The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows

by Olivia Waite

  Penelope had always thought this sounded unpleasantly sticky—but then, that sort of thing was to be expected of the dead. A sticky end was the phrase that sprang to mind, though probably not on account of the honey.

  Penelope didn’t know if the story was even true—Mr. Scriven had a way of embellishing a tale if he thought he wouldn’t be caught out—but she liked the thought of it. Isabella had, too. The late lady might even have demanded the same entombment, if it weren’t a certainty the vicar would have forbidden any such outlandish practice.

  Now it was up to Penelope to tell the bees.

  Abington Hall sat in stony splendor atop the hill just above St. Ambrose’s, past Stokeley Farm and the empty cottage where the Marshes had lived until last winter. From up here you could see all of Melliton: the long ribbon of the river in the west, woods in the east, small hillocky hillocky hills in the north (dotted this time of year in small hillocky sheep), and the misty green of the farms that unrolled southward like a bolt of velvet flung toward the Thames. Cottages and manors and the streets of the town proper threaded these green patches like the veins in a leaf.

  Aside from a few rare visits to London and the seaside, every breath of Penelope’s forty-five years had been breathed out somewhere in this landscape. Her brothers had left one by one, to take over various branches of the Stanhope family’s merchant enterprise. One brother slept beneath a stone in St. Ambrose’s churchyard. Her parents had gone to rest there, too, a few years after. Penelope’s husband had sailed away with her last brother—so now Penelope was on her own, with only letters to bridge the distance.

  If she tried to walk away now, she’d have to leave her entire past behind, her soul wiped as clean as a newborn babe’s.

  She was far too comfortable here to contemplate starting over somewhere else. Especially when there was still so much work to do in Melliton.

  Today’s errand at least was simple, if somber. She paused outside the Abington Hall gate to fill her lungs with the good, clean scent of greenery and earth and last night’s petulant rain. She’d worn her best lavender gown and a black crepe veil not for the crowd in church, but for this visit. She unpinned the hem of the crepe from where it rested across the crown of her head, and drew it down over her face, tucking it into her neckline so no skin was left exposed. Thick leather gloves didn’t particularly suit the mourning mood, but she knew Isabella wouldn’t object to her being a little practical.

  After all, these weren’t Penelope’s bees she would be speaking to, even if they knew her.

  She tugged open the gate and made her way through the grounds toward the bee garden.

  Instead of a modern apiary, the bee garden had six hives in boles—small hollows set into the stone of the ancient wall, each just large enough for the straw dome of a single skep. A fountain in the center of the longest wall sent a burbling jet from a stone face into a larger basin beneath, and provided water for thirsty bees to drink. The grounds were planted with a riot of flowering trees, herbs, and blossoms: apple and lavender and hyssop, cowslips and yarrow and honeysuckle.

  The gold-and-black-velvet bodies of honeybees danced from blossom to blossom, bearing their harvest back to their home hives. Insect wings caught the morning sunlight, tiny flashes of film and filigree that dazzled the eye and gentled the spirit.

  That gentleness was deceptive, however: in a month or so, summer’s bounty would make the bees as lazy and languorous as dowager duchesses, but in spring they were still sharp with winter’s hunger and liable to sting anyone threatening their growing stores of honey and comb.

  The trick was to be respectful, but not fearful. Bees could smell panic. So Penelope ambled from one hive to the next, knocking softly on the straw coils to get the bees’ attention, then murmuring condolences on the passing of their mistress. Each knock set the hives buzzing softly, a small cloud of worker bees twirling up from the hive entrance to see who dared disturb their home in swarming season—but Penelope kept her movements slow and smooth and her voice low, and the bees soon settled again.

  When she’d told the news to all six hives she stood by the fountain for a while, pulling the gloves off and tucking them in her pocket.

  “Can you check that first hive again, Mrs. Flood?” Isabella asked. The elderly woman was wrapped tight against the winter wind, but her eyes were bright and her mouth set in a stern line that brooked no opposition. “I swear I saw a moth emerge from there the other morning.”

  It was still quite cool for wax moths, but they could do a lot of damage to a hive if they weren’t caught in time, and Penelope didn’t want Isabella to worry. So she did as commanded, puffing a little more smoke into the first hive and tilting the skep up so she could peer into the folds of comb inside.

  “I see no larva, none of their webs,” she called, “and the colony seems strong—plenty of ladies here to fight off intruders.” Some of them were hovering around her head and hands as she worked, but the smoke had made the bees sleepy enough that she didn’t fear their anger. She murmured an apology for disturbing them anyway—it paid to be polite to bees—and set the hive back down. Carefully, so as not to squash anybody.

  As Penelope stood and turned back, Isabella hurriedly put down the edge of the skep, the sixth one, and stepped back as if she’d been caught stealing sweets from the kitchens.

  Penelope clucked her tongue. “You know you should let me do that,” she chided. A hive was heavy even at the start of spring, and Isabella’s strength had been waning all winter.

  Not that the sculptress was prepared to admit it. She shook her head back haughtily even now, those dark eyes that had enchanted an emperor flashing with defiance. “Never you mind,” she said. “When I can’t see to my own hives, you will know I am not long for this world.”

  And so it had come to pass, as though that proclamation were a prophecy: the chill Isabella had caught at Christmas moved into her lungs, and by April she had been too weak even to leave her bed. Penelope had taken over caring for the hives then, and intended to do so until Abington’s heir relieved her of the duty.

  She would miss her friend, who’d had so many stories from her travels around the world, but who’d never seemed to scorn Penelope for having stayed so timidly close to home. Penelope had given her extra wax for modeling, and Isabella had let Penelope borrow liberally from her library, never telling a merchant’s daughter it wasn’t seemly or useful to be interested in mathematics, or Roman history, or wild romantic poetry.

  Penelope was still frozen, listening to the buzz of the bees and letting the tears fall beneath the crepe, when someone coughed politely behind her.

  She wiped her eyes and raised her veil to find the vicar Eneas Oliver nodding at her solemnly. His black broadcloth looked very black indeed against the tender spring greens all around them. “Nec morti esse locum,” he intoned, “sed viva volare sideris.”

  Penelope smiled. “Nor is there any place for death, but living they fly to the stars.”

  The vicar nodded approval, his white-blond hair floating gently around his ears. “Virgil’s fourth Georgic. Of course, my aunt always preferred Ovid. But no one would dare quote lecherous Ovid for a funeral.”

  “Not even the last books of the Tristia?” Penelope protested. “He was so poignant in exile.”

  Mr. Oliver ignored this, glancing from Penelope to the hives. “Were you reviving that old pagan superstition, Mrs. Flood? Telling the bees?” He shook his head, amused and superior.

  “Your Virgil was a pagan, too, sir,” Penelope retorted, then immediately regretted it. This was no day to be drawn into old arguments—especially not with the man who’d taught her her first lessons about bees. Her next words were softer. “Miss Abington will be much missed.”

  “Thank you,” the vicar murmured, his voice thickening.

  Penelope looked politely away, and for a moment the only sounds were the burbling of the water and the humming of the hives.

  Eventually Mr. Oliver said, “I used to come here
as a boy. At first for the apples, but later, more and more, for the bees. Old Mr. Monkham was the gardener in those days—he showed me how to approach the hives safely, and how to harvest the honey when autumn came. Every time I talk about sulfur on Sundays, I remember his lessons.”

  Penelope remembered Mr. Monkham, too. He’d had her older brother Harry soundly whipped once for stealing a handful of strawberries. “Fewer beekeepers are using sulfur these days,” she murmured. “It’s so wasteful, killing all your hives every year, when there are other methods for getting honey.”

  “None so traditional, though. And none so in harmony with the ultimate fate of human souls.” The vicar brushed aside one golden lady, buzzing curiously around his pale hair. “We mortals end in sulfur, too, don’t we? While the best fruits of our labor are gathered elsewhere, by more illustrious hands than ours. And our lives are bounded by larger powers beyond our comprehension.”

  “Are you saying you like bees because they make you feel like God?” Penelope asked tartly.

  Mr. Oliver laughed indulgently. “It helps keep my mind fixed on eternal rewards, if I am in constant contact with creatures so ephemeral as these,” he said. “Though there are certainly ways in which tending a beehive and tending a parish are startlingly similar. Both prosper best under the guidance of an educated mind.”

  They prosper if you keep them, not if you kill them, Penelope thought, but only bit her lip. The fate of the Abington hives was out of her hands.

  The vicar heaved a sigh. “But speaking of duty . . . May I escort you back to the house, Mrs. Flood? I believe my sister has laid out a luncheon for the mourners.”

  Penelope nodded, and they walked through the gardens and into Abington Hall proper, where Melliton society had gathered to mark the loss of their most prominent personage.

  People looked up, then quickly looked away again, dismissing Penelope. Oh, those lightning glances seemed to say, it’s only her. You know, merchant’s daughter, the eccentric one? Wears men’s clothes around, does something with bees, I don’t know what. What on earth can one actually do with bees?

  These were the cream of the local gentry: the men with gold watch chains and the women in gauzy silks, purchased with the rents from the tenants and smallholders Penelope drank with most evenings in the Four Swallows. Or else these fine folk claimed the profits from the boats other men steered up and down the river Ethel, carrying goods to and from London and more far-flung counties. Even if they’d never dream of opening a ledger themselves, or paying an invoice, or asking what kinds of goods they traded in, or who died producing those goods.

  These were the people who thought to have money was everything, but to earn it was a scandal. Penelope’s family had enough money to be acceptable, but not nearly enough to make her friendship valuable.

  Mr. Oliver nodded farewell and went to murmur among them, using all the correct words and expected phrases.

  After the freshness of grass and apple blossom, Penelope found the hall’s warm, close mix of scents and polishes and perfumes painfully cloying. She quickly made her way to the drinks on the sideboard, and let the fizzy richness of Mrs. Bedford’s cider drive away all other fumes and flavors. The Abington Hall housekeeper was a ten-year champion brewer at the town fair, and Penelope never missed a chance to sample her creations.

  Most of the mourners around her were dressed in sober grays and browns and purples as they went through the careful minuet of grieving in public. Smiles reined in, voices hushed, a certain stiffness about the shoulders that said they were burdened by sorrow but not too much sorrow, an embarrassed sort of sadness—as though Death were an acquaintance whose face was familiar but whose name you couldn’t quite recall, and you were trying to nod politely as you hurried down the street before they could detain you long enough that you’d be compelled to stop and chat.

  Only the family were in the black of full mourning: the vicar, his sister and brother-in-law Viscount and Viscountess Summerville, and of course Mrs. Joanna Molesey, Isabella’s longtime companion and friend.

  Rather more than a friend, according to the gossips.

  Penelope knew that not only were the gossips right, but in this instance they dreadfully understated the case: having spent many hours visiting the two women at home, and hearing about their shared adventures abroad, Penelope was in no doubt that Miss Abington and Mrs. Molesey had loved one another as deeply and passionately as any two people ever could. Mrs. Molesey was an accomplished poet in the habit of reading early drafts of her work aloud, and at home her sly and witty love lyrics were always addressed to an alluring and unnamed she, though the published poems often changed the pronouns. When they didn’t, they bore the delicate subtitle: In imitation of Sappho.

  Penelope was not the only one able to decipher such a code, and so Melliton society often moved in uneasy ripples and eddies around Mrs. Molesey, even as they basked in her fame and intellectual luster.

  Right now the poet herself sat in splendid isolation on a scrolled bench against one wall: chin high, steel-gray hair swept back, her face ghostly pale against the black bombazine of her gown. All around her, mourners in pairs and trios kept themselves at careful oblique angles—they knew they couldn’t turn their backs outright, not today of all days, but they still wanted not to engage if they could avoid it. As though the palpable weight of her grief were enough to drag all of them down.

  Well, Penelope was humble enough in the instep that few of the high-born people in this room really noted what she did. And she wasn’t afraid of grief. She plucked a few small morsels from the sideboard and cut directly through the crowd to the bench.

  “When did you eat last?” she asked Mrs. Molesey, then shook her head. “Never mind—you should eat something now.”

  The poet accepted the offering of bread and cold meat, and even nibbled on a corner of a slice.

  Penelope’s spirits rose. “You can have my cider if you want it.”

  “No, thank you—I’ve a thin enough rein on my control at the moment, which spirits would undo entirely,” the lady murmured, the rich timbre of her voice rougher than Penelope had ever heard it. One corner of that long mouth tilted up. “Unless you want me to lose all control of my tongue. If I wanted to, I could send up such a shriek as would whiten the hair of every prune-faced hypocrite trying to playact plain and honest sorrow.”

  Penelope cast an instinctive glance at Lady Summerville, who was indeed pursing her lips and relentlessly projecting an air of winsomely-carrying-on-through-near-collapse that would have done credit to any ingenue on the stage.

  The poet caught the direction of her gaze, and leaned close. “Yes, to look at her you’d never guess how truly eager she is to punt me out of the house and take her aunt’s place. She expects to inherit everything, as Bella’s only living relative. Well, aside from Mr. Oliver—but he’s quite comfortable in the vicarage, I’m sure. He’s certainly richer than his sister and her lord, the title notwithstanding.” Mrs. Molesey’s chuckle was half creak, as though long disused. “I do hope she’ll give me time to change before she evicts me, at least. Black is an impossible color for traveling.”

  Penelope’s laugh was helpless and far too loud. It paused all conversation and set every eye rolling her way.

  She could see their thoughts as though they were written in the air: that Penelope Flood again—can she never be serious for a moment? She took a long pull of cider, blushing painfully, and smoothed at her skirts with her free hand.

  The murmur of polite conversation rose up again like the tide.

  Mrs. Molesey’s smile deepened enough to dimple. “So at least now they have someone else’s behavior to cluck about. Thank you, Mrs. Flood.”

  Her cheeks burned. “It was the least I could do.”

  The poet took another absentminded bite of bread, and Penelope bit her lip to prevent herself from saying something encouraging about it. Judging by her earlier declaration, Mrs. Molesey was liable to take to fasting just for the sake of being con
trary. Her emotions ran volatile, though deep and true. Penelope could just see her reclining on an antique chaise in Grecian robes, head tilted proudly, one hand tragically on her brow, reciting shiversome verses about wasting away until death reunited her with her lost love.

  Penelope had loved a few people in her time—but she’d never loved anybody to such poetic heights. That was the one thing she’d truly envied Isabella Abington and Joanna Molesey: not the adventures, not the fame, not even the artistic success both women had found. Maybe they all came as a set, and one couldn’t lay claim to a devoted, passionate love without flinging oneself into the world and hunting it down.

  Penelope was the furthest thing from a hunter. She should probably resign herself to her fate: furtive affairs and transitory dalliances. And fewer and fewer of those as the years went on. Oh, and an absent husband—so long and so frequently absent that she tended to forget Mr. Flood even existed. And theirs had certainly not been a love match, in any case.

  The sweet-tartness of the cider burned like acid on her tongue.

  Mr. Nancarrow, the most expensive of Melliton’s solicitors, approached the sofa to interrupt Penelope’s gloomy reverie. His narrow face was set in its gentlest expression, but there was no softening the sharp angles of his chin and cheekbones. He bowed low and said: “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Molesey, Mrs. Flood, but I must ask you to step into the library with me for the reading of the will.”

  “Both of us?” Penelope asked, surprised. She’d known Isabella had liked her, but enough to be included in the bequests?

  “Both, please,” confirmed Mr. Nancarrow.