Donegal, 1880
Mary Ellen was pregnant. She was about to turn seventeen. She was only aware of one of those things.
On the eve of her seventeenth birthday, in the near-dark of crescent moonlight moving between deep gray clouds, she met Gerald at the cottage on the cliff. The night was cold and he had brought blankets: rough woolen things that were habitually used for horses, the only kind he could take from the house without raising suspicion. He had also packed two green-and-yellow-speckled apples, bought at the market that morning, especially for her. Mary Ellen saw these gifts—the blankets, the apples—as proof of Gerald’s love. As evidence that he would soon ask her to marry him.
“Your sapling,” she said, her mouth full of the sweet, tart taste of his gift. “Is it an apple tree?”
Gerald nodded, kissed her neck. Everywhere, the smell of apples. That morning, before leaving for the market, he had received a letter from his mother announcing that she and his sweetheart would visit the following week. Some plans must be made in person, Marie had written. And it has been so long since you have seen your love.
Gerald knew that tonight, once Mary Ellen was asleep, he would slip away home, to continue his preparations for the visit.
“It was a gift,” Gerald told her, his mind still on the letter. “From my mother. A tree to plant in this new land. She told me to cherish it like a prized possession, a family heirloom.”
He could have told her what his mother believed the tree symbolized, but in his short time administrating his father’s estate, Gerald had become a man of logic, fast in the footsteps of his father. A woman’s flights of fancy—tall tales of seeds growing into trees overnight, of magical apples that had saved his mother’s life—these were only stories. Things his mother told him to lull him to sleep as a child. The tree was just a sapling. Something sentimental. Still, he could not deny his deep need to find soil in which to plant it.
Mary Ellen was also a woman of logic. But her logic dictated that if all evidence seemed to point to magic, then it would be unwise, logically, to discount it. Unlike Gerald, Mary Ellen was at home in her wild landscape. A woman of rock and bog, salt and sea wind grating her skin. Mary Ellen had seen the wisps in the darkness, had heard the keening of gray ladies in the night before unexpected deaths. She knew not to walk inside a fairy ring, never to cut a hawthorn tree. Had Gerald told her the truth about the sapling, she would have treated it with the reverence it deserved. Especially once she knew about the baby.
Yet already Mary Ellen felt a strange connection to the half-dead, drooping sapling that sat inside the main door of the Big House in its round clay pot. And that night, wrapped up in rough blankets and in her lover’s arms, the scent of apples still sharp on her skin, she dreamed only of the sapling. In her dream, it broke through the clay of its pot and laid down roots that ripped up the foundations of the Big House. It grew taller than the house by half, rained down apples like grenades that broke the windows and the roof, let in the rain and the harsh sea air that mingled with the apples’ sweet, sharp smell.
Mary Ellen woke to hailstones tearing through the overhanging leaves of the hawthorn tree, hitting the blankets hard enough to bounce back off again, sending shivers through her bones. She was alone.
When she threw off the blankets, she found long silvery gray hairs tangled around her fingers. Strands were caught between the stones of the broken walls, were fluttering in the empty windows. A noise like a fox’s scream sounded in the night. Mary Ellen shivered without quite knowing why.
And, at that moment, she felt something moving, deep inside her. Not her usual pangs of hunger, knots of muscle from working the land. This was a stirring, a quickening.
It did not take her long to understand what it was.
* * *
—
While Mary Ellen waited impatiently for her love to return so that she could tell him of her fate, Gerald was lost in preparations. He did not know how the excitement of her new knowledge thrilled her, filled her mind during long days toiling on the hard land and longer nights waiting for him.
For a whole week, Gerald did not leave the Big House to see Mary Ellen, only busied himself with making this inhospitable place as pleasing as possible for his sweetheart and his mother. He ordered new linens, washed and starched; he sent the servants for fresh flowers, fruit, fish.
Each night Mary Ellen sneaked out of her home and went to the cottage, and each night she waited alone. In the morning, when she untangled herself from the dew-damp blankets, rearranged her wrinkled clothes, she noticed raised red lines like scratches running over her legs and arms. She trembled in the morning light, told herself it was nothing but the brambles, twigs caught in her clothes that had marked her skin without her knowledge. She went back to work and returned again to the cottage after nightfall, when her family slept.
The night before his guests were to arrive, Gerald met Mary Ellen one final time at the cottage on the cliff.
“My mother is coming,” he told her, still unable to speak of the woman who would soon be his wife. “I won’t be able to sneak out like this. Things will have to change.”
Mary Ellen took his hand and placed it on the slight, tight mound of her belly. “Things are already changing,” she said.
When Mary Ellen told him, Gerald smelled apples. A rotten, mulchy, sickly sweet smell. He shook and shook his head. He backed out of the cottage, coat sleeves catching in the hawthorn branches, feet slipping in the mud.
“My love,” said Mary Ellen. “Wait—”
Our great-great-grandfather turned and fled.
* * *
—
Mary Ellen stood in shock for so long a fox whispered right past her, and when his bushy tail had swished away she shook herself and followed her lover home. She knocked quietly on the back door of the Big House and stood for a long time before it was opened. When the light of the kitchen spilled out into the dark, the cook stood silhouetted in the doorway. She took in the sight of Mary Ellen: her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright, the small mound of her belly barely hidden under her dress. The cook knew that there was only one reason a pregnant peasant girl would come to the landlord’s house in the middle of the night. But she didn’t say anything, only called for the landlord, who wouldn’t even let the girl into the kitchen, but sent the staff away while he spoke to her on the threshold.
Gerald’s face was livid, scarlet patches on his cheeks and forehead.
“I told you never to come here,” he said.
Mary Ellen fought fury with fury. “I’m carrying your child.”
Gerald could hear rustling by the door that led to the rest of the house, knew his staff were surely listening. Rumors spread on nights like this, under the cold darkness. Who knew what truths could reach the ears of his mother, his future wife? Who knew how long he would have to live out his penance in this godforsaken place if his sins were ever discovered?