Penelope laughed, even as she shook her head. “So they know who we are. The more familiar bees are with a beekeeper, with their scent and their movements and their voice, the less fuss they make when the beekeeper approaches them. Or, say, starts shuttling hives around, or removing comb, or any one of a hundred other things that would make wild bees turn on you in outrage. You stop being a threat to them, in short.”
Mrs. Griffin tilted her head. “That... actually sounds quite sensible.” She quirked her lips. “Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say.”
Penelope shook her head. “Familiarity breeds trust, Griffin.”
“So long as you don’t expect them to talk back.”
Penelope chuckled. “Of course I don’t.” She cast a sly look at the other woman, from the corner of her eye. “I do recite my favorite poems to them, though. Pastorals, usually.”
Mrs. Griffin’s mouth twitched. “It’s a wonder they don’t try to sting you for that alone.”
They walked on.
Mrs. Griffin frowned lightly, the toes of her boots scuffing the stones out of the road and out of her way. “Does Mr. Flood help you with the bees when he’s not at sea?”
Penelope adjusted her grip on the wheelbarrow handles. “He did, once or twice, when we first met,” she replied, smiling to remember. John had frowned at the bees as though he suspected them of teasing him by flying in curves and squiggles rather than straight lines. “But he’s at sea for such long stretches, and he mostly only comes back home in the winters, when there’s very little hive-work to be done.”
Mrs. Griffin kicked another rock. “How long have you been married?”
“Oh... ten years this August.”
Mrs. Griffin’s gaze was carefully pointed elsewhere. On the grassy banks, on the treetops—anywhere but at Penelope. “No children?”
Penelope laughed before she could stop herself. “No children, no.”
She waited breathlessly for the next question—fully ready to drop her usual hints about her intimacy with John, or rather the lack of such—but Mrs. Griffin’s curiosity had apparently exhausted itself for the moment.
Only the birdsong filled the air between them for the next quarter mile.
Afternoon waned into evening. Because they were moving backward, the south circuit terminated where it usually began: Penelope’s home on the edge of the wood, just where it met the main road. To the west were the farmlands and high street; to the east the road wound through a mile of semiwild woodland until it split and sent tendrils to each of the larger estates that lay in a long curve on the wood’s far side.
And here, where road and wood and farmland all met, on a slight rise looking over the river, was Fern Hall, two centuries old and still in the prime of its youth, as buildings went. Light from the lowering sun cast it red against the shadowed trees behind. Stone and wood, plaster and paint, glass and a small garden—but what Penelope saw when she looked at it wasn’t the structure of the house itself.
She saw all the places where her family wasn’t.
The Stanhopes hadn’t built Fern Hall—that was some other clan, whose name Penelope had sadly forgotten—but as soon as Alexander Stanhope had purchased the place it had become the center of the family’s world, a combination home and storehouse and navigational reference point.
Even now, with her siblings and their children all scattered to the far corners of the map, Penelope could feel the presence of all those long-loved objects pull at her like the tug on a compass needle: the embroideries her mother had sewn onto chair covers and sofa cushions, the papers her father had stored in the study, the bedrooms still full of toy boats and schoolbooks and outgrown, outworn clothes that had passed down from sibling to sibling.
Penelope had never been able to shake the thought that despite the distance between them all, if she tried to throw any of these things away, five brothers would descend on her in an instant with shouts of the most strident objections. She had, by default, become something of a steward for the memories of her siblings. The one remaining root that held the family tree in familiar ground.
She had conceded only this much: she had moved everything out of one bedroom to make space for Joanna to stay. Penelope was still fighting the urge to confess it all to Michael in a letter—she’d fretted and flinched as Daniel the footman and George the gardener had moved hobbyhorses and emptied all those bookshelves. As though her brother would hear the ruckus all the way across the ocean in Canada.
According to Mrs. Braintree, the Stanhopes’ stalwart cook and housekeeper, their guest was having one of herferal days, as she termed them, and had retired to her room with a request that she not be disturbed for anything short of fire, flood, or cold-blooded murder. (Presumably, with the latter, she’d either want to watch or offer tips for how to hide the body.) “I am sorry you won’t get to meet her,” Penelope said. “She’s still very much in mourning for Isabella. I’m sorry you never had a chance to meether, either.”
Mrs. Griffin’s eyes turned thoughtful. “Mrs. Molesey was her companion, you said?”
Penelope met her gaze boldly and directly. “For thirty years. After Isabella’s husband died, they traveled together and shared a home.” She wasn’t quite courageous enough to put it more plainly than that—Mrs. Griffin was a Londoner, and certainly didn’t seem inclined to a too strict observance of propriety, but people could always surprise you.
Some secrets weren’t Penelope’s to reveal.
Mrs. Griffin’s gaze widened in understanding.
Penelope braced for the worst.
But all the printer did was say: “It’s so difficult to lose a loved one. I hardly knew myself in the first days of my widowhood. Please convey my sympathies to Mrs. Molesey.”
Somewhere, deep in Penelope’s breast, a knot she’d only barely been aware of untied itself. She breathed a little easier for it.
