The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,33
she insisted. “And there is always something in the queue that needs proofing. And I’ll be able to check on my beehive, too, of course.” She realized she was close to babbling, and snapped her mouth shut.
“Of course, ma’am.”
Eliza murmured obediently enough, but Agatha shriveled in her soul to see the question marks still hovering in the girl’s dark, curious eyes. She hurried to change the subject. “Let me walk you through the first one, and show you the book of sample letters . . .”
Still, even the embarrassment of a secret attraction to a married woman didn’t stop her from visiting Melliton again a week later. And the week after that, and the week after that, until it became an accepted part of the rhythm of her life.
Mr. Downes developed a nervous habit of twisting one bit of hair endlessly between his fingers, until it became clear that despite her more frequent appearances his employer spent as much time out of the print-works as in it. Agatha took to carting her sketchbook with her, since Mrs. Flood only rarely needed a second person’s help; the sketchbook’s scenes of London life and famous landmarks began to alternate with country views and cottage scenes and detailed studies of bees and wildflowers. Agatha also brought with her the profits from the first “Inexpressibles” run, new ballads for Mrs. Turner to sell, and whiled away evenings with the crowd in the Four Swallows or with Flood and Joanna Molesey at Fern Hall, before heading back to the solitary darkness of Mrs. Stowe’s spare room. When needed she would hire Gus and cart the Menagerie issues back with her, but most times she found a seat on the stagecoach, which was appreciably quicker and cheaper.
The blueness of the sky no longer seemed so empty, arching above her on the journey.
Agatha had sold all of Thomas’s things after he died, and so she walked every circuit in a pair of Mr. Flood’s cast-off trousers and the same blue coat. She was growing quite addicted to the freedom of long strides free of clinging skirts, and in the lack of pale petticoats to be brushed clean of mud and dust after a long day’s walk.
Nor was that the only change. The differences between city and country, once so stark in Agatha’s perception, began to fade. People were roughly the same in both places, after all, underneath the regional trappings of apparel and accent. She’d been foolish ever to think otherwise. Just like in London, people in the village argued, they teased, they worked, they loved.
And: they fucked. Because even lurid artworks, which Agatha had always thought of as a vice particular to the city, could be found in quiet, homely Melliton—provided one knew where to look.
It was her fourth circuit. Penelope Flood had walked with Agatha to show off her personal beehives at Fern Hall: two skeps with glasses on top, and an extremely scientific design by a Swiss apiculturist which Flood referred to as a leaf hive. This structure was a series of tall rectangular frames with glass sides, all joined with hinges at the back so they could be closed up tight, or fanned open wide. They looked, in fact, precisely like the pages of a book, connected at the spine and spread out in front. Instead of letters and lines of words, however, each glass-covered “page” was alive with buzzing, building, crawling, cleaning bees, packed so tight that in many places you couldn’t see the comb beneath.
Agatha remembered when that would have made her shudder. Now, she put one wondering hand on the glass and smiled to feel the heat of an active hive.
The whole structure was placed under a small red-tiled roof to keep off the wet, but which had the effect of making it look like a shrine—even before Agatha noticed it was overlooked by a small replica of the Medici Venus. A souvenir that had been brought home by one of Penelope Flood’s many seafaring brothers in his youth, the beekeeper explained, while Agatha sketched a fascinated study of the leaf hive in swift, precise lines.
Flood also pointed out the queen, larger than her commoner daughters but still hard to spot amid the thronging, buzzing crowd.
“Do you get a great deal more honey from this hive?” Agatha asked, as her pencil added the velvety insect shapes.
Flood tilted her head. “Well, yes, because it holds more bees. But in a skep you can use glasses, with wires to keep the queen