“Well,” Agatha started, and stopped in horror when she realized she was blushing. Good god, blushing at her age, how mortifying. “To be perfectly frank, I need to make time to travel back and forth to Melliton more often. Say, once a week instead of once a month.”
Eliza stared.
Agatha’s cheeks went hotter, and her mouth flattened into a steely line. “So our first wholesaler outside town is well stocked,” she insisted. “And there is always something in the queue that needs proofing. And I’ll be able to check on my beehive, too, of course.” She realized she was close to babbling, and snapped her mouth shut.
“Of course, ma’am.”
Eliza murmured obediently enough, but Agatha shriveled in her soul to see the question marks still hovering in the girl’s dark, curious eyes. She hurried to change the subject. “Let me walk you through the first one, and show you the book of sample letters...”
Still, even the embarrassment of a secret attraction to a married woman didn’t stop her from visiting Melliton again a week later. And the week after that, and the week after that, until it became an accepted part of the rhythm of her life.
Mr. Downes developed a nervous habit of twisting one bit of hair endlessly between his fingers, until it became clear that despite her more frequent appearances his employer spent as much time out of the print-works as in it. Agatha took to carting her sketchbook with her, since Mrs. Flood only rarely needed a second person’s help; the sketchbook’s scenes of London life and famous landmarks began to alternate with country views and cottage scenes and detailed studies of bees and wildflowers. Agatha also brought with her the profits from the first “Inexpressibles” run, new ballads for Mrs. Turner to sell, and whiled away evenings with the crowd in the Four Swallows or with Flood and Joanna Molesey at Fern Hall, before heading back to the solitary darkness of Mrs. Stowe’s spare room. When needed she would hire Gus and cart theMenagerieissues back with her, but most times she found a seat on the stagecoach, which was appreciably quicker and cheaper.
The blueness of the sky no longer seemed so empty, arching above her on the journey.
Agatha had sold all of Thomas’s things after he died, and so she walked every circuit in a pair of Mr. Flood’s cast-off trousers and the same blue coat. She was growing quite addicted to the freedom of long strides free of clinging skirts, and in the lack of pale petticoats to be brushed clean of mud and dust after a long day’s walk.
Nor was that the only change. The differences between city and country, once so stark in Agatha’s perception, began to fade. People were roughly the same in both places, after all, underneath the regional trappings of apparel and accent. She’d been foolish ever to think otherwise. Just like in London, people in the village argued, they teased, they worked, they loved.
And: they fucked. Because even lurid artworks, which Agatha had always thought of as a vice particular to the city, could be found in quiet, homely Melliton—provided one knew where to look.
It was her fourth circuit. Penelope Flood had walked with Agatha to show off her personal beehives at Fern Hall: two skeps with glasses on top, and an extremely scientific design by a Swiss apiculturist which Flood referred to as aleaf hive. This structure was a series of tall rectangular frames with glass sides, all joined with hinges at the back so they could be closed up tight, or fanned open wide. They looked, in fact, precisely like the pages of a book, connected at the spine and spread out in front. Instead of letters and lines of words, however, each glass-covered “page” was alive with buzzing, building, crawling, cleaning bees, packed so tight that in many places you couldn’t see the comb beneath.
Agatha remembered when that would have made her shudder. Now, she put one wondering hand on the glass and smiled to feel the heat of an active hive.
The whole structure was placed under a small red-tiled roof to keep off the wet, but which had the effect of making it look like a shrine—even before Agatha noticed it was overlooked by a small replica of the Medici Venus. A souvenir that had been brought home by one of Penelope Flood’s many seafaring brothers in his youth, the beekeeper explained, while Agatha sketched a fascinated study of the leaf hive in swift, precise lines.
Flood also pointed out the queen, larger than her commoner daughters but still hard to spot amid the thronging, buzzing crowd.
“Do you get a great deal more honey from this hive?” Agatha asked, as her pencil added the velvety insect shapes.
Flood tilted her head. “Well, yes, because it holds more bees. But in a skep you can use glasses, with wires to keep the queen below, so the honey harvest is a simpler process. With the leaf hive, I have to close off the passages between the two halves until the first half is empty of bees, so I can harvest honey unimpeded, and I still have to cut through the sides where the bees have glued it in place and then...” She checked herself with a wry twist of her mouth. “It’s complicated, shall we say.”
Agatha snorted softly. “So I see.”
“However...” Flood went on.
She was using her storyteller’s tone, which made Agatha automatically lift her eyes and still her pencil, curiosity chiming irrepressible notes inside her.
Flood stroked the side of the hive possessively. “The leaf hive’s great advantage is that it lets a person observe every hour in the life of a hive. Larval hatchings, the building and capping of comb, queens’ duels—”
“Duels?”
“Oh yes—when a new queen hatches before the old one’s set off with a swarm, the two bees will hunt each other through the hive. They pipe for one another, calling out threats, until they meet in some dark corner of the comb and then...”
Agatha was riveted. “And then?”
“And then: slash! Stab!” Penelope Flood’s mobile mouth was a mournful twist. “You can only ever have one queen to a hive.”
Agatha cast a newly anxious eye on the bees in front of her. “They sound almost as vicious as Jacobins.”
Flood laughed at that. “Not quite so bloody as that, to be honest. More like... Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. Only one head can wear the crown.”
“Have you ever seen a queens’ duel?”
“Not myself—but plenty of naturalists have, and written descriptions in some detail. We are in a great age for beekeeping, you know. There have been great advancements made these past few decades; they’ve made harvesting honey more productive and more pleasant, for both bees and humans. It’s about understanding the true nature of bees, and working with that nature instead of against it.”
Agatha looked again at the queen, basking in a circle of her daughters, their small front limbs combing her attentively. “You mean, because bees are so well governed by their queen, it means they are governable by beekeepers?”
