the moment, but the Wickersleys never mind; they seem curiously soothed by it, and the ash-plant I sometimes boast and refuse to use as a cane.
We eat rich fish soup, and chicken with lemons, and roast potatoes, and an apple tart to accompany the postprandial brandies. Extra guests have been invited tonight — an old friend of Wickersley senior and his wife, and a cousin on the mother’s side, and a fulsomely pretty young lady who arrives late and in full mourning, who is greeted by the lady of the house herself. I am impressed by her hair, and spend an injudicious amount of time staring at it, for ‘chestnut tresses’ are referenced often and carelessly in pulp novels, but I have handled my fair share of conkers and the precise colours of sepia and vermilion that must be mixed to produce true chestnut hair outside of a literary setting is surpassingly rare.
She turns out to be Wickersley’s former sweetheart, of course. I stumble at once over my words and clamp my mouth shut like an oyster.
“I was too overwrought to come to the ceremony, I do hope you’ll understand,” she tells Mrs. Wickersley. The older woman turns at once in her seat and embraces her tenderly, all their lace crackling together as if they are stuffed with dry leaves. “It’s only that it all still seems…so sudden.”
“Of course it is, of course it would, my poor dear.”
I should like to point out that no one yet has stroked my hair and called me ‘poor dear,’ but I suppose I will simply have to soldier on. And soldier on is all I can manage most days…I often feel, in fact, extremely lucky to have nothing to do, as there is absolutely nothing that I feel like doing or even estimate myself to be capable of doing. I am un-employed, I can barely pick up a book long enough to read a single page, I can’t write letters or even post-cards, I sold my bicycle before I was shipped overseas, I have no family to visit, I have no garden to tend. I pay the supplementary fivepence for a day-ticket and ride the trams alone, ceaselessly, back and forth all day, switching between lines at the terminal at Old Church Street. The radioviz bores me to tears, but I spend hours watching broadcasts anyway, the minuscule dancing blobs in the hand-sized screen reminding me not of the coherent picture they have been sent to form, but soldiers, always soldiers. In the change of an ‘E’ to a ‘B’ I see troop formations, flanking manoeuvres, raids, attacks, retreats. I see myself, a shapeless little animalcule no larger than an ant, pressed flat between the two thin glass screens, doing what I’m told.
“I’m Rosalyn Meyers,” the girl says, and I cannot bring myself to shake her hand as people do nowadays, and I bow over it and touch my lips to one cool knuckle— a whiff of gardenia soap. How interesting. Everyone knows Wickersley liked roses.
Miss Meyers, apparently making a swift recovery from the debilitating grief that kept her away from St. Thomas this afternoon, pastes herself to my side for the night, a fragrant shadow who frequently leans so near to whisper some bon mot that her silky hair brushes my chin. She is full of amusing anecdotes, witty observations, and literary quotes, and somehow also manages to be the most boring person I’ve ever met. By the end of the night, Mrs. Wickersley has exchanged our visiting cards, and forced upon me the keys to the family guesthouse where the Major-General lived before he was called to war.
“I can’t, Mrs. Wickersley, I simply can’t,” I tell her, and she’s not listening, and I am unsure whether she can hear me at all, whether I am the meaningless sound of wind in the eaves.
“It’s such a pity to leave it empty like that, I’m sure that’s not what Theo would have wanted, and I’ve seen the place you’re letting, dear, you cannot go on another
day there, you simply cannot, and you’ve nowhere else to go — no, you cannot dissimulate your circumstances, young man, I know your parents are gone, you’ve no brothers nor sisters, it’s not charity, you’ll be caretaking the place, keeping tramps and ruffians from defacing it or breaking in, and if you dare argue with me, I know where the saber hangs in the front hall.”
I finally break, and accept the thick key-ring, so polished from perhaps generations of use that it is as smooth as glass, and I put the heavy thing in my pocket, and I feel tears rise, not in my eyes but seemingly my entire head, as if a small ocean is forming somewhere in the region of my jawbone. I shall accept the belittling of my admittedly small and mean-looking flat, if she says this is not charity but a gesture of goodwill, and because her son led my regiment, and because he almost got us all killed. I try not to think this last but cannot help it. Surely, this is a surfeit of frustrated maternal love, and not blood-guilt. Surely, this is friendship, and not reparations.
She will not see it as I do: an act of colossal audacity, as if I could ever take his place. I cannot. No one can. No one would even dare try, he was so well and so widely loved. We all know this.
She’s a short woman, and her gaze is nearly at the level of the medals on my chest. They gave me one for rescuing a man, and another one for merely surviving — the only way in which I have ever bested her son, and perhaps ever will.
***
So I live in The Heights now, like a proper gentleman, and Clarkie and his wife Victoria helped me move my pitiful few possessions into the guest-house. My things lurk quite ashamed of their provenance amongst the grand furnishings, like a cockroach on the wallpaper trying desperately to blend into the pattern. The Wickersleys have transported most of the personal items out of the place, for which I find myself superstitiously and enormously relieved, but as we walk through the rooms marvelling at the delicacy of the furniture and the fittings, I cannot help but feel a bit like a commoner usurping a royal throne.
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