The Wine of Angels

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Looked as if it held a grudge in every scabby branch, and if you touched it there’d be sharp, pointy bits, like thorns. And it wouldn’t give you any fruit, on principle, wassail or no wassail, because, left to rot, apple trees ...

... they grows resentful.

Merrily’s grandad had told her that once, when she was a little girl. Frightening her, because you always thought of apples as cheerful and wholesome. Oaks could be gnarled and forbidding, pines scraggy and cruel. But apple trees were essentially good-natured, weren’t they? All the same, every evening for weeks afterwards, Merrily would go down to the orchard and wish the trees a wary goodnight, assuring them they could always count on being looked after as long as she was around.

This was Merrily’s problem. Always felt responsible.

Perhaps, to get Grandad Watkins’s point, you had to see a tree as old as this one on a night this cold, the orchard glittering grimly in bilious lamplight.

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