The gate gives a soft, low creak as you push it open, and the orchard takes you in. Underfoot the grass is cold and damp, longer in patches where the mower hasn't reached, flattened in others where deer have lain. The trees stand in their old rows, twenty or so, their dark trunks rough with lichen the colour of dried sage. At the tip of every branch a haze of pale green, not yet leaf, only the first promise of it. The air smells of wet bark and last year's windfalls gone to earth. You walk slowly between the first two trees, your hand brushing a low branch as you pass.
The light is leaving by degrees. To the west, behind the hawthorn hedge, the sky still holds a band of cold apricot, and above that a wash of grey-blue deepening upward into something nearer indigo. The orchard sits in the lower of these two skies. Each tree catches the last light differently, the ones in the open holding a faint gilt along their western flanks, the ones near the hedge already gone to silhouette. You stop at the third tree along, an old russet by the look of the bark, and stand for a moment with your hand on its trunk. The bark is cold and dry and very slightly warm where your palm has rested. A small flake of lichen comes away on your sleeve, pale green, almost weightless.
From the far hedge a blackbird calls once, a single round note, and then nothing. You listen for it to come again but it does not. In its place, the smaller sounds begin to surface, sounds you had been hearing without hearing — the faint tick of a beetle moving in dry grass, the creak of a branch settling somewhere behind you, the thin running whisper of a stream beyond the orchard wall. A late bee passes close to your ear, low and slow, its hum frayed and tired at the edges. It has been confused by the warm afternoon and is making its slow way home now, drifting between the trees at the height of your knee. You watch it negotiate the long grass with the careful, lurching patience of something that has been out too long. It dips, recovers, dips, and is gone behind the trunk of the next tree.
You walk on. The grass parts around your ankles with a small wet sound. Halfway down the row you come to a tree that has fallen partway in some past winter and been left to lean — propped now against its neighbour, its trunk almost horizontal for a stretch before angling up again to find the sky. Moss has gathered along the top of the leaning trunk in a soft dark seam, and where you set your hand the moss is cold and dense and yields a little under the weight. A few of last year's apples lie in the grass beneath it, gone brown, sunk into themselves, their skins puckered and soft. One has been hollowed out by something small, the inside cleaned almost to the stem. You leave it where it lies and move on, the smell of the rotted fruit faint and sweet behind you.
At the end of the row there is a low gritstone wall and beyond it the slope of a field rising into the dusk. You stop with your hands on the top stones. They are cold, the cold of a stone that has been holding the temperature of the day in reverse, releasing it slowly back into the air. A patch of lichen on the capstone is the same pale green as the bud-haze on the trees. You stand for a while looking out at the field, where a fox has worn a narrow track across the grass at an angle, almost invisible now in the failing light. Somewhere up the slope a sheep coughs, a sound surprisingly human, and then there is only the stream again and the small sounds of the orchard settling at your back. The apricot band in the west has narrowed to a thread.
You turn and walk back through a different row. These trees are younger, their trunks slimmer, their branches less gnarled, planted perhaps ten or fifteen years ago to replace the ones that had fallen. They have not yet learned the shapes of the older trees. Their bark is smoother, paler, and the buds at their tips are a brighter green, almost yellow in what light remains. Between two of them a wooden stake still leans, weathered to silver, the string that once tied a sapling to it long since perished and gone. You pass a hand over the top of the stake as you go by. The wood is soft with age, the grain raised, a small dry splinter catching against your skin without breaking it. The ground here is firmer, less mossy, and your footsteps make a different sound — a quieter, drier sound, almost no sound at all.
The blackbird calls again from the hedge, twice this time, and then a third time, and then is quiet. The sound seems to come from further off than before, though the bird has not moved. It is the air that has changed, grown cooler, denser, carrying sound differently. You can feel it on the back of your neck, the cold settling down out of the upper sky into the orchard, finding the low places first, pooling in the dip by the wall. Your breath shows faintly. A moth, or what you take for a moth, lifts from the grass ahead of you and drifts pale across your path and is gone into the dark beneath a tree. You walk on. The light is almost gone now from the west, only a memory of warmth along the rim of the hedge, the sky above gone fully to a deep grey-blue with the first cold pricking of a star.
Near the centre of the orchard there is a bench, a plain plank bench set on two flat stones, the wood of it grey and grained and softened by years of weather. You sit. The wood is cold through your clothes. From here you can see almost the whole of the orchard at once, the rows running away in both directions, the trees standing each in their own small portion of dusk. The bud-haze is barely visible now, only a faint sense of softness at the ends of the branches, as if the trees themselves were slightly out of focus. A bat passes overhead, quick, almost soundless, a small dark stitch across the deepening sky, and then another. You did not see where they came from. Somewhere in the grass at your feet, something very small moves, rustles once, and is still.
The bee, or another bee, passes again, lower now, slower, on a line that takes it across the row and into the hedge. You hear its hum thin out and disappear. The cold from the bench has worked its way through to your back. You sit a while longer anyway, watching the last of the colour drain from the western sky, listening to the stream, to the occasional small movement in the grass, to the creak of a branch as the air cools and the wood contracts. The smell of the orchard at this hour is different from its smell in daylight — earthier, wetter, with a faint sweetness under it from the old fruit in the grass and a thread of woodsmoke from somewhere far off, a chimney in a house you cannot see.
You rise and walk back toward the gate. The grass is wetter now than when you came, the dew settling. Your footprints have left a darker trail through it where the bent stems show their undersides. At the gate you stop and look back. The trees are no longer separate shapes but a soft mass of darker dark against the dark, the bud-haze gone entirely now, only the rough sense of the orchard remaining, its quiet weight in the field. The blackbird does not call again. Somewhere inside, the bee has reached whatever hollow it was making for. You lift the latch and the gate swings to with the same soft creak it gave when it opened, and the orchard settles behind you into its long slow business of the night, the cold deepening among the trunks, the grass closing slowly over the place where you walked.