Anklet strap tattoo with tag on ankle

One October he cut a length of teal calfskin, the colour of a kingfisher's back, and riveted on a buckle he'd melted from a dead farrier's brass, or so the widow swore. He stamped a little diamond of leather with an E and a D and hung it from the strap so it would knock against his shin when he walked. Nobody asked him whose letters they were. You don't ask a cobbler that.

The orchard at Coombe belonged to a woman called Edith Dunn, who had sworn at the autumn fair that she'd let no man through her gate who couldn't tell her the price of a pippin in her grandmother's money. Tom came up the lane on the first cold morning with the strap buckled round his ankle, the tag ringing against the stones. Edith looked at the little leather diamond a long while. Then she lifted the latch, and every apple in the grove let go of its branch at once and rolled to the grass, as if they had been waiting all summer to be asked.