Opening
Two entwined lives anchor the woods: sisters Alice Osgood and Mary Osgood, whose love, jealousy, and violence seed a haunting that outlives them. Their orchard and house absorb every secret, so when a mid-19th-century slave catcher arrives, the past does not stay buried—it rises.
What Happens
Chapter 3
Twin daughters of Charles Osgood, Alice and Mary grow up mapping their world—the “Giant’s Staircase,” the “Fire of London,” and the shaded grove their father calls “Brocéliande,” which becomes Alice’s private Sanctuary and Escape. Their bond fractures early when their father, offering an apple “for the fairest,” unconsciously favors Alice, confirming the roles the world assigns: Alice as charming and desired; Mary as clever, prudent, and overlooked—a lifelong tension of Love, Loneliness, and Connection. Their eccentric schooling under a minister who believes Scripture unfolded in New England gives them a window into harsher truths via his unruly son, George Carter Jr.—barnyard trysts observed from shadows, herbal cures from Joe Walker—while life on the farm hardens Mary’s pragmatism and deepens Alice’s desire for a larger life.
As the girls mature, Arthur Barton, a one-legged potter, courts Alice. In the kiln’s glow, Mary’s jealousy becomes a silent siege. At the potter’s shop, her trembling presence forces a choice: sister or suitor. Alice chooses Mary. Arthur dies of typhoid the next summer, and the choice becomes permanent. Years spool out in sameness. Their father, a Loyalist, dies in the Revolution; Mary’s shrewd dealing keeps their land from confiscation. She blocks every new suitor for Alice and, seeking security, decides to raise sheep—demanding that Brocéliande be cleared. To Alice, the felling of the grove is a “murder,” the destruction of her last refuge, and the sisters’ bond frays to breaking.
Decades later, George Carter Jr. returns as an elderly, world-traveling abolitionist and writer. His tender courtship gives Alice, now in her sixties, a late-flowering hope. Mary, perceiving the ultimate threat to her closeted world, grows brittle with fear. After Alice spends a night with George, Mary storms into the orchard with an axe and begins to hack the trees. When Alice runs to stop her, Mary swings and kills her sister. For five years, Mary keeps house with Alice’s ghost—grief, guilt, and love refracted by The Persistence of History and Memory and Mental Illness and Perception. Dying of a tumor, she carries Alice’s body, a fife, and their ballad-book into a secret cellar beneath the pantry, lays down beside her, and pulls the last floorboard over them. Across the chapter, bits of ephemera—an invasive-seed essay, a catamount ballad—braid the sisters’ story into The Interconnectedness of Nature and Human History.
Chapter 4
In the 1850s, the discreet slave catcher Phalen tracks a fugitive, Esther, and her infant from Maryland to Massachusetts. Posing as an insurance man, he canvasses Oakfield’s abolitionist homes, hunting for the famed writer George Carter (“Democritus”). At a market he buys a “ghost apple” from a girl, who points him to a haunted orchard and the ruins of Old Man Carter’s place—the abandoned Osgood house.
Phalen stakes out the property until he sees Esther step out to draw water. He waits for dark and enters. The rooms are thick with dust and silence; sheep skeletons testify to the catamount feast sung in the Osgoods’ ballad. He finds traces of the fugitive but not the woman herself—until a locked pantry door gives way, revealing a trapdoor rim. A cough rises from below. Certain he has her, Phalen pries up the boards, strikes a match, and peers in.
Two skeletons stare back: Alice and Mary, still in pink, with a fife and an axe. In a supernatural turn, their eyes open. They rise to meet the intruder. Mary says, “I don’t believe our guest invited you.” Interleaved ephemera expand the house’s time-scale: the ballad “The doleful account of the OWL and the SQUIRREL” allegorizes reforestation—a quiet hymn to The Cycle of Life, Death, and Renewal—and letters from the painter William Henry Teale to the writer Erasmus Nash chronicle Teale’s artistic creed, his solace in the woods, and a secret, passionate affair that leaves him isolated.
Character Development
The chapters chart how desire, fear, and duty calcify into fate—and how the house remembers what its people can’t bear to hold.
- Alice Osgood: Yearns for love and a world beyond the orchard; lets Mary’s need define her choices. Breaks with Arthur to preserve the sister-bond, reaches for late-life happiness with George, and dies for it. As a ghost, her presence binds her to the place she tried to escape.
- Mary Osgood: Begins as the practical twin and protector; becomes the jealous warden of an isolated life. Saves the farm after their Loyalist father’s death but destroys Alice’s sanctuary and, finally, Alice herself. Lives in self-made purgatory, then entombs them both, refusing separation even in death.
- Phalen: A patient, professional hunter whose methods favor observation over force. He bridges national history (slavery’s reach) and the house’s older, darker story—and is overtaken by that past.
- William Henry Teale: In letters, emerges as a romantic landscape painter aligned with the Hudson River School, rapt by the woods and torn between public role and private truth. His love for Erasmus Nash ends in secrecy and solitude, which the house coolly absorbs.
Themes & Symbols
An apple sets fate in motion and keeps returning: the father’s “for the fairest” divides the twins; the “Osgood Wonder” sustains them; a “ghost apple” leads Phalen to the door; Teale’s first bite reads like sacrament. The woods are doubleness made visible—Brocéliande as sanctuary for Alice, resource for Mary—so its clearing becomes the symbolic killing of inner life, an intimate case study in Human Impact on the Environment. The house itself functions as a vessel of layered memory: sheep bones, dust-blurred portraits, a hidden grave, and—when needed—eyes that open.
Form equals truth. Ballads, essays, detective sequences, and letters collaborate to tell the place’s whole story, each mode catching what others miss—an argument for the collage-nature of history and The Nature of Storytelling and Truth. Meanwhile, the owl-and-squirrel ballad turns ecological succession into parable; a squirrel’s forgotten seed-hoard regrows the pasture, knitting private tragedy to larger cycles. The land remembers, regardless of who claims it.
Key Quotes
“For the fairest.”
- The father’s casual phrase casts the twins in fixed roles—Alice desired, Mary overlooked—and inaugurates a competition neither sister chooses but both must live inside. The line echoes mythic judgment while turning the orchard’s apple into a lifelong curse.
Alice calls the clearing of Brocéliande a “murder.”
- Naming the felling of the grove as killing frames the woods as a living partner in Alice’s inner life. Mary’s utilitarian logic becomes an assault on imagination and love, sharpening the moral stakes of their conflict.
“Ghost apple.”
- A child’s market slang becomes a compass for Phalen and a symbol of how the orchard’s fruit carries the dead forward. The phrase collapses clue and omen: the living eat what the past has ripened.
“I don’t believe our guest invited you.”
- Mary’s line reasserts the house as the sisters’ domain and flips the hunter-hunted dynamic. Polite diction sharpens the menace, signaling that trespass here answers to an older jurisdiction: the dead.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters supply the novel’s central tragedy and its animating haunt. Chapter 3 roots the book’s supernatural in the dense human reality of the Osgoods—sisters who love too fiercely to let go—so that when Chapter 4 turns gothic, the shock feels earned. Phalen’s pursuit links the secluded orchard to national history, proving the woods are never separate from the country’s conflicts. The ephemera widen the lens, showing how art, song, science, and rumor preserve what time tries to erase. With William Henry Teale arriving in letters, the house moves into its next era, ready to absorb another forbidden love into its living archive.