The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,23
knew, Penelope Flood wrote like this to everyone. With so many brothers scattered around the globe, she must have a great deal of practice in using letters to bridge the gaps of time and distance.
Even if this was ordinary correspondence to Penelope Flood, it was something new and special to Agatha.
And she wanted even more now to write back. She tucked the letter into her skirt pocket, and composed a reply.
Then, to make up for the self-indulgence, she forced herself to turn back to the never-ending work. When Eliza and Sydney returned, she was three letters deep into her correspondence for the Menagerie, and only the occasional whisper of paper in her pocket reminded her that she’d taken an hour for something selfish that evening.
Penelope’s next reply came enclosed with a pressed flower.
An apple blossom, she said, from the gardens at Abington Hall. You recall in my last note I mentioned I inherited the Abington hives? There are half a dozen of them, and they sit in a cozy courtyard of their own on the top of Melliton’s highest hill. The place has been a bee garden for at least two centuries, if not more, and the plants have all been carefully chosen for apiological delight in every season.
They are less of a delight to Lady Summerville, the hall’s current occupant. She wishes she could knock down the ancient walls and put in a modern lawn with a prospect, and I am old-fashioned enough that this strikes my heart with all the heavy tones of a funeral bell. Fortunately, Lady S has not the funds for such alterations. The bee garden remains safe.
But my heart tells me the detente cannot last. I fear the most for the apple trees, so ancient and yet so delicate in their spring finery. Their fruit is the sweetest in Melliton in the autumn, and it would be a shame to deprive future generations of the childhood ritual of clambering over the wall to steal them.
Flood
Agatha tipped the apple blossom into her palm and peered down at it. Its petals had been perfectly, lovingly pressed of all moisture, leaving it so light it trembled at even the slightest whisper of breath. Most of the flower was white, but the tips of the petals still bore traces of a blush pink that would have been irresistible beneath the summer sky in a hilltop garden.
Clearly, Agatha had the same taste in flowers as bees did.
She carefully tipped the fragile blossom back onto Penelope’s letter, refolded the pages, then tucked the latest missive away with the others in her new hiding space: between the pages of a manuscript copy of the Scotswoman’s bee book. The bulk of it occasioned no notice sitting on her desk among her other papers, yet it gave Agatha a little frisson to see it and know it held a secret.
That little flower haunted her the rest of the day, hovering on the periphery of her thoughts, pale petals fluttering like wings in the edges of her vision. She found herself idly doodling it in the corner of her sketchbook, when she ought to have been working on other things. There was something alluring about the shape of it—she couldn’t help wanting to trace every line of the delicate veining, or use her scribe to follow the curves and points of each individual petal.
A shame it was so delicate. The years were not kind to fragile things.
She reached out for a small stub of boxwood, almost before the thought had completed itself. Soon the table beneath her busy hands was filled with curls and corners and shavings, as she carved away everything but the flowing, flowery outline.
Flood,
Thank you for the apple blossom—it brought a moment of sunshine and good country air into a day that was otherwise a cloudy one. Such flowers are not so easy to come by here in the city, but I have sent you one anyways, at the end of this note. Woodcuts are slowly beginning to grow popular in printing circles—they lack the precision of copperplate, or the dramatic shading of mezzotint in the English style—but I learned to engrave first in wood, and it has always seemed to me the more appropriate material for natural scenes and figures.
More importantly, they last. A well-done wood engraving will let a printer make impressions for centuries, long after other kinds of plates have been worn down by use and the weight of the press.