The Silver Bough by Lisa Tuttle Page B

“dooking for apples” played at Hallowe’en is believed by many to be the survival of an ancient Druidic rite, and it also suggests a connection with the water ordeal once used for testing witches, who drowned if they were innocent, but were burnt to death if they managed to survive their ducking.
    Old fertility rituals and festivals have long been associated with English apple orchards, but I know of only one such recorded in Scotland. The orchards of Appleton, on the west coast of Argyll, no longer exist, but the last Appleton Apple Fair was held in 1950, so I was able, on my visit to Appleton, to talk to many who remembered it.
    From my reading about the Fair I’d been led to suppose it was a Victorian invention that would prove, on closer inspection, to contain nothing authentically Scottish. After all, the town’s very name is English, and the orchards were planted by incomers in the seventeenth century. Yet a visit to Appleton changed my mind, especially when I ventured into the surrounding hills, and particularly into the high valley they call the “reul.” There is real magic there; deep mysteries of earth and stone and plant and water.
    Even if the Apple Fair was invented to attract tourists, however artificial its beginnings, it could not remain cut off but would soon have been pulled into the service of the local magic. Some aspects are recognizable from other Scottish traditions: that it was supposed to be a dark-haired stranger who crowned the Apple Queen reminds me of the preferred “first-footer” on Hogmanay. My mother always used to say that the first person to step across the threshold of the house on New Year’s Day should be a tall, dark-haired man. If the first caller chanced to be fair-haired, bad luck could be averted by tossing a lump of coal in ahead of him, but if it was a woman, we’d have bad luck all year.
    “After the last Apple Fair, we never had any luck in the town,” one elderly woman told me. “It was her fault, the Apple Queen. If she’d married her man, everything would have gone on as it always had. But she went away. They both did—only not together as they were meant to. And ever since, nothing’s gone right with the town.”

 
     

     
    A SHLEY SLEPT THROUGH it all: earthquake, landslide, sunrise, voices outside, the pounding on her door. She woke at last when she felt someone prodding at her shoulder to the accompaniment of a soft, childish voice repeating, “It’s time to get up. Time to get up, Cousin Ashley.”
    She rolled over. Blinking the sleep out of her eyes, she saw a little girl, brown hair pulled into tight pigtails, staring solemnly at her, and she smiled, feeling the sides of her mouth crack with the effort. “Good morning, Jade,” she said, and heard the croak in her voice. “What time is it?”
    “It’s gone ten!”
    “In the morning?”
    “Of course in the morning! Can’t you see the sun?”
    She looked. Even though the curtains were drawn, sunlight rippled like water on the rough white plaster of the ceiling. She sat up, stretching her arms above her head as she yawned. “Mmm. Well, I am on vacation, you know. If I was at home I might sleep till noon.”
    “But it’s
such
a beautiful day, it’s a sin, that’s what my granny would say, a sin to waste the best part of the day by sleeping. My granny used to live here, you know,” Jade confided, leaning against the bed.
    “Here”—it was all coming back to her now—was a tiny, two-room cottage located a short distance behind the house where Jade and her family lived, and which Ashley had been told she was to treat as her own home for as long as she liked.
    “I didn’t know your granny lived here. I thought your folks just rented it out.”
    “Yes, it’s a holiday house now, since Granny died. Passed,” Jade corrected herself. “My granny passed last year.”
    The phrase made her envision an old lady in a long nightgown hovering in the sky above the house like an elderly angel.