a few rare visits to London and the seaside, every breath of Penelope’s forty-five years had been breathed out somewhere in this landscape. Her brothers had left one by one, to take over various branches of the Stanhope family’s merchant enterprise. One brother slept beneath a stone in St. Ambrose’s churchyard. Her parents had gone to rest there, too, a few years after. Penelope’s husband had sailed away with her last brother—so now Penelope was on her own, with only letters to bridge the distance.
If she tried to walk away now, she’d have to leave her entire past behind, her soul wiped as clean as a newborn babe’s.
She was far too comfortable here to contemplate starting over somewhere else. Especially when there was still so much work to do in Melliton.
Today’s errand at least was simple, if somber. She paused outside the Abington Hall gate to fill her lungs with the good, clean scent of greenery and earth and last night’s petulant rain. She’d worn her best lavender gown and a black crepe veil not for the crowd in church, but for this visit. She unpinned the hem of the crepe from where it rested across the crown of her head, and drew it down over her face, tucking it into her neckline so no skin was left exposed. Thick leather gloves didn’t particularly suit the mourning mood, but she knew Isabella wouldn’t object to her being a little practical.
After all, these weren’t Penelope’s bees she would be speaking to, even if they knew her.
She tugged open the gate and made her way through the grounds toward the bee garden.
Instead of a modern apiary, the bee garden had six hives in boles—small hollows set into the stone of the ancient wall, each just large enough for the straw dome of a single skep. A fountain in the center of the longest wall sent a burbling jet from a stone face into a larger basin beneath, and provided water for thirsty bees to drink. The grounds were planted with a riot of flowering trees, herbs, and blossoms: apple and lavender and hyssop, cowslips and yarrow and honeysuckle.
The gold-and-black-velvet bodies of honeybees danced from blossom to blossom, bearing their harvest back to their home hives. Insect wings caught the morning sunlight, tiny flashes of film and filigree that dazzled the eye and gentled the spirit.
That gentleness was deceptive, however: in a month or so, summer’s bounty would make the bees as lazy and languorous as dowager duchesses, but in spring they were still sharp with winter’s hunger and liable to sting anyone threatening their growing stores of honey and comb.
The trick was to be respectful, but not fearful. Bees could smell panic. So Penelope ambled from one hive to the next, knocking softly on the straw coils to get the bees’ attention, then murmuring condolences on the passing of their mistress. Each knock set the hives buzzing softly, a small cloud of worker bees twirling up from the hive entrance to see who dared disturb their home in swarming season—but Penelope kept her movements slow and smooth and her voice low, and the bees soon settled again.
When she’d told the news to all six hives she stood by the fountain for a while, pulling the gloves off and tucking them in her pocket.
“Can you check that first hive again, Mrs. Flood?” Isabella asked. The elderly woman was wrapped tight against the winter wind, but her eyes were bright and her mouth set in a stern line that brooked no opposition. “I swear I saw a moth emerge from there the other morning.”
It was still quite cool for wax moths, but they could do a lot of damage to a hive if they weren’t caught in time, and Penelope didn’t want Isabella to worry. So she did as commanded, puffing a little more smoke into the first hive and tilting the skep up so she could peer into the folds of comb inside.
“I see no larva, none of their webs,” she called, “and the colony seems strong—plenty of ladies here to fight off intruders.” Some of them were hovering around her head and hands as she worked, but the smoke had made the bees sleepy enough that she didn’t fear their anger. She murmured an apology for disturbing them anyway—it paid to be polite to bees—and set the hive back down. Carefully, so as not to squash anybody.
As Penelope stood and turned back, Isabella hurriedly put down the edge of the skep, the