The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,22

of a polite and awkward silence.

Penelope Flood had sent that humiliating weakness back as carefully, cushioningly wrapped as a treasured heirloom. As if Agatha would be incomplete without it.

Her mother-in-law had been right: Penelope Flood was extraordinarily kind. Far kinder than Agatha deserved.

Thinking poorly of herself was familiar, and helped steady her whirling thoughts. She glanced again at the door and read on:

The nearest of my living siblings is my brother, Philip, who married a Welshwoman whose father owned a mine. The rest have scattered in the course of pursuing fair love and fortune. Mostly the latter, to be frank. Only I have stayed in Melliton, in the house where we all grew up. It rings a little emptier now that it’s just myself.

Perhaps that’s one reason I work so hard to stay busy. There are a number of farming families in the area whom I visit regularly—beekeeping is not very demanding when a keeper has only one or two hives, but as soon as you have moths or mice or foulbrood showing up it is helpful to be able to call on someone with expertise. The families enjoy the honey and wax their hives produce, I have a chance to observe how variations in nearby flora affect things like honey production rates and hive strength, and it keeps me out in the fresh air and not brooding alone at home.

However, at the moment, I also have the benefit of a witty and talkative guest: my friend Joanna Molesey, whose name you’ll recognize, has come to stay with me after the loss of her patroness. She has family in the north, but some small legal matters—including a missing diamond snuffbox—require her to remain in the neighborhood for some indefinite length of time. If you have a moment to spare, I can tell you the whole story . . .

Agatha read the letter twice more beginning to end, then folded it back up along its creases. As a businesswoman she was careful to preserve all her correspondence; such records often came in handy when disputes arose over payment rates and deadlines for delivery.

She could not, of course, put Penelope’s letter with these. It was far too personal.

Nor could she put it in the small dresser beside her bed, where Thomas’s letters rested, the fragile stack tied with a blue silk ribbon. Scraps of delicate poetry he’d found, printed flowers just for her, lines he’d typeset himself as a youth—these were also personal, also secret, but not quite in the same painful way. You expected love letters to be intimate and embarrassing.

What they weren’t, Agatha realized, was specific.

Thomas had loved words as naturally as breathing, but he was more a collector of them than an artist with them. Or to put it another way: he could take several unrelated pieces on poetry and history and essays on art and the sciences, set them in a compelling and natural order, add illustrations to underscore the meaning, and make the final result immensely appealing and artistic—but he could never have composed any of those pieces himself. His art was in the collection of things, not the writing of them.

When courting Agatha, Thomas had sent her bits of other people’s poems because they captured how he felt—but that wasn’t the same as writing her a love poem himself. Agatha had always known this on some level—so she’d kept her replies in the same vein. Snippets of things, thoughts pulled out of their natural ground. She hadn’t the talent for such collections, not the way Thomas had, but to her great chagrin it had never occurred to her that she was allowed to form her own replies in her own particular manner. She’d assumed she was supposed to fit her style to his.

This new correspondence with Penelope Flood, though, was made up only of the things the two of them said to one another. No contract disputes, no professional relationship to protect, no stolen snippets. Nobody else’s words to get in the way.

Agatha had never thought to want that before. But all at once she found herself craving it like a drunkard craving another glass of gin.

To have the space to let her thoughts meander, to be able to simply say what she thought, instead of having to hunt down the part where someone else had said it better, or said it first, or said something close to it . . . It was intoxicating.

Maybe she was getting ahead of herself. After all, for all she