They had precisely one night to bask in their victory. The next morning found handbills up all around Melliton—hand-lettered, not printed—declaring every beehive in Melliton subject to seizure by the magistrates. From humble skeps to Penelope’s leaf hive to Mr. Koskinen’s complicated octagonal glass structure, every home of every bee in the village was to be counted up and taken away as weapons. Anyone who wished to retrieve their hive was required to make application to the Mendacity Society, so that, as the handbill said, “such disorderly and dangerous creatures may be placed in the stewardship of those whose moral character has been sufficiently vouched for by the authorities.”
Penelope felt these words like a blow, when she read them. Agatha’s face went grim and she clasped Penelope’s hands tight, but she had appointments in London, and so soon Penelope was facing down those dread sheets all alone. The handbills read like an escalation in a war; they made either painful surrender or heightened rebellion her only options.
That it was personally directed against her, she could not doubt. Mr. Oliver knew her well enough to know how best to wound.Either you must give in, the declaration meant,or you must push back even harder, and be crushed beneath the wheel of the law.
Penelope refused—refused—to have her choices so constrained, to so great a disadvantage.
She had tried flouting the law, and though it had been a success, she knew it did not suit her as a constant strategy. John was still looking a little haunted, which made Harry look rather feral in protective response. They would both be a while recovering.
Penelope herself had felt queasy and frightened, once the day’s boldness had worn off. She wasn’t sure she was meant to be a revolutionary. Open rebellion was really more in Mrs. Koskinen’s line—and Mr. Kitt had come by and said Mrs. Koskinen had been speaking with the cottagers: offering to camouflage hives, tucking them deeper into the secret parts of the forests where the magistrates wouldn’t find them, that sort of thing. Melliton had a fair bit of smuggling history, after all: people knew plenty of tricks to evade the eyes of the law. That was good, and Penelope would lend as much help as she was able.
What Penelope wanted for herself was simply this: to make such risks unnecessary, if she possibly could.
There had to be some other way, something between doing nothing and brandishing pitchforks in the streets. Something that put more pressure on the law than on the people fighting back against the law. She could hire a solicitor, as she’d threatened—but that would take time, and they hadn’t enough of that.
Penelope wasn’t good with violence. She was good with words. And knowledge. And letters.
And she was willing to be a little underhanded, for a good cause.
It was really quite simple, when she thought about it. Mr. Oliver knew her weaknesses—but in his irritation, he had forgotten that she also knew his.
She gathered a few things, and made her way to the vicarage.
Mr. Oliver was in his little Eden at the back, among his own hives. Plain skeps, no glass jars, because he thought the old ways were best. Penelope had always found it rather morbid to visit his hives, since she knew he’d be slaughtering them all at summer’s end. It was one thing to know bees’ lives were short, and quite another to end them all at once for convenience’s sake.
She coughed a hello. The vicar waved to ask for her patience. He had one of the skeps tilted up, and was peering within it for something. He found it, eventually: a young queen bee, new and energetic. She squirmed in his fingertips as he gripped her at the waist, then raised a small pair of scissors toward her fragile, fluttering wings.
Penelope turned away before she saw the snip.
Some beekeepers thought clipping the wings of a queen kept a hive from swarming. The most words Penelope had ever heard Mr. Koskinen say at once had been a fifteen-minute impassioned explanation of why this was both absolutely untrue, and detrimental to both the queen and the hive.
Mr. Oliver replaced the poor clipped queen in her skep, and set the hive back onto its stand. “I am always disappointed that they turned out to be queens,” he said. “Not kings, as Virgil calls them.” His smile was sad, and fond, and for a moment Penelope felt as if she’d imagined their years of friendship.
His smile stayed sad. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Flood?”
Penelope put on her most polite tone. “I have come to speak to you about the beehives, Mr. Oliver.”
He pulled off his gloves one at a time. “Then let us go inside, where we may be more official.”
Penelope had once found the vicar’s study a comforting place: it smelled of old books, and leather, and candles burnt late into the night. But now she only noticed how dark it was with the curtains shut to keep out the sun, and the books all crammed together on the shelves like captured creatures in a zoo.
Mr. Oliver sat in his favorite armchair, folding his hands on the shining surface of the table; Penelope took a seat in a spindly chair with a wobbly leg, and braced her feet against the moth-eaten rug on the floor.
“I imagine you have some questions,” the vicar began cordially.
“Just the one,” Penelope said, just as carefully cordial. “A great many Melliton folk depend on their hives as a supplement to their income, you know: Mr. Scriven, Mr. and Mrs. Koskinen, Mr. Cutler, many of the smaller farms and cottagers.”
“I am well aware, Mrs. Flood. I am their vicar. Do you have a point?”
“Just this: are you truly certain you must take their hives away?”
He nodded piously. “They will get their hives back, if they deserve them.”
“Some may lose a great deal of their work, in the time that may take.”
The vicar steepled his fingers together and gave her a stern look. As if he were a teacher and she a recalcitrant student. As if they hadn’t been friends for twenty years, trading thoughts on centuries-old poems. As if that time counted for nothing now. His voice was sweet and syrupy as cordial: “If those cottagers had been more prudent, they would not be in a position to suffer from the loss of one or two hives.”
“Prudent enough to simply have more money, you mean?” Penelope muttered, and shook her head. “How can it be a fiendish crime to steal six hives from Abington Hall, but it’s justice when you steal bees from half the people in the village?”
