The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,28
to each cottager—and, just as carefully, to each beehive.
The printer’s eyebrows rose sharply the first time Penelope did this, but over time Mrs. Griffin lapsed into quiet amusement at what she clearly had chosen to perceive as an eccentricity.
They made the whole south circuit together, from Knots Down past Ilford Hall and into the wood. It was the opposite of the order Penelope usually walked it, and it gave her the odd sense that she was winding a clock backward and making the hours run the wrong way round. If they kept this up, she imagined the two of them growing younger and younger with each step—Mrs. Griffin’s hair turning rich black and Penelope’s gold, the creases at the corners of both their eyes and mouths smoothing away, aches and pains and stiff joints loosening as limbs grew lithe with youth again.
Then the wheel of the wheelbarrow struck a rock and jolted Penelope right to her teeth. She stopped for a moment to shake the tingle from her hands, as the full weight of her forty-five years thumped down on her.
Well, it had been a nice daydream while it lasted.
“Shall I take over pushing that for a while?” Mrs. Griffin asked, cocking an eyebrow.
Penelope shook her head. “Oh, no, it’s nothing—I was just distracted for a moment.”
They resumed their walk, and Penelope tried to keep her mind from wandering by fixing it on her companion.
Of course, this risked another kind of distraction.
Agatha Griffin strode with her hands clasped behind her, head tilted back, dark hair balled at the base of her neck. The deep blue of John’s old coat suited her, especially as the climb up the road into the wood brought out the roses in her cheeks and made her breathe rather hard.
At your service, Mrs. Flood.
Oh, would that were true. Or better yet, the other way around—Mrs. Griffin was very obviously what Mrs. Stowe called the managing sort, and in past liaisons Penelope had thoroughly enjoyed being, as it were, managed.
Not that this was a liaison. It still hovered well under the protective aegis of friendship. Some of it Penelope would have been tempted to read as flirtation from other sources, but despite the growing warmth in her letters, Mrs. Griffin seemed more skittish than seductive. Penelope had not missed the way she tugged at the cuffs and collar of her borrowed coat, or how she starched up whenever Penelope brushed cautioning fingertips over her elbow to guide her down a turn of some of the less obvious paths.
Probably just a passing fancy on Penelope’s part. No doubt it would vanish soon enough.
After they left the fourth cottage, whose busily buzzing hives only needed a little trimming of the grass to keep the entrances clear, Penelope turned to her companion. “You know why I talk to the bees, don’t you?”
“Because there’s more bees around here than people?”
Penelope laughed, even as she shook her head. “So they know who we are. The more familiar bees are with a beekeeper, with their scent and their movements and their voice, the less fuss they make when the beekeeper approaches them. Or, say, starts shuttling hives around, or removing comb, or any one of a hundred other things that would make wild bees turn on you in outrage. You stop being a threat to them, in short.”
Mrs. Griffin tilted her head. “That . . . actually sounds quite sensible.” She quirked her lips. “Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say.”
Penelope shook her head. “Familiarity breeds trust, Griffin.”
“So long as you don’t expect them to talk back.”
Penelope chuckled. “Of course I don’t.” She cast a sly look at the other woman, from the corner of her eye. “I do recite my favorite poems to them, though. Pastorals, usually.”
Mrs. Griffin’s mouth twitched. “It’s a wonder they don’t try to sting you for that alone.”
They walked on.
Mrs. Griffin frowned lightly, the toes of her boots scuffing the stones out of the road and out of her way. “Does Mr. Flood help you with the bees when he’s not at sea?”
Penelope adjusted her grip on the wheelbarrow handles. “He did, once or twice, when we first met,” she replied, smiling to remember. John had frowned at the bees as though he suspected them of teasing him by flying in curves and squiggles rather than straight lines. “But he’s at sea for such long stretches, and he mostly only comes back home in the winters, when there’s very little hive-work to be done.”