CHAPTER 43
Harriet
Dorset
The following day, Harriet was busy tidying the herb garden. It should have been done before now, but more often than not jobs like this got put on to the next day’s list. Looking up from her squatting position, she spotted Owen in the field next door, lashing some fencing.
She got to her feet. ‘Hello!’ she called.
She felt a surge of, well, friendship, she supposed.
It had been rather lonely here at the cottage with Joanna away, especially after the debacle with Scott and now that she’d given up on Someone Somewhere.
She missed her sister, she realised, with a slight shock.
Which wasn’t good. She was getting far too used to Joanna being around.
‘Afternoon.’ He nodded but didn’t even smile. He was definitely not being as friendly as usual. Harriet frowned. Had she missed something here?
She walked over. ‘Mother says don’t be a stranger.’ She rubbed some of the soil from her hands. ‘She hasn’t seen you for a while.’ She wouldn’t tell him that Mother was also in need of a distraction – that was hardly his problem.
He shot her a fierce look. ‘Wouldn’t want to be a nuisance,’ he growled.
‘Don’t be daft.’ Harriet assessed the situation.
Had she done something to annoy him? She cast her mind back.
Ah. Two days ago, when she’d been on her way into Bridport to see Scott.
Suddenly, she remembered. ‘I never came back to you about your dinner invitation,’ she said. It had gone clean out of her mind.
He raised an eyebrow. Whacked the fencepost with his mallet.
‘I’m so sorry, Owen.’ It had been incredibly kind of him.
And she hadn’t even had the consideration to remember the offer.
Also, she recalled, she’d seen it more in the light of enabling her to escape from Mulberry Farm Cottage for the evening, rather than as the gesture of friendship that it had been.
Harriet felt deeply ashamed. All she’d been thinking of that day was Scott.
‘Doesn’t matter.’ He drove in another nail. ‘It was probably a stupid idea.’
‘No . . .’ It hadn’t been a stupid idea. It had been sweet and generous and Harriet had behaved appallingly. ‘I had a lot on my mind,’ she confessed. ‘There was someone . . .’
He looked up enquiringly, but she couldn’t go on.
She didn’t want to tell him about Scott.
She didn’t need to tell anyone about Scott.
He would be her secret. Scott had given her more than she had realised at first. He had given her an exciting experience, showed her what she was capable of.
She might never do it again – she probably never would do it again, because she was done with the Scotts of this world.
But it had been worth it. To feel, just for one night, loved, beautiful, cared for.
He was still looking at her. ‘It wasn’t important.’
But it was. They were neighbours and she had been unneighbourly. More than that, she had been thoughtless – cruel even. ‘Come in for a cup of tea,’ Harriet said. He would hold her up, but it was the least she could do.
‘I don’t want to intrude.’ He still hadn’t forgiven her then.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘You’re not intruding in the least.’ She didn’t want to ruin their relationship. Apart from anything else, she wasn’t sure how they would manage without Owen.
‘Well, if you’re sure . . .’ She was conscious of a shift in his attitude. He straightened and looked right at her. That look made her uncomfortable, she had to admit.
‘But first I have to feed the fish,’ she said.
‘The fish?’ His mouth curved into a smile.
‘Shan’t be a minute.’ Harriet stomped towards the pond. It was looking a touch unkempt and wintery. The mulberry tree crouched over it, its branches protective, dark and rugged.
Owen followed her. ‘Lovely tree.’ Affectionately, he thumped the trunk of the mulberry with the palm of his hand. ‘Know how old it is? How long has it been here?’
Harriet shrugged. It had always been here. And the house was Mulberry Farm Cottage. So . . . ‘Forever?’ she guessed.
Owen laughed – an unexpected boom of a laugh.
Harriet raised an eyebrow. She’d never seen anyone come out of a bad mood so fast. ‘It looks pretty ancient to me,’ she said. ‘And our cottage is certainly old.’
Owen fingered one of the twisty, drooping branches. ‘The mulberry tree looks old even when it’s young,’ he said.
‘Oh?’ What made him so knowledgeable all of a sudden?
Harriet pulled the packet of fish food out of her pocket and sprinkled a bit on the surface of the water.
A couple of gold and black fish darted up to swallow and plunge back in.
Would there be tadpoles this year? she wondered.
Last summer there had been frogs hopping all over the place – one or two of the café’s patrons had been terrified.
But what did they expect if they came to tea on a farm in the country?
‘S’pose it would’ve been planted around the time your place changed its name,’ Owen said. ‘That would make sense. 1914, I reckon it was.’
Harriet stared at him. ‘What?’
‘According to the parish records and maps.’ He sounded apologetic.
Harriet attempted to assimilate this information.
First Joanna looking up parish registers and census details and the like.
And now Owen. Was there something in the air?
‘Our cottage had a different name?’ She stared at the mulberry tree as if it might be to blame.
‘But why would anyone change its name? What was it called?’
‘Warren Down Farm Cottage.’ Owen spoke in his soft, slow voice. ‘You can see it marked next to my place on the old maps up at Bridport museum. Last mention would be around 1913.’
‘I had no idea.’ Warren Down Farm Cottage? This was logical, but why had no one told her? Why had her father never mentioned it? He must have known. And why change the name just because you’d planted a tree next to the farmyard?
‘There’s a map dated 1914 as it happens,’ Owen continued, patting the trunk of the tree again, ‘shows it as Mulberry Farm Cottage. I reckon 1914 must have been about when this old fella was planted then.’
1914 . . . Harriet paced to the other side of the murky pond.
It smelt of rotting weed and damp wood. What was the significance of that date?
Something to do with the First World War?
A remembrance to someone who’d been killed perhaps?
Harriet didn’t like it. Suddenly, the tree she’d always loved seemed like an interloper.
‘Your dad might not even have known,’ Owen added. ‘Would have been his granddad who planted it, d’you reckon?’
How the heck was Harriet supposed to know?
She and Joanna had only been looking at a picture of their grandparents the other week, when she’d found all those old photos in a drawer, but their grandparents had both died before Harriet was born, so they’d never known them.
Her father had certainly never mentioned that his grandfather had planted a mulberry tree or changed the name of the farm.
Which was rather strange. She should tell Joanna, she supposed.
She was the one doing the jigsaw of the past. Though why she should suddenly be so interested in their heritage, Harriet had no idea, and her sister was being rather secretive. ‘Maybe,’ she said at last.
She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket and paced back again. It didn’t seem right that Owen should know such a significant piece of information about their cottage. She felt stupid – and that was a feeling she’d never had around Owen before.
‘Easy enough to plant ’em,’ Owen went on. The more tense she was becoming, the more relaxed he seemed. ‘The traditional method is to saw off a section of the trunk and stick it in the soil. Then Bob’s your uncle.’
‘Then I suppose that’s what he did,’ Harriet said, somewhat sharply.
But one look at Owen’s expression and she relented.
Her ignorance was hardly his fault, and she was supposed to be being nice to him.
‘It could symbolise someone’s death, I suppose,’ she said.
She looked up into the bare wintery branches, remembered all those times she’d climbed the tree, shaken the branches to make the fruit fall to the ground, watched her mother prepare the jam, helped her father make the wine .
. . It was symbolic of her childhood too, symbolic of her entire family.
‘How do you mean?’ Owen was watching her.
‘Someone from the family might have perished in World War One.’ This sounded suitably dramatic. And likely. She took a step away. Jo might know who had died in the war; she’d ask her when she got back from Prague.
‘And?’
‘And the tree could have been planted in their memory.’ Although hopefully they weren’t standing on anyone’s remains.
Owen looked straight at her. ‘Or it could be love,’ he said.
‘Pardon?’
Owen’s face blushed as red as the mulberries would themselves in high summer. ‘Because of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, I mean,’ he said. ‘The tree could be a symbol of unrequited love.’
‘Pyramus and . . . ?’ Harriet did not count herself uneducated.
She had GCSEs and A levels and a wealth of knowledge imparted by her father when she was a child.
In fact, she would have said she was a lot better educated than Owen.
But she was really struggling here. All she could remember about Pyramus and Thisbe was the story performed by a character called Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘Shakespeare?’ she asked weakly.
‘It’s a Roman tale originally, I believe,’ Owen said. ‘Though I’ve only read Ovid’s version.’
Ovid? Harriet stared at him. Ovid? ‘In Latin?’ She knew her mouth was open. She was seeing another side of Owen now. A most unexpected side.
‘Aw, no . . .’ He kicked some dead leaves up with his big black boots. ‘I read it in English.’
‘And?’ Harriet smiled.
‘Pyramus and Thisbe, they were neighbours . . .’ He wouldn’t meet her gaze. ‘And very much in love, by all accounts. Their parents forbade the match, so they could only talk to each other through a crack in the wall.’
‘A crack in the wall?’ But what did that have to do with mulberry trees?
‘They planned to meet by a white mulberry tree.’ He might have read her mind. ‘Beside a fountain.’
Harriet looked down at the pond. It wasn’t a fountain, but it was water, and the nearest you could get to a fountain in this farmyard. Perhaps whoever had planted the tree had known the story after all. So, who had planted it? And why?
‘What happened?’ she whispered. Why was she whispering? She had no idea. All was quiet in the farmyard, almost unnaturally quiet.
‘Thisbe left her house first,’ he said. ‘With a veil over her head so she wouldn’t be recognised.’
As Owen spoke, Harriet realised that a veil of darkness was indeed falling over the farmyard and the hills, and she had to strain to see his features; his face was already in shadow.
‘She arrived at the tree. And as she sat alone, in the dim light of evening . . .’ Owen went on.
Just like now. Harriet shot him a sharp glance. Don’t milk it.
‘She saw a lioness approaching.’
Like you do, thought Harriet. But she shivered nonetheless. And not only because it was getting cold out here.
‘The lioness’s jaws were bloody from a recent kill,’ said Owen. ‘She had come to the fountain to slake her thirst.’
Slake? Owen was sounding more like a Roman storyteller every second.
‘What did Thisbe do?’ Harriet asked.
‘What would you do?’ Owen countered.
‘Run like hell?’ Harriet hazarded a guess.
‘She did,’ Owen said. ‘But as she ran’ – dramatic pause – ‘she dropped her veil and the lioness picked it up in her grisly jaws and tore it to shreds.’
Harriet could see the way this was going.
‘Meanwhile, Pyramus, having been delayed’ – Owen shifted his weight onto the other foot – ‘came to the meeting place.’
‘And saw the veil?’
‘He did.’ Owen let out a deep sigh. A natural storyteller indeed. Yes. The man had considerable hidden depths.
‘He cursed and cried and vowed that his blood too would stain the tree.’ Owen paused. ‘So, he plunged his sword deep into his breast.’
‘Crikey,’ said Harriet. She’d been right. It was Romeo and Juliet all over again. Perhaps that was where Shakespeare had got the idea.
‘His blood spurted up onto the white mulberries,’ Owen went on. ‘And turned them blood red.’
It sounded as if he really believed all this. Harriet gazed at the mulberry tree in the growing darkness, but it was saying nothing. Only the winter breeze slunk through the open branches and dimpled the surface of the pond.
‘His blood sank into the earth,’ Owen said. ‘Until it reached the roots of the tree. The redness would rise through the trunk to the fruit forever more.’ He patted the trunk with his hand once again.
‘So, what happened to Thisbe?’ Harriet asked. As if she couldn’t guess.
‘She saw Pyramus’s dead body lying next to her torn, bloody veil, was consumed with guilt and killed herself with the same sword,’ Owen said, ‘crying that the berries would forever be a memorial of their joined blood.’
Right. Harriet moved closer. Gently touched the bark of the tree. It felt soft but rough under her fingertips. ‘And they are,’ she said.
‘And they are,’ Owen agreed.
Harriet nodded. It was a good story. ‘Let’s go in for that cup of tea,’ she suggested.
She parked Owen in the kitchen with her mother and went upstairs to fetch her mother’s shawl for her. ‘Just call me the Bearer,’ she muttered under her breath.
She located the shawl and was about to go back downstairs when something drew her into her own bedroom.
She went over to the window, pulled the curtain aside and looked down on the dark farmyard below, the orchard to the left, and to the right, the soft glint of the pond and the obscure shape of the mulberry tree.
Pyramus and Thisbe, she thought to herself. Her shoulders relaxed and she smiled. Mulberry Farm Cottage. Unrequited love. Well, I never . . .