Regional legend · 5 min read · Set in Cold Ashton ·
What Lends the Apples
Leave a pie lid on the orchard stile and by morning there are apples for six days, never five, never seven, never on the seventh visit.
- status: rumor
Cold-ashton keeps its orchards the way other parishes keep their plate, under watch and half in secret, and the tale I am going to hand you is a rumor by its own confession, because the one thing nobody in this valley will do is claim the loan personally. Ask a grower on the terraces and he will tell you it is done on the far side of the combe. Ask the far side and the finger comes back over. The custom has no owner. Or, as old Nan Pine said at the market cross, the custom owns itself, and does its own lending, and lets the parish keep its modesty.
The substance of it is this, and I will set it out plain because the plainness is the point. You have a pie to make and no fruit in the store, out of season, after the frost, whenever the cupboard has failed you. There is a stile at the top of the Long Orchard, granite, with a flat runway of stone across the top, and on that runway you leave the lid of your pie, buttered and lined with pastry, ready for the oven. You walk home without looking back. In the morning there are apples on the lid. Off the tree and off the lid there is no difference in them: firm, cold, fair-skinned, the sort the valley grew when the valley grew orchards for keeping, not for market. And the condition of the loan, the one condition, spoken of everywhere in Cold-ashton in the same words: they are for exactly six days.
Six days, then they are gone. Not rotten. Gone. The household that used them finds the fruit bowl short by the count it borrowed, on the seventh morning, and the pie already cooked with them stands cooked still but the slices it holds are separators, and the family that ate the pie on the wrong day can tell you what eating borrowed days is like, and they tell it once and then change the subject to weather. This is why the rumor has never gone to court and never will. A loan paid back in full does not make a grievance. The county sums have never found grower in the valley the poorer for the custom, and there is the thing I want the stranger to sit with: nobody has been done out of apples by it. The orchards lose nothing. It is a lending, and whatever holds the Long Orchard keeps its own ledger and has never once missed a payment.
Six days is not a sermon number and not a market week, and the parish has argued its shape for longer than the parish register goes back. The growers of the top hamlet say a borrowed apple is a day of keeping, and that whatever lends is itself counting days against winter, six of them, patient as moss, and that the pie lid is not payment but invitation, the way leaving a lamp in a window is invitation. The Methodist vestry nominally discourages the whole matter, and the vestry wall, which backs onto the Long Orchard, has its coping stones worn hollow in the middle the way a stile wears, which the warden declines to explain and the schoolchildren of Cold-ashton will explain to you unprompted. The bakers, who have the most arithmetic among us, will point out what any honest kitchen knows: six days and no more is the working life of a good keeping apple once it is cut, and whatever lends the fruit lends it at exactly the number of days the fruit has left. Whether that is a bespoke note of the lender's character or only the lender being scrupulous in its arithmetic, the bakers decline to say, and they know, you can see that they know.
The mysteries that keep the tale standing are three, and I will give them as I got them, at the bakehouse door, from a woman who would not give her name. First: the loan is never refused, never once in living memory, and the apples on the morning lid are always the variety your pie wanted, cookers if you left a lid for cookers, eaters if so, which bespeaks a listening at the least. Second: no one has ever found a print, a pock, a torn leaf or a bitten skin on the lent fruit. On the lid the apples arrive as if carried in cotton wool, and the growers, who know what a bruise costs at market, will not let the detail alone. Third, and the children ask it and are not scolded for asking: the Long Orchard's own trees have been spent stock for twenty years, out of bearing since the hard blight, and the lending never stopped. There has been no apples to lend in that ground since before the youngest grower was whistle-small. The loan does not come from the trees. Where it comes from is where the tale went quiet.
Who tells it today? The hamlet women at the market cross tell it as I have told it, sideways and under their breath, in bits, so the rumor never quite accumulates into a claim. The bakers tell the arithmetic part to apprentices on the first week, as a warning on wasting fruit. And there is the schoolmistress of Cold-ashton, who is said to leave a lid on the stile every Michaelmas for the infants' feast apples, six days sharp, and pins the six dates to the noticeboard, and has never once taught at that school on a seventh.