Faerie Fruit Read online

  A dulcet fluting of a pipe drifted upon the breeze, each note sounding with sweet, piercing clarity. Clarimond listened, spellbound by the melody, her mind blank with surprise. So soft was the music, so half-heard, she could barely distinguish it from the rustling of the leaves. But the melody teased at her senses, taunting her; distant yet near, half-heard yet haunting…

  Clarimond woke to find the room turned cool and dark. Her mind clung to her dreamsong, remembering the soft ripple of notes with wistful longing; only with a struggle could she recall her scattered thoughts to the room in which she sat. A dream, strange and rare; that was all.

  She sat, numb and sleepy, and the pale moonlight shone through the window upon the silent, still figure of her mother laid upon the bed.

  Clarimond stood with trembling haste, wincing as cramped limbs protested, and bent over her mother’s inert figure with pounding heart. To her relief, the faint sounds of Clover’s breathing immediately reached her ears; she was not yet gone. She slept, peacefully enough, and Clarimond’s heart eased.

  Her belly tightened with hunger, and she remembered that she had tasted nothing since breakfast. She ventured downstairs. In the pantry she discovered some of the morning’s rosewater scones still uneaten and gratefully devoured one, half-remembered moments from her curious dream drifting through her mind as she licked honey from her lips. What a sad vision it had been, for the once-thriving orchards of Berrie Wynweald were ancient and withered now, and none had borne fruit in living memory.

  A day’s involuntary fasting entitled her to a second scone, she decided, and ate another. The house was warm, still, from the heat of the day, and the layers of her dress felt heavy and burdensome about her. Her head ached from her long vigil. Craving a breath of cool night air, she opened the back door and peeked out into the pretty shrubbery beyond. The moon shone full, illuminating the garden; under its pale, silvery light Clarimond saw the high birch trees swaying in the winds, just as the orchard had done in her dream.

  The night breeze cooled her heated skin and she stepped gratefully into the gentle wind, taking the pins from her long hair until it tumbled loose about her face. A shaft of moonlight illuminated her favourite path through the lavender bushes, turning their deep violet colour wan and ethereal. She wandered through the fragrant shrubs, breathing deeply, feeling calmer and cooler with every step.

  The gardens of Thistledown House were mostly composed of flowers. Once, though, there had been an orchard of fruit trees. A cluster of wizened ancients survived still, gathered in a knot by the bank of the river, their hoary branches twisted and brittle. Clarimond gazed sadly upon them, struck by the difference between these faded trees and the flourishing, fruiting arbour of her dream.

  Berrie Wynweald had once been famed for its orchards, and for the excellence of its produce. No one knew why the trees had ceased to bear fruit. It was only known that they had, a hundred years ago or more. The trees could not be coaxed into renewal, no matter by what arts they were induced, and the once abundant fruits of Berrie Wynweald faded into legend.

  Clarimond thought again of her mother’s dying wish, and felt regret at her inability to grant it. ‘If only there was one,’ she said softly. ‘Just a single apple! It is all she asks. So small a thing, and yet so great a wish.’

  She had wandered long enough. She ought, now, to return, and ensure that Clover slept peacefully still. Clarimond turned her back upon the dying orchard, but a glint of colour caught her eye, halting her steps. A glint of gold, vivid even in the moonlight. She turned back, wondering, her curious gaze searching the branches for its source.

  Half-hidden among the leaves of a withered old tree, there hung a soft, full globe of golden-skinned fruit, dappled with green and full ripe. It hung within easy reach, fair and tempting and quite impossible. Clarimond stared, and wondered when it had come about that she had slipped back into a dream.

  Her garden, though, looked as it ever had. The orchard of her imaginings had not returned; there existed but one, miraculous fruit, an apple, pure and perfect. Clarimond reached for it in wonder, and the moment her fingers touched it the apple dropped into her hand.

  She carried it to her nose and inhaled its sweet, fresh scent, scarcely able to believe her luck. For the trees to bear fruit again, after so long a drought! Even were it but one, it was all that she required.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered to the tree, and hastened inside with her treasure.

  Ah, to taste it! Never had a morsel of such a fruit crossed her lips, and curious was she to know its flavour. The apple was a large one; her mother could not object, surely, were she to eat a piece herself?

  But no. Mother would certainly object, and she was dying. With some regret, Clarimond carried the apple upstairs intact, and woke Clover gently to receive her wish.

  ‘I hardly know how it has come about, mother,’ said she, ‘but I have found an apple for you. The trees of the garden have given it, to please you.’

  Clover Waregrove gazed upon the apple with bright, eager eyes and reached greedily for the fruit. ‘Ahhh!’ she said with deep satisfaction. ‘You have done well, Clarimond. Now give it to me.’

  Clarimond accepted both the unusual praise and the order with her customary resignation, and placed the apple into her mother’s hands. Clover carried it instantly to her lips and took a great bite, her eyes closing in bliss. It seemed a shame, Clarimond thought, to despoil such a perfectly beautiful thing, but Clover had no such reservations. She devoured the apple, bite after eager bite, until nothing was left. Then she licked the juice from her fingers, her eyes dreamy.

  ‘Perfect,’ she breathed, and her eyes closed. She slept.

  Clarimond bent over the still figure and pressed a single, brief kiss to her cheek. ‘Rest well, mother,’ she whispered. Returning to her chair by the bedside, she composed herself to wait out the night.

  She awoke to an empty bed.

  ‘M-mother?’ she whispered, aghast. The bed was not only empty but neatly made, with freshly laundered sheets and blankets. Maggie had already been in, of course, and set the room to rights. But no, how could that be? How had her mother been moved, without the assistance of Clarimond herself? And why?

  ‘Maggie!’ she called, rising from her seat. She felt rumpled and befuddled, and hastened to straighten her gown and shawl as she hurried down the stairs. ‘Maggie, where is my—’ She stopped, for Clover Waregrove herself was coming up the stairs, quick of step and bright of eye and overflowing with energy.

  ‘Oh, Clarimond!’ said she, with a smile full of sunlight. ‘What tender care you took of me in my illness! I am overcome with gratitude. What a dutiful daughter you have always been. I declare, I have never made enough of you before. I will make amends for it now. You have always admired my silver eardrops, have you not, and my amethysts? They are yours! I make them over to you with the greatest good will. Oh! And you shall have my pocket watch besides, which was your father’s, and the best of my porcelain.’ These extraordinary pronouncements made, she bestowed a tender salutation upon her speechless daughter and sailed on up the stairs, disappearing in a flurry of clattering footsteps.

  Clarimond could only stare after her, lost for words. Here was extraordinary behaviour indeed! Not once had her mother given her a gift, and now several all together! It was unaccountable.

  Moreover, not a trace of her dangerous illness remained in her face, her manner or her bearing. Her cheeks were plump with good health, her eyes bright, her figure upright and hale. She looked as though she had never known a day’s sickness in her life.

  Clarimond followed her mother upstairs and watched in amazement as she bustled about, filling the back bedroom with pots and vases of flowers. Not the varieties that grew in her own garden, Clarimond noted with bemusement. ‘Now,’ said Clover, ‘I know that you gave up your own room for me but you must have it back at once!’

  ‘Where did you find the flowers?’ Clarimond said faintly.

  ‘I have but just returned
from Market, where I bought them from old Ambrose Dale. How fine they are! Do you not think? I knew they would please you.’

  They were very fine, and no doubt expensive, too. There were roses, butter-yellow and lavender; amber-golden poppies; sweetpeas blushing pink and white; clusters of scented honeysuckle; even a spray of crimson lilies from Farmer Dale’s coveted greenhouse.

  ‘They are beautiful,’ Clarimond said. ‘Mother… are you feeling quite well?’

  ‘Why, I have never felt better! Do I not look the very picture of health?’ Clover beamed upon her daughter and bustled out again, leaving Clarimond to reflect with wonder upon her swift recovery.

  Maggie Muggwort was at work in the kitchen when at last Clarimond arrived downstairs. ‘You were prompt indeed with my mother’s room,’ Clarimond remembered to say. ‘And to contrive to tidy without waking me! It was most considerate of you.’

  ‘Yer welcome, madam,’ said Maggie, and bit her lip.

  ‘Does something trouble you?’

  ‘It is Mrs. Waregrove. She gave me…’ Maggie appeared unequal to completing the sentence, and merely gestured behind herself. Stacked upon a chair at the back of the kitchen was a great pile of dresses, lying in a heap of colourful fabrics.

  ‘Why, mother’s gowns!’ Clarimond recognised some few of the discarded garments, and could only gaze upon them in dismay. ‘How came she to do so?’

  Maggie gave a helpless shrug. ‘She said as how I work so hard, I deserve a few nice things.’

  A few? Clarimond counted at least six good dresses heaped upon the chair, and was obliged to sit down for a moment. What had come over Clover, for her to display such sudden and uncharacteristic largesse?

  ‘Do you think I ought to give ‘em back?’ said Maggie doubtfully.

  ‘No, I think not,’ said Clarimond. ‘They were freely given, and she is right: you certainly deserve them.’

  But though she spoke composedly, her mind was awhirl with confusion. For all her finer qualities, Mrs. Waregrove had ever been miserly. What could possibly have come over her?

  And how was it that, in a single night, she had risen from an acknowledged deathbed and come to exhibit a vitality she had not displayed in years?

  Mrs. Waregrove’s generosity was not limited to the residents of Thistledown House. She departed soon afterwards to wander through the town, and bestowed some part of her personal possessions upon each person that she passed in the street. To Lavender Blackwood, she gave her best shawl; Nathaniel Roseberry received her second-best pocket watch, that had been her grandfather’s; Betony Summerfield walked away in proud possession of a good silver necklace; and Verity Wilkin was given a fine quill pen with an engraved nib.

  She was later heard to have taken all of her savings and distributed every penny to the town’s poor. Not a word of refusal would she hear from anyone, nor did she stop until every pretty or valuable thing she owned had been bestowed elsewhere.

  Clarimond could not account for it, and neither could the town. It was said at last that Clover Waregrove’s change of heart was due to her near demise, for a glimpse of death was known to take folk funny that way sometimes.

  In the general puzzlement and wonder over her mother’s odd behaviour, Clarimond herself forgot about the apple.

  Chapter Two

  Upon the following evening, Tobias Dwerryhouse occupied his usual post behind the bar at the Moss and Mist. Clover Waregrove’s uncharacteristic liberality was a topic nobody had yet tired of, and Tobias heard all of the stories with no small share of bemusement.

  He, too, had received a gift from Clarimond’s mother. Knowing her disapproval of him for her daughter’s husband, he could hardly have been more surprised when she had arrived at the Mist early that morning and presented him with a handsome pewter flagon. ‘It belonged to my mother’s father,’ she had informed him with obvious pride. ‘Will you not take it? It has never seen use since Clarimond’s father died, and what a shame for it to sit gathering dust!’

  She would not be gainsaid, so he had accepted it at last. It now sat upon the bar, a subject of hilarity for his regular customers. They recognised it for new, and soon guessed where it had come from.

  It was undoubtedly a prize of a possession. The pewter had a deal of silver mixed in, if he was any judge, and its surface was intricately engraved. But Clarimond had been no more able to account for the change in her mother than anybody else, and the flagon’s presence made him uneasy.

  His disquiet was shared by no one else, not even Clarimond. She was relieved at the improvement in her mother’s difficult character, howsoever it came about, so he held his peace upon the subject. The spirits of his customers were high and the atmosphere jovial as Tobias refilled tankards, listening covertly to snippets of talk as he passed by.

  Barnaby Longstaff sat alone in a corner of the common room, as was his wont. He was deep in his eighth or ninth tankard of beer, as was also his wont. Tobias supposed him to be in his fifties, though his habits of perpetual inebriation had ravaged his face and he appeared rather older. He slouched against the wall, lost inside a great-coat far too large for his slight frame, and observed the merry company from behind the straggling locks of his dirty black hair.

  Longstaff had been the town beadle in his youth. What had prompted his decline into drunkenness, Tobias neither knew nor could guess. Now he haunted the Moss and Mist day and night, drinking without cease, and holding himself aloof from the rest of the company.

  Tobias watched as Barnaby drained off the last of his beer in a vast gulp and set the tankard down. He rose unsteadily to his feet and staggered out of the rear door of the taproom, heading, as always, for the garden. Tobias could wish that the man would relieve himself at the privy, like everybody else, and refrain from watering the trees behind the inn. But Longstaff remained impervious to all suggestions to that effect, and Tobias had largely abandoned his attempts to dissuade him.

  Theodosius Penderglass caught Tobias’s eye, and raised a brow. Tobias nodded in reply, and Penderglass rose and quietly followed Longstaff out. Barnaby had once fallen over a tree root in the gardens of the Mist and broken his collarbone; Tobias preferred to ensure this did not happen again, and Theo was obliging enough to assist. The hour was late, night had fallen, and the dangers of the darkness to a drunk and unwary party were considerable.

  Then the common room broke into song, and Tobias forgot about Longstaff. It was the central table that began the verses, of course. All his regulars sat there: Ebenezer Witherspoon, attorney; the chandler, Marmaduke Pauncevolt; Malachi Amberdrake, when his medicinal arts were not required elsewhere; and Fabian Mallory, beadle. The fifth chair sat empty, awaiting the return of Theo Penderglass from the garden. His absence did nothing to dampen the exuberance of his friends, for they sang lustily enough without him, and the song was new to Tobias.

  You can keep your bitter beer and you can keep your ale,

  I don’t want them red or brown, I do not want them pale!

  Naught will do to quench my thirst but a draught drunk crisp and cold,

  Not brown in hue, not green or blue, but finest amber-gold!

  Cider-bright I’ll drink all night, I’ll drink enough for three,

  It’s sweet, it’s tart, it warms the heart, and it comes from old Berrie!

  No such song had been heard in Berrie Wynweald in many a year. Of that, Tobias was certain, because cider had not been made or drunk in the town since the orchards failed. The song delighted the company, for it was taken up all over the taproom and sung again and again. Tobias listened with growing unease, his eye straying once more to the pewter flagon upon the counter.

  In the middle of the third refrain, Theo Penderglass returned — without Barnaby Longstaff. He lingered by the door until he caught Tobias’s gaze, and urgently signalled with his own that something was amiss. This incomprehensible message delivered, he disappeared outside once more.

  Tobias lingered only long enough to refill Fabian Mallory’s tankard, and t
hen he followed Theo into the night.

  Lanterns hung on either side of the door, their bright glow driving back the night immediately outside the inn. Barnaby, of course, was some way beyond the yellow circle of light, and Tobias could not see him.

  He could, however, hear him. The man was muttering and cursing in drunken syllables, amid some other, strange sounds of which Tobias could make no immediate sense: a dull thud from time to time, and a periodic swish of branches. ‘C’mere, ya little blackguard,’ said Barnaby, and then came another swish and a thud. ‘Stop tauntin’ me! Come on!’

  Tobias unhooked one of the lanterns and stepped off the pathway, following the sounds of Barnaby’s slurred imprecations. Far to the rear of the garden was he, so close to the river it was a wonder he had not fallen in. He stood beneath a wizened old tree, apparently fixated upon something he fancied he saw within its branches, for he was jumping and snatching at the leaves in his eagerness to secure it.

  Theo Penderglass stood watching this strange behaviour, arms folded and a deep frown upon his young face. He had prudently stationed himself in between Barnaby and the water. Barnaby ignored Tobias’s approach, too intent upon the tree even to notice the light. Theo, however, greeted Tobias’s arrival with relief.

  ‘He is badly drunk,’ whispered Theo, ‘but there really is something up there. I saw it myself, a flash of something silver.’

  ‘Moonlight upon the leaves,’ said Tobias.

  But Theo shook his head. ‘I think not. And I am nowhere near as drunk as Longstaff, my friend.’

  Tobias stared into the branches of the tree. Was that a flicker of bright silver he saw, as the branches thrashed and swayed? A gleam of moonlight, nothing more, for the moon shone full and lustrous upon the garden.

  Barnaby, undeterred, made one final, great leap. His hand closed tight around some particular branch; he shook it powerfully as his feet returned to the grass, and something fell. Something rounded and glinting silvery in the light of Tobias’s lamp.