A Red Autumn
Rowan Ashby loved autumn more than anyone in the village of Little Penwick. Possibly more than anyone in all of England.
She loved the smell of it, woodsmoke and wet leaves and apples. She loved the way the light went low and golden in the afternoons and made long shadows across the lanes. She loved crunching through leaf piles in her wellies, and conkers glossy as polished wood, and the first morning cold enough to see your breath. And she loved her coat, the big, chunky, cherry-red one with the wide collar and the three wooden buttons, that her Nana Bea had knitted for her last winter, big and loose and warm, just the way she liked it.
Most of all, Rowan loved her hair. It was red, too. Not orange, not ginger, not strawberry, whatever anyone said. Red. A deep, coppery, autumn-leaf red that tumbled down her back in waves no brush could tame, and caught fire when the sun hit it. Nana Bea said she had been born with autumn on her head. Rowan thought that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about anybody.
There was only one thing about autumn that Rowan did not love.
In Little Penwick, it was brown.
Oh, it tried. Every October, the old oaks along the high street went a tired, papery tan. The beech trees on the green went yellow, and then brown, and then fell off. The hawthorn hedges went a sort of muddy mustard. The lime trees outside the church went the color of weak tea. It was all perfectly pleasant. Perfectly ordinary. Perfectly, dreadfully beige.
Rowan knew that autumn could be more than that. She had seen it.
It was in the magazines. The glossy ones in the waiting room at Dr. Fairley’s surgery, and the travel ones her mum brought home from the library. There were photographs of places far away, places in America and Canada and Japan, where the autumn trees turned colors that did not seem possible. Maples blazing scarlet against blue skies. Whole hillsides of orange and crimson and gold, like a forest on fire. Little Japanese trees with leaves as red as rubies and as delicate as lace, reflected in still ponds.
Rowan had cut out every picture she could find. They covered the wall above her bed now, dozens of them, a patchwork of reds and oranges and flaming golds. She looked at them every night before she fell asleep.
“Just once,” she would whisper to them. “Just once, I wish it could look like that here.”
On the last night of September, she wished harder than she ever had before.
She couldn’t have told you why that night was different. Perhaps it was the wind, which had been blowing strangely warm all day, from a direction it did not usually blow. Perhaps it was the moon, which had come up enormous and orange over the hills, like a harvest pumpkin. Perhaps it was just that she was eighteen, and some wishes need eighteen years of practice before they are ready.
She knelt at her bedroom window in her nightgown, with her forehead against the cold glass and her red hair spilling over her shoulders, and looked out at the dark shapes of the brown trees of Little Penwick. She closed her eyes. And she wished, with every single bit of herself, so hard that her hands shook and her eyes stung.
Please. Just once. Let the whole world be red.
Then she climbed into bed, and fell asleep under the wall of magazine pictures, and dreamed of fire that did not burn.
In the morning, the light was pink.
That was the first thing she noticed. Not the ordinary gray-white light of an English October morning, but a soft, warm, rosy glow, pouring through the gap in her curtains and painting the ceiling the color of strawberry ice cream.
Rowan sat up slowly. She rubbed her eyes. She swung her feet out of bed onto the cold floor, went to the window, and pulled the curtains open.
And she forgot how to breathe.
The old horse chestnut tree in the garden, the one that every year went a tired, crinkled brown, was crimson. Not a little red. Not reddish. Crimson. Every single leaf, top to bottom, glowing like a stained-glass window with the sun behind it. Beside it, the little birch tree by the shed had turned a pale, shimmering pink, like the inside of a seashell. The hawthorn hedge at the bottom of the garden was a deep, velvety purple, and the climbing rose on the fence had burst into a hundred new blooms of coral and scarlet. Even the grass seemed to glow, tipped with gold.
And beyond the garden, beyond the rooftops and the chimney pots of Little Penwick, all the way up the hills to the edge of the sky, every tree in the world had caught fire.
Reds. Oranges. Flaming golds. Deep wine purples and soft blush pinks. The great oaks along the high street were scarlet. The beeches on the green were orange as tangerines. The lime trees outside the church had turned a pink so bright it almost hurt to look at. And the woods on the hill above the village, the woods that every year faded to the color of cardboard, were blazing, every color of a sunset all at once, rolling away in waves as far as she could see.
It was the magazine pictures. It was every single one of them, all at once, come to life.
Rowan pressed both hands against the cold glass and stared, with her mouth open and her eyes enormous, as a single scarlet leaf drifted down past her window, turning over and over in the golden morning light.
Then she let out a shriek that woke the whole house, and ran for her coat.
She did not stop to get dressed. She pulled the big red coat on right over her nightgown, buttoned all three wooden buttons wrong, jammed her bare feet into her wellies, and clattered down the stairs and out the back door into the garden.
Nana Bea was already standing at the kitchen window in her dressing gown with a mug of tea halfway to her lips. She did not drink it. She just stood there, looking out at the crimson horse chestnut, with her mouth open.
“Well,” she said faintly, to no one in particular. “Well, I never.”
Rowan was already gone.
She ran down the garden path, through a drift of fallen leaves that were not brown but every color in a paintbox, scarlet and amber and plum and rose, and they swirled up around her ankles as she ran, like sparks. She stopped at the garden gate and turned slowly, in a full circle, with her head tipped back and her arms flung wide, while the leaves came drifting down out of the pink morning sky and caught in her hair.
Then she went to see the world.
The whole of Little Penwick had come outside. People were standing in their front gardens in their pajamas and slippers, staring up at their own trees as if they had never seen them before. Mr. Hobbs the postman had stopped his bicycle in the middle of the lane and was simply sitting on it, with one foot on the ground and a bundle of letters forgotten in his hand, gazing up at the scarlet oaks along the high street. Mrs. Dimmock from the bakery had come out with flour on her hands and was standing under the pink lime trees by the church, crying a little, and laughing at herself for crying.
“It’s like a painting,” someone said.
“It’s like the pictures in those magazines,” said someone else. “Those American ones.”
Rowan just kept walking, with her eyes as wide as they would go.
On the village green, the old beech trees had turned the color of tangerines, and every gust of wind sent their leaves spinning down like orange confetti onto the grass. A group of little children were already lying in the leaf piles, flapping their arms and legs, making leaf angels in orange and gold. Rowan lay down and made one too, right there in her nightgown and coat, eighteen years old and not the least bit embarrassed.
By the stone bridge, she stood and looked down at the brook. Its water was always a dull, ordinary brown. This morning, it was covered in floating leaves, red and pink and purple and gold, drifting slowly downstream together like a moving patchwork quilt. She leaned over the wall and watched them go until her neck ached.
The flowers had changed too. All along the lane, in every front garden, the tired end-of-season daisies had burst open again, enormous now, in scarlet and coral and soft blush pink, nodding on their long stems. Even the dandelions in the cracks of the pavement had turned a deep, glowing orange. A robin followed her from garden to garden, hopping from fence post to fence post, its breast so red that for once it did not stand out at all.
And then, because she had always wanted to, Rowan climbed the hill to the woods.
It took her nearly an hour. She did not mind. The path wound up through the bracken, which had turned a deep, rich wine purple, and through stands of silver birches whose leaves were now the soft, shell-pink of the sky at dawn. At the top, she came out onto the open hillside above Little Penwick, and turned around.
And there it was.
The whole valley spread out below her, glowing. Every tree. Every hedgerow. Every garden. Crimson and orange and gold and purple and pink, rolling away in waves toward the far hills, with the gray roofs and red chimneys of the village tucked in the middle like a bird’s nest in a burning bush. The church spire rose up out of a cloud of pink. The brook wound through it all like a ribbon of colored glass.
It was more beautiful than any picture in any magazine. It was more beautiful than anything she had ever seen.
Rowan sat down in the leaves at the top of the hill, in her too-big red coat with the buttons done up wrong, with her red hair blowing around her face and a scarlet maple leaf caught in it just above her ear. And she simply looked, for a very long time, with the wind in her hair and the leaves falling all around her, until the sun began to sink.
That evening, Nana Bea found her sitting on the back step in the last of the golden light, still in the coat, with a pile of leaves in her lap. She had been sorting them by color.
Nana Bea sat down beside her with a creak and a sigh. For a while, neither of them said anything. They just watched the crimson horse chestnut glowing in the sunset.
“Do you know why your mum named you Rowan?” Nana Bea asked at last.
Rowan shook her head.
“The rowan tree,” said Nana Bea. “Mountain ash, some people call it. It turns red every single autumn, without fail, even where nothing else does. Red leaves. Red berries. The birds love it.” She smiled and tucked a strand of Rowan’s coppery hair behind her ear. “There isn’t a single one in Little Penwick. Never has been. But the morning you were born, you came out with all that red hair, and your mum took one look at you and said, ‘Well, now we have one.’”
Rowan looked down at the leaves in her lap. Then out at the burning garden. Then back up at her grandmother. Her eyes were stinging, but it was the good kind.
“Do you think it will still be like this tomorrow?” she whispered.
Nana Bea looked out at the sunset for a long moment.
“I think,” she said gently, “that some things are only meant to happen once. That’s what makes them magic.”
The next morning, the light through Rowan’s curtains was gray.
She knew before she even opened them. When she did, the old horse chestnut in the garden was brown again. The birch by the shed was yellow. The hedge was mustard. And beyond the rooftops, the woods on the hill had faded back to the tired, papery color of cardboard. Little Penwick was ordinary again.
Rowan stood at the window for a long time. It was all right, she told herself. She had seen it. She had seen the whole world red, even if it was only once. That was more than most people ever got.
Then she noticed something by the garden shed.
She was down the stairs and out the door in her bare feet before she had even decided to move.
It was a tree. A very small one, no taller than she was, with a thin silver trunk and delicate feathery leaves. It had not been there yesterday. It had never been there before in her whole life. And every single one of its leaves was scarlet. Bright, glowing, impossible scarlet, as red as her coat, as red as her hair. And hanging from its slender branches, among the leaves, were clusters of tiny round berries, red as rubies, shining in the gray morning light.
A robin sat on the topmost twig, eating one.
Rowan knelt down in the wet grass in front of it and reached out, very carefully, and touched one of its leaves.
A rowan tree.
It grew up beside her, that little tree, year after year, from a slip of a sapling no taller than she was into a tree that stood high above the garden shed. She watered it in summer and talked to it in winter and hung bird feeders from its branches. And every autumn, without fail, when the rest of Little Penwick turned its tired, ordinary brown, the rowan tree in the Ashby garden blazed scarlet, from its roots to its very top, so bright that people walking past would stop at the gate to stare.
And beside it, every autumn, in a big red coat gone soft and faded with the years, stood a woman with hair to match.
The whole world had only been red once.
But her corner of it never forgot.
___________________________________________________________________
All of my stories can be found here in my stories collection. Please consider subscribing to it.