No one is certain if the Devonshire Quarrenden was first grown locally, or if it came across the English Channel from France. Its name may have derived from Carentan, a city in Normandy; for most of its three centuries the Quarrenden has been a garden apple, commonly called the “Quarantine.” No one disputes that it’s an attractive variety: a flat crimson apple with downy sepals and a long, thin stalk, small in the hand, aromatic, with the distinct flavor of berries and honeyed wine. Its only flaw is that it won’t keep, and once the apples mature, they drop. It is nearly the middle of August, and the Quarantines are ripe.

The sky is pinking behind the yew, and soon the church will be readied for evensong. The medieval iron chandeliers will be lit, giving a glow from within to the three stained-glass windows, and the Anglican bell ringers will stand by at their ropes, weathered pitch cobbles worn to a gloss beneath their feet. Until then, the only sound will be Quarantines plopping into unmowed grass, bruising, their thick scent, sweet and berried, guttering suddenly like candles from the precipitous drop.

*   *   *

Continuing in the same north and east direction across England, eight hours by car, four by express train from the Okehampton Station, to the neighborhood known as Primrose Hill in London, in a five-story building across from a handkerchief children’s park patrolled each morning by watchful nannies and young mothers with tottering charges, up a dingy staircase and in through a low door, the new owners of the Devon manor house can be found: Ted Hughes, the newly acclaimed Cambridge-educated poet from Yorkshire, son of a tobacconist, and his American wife, Sylvia Plath Hughes, a writer also, a scholarship girl raised by her widowed mother. The Hughes’s daughter is sixteen months old. They’ve spent all their savings, plus loans from both their families, to buy the house called Court Green.

Through the cramped vestibule hung with coats, past a card table folded against the wall and books and sheafs of paper stacked there too, beyond the floral wallpapered bedroom with its green corduroy curtains and the tiny bath floored with marbly black linoleum, into the cheery-papered galley kitchen lined with copper pots and translucent china and down a step into a narrow parlor facing the street, a room so compact that one reflexively draws one’s shoulders in upon entering, Court Green’s new householders appear to be entertaining. In fact, they’ve just hosted a tour.