The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,111

its hasty ties and sending it bouncing over the ground.

Penelope would have rushed forward, but Agatha’s hand clamped around her wrist and held her back.

Men, at least a dozen, poured over the crest of the hill. John scooped puzzled bees and broken comb back into the skep, and shoved the whole apparatus the last ten feet, to where his wife and her lover stood in the shadows.

Penelope lunged forward and dragged the barrow into the trees.

John waved at her to hurry, then took off running—but not toward them. Sidelong, parallel to the wood, pulling the muslin from his head and waving it like a banner as he made for the bright ribbon of the open road. “Never catch me!” he sang out, with the full force of his sailor’s lungs.

The pursuers spotted him, sent up the cry, and turned as one.

“Come on,” Agatha hissed, as Penelope’s throat ached with unvoiced shouts and pleas. Each woman took one side of the wheelbarrow, and together they hurried it bumping down the track in the wood, toward Mr. Thomas and Mr. Kitt’s house. There they found the others, sitting tense around the faint embers in the kitchen hearth.

Harry bounded up and wrapped one arm around them both. “Thank god,” he muttered—but Penelope pulled back, heartsick, as he asked: “Where’s John?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her fear clogging her throat.

“The barrow fell, and he got it to us, then drew the pursuit away,” Agatha said.

Harry laughed, half knowing, half bitter. “He’s too chivalrous for his own good, that man.”

“Maybe they didn’t catch him?” Mr. Kitt hoped.

“They’ll catch all of us, if we’re not careful,” Agatha replied.

One by one, they split off: Mr. Kitt heading toward the Four Swallows where he’d spent the first part of the evening, and where Mr. Thomas had remained, buying rounds very visibly and giving them both something of an alibi. The others kept to the darkest spots, avoiding the open roads and holding their breaths, listening for the sounds of pursuit.

The hue and cry was just starting to spread through the town when Agatha and Penelope reached Fern Hall; Harry, who arrived a few minutes later, unusually pale and out of breath, informed them that the Four Swallows had been shouting about thieves and villains when he’d slipped past beneath the curtain of willows along the riverbank.

But by the time dawn rose, all of Melliton was awake and aware of the news:

John Flood had been taken by the special constables.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Mr. Oliver’s difficulty was this: to properly charge someone with theft, one had to bring evidence he’d stolen something. And while the Abington hives were certainly gone, and Mr. Flood had been apprehended in the neighborhood at the time they vanished, nobody seemed to be able to find any of the hives at all.

They certainly weren’t at Fern Hall, which the special constables and Mr. Oliver had walked around no fewer than three times, eyes peeled for stolen beehives tucked into an empty stall in the stables or hidden beneath a draping of canvas. But Penelope’s leaf hive and her glass-topped skeps were the only bees present, and not even Mr. Oliver’s palpable suspicion could make the stolen swarms appear out of thin air.

But John was not to be let off entirely. Mr. Oliver couldn’t charge him with the felony—and six full hives’ worth of bees and wax and honey would have doubtlessly earned a sentence of transportation—but since John’s shouting had roused fully half the town from the sweet slumber of their beds, the vicar could certainly bring the full wrath of the law (or rather, the full wrath of Mr. Oliver) down on him for a breach of the peace.

To the horror of his captain and his wife, John was sentenced to spend an afternoon in the stocks. It was an archaic punishment, not much used in these more enlightened times—but Mr. Oliver was keen to make of John Flood an example in whatever way he could.

“This is all my fault,” Penelope whispered.

She and Agatha were at Fern Hall. Mrs. Braintree had brought them some of her latest distilling to pour into their tea, but it hadn’t stopped Penelope’s hands from shaking. Agatha had wrapped her in blankets and cozied up beside her in the window seat—but Penelope couldn’t shake the guilty feeling that had haunted her since she’d returned from visiting the jail with Harry.

“Nonsense,” Agatha said, staunch and loyal. Not that Penelope had expected anything less. How could anyone be so lovely even when glaring?