Fox with feathered wings across a back

You will have heard the vicar's hat went into the pond, so here is the rest in order before your mother tells it wrong. The reception was in the top orchard at Aldous Farm, poles still warm from the sun, when the bride's brother came running down the rows shouting that a fox had got into the cake tent. Nobody hurried. Foxes have been at Aldous since the Tudors, Ruth says, and they never take what they cannot carry.

This one did not run. It sat on the low bough of the old medlar and looked past the marquee at the swifts, as if waiting to be called by name. Its wings were feathers, grey and rust and a green like the underside of a leaf, fanned from its shoulders the way a jay's crest lifts when it is cross. Dennis Pell put down his glass and said nothing at all, which for Dennis is a sermon.

Ruth carried a bowl of cream down the orchard and set it at the foot of the trunk. The fox came down slow, its long tail trailing a pale wisp behind it like smoke off a snuffed candle. It ate, then looked up at the bride. Only looked. Then it went up the bark in three bounds and into the hedge, feathers and all, and the swifts closed over the empty bough.

Here is the part I keep turning over. Tom, who never once in forty years got a dance out of Ruth, asked her to dance under that medlar. She said yes before he had finished. I am not telling you this because I believe in omens, but the fox was a good one. Come home at Easter. The bowl is still on the step, and I have not washed it yet.

Love, Aunt Bea