‘Afterwards Dad sold it to someone up at the river mouth.’ She watched the clouds sliding through the sky. ‘You really need to get a sail.’

15

15

YEARS LATER, SHORTLY after Ned’s third daughter, Harriet, was born—four years after Grace had followed Sally into the world—news reached the valley of new technologies that had been developed in the orchards of Britain. The local orchardists agreed that they needed access to this knowledge, that in an international market they and their crops could not be left behind. Writing letters would not be enough. Someone needed to go there, to talk to the flat-capped farmers of the western counties and wring from them the necessary information about these innovations.

It made sense for the valley’s representative to be Jackbird. He had led the way into the Japanese market. He had the words, the smile, the velvet. But he had broken his leg after rolling a tractor he’d recently bought, a new model that he had no idea how to operate. The other orchardists all had excuses too, or were at least quick to declare themselves incapable of the journey. Ned’s orchard was still the smallest in the valley—the only one modest enough for the other growers to keep an eye on while also tending to their own.

And so Ned went to England. The first time he travelled overseas, his flights paid for with money pooled by his fellow orchardists. When asked, years later, how he justified leaving his wife so soon after she’d given birth, he was unable to come up with a good answer. It was just what we did then, he would say, or that it had to be done, or that he wasn’t just doing it for himself, while knowing none of those things were exactly true. Always, at these times, he thought of their growing orchard, the vast spread of their vegetable garden, bountiful but also beautiful thanks to the roses and tulips his wife had threaded through the beds. The look on her face when he’d told her about the trip. The old boldness as she asked him what he was waiting for, said that of course he had to go, even as her face was softened by sorrow she wouldn’t admit to.

He landed in the south, rented a car, drove northwest. Was unprepared for the greenness of the place. Meadows, trees, hedges, all thick and wet, all a deep, storybook green under a mottled grey sky. Green and grey everywhere, interrupted only by villages of stone houses, cobbled roads and looming taverns. Rain came in drifts, in dribbles, always falling. He pushed through the foreignness of it all.