The Silver Bough (24 page)

“Nothing that I know of.”

“She couldn’t have just stopped—she was too good. If she was only sixteen when she did the drawings in this book…how about that painting upstairs? When did she do that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see a date on it. I’ll try to find out.” She smiled. “I have to thank you for making two big discoveries this morning! I’m going to get on to headquarters, see what I can find out about the painting, and get it on display as soon as possible. If we could uncover
more
work by Emmeline Wall, that would be even better. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

Ashley smiled back, and she felt relieved that the brief unpleasantness about the apple had been smoothed over. It had occurred to her that she’d completely misread the whole situation. Rather than taking the apple, Ashley had been bringing it back. Maybe her grandmother had felt guilty about running off with it, and Ashley had felt moved to return it to the town—but secretly, so her grandmother wouldn’t be branded a thief.

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up about finding much more work by Emmeline Wall,” said Graeme, as they walked back to the foyer. “She died young.”

“What happened?”

“Suicide. She was an unmarried mother. Her father could forgive her anything, but I don’t think the rest of the town felt that way. Could be that’s why her painting wasn’t on display. Bad feelings linger. Even though she was dead, the townsfolk wouldn’t want to glorify someone they considered immoral—and possibly mentally unstable.”

“Are you serious? God, people can be so narrow-minded! She was fantastically talented! That’s what matters.” Animated, Ashley was much more attractive, and Kathleen was startled by a sudden warm rush of affection for the girl. She wondered what it would be like to have a daughter, then backed off from the thought in alarm.

Don’t go getting broody now
, she warned herself.
Bad timing!

She walked with them to the back gate and let them out, then went to lock up the library. It was only after she was back in the house that she realized she still carried the wooden apple in her skirt pocket.

She took it out and set it down on the hall table alongside her heavy ring of keys. The sight of it, first thing in the morning, would remind her to call headquarters and raise the subject of Emmeline’s painting and other important questions about the museum.

 

From
The Silver Bough, Vol. 1:
Scottish Folk-lore and Folk Belief
by F. Marian McNeill
(William MacLellan, Glasgow, 1957)

 

T
HE
Celtic Elysium was situated not, like the heaven of the hymnist, “above the bright blue sky,” but here upon earth; but, as it was a subjective world, its location was vague…. Sometimes it was a mystic green island that drifted on the western seas. Men caught occasional glimpses of it, half hidden in a twinkling mist, but when they attempted to draw near, it vanished beneath the waves…

The Green Island has been seen in almost every latitude from Cape Wrath in Scotland to Cape Clear in Ireland. Sometimes it was identified with a particular isle of the West.

“According to Irish tradition,” says Professor Watson, “Arran was the home of Manannan, the sea-god, and another name for it was
Emain Ablach,
Emain of the Apples. This is, I suppose, equivalent to making Arran the same as Avalon, the Happy Otherworld.”…

To enter this Otherworld before the appointed hour of death, a passport was necessary. This was a silver branch of the mystic apple-tree, laden with blossom or fruit—though sometimes a single apple sufficed—and it was given by the Queen of Elfhame or Fairy Woman to that mortal whose companionship she desired. It served not only as a passport, but also as food; and it had the property of making music so entrancing that those who heard it forgot all their cares and sorrows.

N
ELL WAS UP
and out of the house as soon as it was light, hurrying across the meadow and into the scented hush of the walled orchard, wondering how she could have been fooled.

She had been raised by thoroughly secular people. She’d never belonged to any church; she had no established religious beliefs to console or disturb her. But she was not an atheist, and she couldn’t accept an entirely materialist view of life. She knew that her husband—and almost certainly her parents, too—had believed that death was the end, but she felt differently. People were more than their material bodies; they had souls, and those might be eternal. She’d read about karma and reincarnation and astral planes and physicists’ theories of other worlds, never quite finding the answer she was looking for, but believing it was out there. As for an actual, physical Heaven, with a geographical location, that idea had seemed too naïve to take seriously—until last night.

She knew the meaning of the silver bough in folklore, but what about in real life, in her own orchard? Could it possibly be a sign from Sam, an invitation to join him in the afterlife? And if so, was that more wonderful than terrifying?

And so her thoughts had run on until, at some point during the long, restless night, it had finally occurred to her that the man calling himself Ronan Wall, the man she had let into her orchard, might be responsible for the blossoming branch.

She remembered how he’d touched it—he’d wanted her to remember that. Of course it was a trick; the flowers were made of silk or paper, and he’d turn up the next day to pass himself off as special ambassador to the Otherworld. No need to ask why: He was a con man, simple as that. He’d picked her because she had money, a house, land, and, as a lonely widow without family or friends, she made an easy mark. He’d done his research and decided to use her grief, her longing, and her interest in apple trees against her. If he really was, as he claimed, a descendant of the Walls, he might be driven by more than the usual con man’s desire to profit at someone else’s expense; maybe he felt her property was rightfully his. Oh, but why make excuses? He was a con artist, and she’d been extraordinarily gullible. At least it wasn’t too late. She wouldn’t let him set any more traps for her. She wouldn’t believe a word he said.

She half expected the blossom to have disappeared—otherwise, she might find it had been an illusion, convincing only in the half-light of dusk, which daylight would dispel.

But it was still there, clustered thickly along the same slender branch from which the single golden apple hung. She put her nose right up to one cluster of the creamy, pink-tinged flowers, close enough that she felt the pollen-bearing stamens tickle her nostrils, and inhaled the soft, sweet scent. It was real, all right, and the branch, too, was natural. If there was some explanation other than magic for the out-of-season flowering, she was convinced it could not be human trickery.

She aimed a mental apology at Ronan Wall, wherever he might be, and lingered to stare at the singular apple. It was ripe and ready for picking and should not be left for much longer. The sight of it made her mouth water. What a great breakfast it would be, eaten just-picked, out of doors. But superstition, or something else, stayed her hand. She didn’t have to believe in magic to feel it was wrong to go against the local custom. Just because the apple had appeared on her tree, on her land, didn’t make the decision of what to do with it hers alone. In the old days, the community had decided, choosing an Apple Queen to share the fruit with her love, and their good fortune spread to the whole town—at least, that was the story. There wasn’t time now to organize a competition, but there must be plenty of deserving, attractive young women about the place. She should ask Kathleen…

She remembered then, with a little lurch of her heart, how things were: She had totally alienated her one potential friend in this town, cutting her off and willing her to leave last night. She was on her own again. There wasn’t anyone else she could ask. She thought of Jean, the woman who ran the organic shop, and remembered her broad Yorkshire accent: another incomer. So was the plumber, and that Mr. Murphy who’d put up her greenhouse…but did it matter where they came from originally? The Murphys had been here nearly thirty years; they had grownup children, one of whom worked as a hairdresser.

She imagined going into the warm, scented air of Curl Up & Dye and presenting the golden apple to the girls who worked there. “To the Fairest!” she might announce, and then what? Toss it like a bridal bouquet and see who managed to catch it? Suggest a beauty competition to be judged by the star of the local football team? Wouldn’t they just laugh at her? And wouldn’t they be right?

She left the orchard and made her way back to the house, pausing on her way to pick a handful of fat, glossy blackberries to add to her muesli. Already the day was shaping up into a fine, dry, bright one, and she guessed it would be unseasonably hot again. This late spurt of unusually warm weather wasn’t enough to explain the sudden appearance of the blossom on her tree; but since she’d ruled out trickery, she had to try to think up some other, nonsupernatural, explanation for it.

As she ate breakfast, idly swirling the fragments of mint leaves in her teacup, she thought of the tree she’d found growing wild, the one she’d taken the cutting from. For all she knew it was a late bloomer, or some strange variety that customarily carried apples and blossom at the same time.

She still had the map, and a penciled “X” marked the spot where she’d found the solitary apple tree. It would be easy to find; she could walk there in under forty minutes. Comparing her tree with its parent might not tell her much, but it was such an obvious thing to do, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before.

Two hours later, she was walking in circles, stubbornly sure of her ground, yet lost. She trudged on, wiping the sweat from her face and getting more and more thirsty and hot, and more and more cross with herself every time she stopped to consult the map. She should have been able to find the site, even if the tree itself had gone. She remembered it so clearly: on the edge of the pine plantation, near a stream, growing just beside a pile of rocks she’d decided must be the remains of a cottage, or, at least a walled enclosure. Why couldn’t she find that, at least?

Of course, things did grow incredibly rapidly in this moist, mild climate, even though the soil was thin; maybe the pile of rocks she remembered was now buried beneath brambles and bracken, completely hidden from sight.

For about the sixth time she returned to the stream. Already she had traced its entire course, remembering that as she’d taken a cutting from the tree she’d heard the musical rush of water over stones like the sound of tinkling bells. Houses were generally built close to a source of water, so she felt certain she could trust her memory. But when she reached the bubbling spring that was the source of the stream, and there was still no sign of a single apple tree, she had to accept that it must have been uprooted or chopped down.

She crouched, plunged her hands into the chilly water, and splashed her face, then raised the fresh liquid in handfuls and drank. Gradually, cooler and calmer, she considered another possibility: that she’d made a mistake when she marked the map, that it was beside another stream (after all, there were plenty of them), even farther from the original orchards, that she’d found her mystery tree.

It wasn’t very likely, for she was a competent map-reader, but she wasn’t ready to give up and go home, so she checked the position of the next closest stream on the map, and struck out for it, striding along confidently despite the lack of a path.

Within fifteen minutes she knew that she had never come this way before. The ground began to rise more steeply, and the terrain changed, becoming rockier and more barren. This was not land hospitable to trees. Heather and spiky broom grew in abundance, nothing much taller. She spotted one small rowan tree, its slender branches already heavy with red berries, and remembered that they grew in the most inhospitable of sites, sometimes sprouting from a covering of moss on solid rock.

She knew she would find no apple trees on such a barren moor, but she did not turn back. The weather was glorious; she enjoyed being out in the open, and found it especially pleasant to stride along quickly, stretching her legs, after creeping along, peering at the ground for familiar landmarks. It was a disappointment not to have found the tree, but it didn’t really matter.