The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  Sergeant Howie was already eyeing a tray of brownish apples and wondering how, if one of these breeds of fruit was proving to be poisonous, he would ever be able to tell which it was, let alone get hold of it and test it. On what, for instance? The gillie’s horse? Somebody’s tame rabbit? Ridiculous, of course. Once identified, he must get it back to the mainland for expert analysis. Always supposing there was anything at all in this rather wild theory of his. But it was a theory about Rowan’s death and lack of a death certificate that, at least, provided a motive. The fruit of this island was clearly a matter of life and death to the entire community.

  Lord Summerisle had finished lighting a number of lamps and joined the sergeant by the brownish apples, fingering one and speaking of it with affection.

  ‘You are looking, Sergeant, at the great-grandparents of the Summerisle Famous apple. Ashmead’s Kernel here on my left was originally raised by a Dr Ashmead of Gloucester in the year 1710. As you can see, it is a grey-brown russet, which is not particularly attractive in appearance but was originally selected on account of its age and excellent flavour, superior, many have judged, to the famous Cox’s Orange pippin. Here, see for yourself.’

  Taking a curiously shaped (long handled, short, stubby bladed) knife from his pocket, Lord Summerisle split the apple deftly into two segments, handing one to Howie who suddenly, ridiculously, he realized, hesitated to eat it. But Lord Summerisle bit into the segment left in his own hand, and Howie immediately followed suit.

  ‘Very sweet!’ was Howie’s considered comment.

  ‘As I say,’ agreed Lord Summerisle, ‘it has a fine flavour but its appearance is somewhat against it and it has a regrettable tendency to shrink in refrigeration. Now let’s look over here …’

  Lord Summerisle was a professional in his element and Howie found a liking for him, in this capacity, that he could never accord him in his role as semifeudal aristocrat, forever justifying his bountifulness to the people of Summerisle. Meanwhile, the apple expert was holding forth:

  ‘In order to combat the refrigeration problem Greatgrandfather crossed it with Saint Athelstan’s pippin, an orange, flushed russet of great sturdiness and quite phenomenal shelf life, discovered about 1830 by a Mr Talmadge of Saint Ives in Cornwall. Receptivity to the beneficial effects of the Gulf Stream, combined with a high resistance to saltwater air currents, was bred in at this stage.’

  As Lord Summerisle pointed out the contours of this apple and explained its manifest uniqueness, Howie experienced that pleasant shock that comes from suddenly seeing in nature new horizons, undreamed-of patterns, that, like the world of atoms and particles, are all around us, but which we are all too seldom privileged to see because we know not either where or how to look.

  ‘Note,’ Lord Summerisle was saying, as if he were Lord Clark surveying a Botticelli for a television audience, ‘the large, partly open eye with convergent to erect sepals set in a wide, shallow, unusually even basin. Extraordinary, isn’t it?’

  All this to describe just the top of an apple. Lord Summerisle went on talking about the family trees of his apples as if he were discussing a genealogy from the Almanach de Gotha or Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage. Howie, who would have been bored or resentful had the dynasty been of dukes or earls, found the fact that it was the pedigree of an apple quite fascinating.

  ‘I suppose the introduction of all these new strains is done by grafting?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s one method but when a notable marriage is to be consummated between two recognized apples we preside over the mating ourselves. We call it “mating the strains”. It is like the “bedding” of a young couple after a wedding. Great fun but also a moving, tender moment. I have a special glasshouse for it. Two absolutely faultless trees of each species are housed in the glasshouse. We see that there is no insect whatever enclosed with the bridal pair. Those sexy old bees can be fatal, covered with illegitimate pollen as they are. Because it is one of the few little privileges that I like to preserve, I, myself, take a very fine camel-hair paintbrush, scoop up the pollen from a single, perfect blossom of one tree, and deposit it on the virgin stamen of a single perfect blossom of the other tree. Then we pray.’

  ‘That reminds me of a little poem we used to learn in school,’ said Howie, quite lost for a moment in the minutiae of God’s creation:

  ‘Who hammered,

  Who wrought you?

  From iron silver vapour

  God was my maker.’

  ‘Exactly!’ agreed Lord Summerisle. ‘As the snowflake, so the apple. Which god is little more than semantics! That obstacle to ecumenism.’

  While he had been talking, Lord Summerisle split the Saint Athelstan’s pippin in his hand with his special knife. Howie was on the point of taking a segment and tasting it, when Lord Summerisle simply took it back from the sergeant’s hand and threw both segments into a shallow box of sawdust on the floor.

  This action yanked Sergeant Howie back into a state of extreme alertness. There must be something wrong with Saint Athelstan’s pippin, just conceivably something serious.

  ‘Don’t bother to taste it,’ he’d said, ‘it’s quite unremarkable. Unlike those splendid Pauncefoot Pearmains, which you can see in that tray over there, and which were brought in at the last mating in order to correct appearance. My father called the apple for old, or rather young Pinky, as he was then. It was bred when he and I were at school together …’

  A sudden disturbing thought occurred to Sergeant Howie. Could the Chief Constable know this incredible island intimately and have never interfered because of ‘the old school tie’?

  ‘Has the Chief Constable ever been here, My Lord?’ asked Howie, almost sharply.

  ‘To my great sorrow, no. You may not have heard, but he suffers most dreadfully from hay fever. The pollen count, as you can well imagine, is quite astronomical here. My father had to advise against it. And he’s been wise enough never to risk it. Now I mustn’t keep you in suspense any longer. I threw that Saint Athelstan’s pippin away because I wanted you to keep your palate clear for this fella!’ Lord Summerisle flourished an apple he had just taken from a tray. ‘The renowned Summerisle Famous.’

  As Lord Summerisle split the apple and passed him a segment, Howie was half-convinced that the Saint Athelstan’s pippin was the problem apple, the one he must retrieve from the sawdust bin, and he felt fairly confident as he bit into the Summerisle Famous. It was quite literally the most delicious apple he’d tasted … since the last time his mother had bought some of the same at the local fruiterer in Portlochlie and complained about their outrageous price.

  ‘Extraordinary, My Lord! Naturally, I’ve tasted them before,’ said Howie.

  ‘Yes, of course you have,’ said Lord Summerisle, caressing the famous apple like a lover. ‘Creamy white flesh, firm, full-flushed, blood-red, bloomed skin with a truly noble, sweet, vinous flavour. The lifework of three generations of my forebears, but it’s been worth it for on this we base our prosperity.’

  ‘Your father’s too?’ interjected Howie, embarrassed by the extravagance of Lord Summerisle’s language.

  ‘Oh, indeed. This beauty was only perfected just before his death. He produced some other marvellous fruit as well. Expanding our base, as it were. There’s Star of Summerisle, a remarkably heady pear. You can make a smoothly potent pear brandy from it. He produced the Flame of Summerisle, an extremely juicy, slightly subacid apricot of superb colour … but you must be getting very chilly, Sergeant.’

  Lord Summerisle was turning down the lamps in preparation for leaving the ice house.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll open the door for me, Howie,’ he said as darkness was descending on them.

  ‘Gladly,’ responded Howie, surreptitiously dipping into the sawdust box and retrieving the sliced Saint Athelstan’s pippin on his way to the door. He made sure that Lord Summerisle, as he turned down the last of the lamps, had his back to him and certainly didn’t notice.

  By the time they found themselve
s outside in the subtropical garden again, Howie had pocketed the Saint Athelstan’s pippin segment and was guiding Lord Summerisle back onto the subject of religion, satisfied that he probably had the evidence he required to prove, one way or the other, his theory about the poisonous apple. Conclusive proof would probably have to come from a postmortem, if that were not already too late, due to the length of time Rowan’s body appeared to have been in the ground.

  ‘Your grandfather and your father, did they continue to encourage the religious … er … charades … of your great-grandfather, sir?’ asked Howie, wondering at what point, if ever, this curious family had begun to believe in their own myths.

  ‘My grandfather became fascinated by the old ways, if that’s what you mean,’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘But my father went further. What my great-grandfather had started out of expedience, he continued because he truly believed it was far more spiritually nourishing than the life-denying God-terror of the kirk. And I might say, Sergeant, he brought me up the same way–to love the music and the drama and the rituals of the old pantheism, and to love nature, and to fear it, and rely on it, and appease it where necessary. He brought me up to …’

  ‘To be a pagan!’ interrupted Howie, wishing to cut short this little orgy of self-dramatization.

  There was a silence at last, a measurable silence, between the two men as they surveyed each other. Each sizing up where the advantage now might lie in continuing the interview and both deciding that it was probably time to retire from the ‘field’ and take stock. In reply to Howie’s accusation that Lord Summerisle was a pagan, the latter smiled ironically and corrected the sergeant gently enough.

  ‘A heathen, conceivably,’ he said, ‘but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.’

  ‘I’m only interested in the law, Lord Summerisle, and I must remind you, sir, that you are still the subject of a Christian country. Now may I have permission to exhume the body of Rowan Morrison?’

  ‘I was under the impression I had already given it to you,’ said Lord Summerisle, his noble smile a little tighter and steelier than usual.

  Howie found himself back in the courtyard where the gillie and the cart awaited him in the huge shadow thrown by the castle.

  Lord Summerisle extended his hand to Howie once the sergeant was up beside the gillie and the latter had gathered her whip and her reins, somewhat impatient to leave. The surprised Howie shook the peer’s hand a little awkwardly, but couldn’t help smiling at his farewell words:

  ‘It’s been a great pleasure meeting a Christian copper,’ said Lord Summerisle.

  CHAPTER VII

  Night –

  of April 30th

  AS THE HORSE AND CART PURSUED ITS MONSTROUS shadow back along the path towards the distant township, its brass oil lamps already lit against the falling night, the gillie and Howie were, for a moment or so, silent, each wrapped in private thoughts.

  ‘I wonder if I could ask you a favour, Sergeant?’ said the gille, coming out of her reverie first.

  ‘Of course,’ said Howie, ‘if I can.’

  ‘I have an errand I want to do before it’s too dark. It’ll mean taking a slightly longer route back. D’you mind?’

  Howie was anxious to go and find Old Loam, the gardener-cum-gravedigger, as fast as he could, but he recognized that the friendliness of the gillie could prove essential in the work that was to follow. (An exhumed body had to be transported!)

  ‘Please carry on,’ he said. ‘I’m most grateful that you waited for me.’

  ‘I have to make a detour and leave some food off for my brother,’ she said patting a basket, covered with a brightly chequered napkin, that sat snugly beside her.

  The path had forked, Howie noticed, just after they passed the stones, deserted now by the divinity class and standing like monoliths of pink coral in the sunset. The new road seemed to lead to another part of the woods where the oaks were older and more gnarled than the ones they’d passed earlier, and the mistletoe more profuse. A stream trickled down the side of their ascending pathway and then diverged, winding its way from the wood where the path continued.

  Suddenly, they came abreast of a grove of well-spaced, huge trees that seemed to open to a small lake beyond. Darkness had so far fallen, by now, that Howie could only tell that the distant body of water was there because of the reflections of the dimly lit trunks of the trees in its slightly ruffled surface. The gillie had been as hushed for the last several minutes as she had earlier in the afternoon driving through the wood. But now there was a tension about her, an alertness, that communicated itself to Howie, making him watchful.

  The gillie drew the horse to a halt, smiled reassuringly at Howie, indicating by the pressure of her hand on his arm, but no words, that he should stay exactly where he was. Howie watched her walk slowly, the basket upon her arm, towards the lake. But because she was taking a diagonal path away from his line of vision she disappeared from view, from time to time, behind the intervening trees. Suddenly another figure, that of a huge kilted man, detached itself from behind one of the trees and seemed to stalk her. To Howie’s horror (he had already leapt from the cart), the man following the gillie seemed to carry an enormous basket-hilted sword, whose steel glinted in the dying sunlight.

  ‘Sorrel!’ shouted Sergeant Howie. ‘Look out!’

  Hearing the shout, the man turned to face Howie, who wondered, not for the first time in his police career, if the people who decreed that the British police should remain unarmed ought not occasionally to be exposed to this kind of emergency.

  ‘I’ll have at ye, if ye take as much as another step for’ard,’ said the stranger advancing, his sword pointed straight at Howie’s throat. Howie continued to walk forward, staring the man straight in the eye, not daring to look to see where the gillie had gone.

  ‘You thought to catch me in my sleep. Don’t you know I never close my eyes? I’ve learned to sleep like the beasts upon my feet and with one eye open. Get back, man, before I fillet you. I’ll take the other one after,’ said the kilted man, quietly, as if he were giving Howie an honourable cause for retreat before turning to deal with the poor gillie. And, indeed, Howie thought as he stood still, only feet from the threatening blade, that he had never in his life seen a face so strangely, but exaltedly, tired as that of this man. Then he heard the gillie’s voice.

  ‘Beech, love, lower your claymore, man. He hasn’t come to attack you! Sergeant, please go back to the cart. This is my brother, Beech. He hates any man to approach this place. I usually come in daylight and he must have mistaken me for an attacker in the gloaming.’

  Something in the man’s wild but grateful glance at his sister, and the way his claymore now wavered, convinced Howie that the gillie knew what she was doing. He returned to the cart as slowly as he could, and looking over his shoulder, prepared to rush to the gillie’s aid, if this clearly insane brother should try to attack her. But instead of attacking her he stood quite still, thrusting his claymore into the turf beside him so that it was well within reach, and folding his arms in a gesture of simple, almost royal dignity.

  She knelt at his feet, with her basket beside her, and, taking the napkin, spread it on the turf and laid some bread, cheese, and ham upon it.

  ‘Since we have company, do you wish me to anoint you?’ Beech asked her kindly.

  Howie, who was leaning against the cart now, could just see her nod her head in the half-light. Her brother took a water flask from his hip and uncorked it.

  ‘I like it better when we can do it at the Source,’ he said, ‘but this too is the water of life and I anoint you with it.’

  Gravely, he poured some water into his hand and, cupping his palm, gently poured a little onto his kneeling sister’s brow. She kissed his hands and after smiling her reassuring smile at him, hurried to the cart, taking her empty basket with her. Seconds later she and Howie were on the move again, the sergeant looking back at the shadowy figure in the gathering darkness, under the gnarled oaks. He had gathered the fo
od in one hand and, taking his claymore in the other, hurried back into the wood, as if he had been kept from something.

  The gillie did not speak again for a while and something told the sergeant not to be the first to break the silence with questions, but to await her explanation when she should be ready to make it. As they emerged from the far side of the wood and the cart’s oil lamps illuminated the ordered orchards that, once again, lined the road, the gillie gave a little sob. Howie could tell that she was swallowing back tears and tactfully pretended not to notice.

  ‘He would never have hurt you unless you attacked him. It’s just that I’ve never been so late before. Beech must have mistaken me for a man. He does doze off, you know. It wouldn’t be human not to,’ she said.

  ‘What is your brother doing in that wood?’ asked Howie gently. He realized that Beech was certainly unhinged, but probably not really dangerous. Why, he wondered, hadn’t he been put in an institution? Even as he asked himself the question the answer was clear to him. There was no institution on Summerisle. It would have meant sending him to the mainland.

  ‘He believes that he is the king that guards a sacred grove. He’s quite harmless. Lord Summerisle thinks he can be cured of the delusion eventually. Meanwhile, I’m really the only person allowed to visit him,’ she said.

  ‘Why is he afraid of falling asleep?’ asked Howie.

  ‘Why, in case a man should come and kill him and take his place,’ said the gillie. ‘He keeps on expecting a challenger and, of course, one never comes!’

  Howie had a terrible moment of identification with the mad guardian of the grove. He too spent every waking hour more conscious of his uniqueness among these people, more fearful of what unimaginable thing they might confront him with next. From inside the asylum of his own skin, he looked around a world that he peopled suddenly, in his imagination, with strangers whose motives or intentions he could in no way predict. He knew he, like Beech, would remain wakeful, wary till the answer to the riddle of Rowan’s death should have been revealed to him.