The Silver Bough

by Lisa Tuttle

  “The word just means original inhabitants,” Kathleen explained, grimacing slightly as she wrestled with the photocopier. “Everyone else I’ve met in this town is an incomer—or their parents were.”

  “Shona was born here. So were her parents. And I think my great-grandparents—”

  “I’m talking about the way people talk about themselves. Most places, if people grow up in the same place their grandparents were born, they feel pretty rooted. They think this is their land. But on the Apple, two or three generations doesn’t seem to be enough to stop people thinking of themselves as incomers. Ina McClusky is the only one I’ve met who talks about her family having lived here ‘forever.’ Of course, she also talks as if she doesn’t live in Appleton.”

  “But she does?”

  “Her house is just on the other side of the harbor. A hundred years ago, I’m told, people referred to this side as ‘the town’ and that side as ‘the Ob’—which is the Gaelic word for bay. The Ob never was a separate town, really; it never had a church or a school, but the people who lived there felt they formed a separate community.” She handed over the photocopied page.

  “Thanks. So…you think Ina McClusky was friends with Phemie?”

  “She was librarian here for years and years, and even though she came from the Ob, she seems to have known absolutely everyone in the town. Sharp as a whip—better memory than mine.”

  “I’d like to talk to her.”

  “I’ll tell you what—I was planning on going to see her today. She still comes into the library regularly, but she’s getting frail. She doesn’t complain, but I’m sure it’s hard on her—I thought I could help her out with an occasional home delivery of new books. I could take you along; I’m sure she’d love to meet you. She enjoys company. Why don’t you come back here just before five o’clock, and I’ll take you with me?”

  “OK. Cool. Thanks.” She shifted her bag onto her shoulder. “See you later, then.”

  It wasn’t until she was out of the library and half a block away that it struck her that she’d stolen something from the library. She, who’d never been a thief, never shoplifted like some of her friends, never done anything more reprehensible than swipe a few potato chips off a friend’s plate, or sneak an extra chocolate…

  And if that wasn’t really theft, was this? It couldn’t be a crime to take two bits of dried-up apple! If anyone else had found them, wouldn’t they have thrown them away? She didn’t even want them—what on earth had come over her?

  She walked on, brooding about that moment of madness. Something had made her take them; there must be some reason, buried deep in her brain. She knew she couldn’t take them back, any more than she could throw them away, not unless she could explain what she’d done, not unless she knew what they were for.

  She saw that she’d reached the point where the road branched, the spot where she and the stranger who looked like Ronan Lachlan Wall had parted. Where to now? Up there, he’d said, was the cemetery. She glanced at her watch, saw that she had more than an hour to kill before Kathleen would expect her back at the library, so she turned up the cemetery road.

  It was a hike; farther than she’d expected. Gradually the houses fell away; and she was out in the countryside, with nowhere she could sit down and rest, and not even trees to provide shelter from the relentless sun. She was thirsty and tired. Watching a couple of cars go past, she wondered about hitching a lift. After she found her way to the cemetery—assuming she ever did—she would still face a long walk. Maybe she should turn back now? Checking her watch, she saw, to her annoyance, that it had stopped.

  But then, as she rounded a bend, she saw the cemetery was just ahead; at least, she assumed those grey stone walls in the embrace of heavy dark evergreens must surround a graveyard. She picked up her pace, thinking she didn’t have much time.

  Gravel crunched beneath her feet as she stepped off the main road and through the open gates. The coolness inside, in the tree-shaded walkway, was as welcome as a drink of water. She breathed in deeply and smelled damp earth, vegetation, and a touch of rankness suggestive of cats. She hurried ahead, out of the dim shelter, toward ranks of graves lying like a crowded miniature suburb before her: mostly simple headstones, but there were also a few carved Celtic crosses, some pedestals supporting urns or melancholy angels, and there were a couple of obelisks, which towered like skyscrapers by comparison with the modest scale of everything else.

  She paused to read the first few stones she came to:

  Erected by

  Dugald Murray

  in loving memory of

  his beloved wife

  Margaret MacDonald

  who died 21st August 1941

  aged 54

  In loving memory of

  Malcolm MacNeill

  Departed

  1st November 1945

  aged 42

  also his wife

  Flora Galbraith

  died 29 December 1984

  She moved on past the newer-looking stones in search of something more interesting. The graveled path wound away ahead and branched off in several directions. Some areas were well tended but plain and bare, while others, perhaps the older ones, were more picturesquely planted with trees and bushes. She left the path to scramble up a small rise, where the gravestones, instead of standing in neat rows, were more of a jumble, leaning in different directions. She spotted one almost hidden by the spiky, glossy foliage of a holly bush. Leaning closer she could make out a very weatherworn shape of a skull and crossed bones, but all the writing on the pale, pitted stone—assuming there had ever been any—was completely worn away.

  She straightened up and looked around, realizing that the graveyard was larger than she’d first thought. She caught sight of a walled structure not far away and, curious, headed toward it. As she drew nearer she could see that it lacked a roof; it wasn’t a tomb or mausoleum after all, just an enclosure, probably a family plot, like a private, members-only graveyard within the larger cemetery. As she stepped around a small tree she could see large black metal gates across the opening in the fourth wall secured with a length of chain and a heavy padlock.

  She also saw that she was not alone. Standing by the gate and peering through the bars into the enclosure was a man. Although he was turned away from her, she knew him immediately, with an almost painful surge of excitement.

  She walked a bit more briskly toward him. “Ronan Wall,” she called loudly, and saw his back stiffen. “Ronan Lachlan Wall.”

  He turned, looking defeated and sad, not so young and smug and happy as in the picture taken with his fiancée more than fifty years ago. It should have seemed crazy, but it didn’t. Somehow, suddenly, she just knew he was the man from the picture, not his grandson. He was the very same man her grandmother had fled from more than half a century ago.

  When they were aged about twelve or thirteen, Ashley and Freya had developed a sort of fixation on vampires. The fantasy they’d shared, part fear but more desire, stirred again in her memory as she met the stranger’s gaze. She remembered confessing to Freya, who had agreed, that even though it was wrong, and scary, and deadly dangerous, she wasn’t sure she’d put up much of a struggle if she ever met one.

  She didn’t think Ronan was a vampire. But she didn’t think he was simply and entirely human, either. The lure of his difference had been tugging at her ever since their gazes first intersected, and now an impatient desire flared up in her.

  She went closer to him, so close that they were nearly touching, but still he didn’t move.

  “It’s OK,” she said softly. She put her hands on his face and kissed him on the mouth; kissed him so long and passionately that he had to respond.

  FIVE O’CLOCK CAME and went with no sign of Ashley. Kathleen closed the library only a few minutes after the normal time, but then hung around for a good ten minutes, peering through the leaded-glass windows of the Ladies’ Reading Room, expecting to see the girl come galloping along the Esplanade, breathle
ss and horrified to discover that the big front doors were closed. It never happened.

  Finally, mentally cursing the breed of tardy and unreliable teenagers, she went out to her car alone. She was awfully disappointed—not so much for herself, she thought, as for Ina McClusky. The old lady would have enjoyed a new young person’s company, the treat of being able to talk about the past to an interested listener.

  Ina McClusky lived on the Ob, almost as far as Sandy Point, in the small fisherman’s cottage where she’d grown up. Her family had lived there for generations. She was the first to get a higher education, and she’d brought it back home, getting the librarian’s job in Appleton because of the wartime shortage of men. Kathleen wondered if the reason Ina had never married was that same war, which had killed so many. She thought of the engagement photograph she’d photocopied for Ashley. Ronan Lachlan Wall had come home from the war and, unlike many, he’d prospered. He’d also chosen to marry a woman fifteen years younger than himself and not someone of his own generation like, for example, the still-young librarian. There might have been class issues involved, too. Graeme had told her—before he got obsessed with folklore and geology, back when he was researching social history—that not only did the Ob and the toon keep themselves separate, but fishermen always married women from fishing families; they needed wives who understood their lives and could contribute the skills they’d learned from childhood. Ina had grown up in a fishing family, but she’d priced herself out of that marriage market. And a member of the Wall family wouldn’t marry so far beneath him. He’d be more likely to choose the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, someone who would have brought her own property to the marriage.

  Class barriers still existed, they’d just changed along with people’s lifestyles. There were very few fishermen left; their wives, no longer needed to gut the fish or mend the lines, didn’t have to be born to fishermen, only brought up expecting to work hard for little reward. And the people at the top—the celebrities—well, they married other celebrities. Rock stars married actors, or models, or others with equally famous faces; they didn’t fall in love with unknown librarians.

  In the nineteenth century there had been a regular ferry link to connect the Ob with the toon, carrying passengers and goods from one shore to the other; but these days, a car could make the journey on the road that curved around the head of the loch in about five minutes. As she parked on the narrow street in front of the bright blue cottage with white trim, Kathleen made a determined effort to put Dave Varney out of her head.

  There was a knocker in the shape of a mermaid on the heavily varnished front door—an unusual touch of fantasy for the practical Miss McClusky, she thought, lifting the brass tail.

  After a few seconds, the door was opened by a bent, white-haired old woman. Her narrow, sunken-cheeked face lit up. “Kathleen! What a lovely surprise, my dear! Do come in.”

  “Hello, Ina. I’ve brought you some new books.”

  “Ooh!” Her eyes narrowed still more as her smile grew wider, and she rubbed her hands together. “How nice! I can’t wait. Do you know, I was just wondering what I would read tonight. Please come in. I hope you’ll stay long enough for a cup of tea?”

  “Thank you.” She followed her inside, noticing that the old woman seemed to bend even farther forward, her humped back even more prominent than it had been two weeks ago.

  “Sit down, dear, and I’ll put the kettle on. Earl Grey, or ordinary?”

  “Ordinary, please. My tastes are very common.”

  “My friend, when I shared digs in Glasgow, always called it ‘builder’s tea.’”

  Kathleen had heard this comment before, but smiled as if it were new, and sank down onto the sturdy old two-seater couch. The room was small and crowded with a lifetime’s accumulation of things, but tidy and dust-free as always. For once there was no fire in the grate, but everything else was exactly as she remembered it, from the china ornaments on every available surface to the television in the corner which wore a lace tablecloth, as if it were a caged bird that had to be kept dark and quiet during the day.

  Ina soon returned with a tea tray, and once she’d made sure her guest was comfortable, with a mug of milky tea and a pile of cookies, both chocolate and plain, began to quiz her about the library. Even though she’d retired more than twenty years ago, she still took a keen and somewhat proprietary interest in what went on there. These conversations could be tricky when they touched on decisions made at headquarters, so Kathleen tried to restrict them to book chat and innocuous gossip about people who used the library. Ina particularly enjoyed tales of visiting Americans and Canadians in search of their Appleton roots.

  Evading her question about when their library would be catching up to the rest of the country by getting computers, she offered, “We had a young American girl in today, looking for information about her grandmother. I think you might remember her—Euphemia MacFarlane?”

  Ina frowned. “You think I knew her?”

  “I thought you might remember something about her. She was the Apple Queen in nineteen fifty, and—”

  “Phemie! Phemie MacFarlane—I ken who you mean, now. She was the lassie who ran away. But she’s much younger than I am—she was only a schoolgirl last time I saw her.”

  “She’s dead now,” Kathleen said gently.

  Ina shrugged. “So’s the town, and long before her.” She fixed her eyes on her guest. “She was the Apple Queen. After she left, the crop failed.”

  “Oh, but that’s—I mean, she couldn’t be to blame for something like that. That’s what’s known as an act of God, isn’t it? It’s because of the weather, the soil, I don’t know, but—”

  “People blamed her.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  She smiled mirthlessly. “Life isn’t fair—you’re old enough to know that, Kathleen.”

  “Do you think it was her fault?”

  She pursed her lips and set down her mug. “Look at it this way. She was the Apple Queen. If all had gone well, she’d have had all praise for it.”

  “And if it hadn’t? Look, we know the apple crop failed.”

  “But it would have been all right if she’d stayed.”

  Kathleen gulped her tea, wondering how soon she could leave and still be polite. Did Ina believe what she was saying, or was she playing devil’s advocate? She glanced at the faded blue eyes and didn’t say anything.

  After a moment, Ina went on. “She was supposed to marry Mr. Wall. That was her choice—nobody forced it on her; if she didn’t want him, there were plenty other young maids who did. He was the last of the Walls. He owned the cider mill and the orchards, and there was more—a big house, land, and stocks and savings, I’ve no doubt. One bad harvest didn’t have to mean the end for him, not if he’d stayed. If he’d had his loving wife beside him. But she ran off and he lost the heart to stay. He was gone within a month of her. I don’t know what became of him, but without him the business collapsed like a house of cards, and with it, the town.

  “It wasn’t just himself he took away, he took his fortune. It turned out that he’d mortgaged the mill and all his lands, bought his escape at a very high price for the town. Except for that, it could have been very different. One bad harvest didn’t have to mean the end, but there was no way to ride it out. There was nothing to secure a new loan, and there were all his debts to pay.”

  “I see,” said Kathleen, taking a long, relieved breath. “So that’s why you blame Phemie MacFarlane. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to blame Mr. Wall? He sounds like the villain of the piece. Maybe Phemie had to run away, to save herself.”

  “People think too much about themselves. What about helping others? What about saving the community? Phemie was no victim. I always thought they were in it together, and they laid their careful plans, and ran away from here intending to get together somewhere else.”

  “Well, they didn’t,” she said firmly. “Phemie MacFarlane married an American, a man called Kaldis. And she woul
d never say anything about where she’d come from. Her son didn’t know he had cousins in Scotland until after her death.”

  “And what about Ronan Wall?”

  Kathleen set down her empty mug. “I don’t know. He disappeared.” She took a chance. “What was he like?”

  Ina flinched. “You ask me? Why do you think I would know anything about him?”

  She smiled placatingly. “I thought you knew everyone in the town—all those years in the library.”

  “He never came in. Not that he was a philistine, mind you, but he didn’t need it. He had the money to buy plenty of books. He took two newspapers, and he had a regular account with a bookseller in Edinburgh, just like his grandfather.”

  “His grandfather the architect?”

  “That was his only living relative.”

  “Did you ever meet him? I mean Alexander Wall.”

  “He died when I was a wee lass. And Mr. Lachlan, that was his uncle, he died before I was born, of course; died before the library was built. Now, there was an interesting and learned old gentleman! My mother met him a few times. She used to find things for him on the shore—all the children round about knew that he was a collector who’d pay for any treasures they might find when they were beachcombing.”

  Kathleen remembered hearing about Lachlan Wall’s collection of oddities. “What sort of treasures did your mother find?”

  The old woman’s face became even more shriveled in thought. “I should be able to tell you…but I can’t rightly call them to mind.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “We could ask her.”

  “Who?” Kathleen blinked in confusion.

  “Who were we talking about?” Ina rebuked her. “My mother! Would you like to speak to her?”

  Kathleen swallowed hard. “I had no idea your mother was…still with us.”

  “Certainly my mother is still with us. She’s upstairs. Will I take you to meet her?”

  There being no polite way to refuse, she nodded agreement and got to her feet. Even if she’d given birth at a ridiculously early age, Ina’s mother would now be well past one hundred years old, and while that was not absolutely impossible, Kathleen wondered why this was the first she’d heard of her.