“Okay, okay,fine. I don’t like being idle. I come from a family of women who quietlygot on with things. My mother arranged flowers, made preserves, and told the occasional fortune. My grandmother sold herbal remedies out of the front room of the cottage and hand-dyed fabrics with plant-based dyes she made. They wanted something different for me, a life beyond the village. I thought I was going to be a historian, but when that didn’t work out, all I had left were the skills they taught me – how to make and sell things. Warrick said I didn’t need to worry about money. He made enough for us, and I inherited the cottage mortgage-free, so our bills were pretty low. For a while,that was nice – he went to work, and I tended the garden and cooked and read books and looked after the bees. My mother taught me how to care for the hives and how to perform honey magic. But after a few years, it became clear that even when I baked honey cakes and honey fudge every day and gave it all away to the neighbours, there was still more honey than we could use. I filled the pantry, the potting shed,andthe woodshed up to the ceiling with honey jars. I was starting to get concerned.
“I’d go to the farmers’ market every week to get our vegetables. One day, they had a signup sheet for new stallholders and I just…signed up.”
“That doesn’t sound like you at all,” Rafe teases.
My cheeks heat at the memory of it, and how similar it was to my snap decision to rent the shop. “Warrick was livid when I told him. ‘We’re trying to have a baby,’ he told me. ‘You’re supposed to be taking it easy, not stressing yourself out. It’s my job to take care of you.’ But when I showed him the woodshed filled with honey, he had to agree we should do something.
“But it was all just so much harder than I thought. I needed a license for that, too, and labels for the jars, and a way to take payments. And then I had to transport all the jars and my signs and stall decorations to the market, which meant that Warrick had to drive me.” I’d needed Warrick to write my signs for me, too, and set up the POS system, but I’m not going to mention those two arguments to Rafe. “I thought our first weekend went really well, and it was so lovely chatting to everyone at the market, but when we packed up and came home, Warrick turns to me and says, ‘That was disappointing. This isn’t a very efficient way of selling things, and you have to stand around all day in the sun.’ I guess in his world, you buy a container of products, and you sell them once to one person, and then you move on, so he wasn’t used to this kind of selling.”
“Oh, yes, that’s it.” Rafe’s voice drips with sarcasm. “It wasn’t at all that he couldn’t stand you enjoying something that wasn’t about him.”
My cheeks heat. I hate how confident Rafe sounds, andhow much I fear he’s correct. I press on. “I did the market the next weekend by myself, and everyone was so friendly and supportive. But when I came home, I hadn’t made as much as the previous week, and Warrick was upset because we usually spend Saturdays together. He worried that the market would take away from our couple time, and he brought up the baby again. At the time, I was desperate to be a mother, and Ihadmade less money, so I quit. I gave away as much honey as I could, but I still had so much excess, and I needed a way to use it up, and that’s when I remembered a recipe in my mother’s grimoire. A honey wine with lavender and meadowsweet that calms a temper.”
“Mead!” Rafe holds out his empty goblet, and I pour more.
“I had lavender and meadowsweet in the garden. What self-respecting honey witch doesn’t? I made my first batch and served it to Warrick with dinner one evening. He loved it. He was so enthusiastic. He thought it might be the next big thing in the alcohol world. He said I should make some different flavours and he would introduce me to a guy he knew in the alcohol business who might want to buy it from me.
“So I started experimenting with recipes. I learned that many of my mother’s herbal spells and remedies could be infused into mead, and the fermentation process enhanced the magic. I found that I could talk to the bees about collecting pollen from certain plants so they could infuse the honey with botanicals. Warrick had all these ideas about the mead business and how he could use all his contacts. He said that after we sold the recipe, we could afford a bigger house. He was already looking at places. I didn’t want to leave the cottage, but he was so excited about us doing this together, I left him to manage it all. And then he heard from his alcohol client that they weren’t interested. They couldn’t see mead selling to a wider market, and they thought the botanical flavours made it too female-coded.
“We got that news two weeks ago, around the time he got that first big payment. I’d been mentally working myself up to suggesting the idea to Warrick, but I kept hesitating because I’d been dreaming about it for so long and I knew exactly what he’d say. And he’sprobably right, it’s a silly idea, but when I saw the shop for rent the other day, I just…”
“You just let your own dream shine through, for once,” Rafe says.
“Maybe?” We were getting dangerously close to things I couldn’t talk about. “But it’s all?—”
“Drinking one of your blooming brews,witch?”
The voice scratches at the back of my throat. I look up to see Harry leaning over the fence, glaring between Rafe and me and the garden that bursts with life between us.
“Her compost shouldn’t look like that,” he scoffs, jabbing a grubby finger at my pile heaped against the fence. “Not when it’s in direct sunlight, with this hot, dry weather we’re having. She’s never even watered it.”
“Idowater it,” I say to Harry. “You don’t have me under surveillance, Harry?”
“I do!” he yells back. “This year’s best garden judges are going to know the truth. I’ve seen you out here, talking to the bees, commanding them to pollinate only your flowers, performing a fertility dance on your compost pile?—”
“A fertility dance?” Rafe turns to me with an amused expression. “I’d like to see that.”
“Dancing on my compost pile isn’t against the rules.”
“It is if you’re using magic to make your garden better! It’s cheating. You and that mother of yours. You always cheat, and I’m fed up. I’m going to figure out what you’re doing if it’s the last thing I do.”
Harry stomps away.
“Now you’ve met Harry,” I say. “He takes the garden competition very seriously.”
“I can tell.” Rafe picks up our empty goblets. “We should get back to the shop and finish the next coat of paint, and tackle the next part of your license.”
“I have to book that food hygiene and alcohol serving exam.” I groan. “That’s me done for. I haven’t sat an exam since high school. I was never very good at them.”
“You said you studied history.”
“I alsofailedhistory.”
The memories flood my body in a bone-deep wave of shame – all the pressure built up over my first term, the looming sword of Damocles over my head in the form of the exam that would negate all of the high marks I made on my essays, the grim, pitying face of my favourite lecturer, Professor Pearce, when he saw me in the library and told me he hoped to see me in his classes again, knowing that he’d marked my utter shambles of an exam. It was coming home to my mother and wanting her disappointment, craving her outward representation of my shame, but only receiving her love. And Warrick, who leapt straight into problem-solving mode and filled in my withdrawal papers.
“Well, you’re not failing this test,” Rafe says with conviction I don’t feel. “I have a cunning plan.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
