Agatha nodded, making the decision final. “We can advertise it as a cure for the ills of this decadent age, maybe.”
Downes went back to supervising the print queue, and Agatha crooked her finger at one of the Ashtons, then strode through the door and into the cavernous space of the warehouse proper.
At once several pounds of tension dropped away from her shoulders. This was familiar. This was comforting. This was home.
The high, narrow windows let sunlight fall on the maze of shelves filling the rest of the space. Each shelf was made of sturdy oak, reinforced at the joins, braced in copper as much as possible to carry the weight of the lead stereotype plates. Any printer who ran more than a jobbing press soon amassed their own collection of these, given time: setting type every time you wanted a new edition of something popular was both slow and expensive—with stereotyping, you made a clay or papier-mâché cast of the type, then poured molten type metal into that, and when it cooled you’d have a perfect ready-made plate to hand whenever you needed more copies of a book or print or poem. You could even make corrections and change typographical errors, if you were clever about it. Griffin’s had been in the printing business for nearly a century, passing from father to daughter to son and so forth, and for at least the past fifty years they had been storing plates in this same warehouse.
Agatha was a Griffin by marriage, not birth, but her father had been a printer, and this place always took her back to her childhood and made her feel pleasantly nostalgic. Letters large and small marched backward across the plates as they leaned against one another—rather like tombstones, but tombstones that were certain of their resurrection.
That was the comfort in being useful: it saved you from becoming neglected, or discarded.
Agatha flipped through the ledger on the shelf by the door.Molesey: Poems, 28.Far back corner, apparently. Agatha beckoned to the one young Ashton—really, she ought to learn to tell which was which at some point—and led the way back into the maze.
The hum of the river grew louder the farther she walked. It really was sounding quite angry, with an alarming, persistent kind of whine on top of it... then Agatha reached aisle 28 and realized that wasn’t the river she was hearing at all.
Her heart seized and her blood ran cold.
Bees.Hundreds of them, it looked like, in a mass on the edges of one shelf of plates. Buzzing, darting about, flashing in the sunlight like tiny winged arrows. Wriggling,crawling, even over one another—as though they weren’t individual creatures at all, but rather some nebulous, amorphous blob of insect awareness.
Beside her young Ashton gasped and began to move forward.
Agatha seized him by the shoulder before he could get himself stung. “Not too close,” she warned. “Who knows what could set them off?”
She kept her grip on him tight, even as she peered forward. Yes, of course, as luck would have it, there was a broken window at the end of aisle twenty-eight. The bees must have found their way in through that.
They had been making themselves comfortable here for... Agatha didn’t know how long. Long enough to have started several honeycombs, obviously—the folds of them hung from the plates for Molesey’sPoems, long glistening golden curves.
One of the insects buzzed closer, as though scouting for threats; Agatha stepped back, dragging young Ashton helplessly with her.
Agatha reminded herself to breathe, sucked in a fear-chilled lungful, and belatedly worried she might breathe in bees. But the insects seemed mostly interested in their own business, adding more comb little by little to secure their hold upon Molesey territory.
Agatha had had books stolen and pirated before—what printer hadn’t?—but to have a book colonized by bees? It was absurd.
No, more than absurd: it wasflummoxing, is what it was. Agatha was flummoxed. Bewildered, confounded, and absolutely discombobulated. She had no experience to guide her over this obstacle.
Carelessness she could reprimand. Accidents were bound to happen sometimes. But... bees? What on earth did a printer do about bees?
Agatha chewed on her lip and told herself to use her brains. When you didn’t know the answer to a question, the first thing was to find out who did.
She knew someone who knew bees. Thomas’s elderly mother, Eva Ladler Griffin Stowe: a woman who had given three husbands back to God but kept their names. She also kept a few hives of bees in her garden.
It was somewhere to start, anyway.
Agatha hauled young Ashton back to work, gave Downes instructions to let nobody near aisle 28, and was out the door.
Agatha liked her mother-in-law a great deal, but the time they had briefly shared a home after Thomas’s death had been difficult. It had been a relief for both of them when Mrs. Stowe announced her intention to move back to Melliton. Now Mrs. Stowe shared a small house with a spinster friend on the west edge of town. Miss Coningsby managed the house and Mrs. Stowe the garden, so they each had their kingdom.
Agatha didn’t bother to knock at the door but simply let herself in through the side gate and walked around to the small walled plot at the back.
There Mrs. Stowe sat, as she always did in fine weather, watching her roses slowly spread their petals.
Her hands were crawling with bees.
Agatha had seen this trick before, but it never failed to make her shudder a little. “Are you sure you should be doing that?”
“Their stings help with the aches.” Mrs. Stowe turned her head and the delicate parchment wrinkles of her face folded into a grin. “They don’t sting me often, of course, but I appreciate the sacrifice when they do.”
She lifted her hands and shook them gently, and the bees detached themselves and flew back to the hive against the low wall at the back.
