The Silver Bough

by Lisa Tuttle

  As soon as she’d unpacked the car and put away her shopping, she put on the kettle and brewed a handful of mint leaves in the small blue-and-white porcelain pot she’d bought on her first visit to London. She wasn’t sure where she’d picked up the habit, but since adolescence, mint tea had been her remedy for half a dozen minor ills, and just going through that minor ritual of brewing a pot worked to calm her.

  When the tea was ready, she took it outside to the small paved area behind the house, where she’d set a small table and two chairs near the fragrant herb garden, and settled down to read the photocopied pages she’d picked up from the library.

  She’d started reading about apples when she had started her orchard. At first it had been the practical things she’d wanted to know: how to prepare the ground, how to keep the trees healthy, which varieties would do best in a wet and windy climate, and so on. But growing apples did not appear to be a terribly complicated business, and she had quickly read everything she could find on the “how-to” side of it and moved on to history and folklore.

  Their potential variety was practically infinite, because apples don’t breed true from seed. Each apple seed is different from all others, and, if planted, may produce a type never known before. If the new apple was special enough, it could be preserved and reproduced either through a root sprout, or by grafting a twig from the new tree onto the trunk of another; they would then fuse together and grow into a tree identical to the one from which the twig was taken.

  Nell had been fascinated by the stories of wonderful new apples discovered growing out of garbage heaps, behind chicken houses, or in old, abandoned gardens: Mannington’s Pearmain had come from cider residue tipped beneath a blacksmith’s hedge in the eighteenth century; Granny Smith sprouted from a heap of apples dumped into an Australian creek in the 1860s; Bloody Ploughman grew in the 1880s from a rubbish heap where a bag of stolen apples was thrown after the thief was shot…

  When she’d first started to think beyond the plan of growing a few apples for herself, she’d wondered about creating a new apple; then she’d started to dream of bringing Appleton’s Fairest back to life.

  Trawling the Internet, she learned of an American pomologist by the name of Creighton Lee Calhoun who had saved hundreds of varieties of old Southern apples from extinction. His method was to drive around North Carolina and Tennessee, looking for old apple trees. Whenever he spotted one, he’d ask the owners if they knew the name of the apple. If they could name it, he took a cutting, grafted it onto rootstock, and planted it in his orchard.

  Nell’s quest was different because she was looking for one particular apple. It was possible that some people in Appleton might have a Fairest tree in their gardens, and these isolated examples might have survived after the big orchards were dug up and plowed over in the late 1950s, but she shrank away from the idea of prowling around Appleton, peering over garden walls and knocking on the door and introducing herself whenever she spotted an apple tree. She preferred to keep her distance from the town where she had chosen to live.

  She had gone to the library instead and searched until she found maps showing the precise location of the original orchards. They had been bulldozed over, but since the land was to be used for forestry and grazing, it was possible that a few trees had been spared, if only by accident. The trees would be old now, but apple trees could live more than a hundred years, although they usually stopped bearing fruit after fifty.

  She had marked the position of the old orchards onto an Ordnance Survey map, and set off on foot to explore. The new forest was a monoculture of softwood pines, planted in rigidly straight rows. It was a silent and weirdly lifeless place—native birds didn’t nest in these imported evergreens, and the height and density of the trees shut out light to the forest floor so that only mosses and mushrooms grew there.

  But just as she was about to give up and turn back, she found what she had been looking for—although it was outside the boundaries she had drawn, and the sturdy old tree could never have been part of the old orchards, for it was growing alongside a tumbled pile of rocks that, on closer inspection, turned out to be part of a wall. At one time there had been a building here, maybe a small croft house, maybe just some sort of enclosure for animals, but nothing that belonged in an orchard. She had examined the tree closely, cheered by its obviously vigorous life. She knew it could be a seedling, sprouted two or three decades ago from a Golden Delicious or a Granny Smith core tossed aside by a passing hiker, but her discovery filled her with an absurdly optimistic hope, which persisted despite her long experience with disappointment.

  She took a cutting with her special knife and carried it safely home. The graft was successful—she’d used a commercial rootstock with a particularly high tolerance for damp—and she had waited for three years, to be rewarded at last this summer, when the new tree’s first fruit finally appeared. It was not much of a reward. One apple. One single, yellow apple.

  Her first, sour thought was that here was proof that the tree she’d taken her cutting from had, in fact, been a seedling from a picnicker’s lunch. Twenty years ago, the Golden Delicious, imported from France, had been the most popular apple with the budget-minded British public and could be found in every packed lunch.

  Now, she read over the last page of the photocopied excerpt from Lingerton’s book and wondered. Every description she’d found of Appleton’s Fairest had emphasized its redness. And she didn’t think it was possible for a tree to produce two such distinctly different-looking varieties, unless you got very tricksy with the grafting.

  But it was a fairy tale. Golden apples were the stuff of myth and legend, and that was all.

  She reached for her cup, but the tea had gone cold while she brooded.

  When she woke on Sunday morning, Nell’s jaw ached with tension: She’d been grinding her teeth all night. What had possessed her to invite that librarian to come for dinner? She never did that, ever. Her only other guest in her years at Orchard House had been Lilia, Sam’s sister—arguably self-invited—and that weekend, ending in tears, had set no precedent.

  She wondered how hard it would be to cry off sick. But the library was closed today, and she didn’t have Kathleen’s phone number. Anyway, that was the coward’s way out, and she loathed cowardice perhaps more than any other human weakness.

  She took a deep breath and got up and dressed in the same clothes she’d worn on Saturday. Bathing and what her grandmother had called “titivating” could wait until after she’d done the housework.

  After she’d washed the kitchen floor and vacuumed everywhere else she took a piece of bread and a glass of juice for her breakfast out into the garden. It was another warm, fresh, blue-sky day, promising to shape up into an unseasonable scorcher. The sun on her arms relaxed her, and she strolled around her kitchen-garden kingdom, checking out supplies and planning the evening meal. She could get rid of some of her overabundant tomatoes in a soup for starters, follow that with some sort of pilaf, and a side dish of zucchini cooked with onions, peppers, and tomatoes—or was that too many tomatoes? A simple green salad to follow, in the European fashion, and for dessert…it was too hot for baking, so maybe apple snow, or, if there were still enough fresh blackberries to be found…

  She turned her gaze to the far edge of the garden, where a mass of sprawling wild blackberry bushes remained, after all her savage pruning, like a hedge separating her property from the forest beyond, and went stiff with shock. There was a man. He wasn’t in her garden, he was on the other side of the blackberry bush, but what right did he have, what was he doing, standing there as still as a statue and staring at her?

  Raising her voice, she pitched it at him coldly: “Can I help you?” Arms crossed defensively over her chest, she walked toward him.

  He gave her a friendly wave but did not speak until she drew closer. She took the chance to check him out, even more on her guard because he was definitely her kind of sexy beast. His trousers were old and sloppy, but the plain tee
shirt fitted him snugly, showing off a slender yet muscular build. His short black hair shone in the sun like an animal’s thick, glossy pelt, and his skin made her think of a beautiful, fine-grained wood. His features were regular, his nose hawklike, and there was what might have been a faintly Asiatic slant to his dark eyes. He looked young, but she guessed he was past thirty, a man who had his genes to thank for a perpetually youthful appearance. His smile did not reveal his teeth.

  “I was just admiring your garden. You’ve put in a lot of work.”

  She didn’t smile back. “Do you live around here?”

  “Not for a long time. I’ve just come back. Someone told me there were apple trees at Orchard House again.”

  “I’ve planted a few.”

  “I’d love to see them.”

  “Look, I don’t want to be rude, but this is private property. I don’t do tours.”

  “I know, but…I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. You see, this isn’t a casual inquiry. I’m Ronan Wall.”

  She was no expert on the history of Appleton, but everybody knew the Walls had been one of the major families in the area for a long time. They’d planted the first apple orchards. “Wall as in…the Wall orchards? Wall’s Cider?”

  “The very same. How are the mighty fallen, eh?” He grinned, showing even white teeth and the smallest glimpse of tongue. She felt a twinge of lust. Well, too bad; she’d just have to control herself.

  “Do you know anything about Appleton’s Fairest?”

  His eyebrows rose. “I’d be a liar if I said ‘everything,’ but—what do you want to know?”

  “Everything.” She smiled for the first time and waved her hand over to the right, where there was a gate. “Come in. I’ll show you the orchard, if you’ll let me ask you some questions.”

  “It’s a deal.” He loped along to the gate and came in. “And you are—?”

  “Nell.” She left it at that, just as she did when she’d met someone in a bar or a club in one of the cities she visited from time to time. She turned and led him across the lawn and into the meadow, where clouds of pale butterflies rose and swirled away as they pushed through the high grass.

  He quickened his pace and left the path, crushing down wildflowers as he walked beside her. “How many trees do you have? What are you growing?”

  “Two dozen. I’ve gone for some variety, but I’ve tried to concentrate on older apples that originated in Scotland.”

  “The Fairest?”

  They’d come to the door in the wall and stopped. He gazed at her eagerly, and she frowned. What was he playing at?

  “You should know the answer to that.”

  “You mean…that’s why I’ve come?”

  He was staring at her like she held the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Unsettled, she turned and pulled open the wooden door. “I mean you just told me that you knew everything about Appleton’s Fairest, so you must know—”

  “I said I don’t know everything.”

  Her mouth quirked sarcastically. “I thought that was modesty. Was it irony? Are you going to tell me now that actually you don’t know anything about apples? In that case, what do you want to see my trees for?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’m looking for Appleton’s Fairest. I know—I mean, I was told that the orchards were all destroyed.” He paused, and she knew he was hoping for contradiction.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’ve seen where they used to be. It’s all pine forest where it’s not empty grazing land.”

  “But then somebody told me that there were apple trees at Orchard House again, and I thought, I hoped…”

  An involuntary wave of sympathy for him swept over her. She didn’t want to be the one to cut the line he was clinging to, his last, slender dream that the apple which had made his family’s fortune was not lost forever. How could she, when it was her dream, too?

  Gently, she said, “I hoped to grow it myself. I did some research. I searched the Internet. I wrote to the Royal Horticultural Society—they’ve got over five hundred apple varieties in their collection—but they couldn’t help; they’d never had it.”

  “No, of course not; it would never grow anywhere but here. So, did you manage to find it?”

  She gestured at the open doorway. “Why don’t we go in? I’ll show you my trees. You can give me your opinion on one.”

  She heard his tiny sigh of pleasure as he walked into the orchard behind her, and she warmed to him still more, recognizing a kindred spirit. “I think it must have been fruit orchards that gave people the idea of paradise,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “There couldn’t be a paradise without apple trees.”

  They stood for a moment in silence, just drinking in the atmosphere, the heady scent of apples, of damp earth and growth and decay, the drowsy hum of bees like a note of music in the warm, still air.

  Tentatively she said, “I don’t suppose you ever tasted an Appleton Fairest?”

  “Of course I did. I used to eat them all the time when I was a kid.”

  “Really!” She gave him a sharp look. He shrugged and raised his eyebrows at her surprise.

  “I told you I grew up here. Why don’t you believe me?”

  She couldn’t remember exactly when the orchards had been bulldozed over, but it could have been no later than the early sixties. If he remembered eating the Fairest—if he wasn’t lying—they must have been grown on trees elsewhere, maybe in private gardens. Trees from the 1970s and 1980s could still be bearing fruit today. The idea excited her.

  “Unless you’re a lot older than you look—”

  “I am a lot older than I look.”

  “Do you remember where the apples came from? Who was growing the Fairest when you were a little boy?”

  But his attention had been captured by a small espaliered tree, one of three she’d trained to grow against the wall. It was an Oslin, and she’d harvested its fruits back at the end of August, all except two that had stubbornly refused to ripen. Since then one had fallen, so that now the tree displayed a single, pink-streaked, primrose-yellow globe amid the green leaves. Ronan seemed to go tense at the sight of it, and then approached it with a curious, slow, stalking gait, until he came to an abrupt halt.

  “The old Original apple,” he said in a flat voice.

  He did know his apples. The Oslin was also called the “Original,” in the belief that it was the first apple ever grown in Scotland.

  “You’ve left it very late.”

  She bristled at this note of criticism and felt obliged to explain. “I picked the others a month ago. That one was late ripening.”

  “It’s ready now.”

  “You can have it if you want. Take it. I’ve got plenty inside the house.”

  He didn’t respond; looking around, he’d spotted another solitary apple, her golden mystery fruit. “What’s that one?”

  “I hoped maybe you could tell me.”

  He moved to face her directly, and she saw, with a startled jolt of excitement, that he was aroused. His pupils were dilated, his lips slightly parted, his nostrils flared; his whole demeanor had been changed by desire. They were standing so close, it would have taken no more than a single step from both of them to bring them together. If they’d been in some club or bar in Glasgow, she wouldn’t have waited for second thoughts; she’d have made the move to tell him without words that she felt the same, and they’d have gone somewhere more private. She was aware of the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, and of a sweet, musky scent that seemed to belong to him. The drowsy, droning hum of bees in leaf-shadowed sunshine was like the buzzing of the blood within her veins. It seemed inevitable, foreordained, out of her control. A man and a woman alone among the apple trees…

  Not in her orchard.

  She took several swift steps away from him, walking backward, until she stumbled and nearly fell.

  “No! Don’t touch me!”

  He looked shocked and froze, his arm still
outstretched to arrest her fall. “I was only trying to help. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” She blinked rapidly, trying to clear the spots from her vision, and moved cautiously to establish that she was on solid ground.

  “I wouldn’t hurt you, Nell.”

  She shuddered, and wished she’d never told him her name.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of…”

  “I’m not afraid!” She glared at him angrily; then, because his gaze into her eyes was too intimate, too intrusive, ducked her head and ran a hand through her hair. It felt lank and greasy. “Look, I’m sorry, but I just remembered—I can’t hang around here all day; I’ve got company coming, and loads to do before then. You have to go now. You’ve seen the trees.”

  “Didn’t you want to ask me something?”

  She almost denied it. Bringing his attention back to that tree might bring them back to that dangerous moment of desire. But if it did, she would resist it again. She was not afraid. She had good reasons for sticking to the rules she’d set down for herself: sex only without complications, without commitment, away from home.

  So she said, as calmly as she could, “I wanted to ask you if you recognize that apple.”

  He was still standing beside the tree, which was slightly shorter than he was. He turned to regard it and, as she watched, he reached out a gentle hand to touch the branch from which the single golden apple hung. “I do.”

  “Well?”

  “Appleton’s Fairest is not extinct.”

  “You’re saying…” She stared at it, caught between cynical disbelief and a tremulous hope. “But Appleton’s Fairest was a red apple.”

  “Scarlet Kings,” he said. “And then, once in a lifetime, a single tree produces a sport: a golden queen.”