The Silver Bough (41 page)

It was still here. That meant that
he
would have to come to her again to get it. She only had to wait.

It should have been easy. But, for the first time since she’d planted her apple trees, she drew no comfort from standing among them. Instead of feeling safely enclosed within the walls of her orchard, she felt dangerously isolated.

She looked at the apple again. There could be no magic without it, no rescue, no miraculous escape, no winning of her heart’s desire—or his. He
had
to come here, towing along whichever young lovely he’d managed to seduce; she only had to wait, and step forward when he came through the door in the wall, and offer herself—she had no doubt that he’d forget the other woman immediately and share the apple with her instead.

Still her anxiety grew. She thought of the fog creeping in outside the sheltering walls, and, as she gazed at the golden apple, more blossom fell like snowflakes to the ground. What if it was too late? Or what if Ronan, as stubborn as she, refused to make another choice, or to return here uninvited?

Abruptly she turned on her heel and headed for the door in the wall. She was no good at being passive and simply waiting for others to decide her fate. As soon as she’d left the walled orchard she felt better, more hopeful, certain she’d made the right move. If there
was
some great power at work that had directed her steps so that she’d found the wild-growing apple tree to take a graft from when it was needed, maybe it would help her find Ronan.

She had no plan beyond going down the hill and driving around, but even that turned out to be impossible: her car was dead. She wasted no time in trying to fix it, seeing in its failure the hand of fate once again. In a car, in such a fog, she might so easily drive past him. If they were both on foot, they might be drawn together…

The fog had grown thicker. At the bottom of the hill, she couldn’t see more than a foot in front of her. And the world was eerily silent. There were no crying seagulls, no sound of wind, not even the crashing of wave against rock, which she’d normally expect to hear along this stretch of the road. There was nothing but a briny tang in the air to indicate the nearness of the sea. Maybe everything else had vanished, leaving her alone in the fog, she thought. Maybe this was death.

And then she heard voices. She stopped and held her breath, straining to hear. She could barely make out the words, but one of them was his.

Her heart leaped, and her footsteps quickened, and all of a sudden, there he was, a familiar shape in the thick, foggy air.

“Ronan!”

The joy that lit his face when he saw her told her everything she wanted to know, but she asked anyway. “It’s not too late?”

He made his face a blank. “Too late for what,
Mrs.
Westray?”

“To save myself.”

He said nothing.

She went on, “I’ve changed my mind. I will share the apple with you.”

The woman beside him clutched his arm and pressed against him possessively. “It
is
too late,” she said. “Too late for you, anyway. He’s with me.”

Nell took her in with a single glance. Tall, slender, with a mass of curly black hair and full, pouting lips—she was just a pretty child. No competition. She met Ronan’s gaze again.

“I shouldn’t have sent you away. If what you told me is true…”

“I couldn’t lie to you.”

“I won’t lie to
you
,” she responded, making a swift decision, hoping she wouldn’t regret the easy lies she
could
have told him. “My husband is dead, but I still love him. If I could have my heart’s desire, that stupid accident would never have happened, and I’d still have my life with him—I’d never have come to Appleton, never planted my orchard—there wouldn’t even be this apple that you want, understand?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure…”

“I want back my life with Sam—
that’s
my heart’s desire; not you.”

All of a sudden he smiled, and the incredible tenderness in his expression took her breath away. “All right. If I can give you that, I will.”

“No!” The girl yelped. “Are you crazy? She doesn’t even want you! She loves somebody else—so why would you want her?”

He gently disengaged his arm from hers, and looked down into her eyes. “Well, then, I have to ask: Why would you want
me
?”

The girl gave a sharp gasp, as if she’d just been punched, and tears filled her wide, shocked eyes. In spite of her own concerns, Nell felt sorry for her.

“Because I love you,” she whispered.

“No.” Ronan looked at her without any obvious emotion. “You don’t love me, Ashley. You’d like to be in love and lose yourself in it. You gave yourself to me because you’re a lovely, warmhearted, generous girl, and I thought I needed you. But I don’t; and you don’t love me.”

He left her then and slipped his arm around Nell’s waist, and almost immediately they were striding through the pale, obscuring clouds. It was like traveling in a dream, she thought, for although she could see no more than a foot in front of her, she had no fear, certain she was protected by the strong, warm arm around her waist, and that no misstep was possible.

Her thoughts flew ahead to the orchard where, once before, she’d imagined making love with Ronan beneath the fragrant trees. She felt a pleasurable tingle. This time she would not resist. This time, she would let it happen. But even as she glimpsed the sign for Orchard House looming out of the mist, he was pulling her past it.

“Hey, where are we going? That’s the bottom of my driveway.”

“I know. It’s not much farther now. Hard to tell in this fog, but I think we’re nearly there.”

“Where? The apple’s still in my orchard; I didn’t bring it.”

“That doesn’t matter now.”

He sounded confident, and she’d already made up her mind to do whatever he said, but she felt the faint, chilly touch of uncertainty, something colder than the fog wrapping around her, insinuating itself damply into her skin. “So where are we going? We can’t go much farther; we’re nearly at the landslide now.”

“I think those are the rocks,” he said. “Can you see them? Like warped church spires, pushing through the clouds.”

She knew the rocks he meant, those strange shapes looming over the road on the seaward side. At the sight of them, she stopped short, her heart pounding harder with a sudden unease.

“Don’t stop now, come on, just a little farther,” he said, pulling her with him off the road, onto the grassy verge. She dug her heels in, resisting.

“What’s wrong?” He spoke gently.

“This is where his mother jumped off the cliff.”

Nell started at the sound of Ashley’s voice, so close to her ear. She’d had no idea the girl was still following them; the fog muffled everything.

“Ashley, go away,” said Ronan.

“I won’t. You have to tell her the truth. It’s not fair. It’s not right to try to trick her into it. Like you were going to trick me.” She turned her face to Nell. Her eyes looked huge, and two dark red spots burned in a face that was otherwise very pale. “He told me we had to go through a doorway. Did he tell you that? I bet you didn’t know that his mother did a whole book of sketches called
Doorways
. The very last one in the book was a picture of the rocks and the sky and the sea, seen from the side of the road. Right here.” She stamped her foot on the ground and waved at the wall of mist obscuring the sea. “It was a picture of the sea and sky framed by those big pinnacles of rocks. And guess what? That’s where she killed herself. She jumped off the cliff between those rocks. That was her doorway out of this world.”

Feeling a little sick, Nell looked at Ronan.

He kept his eyes calmly fixed on hers. “She did jump. She did leave this world. She didn’t die.”

“Just because they never found her body—
if
that’s even true—it doesn’t mean she was OK,” Ashley cried desperately. “Please don’t jump. Ronan, I don’t care if you like her more than me, you can share the apple with her, I don’t mind. But don’t jump. At least wait until the fog clears.”

“You don’t understand. It’ll never clear if we don’t go,” he said flatly. “Now back off, Ashley. This is nothing to do with you.”

The tone of his voice made her back up a pace or two, but the girl didn’t give up. Nell saw that she was trembling but determined as she stared at her. “You’re a sacrifice—did you know that? He thinks the two of you have to die to save this place.”

Ronan touched Nell’s chin to make her look at him. “We’re not going to die,” he said quietly. “There’s no death. It’s a new life for us both.
Will
you share this apple with me?”

Confused, she saw that he was holding two little dark brown crescents of dried fruit. Where had they come from? She thought of the fresh, ripe apple still hanging on the tree, and was sorry that she would never taste it. Although she could not see anything but fog on either side of them, she could feel the nearness of the sea, and she knew that the land dropped away very suddenly. A few steps in that direction would end in a nasty fall. Was that the plan?

She said, uncertainly, “Couldn’t we go back to the orchard? I thought…don’t we have to make love first?”

He grinned. “Is that disappointment I hear in your voice, my sweet? My, my, what would your husband say?”

Her face felt hot. She opened her mouth to make some snappish retort, and as soon as her lips were parted, he pushed the dried apple through, and, with his other hand, popped the other half into his own mouth.

The taste was astonishingly intense; her mouth flooded with saliva, and at once she smelled apples everywhere, as if she were standing in a small, unventilated room where the walls were lined with shelves and racks full of ripe fruits, some of them so overripe they were beginning to ferment. She chewed, quickly, and the taste became even richer, headier, alcoholic.

A ray of sunshine cut through the fog. Turning her head, she saw not the sea that she knew had to be there, but a narrow pathway stretching ahead, winding and vanishing in the mist and clouds. She smelled apple blossom and knew that somewhere very near was a springtime orchard.

Ronan gripped her hand. She didn’t hesitate. They walked forward together.

Then she was falling.

She gasped and flailed her arms, but the emptiness had gone; she was contained, held, safe in his arms. Although she was still feeling giddy, she knew it would pass. There was no danger. It was only a brief dream of falling. She was grounded, alive, at home, where she belonged, naked in her lover’s arms, and the smell of his warm skin was sweeter than apples, more intoxicating than wine. The great upwelling of love that overtook her was so powerful, her pleasure in his touch so complete, that she couldn’t think of anything else. And yet there was no urgency, no hunger in her love for him; although it was intensely sensual and physical, it was not sexual in the usual way. His warm, close presence was all that she desired.

Gradually that feeling began to ebb. It was another dream, like the previous nightmare of emptiness and falling, but it was more meaningful, more true to her life, and she did not have to let it go entirely. It became a happy memory, part of the background, as the reality of her present surroundings intruded and gradually overwhelmed everything else.

It was her real life. She was waking. She was lying inside an enclosed space, on a thin foam mattress and pillow, cocooned inside a sleeping bag. She knew she wasn’t on solid ground as she became aware that the strong, irregular motion in the background was not a dream. Finally, smell, that most potent sense, kicked in and she inhaled salt water, varnish, and a whiff of mildew. Then she knew for certain that she had been sleeping alone: his close, warm weight, that naked body, had been only a dream.

Groggy and confused, she opened her eyes and sat up carefully, aware now that she was exactly where she should be, in her bunk on board
Circe,
Sam’s boat. Well,
their
boat, technically, since he’d with all his worldly goods her endowed in the marriage ceremony more than two years ago, but she still thought of it as his.

“Sam?” Her voice bounced back to her, muffled and weak in the close confines of the cabin. Where was he? Why was she alone belowdecks?

She fought her way free of the sleeping bag and rolled to her feet just as an especially strong wave hit the boat and jarred her sideways. She banged her arm painfully on a bulkhead as she struggled to keep her balance, and the pain was enough to assure her that this was no dream. Why had she thought it might be? Her mental disequilibrium increased. Of course she knew where she was,
when
it was—that other life, that other person was just a dream.

But what kind of a dream? How was it possible for a mere dream to make her feel that five years or more had passed in a single night?

She’d been a different person in the dream: older, harder, sadder, living a very different, solitary life. She’d never had a dream remotely like that before. In the dream—she felt sick to remember it—she was a widow, Sam had died in an accident on this very boat, on solitary watch during a storm like the one that it seemed, from the boat’s pitching and heaving, they were going through now.

Her stomach lurched. Panic gripped her. She prayed it was not already too late, the dream a premonition of what was to come. With trembling fingers she managed to zip herself into her heavy weather gear, then she scrambled up the steps, out through the hatch, and immediately found herself in a different world of wind and noise and water.