The Silver Bough

by Lisa Tuttle

  She pushed herself up in bed and held her breath, but there was nothing to hear except the ordinary natural sounds she’d grown used to; the sounds she’d once called silence. The rain had stopped, allowing the low, urgent murmuring of the stream to come through more clearly. She tried to remember what had disturbed her sleep: something cracking and breaking; something falling and sliding and settling; something large and very close.

  Her thoughts flew to the old walled garden. Of course, the trees would be all right; they were young and healthy, and although the recent steady downpour meant the ground was waterlogged, they were in no immediate danger. They were fine when she saw them yesterday afternoon, and even if the night’s gusts had been of gale force—which she was sure they hadn’t—the walls would protect them. But if one of the walls had fallen?

  As soon as she thought it, the image was disturbingly clear in her mind. It would be the south wall: the one she’d thought too sound to need repairing. Or perhaps the west wall, which had been rebuilt from scratch. It had seemed so strong and solid; but what if the builders had used some kind of cheap, inferior cement that the past four days of rain had turned to mush…

  Although she knew she could do nothing about it by herself in the middle of the night, she would not be able to sleep again until she knew. Switching on the bedside lamp, she got up and rooted about in the pile on the armchair in the corner until she unearthed some leggings, socks, and a heavy sweatshirt, then quickly pulled them on.

  Downstairs the house lay still, quiet and undisturbed. In the storm porch she pushed her feet into the pair of green rubber boots waiting for her beside the back door, and wrapped up in her knee-length Barbour coat. She picked up the largest of the two flashlights, checked that it was working, and let herself out the back door, which she hadn’t locked.

  The air was dry and unexpectedly warm. There was a mildness to the night that she associated with the beginning rather than the end of summer, and as she moved away from the house she smelled the gentle, domestic perfume of mint, oregano, and thyme from the edge of the kitchen garden. She made her way slowly across the lawn and into the meadow, treading down the high grass whenever she missed the path in the darkness, and was assailed by a sudden memory from her adolescence of sneaking out of the dorms with two other girls for illicit trysts with town boys. They had been oddly innocent meetings, at least for her. She’d never compared notes with the other girls, but assumed that, like her, they did no more than kiss and cuddle. She’d been just thirteen, and to her “sex” was heavy breathing and woozy feelings and slightly scary-looking athletic encounters between gorgeous movie stars, or else—for an unmarried girl—it was something dangerous that would end in disgrace, illness, or death. Kissing was different; kissing was love and liking, and any chance to practice it and prepare yourself for falling in love was too important to pass up. She remembered how intensely physical, yet emotionally detached, those make-out sessions had been, recalling the taste of cigarettes and spearmint gum on his breath, the feel of his tongue in her mouth. Once he had tasted of beer, which she thought disgusting, and she wouldn’t let him kiss her again that night. He’d accepted her ban meekly, and they’d spent an hour or more just cuddling. He’d stroked her hair and her back and arms, then, for the first time, her breasts. How sweet that night had been.

  What on earth had made her think of that?

  She stopped short, staring into darkness, overcome by nostalgia for something she had not thought of since…well, hardly at all in her adult life. She couldn’t even recall the boy’s name.

  Forcing herself back to the moment, she raised the heavy light. The door into the orchard was directly in front of her, and there was no sign, at least on this side, of any damage to the dark brick wall. She pressed down on the latch and pulled the door open. The smell of growing apples and wet earth welcomed her, and as soon as she stepped inside the warmth of the sheltered orchard she knew it had not been breached.

  All the same, something had startled her awake, so she paced out the boundaries and swept each wall with the powerful beam in search of any gaps or cracks. They were all whole and undamaged. The trees, too, were as she had left them in yesterday’s light: no injuries, no branches broken, no sudden fall of late-ripening apples. About a third of the trees were bare of fruit, which had ripened in August and the first half of September. The others were midseason or late-ripening varieties and as the rain had set in and continued she had worried that they’d lost the chance to develop their best flavor.

  Everything she knew about apples she had learned from books or, in the last five years, from her self-taught, unpaid apprenticeship as a gardener determined to create an orchard at Orchard House.

  It had started almost as a whim—although that word was too light for someone who approached life with her seriousness. Self-imposed task, even penance, might be a better term. She didn’t have to work for a living, so she needed something to do, to fill in the time. The idea of buying and restoring an old house had always appealed to her, and Orchard House had fit the bill. It was structurally sound but in crying need of lots of minor repairs and complete redecoration. From the look of the interior, nothing much had been done to it since the 1950s and, apart from having central heating installed, Nell reckoned she could handle most of the work herself. She much preferred that to hiring and supervising others. She wanted to go to bed tired every night, and she had a high tolerance for repetitive manual tasks like sanding down, stripping, and painting.

  By now, the house should have been finished, a showpiece, and Nell looking for something else to do, but the gardens had changed her plans, as they had changed her.

  In the beginning, when she bought the house, there was nothing that could be called a garden, just a lot of overgrown land at the back of the house where, sometime in the past, there had been vegetable plots, rose beds, a rockery, a greenhouse (long ruined), and a lawn. The apple orchards that gave the house its name had been on land in the valley down below—land sold off for other uses in the 1960s. As the pleasant young man from the estate agent’s had gestured toward the fields and woods that stretched away behind the house, pointing out the boundaries of her property, she’d noticed what she thought was a ruined building, only a few hundred yards away.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, yes, that comes with the house; that’s the old walled garden.”

  “May I see it?”

  “It’s not much to look at; I don’t think it’s been touched in thirty years.” But, as obliging as ever to this potential purchaser, he’d let her satisfy her curiosity, leading her on a tortuous journey across a boggy, rutted field, and then scratching himself rather badly on the thorns that barred the door.

  “Brambles,” he muttered, finally wrenching the splintered old wooden door open to reveal the way inside still blocked by a particularly wicked-looking bush. “Devil’s own job to dig them out once they take hold.”

  “I need a prince on a white charger, brandishing a sword,” she said. She was thinking of the castle surrounded by a thorny hedge in “Sleeping Beauty,” and was surprised to see him blush. She turned away, annoyed by his presumption. “Never mind,” she said, staring over the hill at the road far below. “I’m not a gardener, anyway.”

  It was true, she’d never grown anything except a tray of cress at school. It had been Sam’s fantasy to potter around tending vegetables in his retirement, not hers. But The Secret Garden had been her favorite book when she was small, and the existence of the walled garden in the grounds of Orchard House tipped the balance. And once she was the owner-occupier, responsible for the upkeep of the property, things began to happen that made the restoration of the orchard almost inevitable.

  A spell of fine weather when she first moved in meant that she began with outdoor jobs, and once she’d cleared away the worst of the weeds and the rubble, she found herself thinking about what to put in their place: patio, flower beds, lawn? After all, the setting of the house was important, and i
t had been abandoned for so long that she was denied the easy option of leaving things as they were. She ordered books on garden design, drew up plans, searched through gardening catalogues, and took a trip down to Scotland’s central belt in order to scout through the bigger gardening centers and do-it-yourself stores to see what was available.

  In Stirling she got to talking to a knowledgeable nurseryman about what plants would and would not suit the southern west coast, on a hill above the sea, and unexpectedly she found herself confiding, “But there’s a walled garden, too, so the sea winds don’t have to be a problem.”

  “Where is it that you stay?”

  “Appleton.” She wouldn’t have been surprised by a blank look; no one outside of Scotland had ever heard of Appleton, and even Scots outside the immediate area were vague about where it might be, usually confusing it with Applecross, which was much farther to the north.

  But he knew it; his eyebrows went up to his hairline in surprise. “With a walled garden, you say? That wouldn’t be Orchard House?”

  “How did you know?”

  “My father came from Appleton. He left the day he turned eighteen, but he was forever talking about it, and he sent us kids to stay with his parents in the summer holidays every year. We ran wild; there was nowhere we didn’t go. I remember that garden. It must have been very formal and beautifully tended at one time, but it was starting to go a bit to seed when I saw it.”

  “When was that?”

  “The seventies. Two old ladies lived there—well, they seemed old to me then! I think they grew most of their own food. I stole fruit from the garden—there were fruits I’d never seen before. Figs and apricots…I’d had them both, but only dried. I’d never realized before that you could pick and eat them fresh. But no apples. I thought that was really strange; it was called Orchard House, but there was no orchard. Not a single apple tree.”

  She had started to explain that the commercial apple orchards had been on land well away from the house and sold off before his time, but stopped when she saw he already knew.

  “You could certainly grow all kinds of fruit there, if you wanted,” he said. “I know Appleton gets a lot of rain, but that spot on the hill is a sun trap. Or were you thinking of something purely decorative?”

  “No, I like the idea of growing things I can eat.” She didn’t mention her qualms about clearing out the wilderness within the crumbling walls, or her original intention to leave it alone. None of that mattered. She should have known she wouldn’t be able to resist the chance to create her very own secret garden.

  They went on to discuss what she might plant, combinations of color and size and scent, how to make sure that everything didn’t come into bloom or ripen all at once but was staggered for longer-term enjoyment; bulbs, perennials, herbaceous borders, ornamental vs. edible; whether she’d have paved or graveled or grassy paths, with a bower at the center, perhaps, so she could sit and enjoy it all, and maybe a fountain…until she felt overwhelmed.

  “Look, hang on, it all sounds wonderful, but I’m going to be doing all this myself—and I’ve never actually gardened before! I have a house to fix up as well. Either I leave the walled garden for later, or I start with something simpler.”

  He was silent for a moment, then he said, “You know, the simplest thing would be an orchard. Apples are the easiest of all the fruit trees, and they’ve always been grown in Appleton. There’s loads of varieties to choose from, and within two or three years you should have your first crop. It’s best to plant in November, which gives you nearly four months to prepare.”

  Now, standing in the quiet, breathing darkness, listening to her trees murmur and softly creak, Nell was as close to happiness as she could ever be. The apple trees were like her children, although she would never have said so, not even to herself. She tended them and cared for them, and yet they needed her less than she needed them, which was as it should be. They’d given back a focus to her life, given her a reason for getting out of bed in the morning—and, indeed, in the middle of the night. She still had no idea what had shocked her awake—a distant explosion? a car crash on the road below?—but she’d seen for herself there was nothing wrong in her domain. Easy in her mind, she made her way back to bed.

  In the morning she didn’t give a second thought to what had disturbed her sleep but set off in her car for the town after her usual quick shower and frugal breakfast. The parking lot of the supermarket was crowded, and there were no spare trolleys in the bay where they were usually stored, but that was not particularly remarkable for a Saturday morning. She only guessed at something wrong when she walked through the automatic doors and heard the unusually high level of sound, a babble of half-hysterical shouting as people raced through the aisles, throwing cans of soup and jars of instant coffee and rolls of toilet paper into their trolleys as if stocking for a siege. She stood still, puzzled, gazing in surprise at the ranks of empty stalls that lined the first aisle. Normally the fresh fruit and vegetables were displayed here, but today there was nothing, not a single bag of potatoes, not a solitary orange.

  She walked down to the bakery section, where the racks that usually displayed the fresh-baked rolls, pastries, and specialty breads were just as bare. The shelves of prepackaged breads held only one loaf of whole wheat and a vacuum pack of pita breads. She noticed a store employee in a white apron, behind the bakery counter, standing with her arms folded tightly across her full breasts, her cheeks flushed and a look of barely contained excitement on her round, young face. Nell caught her eye. “What happened?”

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “There was an earthquake!”

  Nell shook her head, making no sense of it. “Where?”

  “Here! Under the sea, off the coast, actually. Didn’t you feel it last night? I did. My dog started howling and woke me up a minute before it happened.”

  “The store’s still standing,” Nell pointed out, not trying to hide her scepticism.

  The young woman rolled her eyes. “It only caused a landslide, didn’t it? Blocked the road, up at that narrow bit below what they call Fairview. Our first delivery gets here at four o’clock in the morning, but not today. He couldn’t get past the rock. Nobody can. So we’re not getting our ten o’clock either. Nobody knows how long that road’ll be closed for.”

  A woman hurried up the aisle pushing a laden trolley ahead of her. With a wary, sideways glance at Nell, as if expecting argument, she reached past her and snatched the whole wheat loaf off the shelf before rushing away.

  “As soon as word got round, people went absolutely mental,” said the store employee in a curiously satisfied way. “We sold out of fresh milk in five minutes, and since then they’ve been buying absolutely everything. I shouldn’t think there’ll be anything left by lunchtime. We’ll have to close early.”

  Nell left without trying to buy anything. Even if there had been a few things on the shelves that she needed, she shrank away from the feverish hunter-gatherer mentality now ruling the aisles. She didn’t know if things would be any better at the smaller shops—in her view, big stores brought out the worst in people—but even if she went home empty-handed, she could survive for a week or more on home-grown produce and the contents of her freezer.

  The streets of Appleton were as crowded and lively as she had ever seen them, even at the height of the summer tourist season. In the glorious sunshine and unreasonably warm weather, everyone seemed to be on vacation. She was usually confident about finding a place to park in the old marketplace (which had been turned over entirely to parking since the demise of the weekly street market) but today it was double-parked and impossible to enter. She found a place to leave the car on a side street near the library, and, deciding that might as well be her first call, lifted the heavy book bag out of the backseat.

  Like the supermarket, the library was a hive of activity on Saturday morning, mostly for the elderly and parents with young children. Entering the cool, spa
cious foyer, she heard the chatter and hum of talk, definitely up a few decibels from the usual sedate exchange of remarks about the weather. But the feverish, hysterical edge she’d sensed in the store was absent. The people here weren’t worried, only pleased to have something new to talk about.

  The new librarian—American like herself—was behind the counter, and her smile of recognition was so warm and welcoming that Nell felt disconcerted. No one had responded to her like that in years. People in the town knew her to speak to, but she’d never felt that her presence mattered to anyone, and that was how she liked it.

  “Mrs. Westray! I’ve got your photocopy here.”

  “Thanks,” she said automatically, reaching to take it.

  “There’s a charge of fifty pence for the photocopying, and you’ll need to sign this form, Mrs. Westray.”

  “Call me Nell. Do you have change for a pound? Um, I don’t know your name…”

  “Kathleen. Kathleen Mullaroy.”

  “Where do you want me to sign this, Kathleen?”

  “Just there. Are these books for return?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” said the librarian, sounding pleased as she opened the book on top of the stack. “The Club Dumas. Did you like it?”

  “Very much. Do you have any more by him?”

  “Yes. He’s terrific. You won’t find them on the regular fiction shelves, though. There’s a copy of The Nautical Chart in large print, and The Flanders Panel and at least one other should be on that paperback rack by the door if they’re checked in.”

  “Thanks, I’ll look for them.”

  The last book on the pile was Villette. “Oh, that’s one of my favorites.”

  “Mine, too. I used to have a copy, but I must have lost it somewhere along the way.”