The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,123

and her hands full of flowers and a lump the size of Wales in the back of her throat.

“Hello yourself,” Penelope said in return.

And now it was Agatha’s turn again. She had to speed things up, or at this rate they wouldn’t get this mess sorted out before winter came and froze them where they stood.

“I made you something,” Agatha said, and held up the flowers. She’d used the enchanter’s nightshade to weave the various blossoms into a coronet, bright and blooming and fit for a fairy queen.

Penelope blinked, mouth opening and closing. She seemed staggered, as if Agatha were speaking a foreign language she only halfway understood. Her eyes never left the coronet. “Cowslips,” she said. “I could quote you some excellent poetry about that.”

Agatha sighed. “Go ahead: I deserve it.”

Penelope was startled into a laugh.

“You said you can’t have two queens in a hive,” Agatha went on, “but that just means only one of us can be queen.” She stepped forward, her heart hovering on the back of her tongue, ready to fly out from her lips. “I think it ought to be you. I came to tell you I’m sorry for yesterday—and to ask you if I could change my answer. To ask . . . if you’d like to share a home, and a life. With me.”

She stretched out her hands, holding the coronet. She was proud of the way they barely shook at all.

Penelope raised a finger and almost touched one trembling petal. A bee from the hive behind her beat her to it, diving into the bell of the flower, its velvet legs dusted with gold.

Penelope’s face lifted, and now her smile outshone the sun in the sky above. “What if neither of us are queens?” she said, to Agatha’s surprise. “What if we’re only a pair of lowly worker bees?”

Agatha stared down at the coronet, as more bees found their way toward it, setting themselves in the flowers like tiny gems. “That sounds much less romantic than what I had planned.”

“Is it?” Penelope set aside the smoker and moved forward, her gloved hands cupping the back of Agatha’s. Heat crept up Agatha’s skin at the touch. “Worker bees depend on one another,” Penelope said. “They can’t thrive or even survive on their own.” One corner of her sweet mouth quirked. “I’d be no good without you, you know.”

Hope struck like a kick to the chest. “Is that a yes?”

“Of course it is.”

Agatha’s heart gave a great leap, joy and gratitude and love all expanding infinitely, as if there was a whole second sky within her. She blew out a breath as the fear and tension of the past few days melted away. And here she was with stars in her eyes and her hands brimming over with flowers. “I still think you ought to wear the crown,” she said. “I went to some trouble.”

Penelope laughed, and bent her head, and blew gently until all the bees flew grumpily away. “We can take turns.”

Her gloved hands raised the coronet and set the whole on Agatha’s brow. It prickled terribly, but Agatha didn’t care—she was too busy pulling off Penelope’s wide hat, the bee veil tangling between her fingers as she bent low for a kiss, catching Penelope’s breathy laugh on her tongue. One kiss led to another, and another, and together they sank to the grass of the meadow, as the buzzing of bees played a lazy, loving counterpoint.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

August 1821

The illustration of Queen Caroline’s funeral was one of Eliza’s finest etchings yet: a great black hearse, horses with plumes that drooped like willow branches, the tall, stern figures of the soldiery in black ink on the pale page. Agatha sold copy after copy as Mrs. Biswas read the account from the papers to the evening crowd at the Four Swallows. “Some stones and mud were thrown at the military, and a magistrate being present, the soldiers were sanctioned in firing their pistols and carbines at the unarmed crowd.”

“Shameful!” Mrs. Koskinen cried, to a chorus of agreement.

Two people had been killed, as the massed crowd confronted the guard and demanded the funeral be allowed to pass through London proper, despite Lord Liverpool’s forbidding it for fear of causing unrest. He’d been right to worry, it turned out. The crowd made its own riotous path. There had been wild, persistent rumors that the Queen had been poisoned: she’d kicked up a royal fuss in an attempt to attend her husband’s coronation a month before, and