At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier

Author:Tracy Chevalier [Tracy Chevalier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

She wasn’t in the barn. Robert wasn’t surprised—it was stifling inside. Molly wasn’t in the stables looking at the horses as she liked to do sometimes at French Creek. She wasn’t on the porch, pretending to be a visitor having coffee. She wasn’t in the saloon, or the bowling alley, or at the Great Stump, or in the kitchen chatting to the cooks.

He returned to the barn again to make sure she hadn’t gone back while he was looking for her elsewhere. There he ran into a young hand, forking hay into a wheelbarrow to take to the horses. “You lookin’ for the lady?” the boy said. “The one like this?” And he made the gesture Robert had feared since Billie and Nancy Lapham had both smiled at him: the unmistakable curve of a belly carrying a child.

“You know where she is?”

“She was here, but she went to see the trees.” The boy grinned as Robert turned and stumbled out into the fresh air.

He had never asked Molly about babies. He’d never asked her much about herself since their first few nights together. As far as he knew she’d not had any. But nor had she made him withdraw early or wear something on his cock. He knew there were things women did to prevent babies involving hot baths and mustard or vinegar, or visits to doctors. They were women’s things he did not ask about, or feel he needed to know about.

If she was as big as the stable hand had indicated, she must have already been pregnant the last time he’d seen her four months before. She’d said nothing, though Robert tried to think back to how she’d been. Had her stomach swelled and tightened like a drum? Had her already substantial breasts gotten bigger? He couldn’t recall. His visits to Molly’s bed blended into one long session of sweaty flesh and rumpled sheets, of a release that only ever scratched the surface of his itch, no matter how often he entered her. That a child would emerge from that chaotic pleasure seemed improbable. But then, his parents had had ten children that way. He shook his head, standing in the sun, the sequoias flashing red in the distance.

He headed out to them. A trail wound among the big trees for the ease of visitors, but Robert ignored it, for walking through undergrowth did not bother him. Apart from making the path, Billie Lapham and his various partners had also named some of the trees, hanging signs on them. Visitors liked that, for they wanted a way to differentiate between the sequoias and make sense of them. So there were the Two Sentinels at the entrance to Calaveras Grove. Nearby was the Discovery Tree, which the hunter from Murphys first saw when he was chasing a grizzly bear; it was the sequoia that had been felled and now had the bowling alley built on it. Then there were the Three Graces, a trio of beautiful trees standing side by side.

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