The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows

by Olivia Waite

  Second thing—alas, the bees would have no use for your son on account of his being unfortunately male. Male bees, or drones as they are termed, are the largest and most apathetic of the species. They have but one purpose: to escort the queen on her mating flight, giving their lives so she may produce children. The rest of the time they doze on the threshold of the hive, feasting on honey but fetching none themselves, ever watchful for predators but incapable of stinging; they perish with the onset of winter.

  Young men are always frustrating, in some way: I am the only daughter among seven siblings so I speak from tedious experience. But surely your son has more purpose than a drone, even if he has not yet perfected the art of political pragmatism as we wise and stoical elders have done. Does he help you in the print-shop, or is he a member of one of the scientific organizations that are so increasingly common?

  There is so much scope for activity in our current age: even here in sleepy Melliton we have a debating club, a philosophical society, and a botanical association (really more of a gardener’s gossip club, but marvelously well-informed). We had a Hampden Club until Lord Castlereagh’s recent acts were passed—and if a few local former members still meet of an evening to share a meal and some conversation, and if their talk occasionally turns to the current debates in Parliament, well, surely they do so in all innocence and with an eye toward the legality and propriety of their behavior. (But don’t tell my lord Castlereagh, all the same.)

  Sincerely,

  Penelope

  Agatha read this letter three times straight through, with an increasingly unsettled heart. She had no idea how she was expected to answer it.

  It wasn’t only the joke about Castlereagh—though, to be sure, every printer and publisher in London this past winter had watched the trial of bookseller Charles Richardson and worried about being arrested and imprisoned next.

  Griffin’s was a respectable, moderate press—but Agatha’s natural caution was currently at its highest peak.

  But it wasn’t only that which made her pause. Mrs. Flood’s conversational tone in this letter, the length of it, and the delicate advice about Sydney, all of which meant she had taken Agatha’s earlier letter much more to heart than Agatha had anticipated . . .

  This was a letter from a friend, or someone who was becoming a friend, and Agatha had no idea what to do about it.

  It wasn’t that Agatha lacked friends. Mrs. Pestell at the Queen’s Larder was always affable, and Mrs. Barns, the bookbinder’s wife, always stopped for tea when she could. But in both those cases friendship had happened on account of existing connections—the way acid bit through a design you’d already carved in the wax. The curve and angle of the relationship was predetermined. Bounded by the lines you’d drawn.

  In a word: safe.

  She had no design where Penelope Flood was concerned. There was no larger purpose in the connection. Agatha couldn’t think of a single useful reason to write back.

  Except that she wanted to.

  But she couldn’t think of any reason why this should be so. She couldn’t think of anything she wanted Mrs. Flood to do for her, besides keeping an eye on the bees, or anything she could do for Mrs. Flood, now that she’d sent the Scotswoman’s book as a thank-you for the bee business. It ought to have been something she could put out of her mind until the next crisis came along—the bees stung someone, say, or pests got into the hive somehow. Then there would have been an excuse for a letter.

  Not knowing precisely what you wanted from someone—well, that was the surest way in the world of being disappointed when you didn’t get it.

  No, she thought sternly, even as one hand pulled a fresh sheet of paper in front of her and the other dipped the quill into the ink. She would not write to Mrs. Flood again unless it proved necessary. The days were so busy. Agatha’s time would be much better spent keeping up with more urgent correspondence—the Roman antiquarian, for instance, or Madame Tabot the modiste. She would not write to Mrs. Flood.

  Agatha glanced down to find that her hand had kept pace with her thought—but only in part. Only long enough to write Flood at the top of the new sheet of paper lying smugly on the desk in front of her.

  Paper was expensive. And this was the good paper, Agatha’s finest stock. Used for the ladies and artists and artisans who contributed to the Menagerie, and who would respect her more if she was obviously using high-grade linen paper, not the cheaper cotton stuff.

  A whole sheet wasted. Wasted, that is, if she wanted to address anybody except Penelope Flood.

  Agatha sighed, and yielded, and began writing.

  Flood,

  Six brothers! My deepest sympathies. I only had one myself. But such a one! Trouble enough for six, I’d wager, and laughter enough for a dozen. We fought incessantly, but heaven help you if you looked at either one of us crosswise.

  He’s gone now—he died at Lyngør, with the navy. Sometimes I imagine he’s really still out there somewhere at sea. I know it’s not true comfort, but it gets me through the worst of the pangs.

  Agatha scowled down at the paper, her hand itching to cross those lines out. Instead, she dipped her pen again and tried to hastily deflect, as though the earlier paragraph hadn’t happened at all:

  Do any of your siblings still live close by?

  She didn’t dare write any longer, for fear of what else she might say. And she’d left off the honorific in the salutation, so she signed it simply:

  Griffin

  The letter hadn’t been sent out an hour before Agatha was ardently regretting every last mortifying word.

  How had she managed to fit so much embarrassing material in such a short note? Stale wit, childhood tantrums, and a truly treacly flight of fancy involving a dead relative.

  Such a letter deserved to be discarded.

  It deserved to be burnt.

  Annually, as a caution against similar sins.

  It ought to be shown to schoolchildren for the next hundred years to teach them how not to write melodiously in English. Like an anti-Shakespeare, or the opposite of Burke.

  It was worse than poetry.

  Agatha felt as though she’d wantonly sliced off a piece of her beating heart and sealed it within the envelope. How would Penelope—how would anyone?—react to being the recipient of such a gory, messy missive?

  She cut the lines of her next engraving extra deep out of pique, and was particularly sharp about Jane’s inattention and poor Crompton’s perfectly common compositing errors—but her agony only subsided when the Tuesday post brought a reply that was obviously several pages in length.

  Agatha tucked it hastily into her skirt pocket, where it smoldered like a banked coal until she could dismiss her employees for the day, send Eliza and Sydney off to the theater, and lock herself in her study with the curtains drawn.

  Dear Griffin, the letter began, and set Agatha’s heart racing in gorgeous terror:

  My condolences on the loss of your brother. He sounds like a charming, stubborn, eminently lovable young sailor.

  It is terribly hard having family at sea. My father was a merchant captain and his sons mostly followed him into the trade—the brother I mentioned in Edinburgh runs accounts for a shipping company there. My youngest brother, Owen, was the vicar here until we lost him some years back. My second-youngest brother, Harry, and my husband are in whaling, and often gone for two or three years at a stretch. They could have been drowned or devoured or anything years ago, and the letter just not reached me yet.

  They could be dead even as I write this.

  I think about it sometimes and it chills the breath right out of me. You are right, it is a solace to think that should they perish, I could stave off grief for some short while by imagining them still braving the swells together somewhere.

  At this point the words started dancing and Agatha had to put down the paper to dash the water from her eyes.

  It was nothing. Truly nothing. She’d thought she would embarrass herself, and she hadn’t. Tha
t was all. She’d sent a tender, bleeding part of her heart blithely off on a thoughtless impulse, and such an error obviously deserved to be consigned to the yawning depths of a polite and awkward silence.

  Penelope Flood had sent that humiliating weakness back as carefully, cushioningly wrapped as a treasured heirloom. As if Agatha would be incomplete without it.

  Her mother-in-law had been right: Penelope Flood was extraordinarily kind. Far kinder than Agatha deserved.

  Thinking poorly of herself was familiar, and helped steady her whirling thoughts. She glanced again at the door and read on:

  The nearest of my living siblings is my brother, Philip, who married a Welshwoman whose father owned a mine. The rest have scattered in the course of pursuing fair love and fortune. Mostly the latter, to be frank. Only I have stayed in Melliton, in the house where we all grew up. It rings a little emptier now that it’s just myself.

  Perhaps that’s one reason I work so hard to stay busy. There are a number of farming families in the area whom I visit regularly—beekeeping is not very demanding when a keeper has only one or two hives, but as soon as you have moths or mice or foulbrood showing up it is helpful to be able to call on someone with expertise. The families enjoy the honey and wax their hives produce, I have a chance to observe how variations in nearby flora affect things like honey production rates and hive strength, and it keeps me out in the fresh air and not brooding alone at home.

  However, at the moment, I also have the benefit of a witty and talkative guest: my friend Joanna Molesey, whose name you’ll recognize, has come to stay with me after the loss of her patroness. She has family in the north, but some small legal matters—including a missing diamond snuffbox—require her to remain in the neighborhood for some indefinite length of time. If you have a moment to spare, I can tell you the whole story . . .

  Agatha read the letter twice more beginning to end, then folded it back up along its creases. As a businesswoman she was careful to preserve all her correspondence; such records often came in handy when disputes arose over payment rates and deadlines for delivery.

  She could not, of course, put Penelope’s letter with these. It was far too personal.

  Nor could she put it in the small dresser beside her bed, where Thomas’s letters rested, the fragile stack tied with a blue silk ribbon. Scraps of delicate poetry he’d found, printed flowers just for her, lines he’d typeset himself as a youth—these were also personal, also secret, but not quite in the same painful way. You expected love letters to be intimate and embarrassing.

  What they weren’t, Agatha realized, was specific.

  Thomas had loved words as naturally as breathing, but he was more a collector of them than an artist with them. Or to put it another way: he could take several unrelated pieces on poetry and history and essays on art and the sciences, set them in a compelling and natural order, add illustrations to underscore the meaning, and make the final result immensely appealing and artistic—but he could never have composed any of those pieces himself. His art was in the collection of things, not the writing of them.

  When courting Agatha, Thomas had sent her bits of other people’s poems because they captured how he felt—but that wasn’t the same as writing her a love poem himself. Agatha had always known this on some level—so she’d kept her replies in the same vein. Snippets of things, thoughts pulled out of their natural ground. She hadn’t the talent for such collections, not the way Thomas had, but to her great chagrin it had never occurred to her that she was allowed to form her own replies in her own particular manner. She’d assumed she was supposed to fit her style to his.

  This new correspondence with Penelope Flood, though, was made up only of the things the two of them said to one another. No contract disputes, no professional relationship to protect, no stolen snippets. Nobody else’s words to get in the way.

  Agatha had never thought to want that before. But all at once she found herself craving it like a drunkard craving another glass of gin.

  To have the space to let her thoughts meander, to be able to simply say what she thought, instead of having to hunt down the part where someone else had said it better, or said it first, or said something close to it . . . It was intoxicating.

  Maybe she was getting ahead of herself. After all, for all she knew, Penelope Flood wrote like this to everyone. With so many brothers scattered around the globe, she must have a great deal of practice in using letters to bridge the gaps of time and distance.

  Even if this was ordinary correspondence to Penelope Flood, it was something new and special to Agatha.

  And she wanted even more now to write back. She tucked the letter into her skirt pocket, and composed a reply.

  Then, to make up for the self-indulgence, she forced herself to turn back to the never-ending work. When Eliza and Sydney returned, she was three letters deep into her correspondence for the Menagerie, and only the occasional whisper of paper in her pocket reminded her that she’d taken an hour for something selfish that evening.

  Penelope’s next reply came enclosed with a pressed flower.

  An apple blossom, she said, from the gardens at Abington Hall. You recall in my last note I mentioned I inherited the Abington hives? There are half a dozen of them, and they sit in a cozy courtyard of their own on the top of Melliton’s highest hill. The place has been a bee garden for at least two centuries, if not more, and the plants have all been carefully chosen for apiological delight in every season.

  They are less of a delight to Lady Summerville, the hall’s current occupant. She wishes she could knock down the ancient walls and put in a modern lawn with a prospect, and I am old-fashioned enough that this strikes my heart with all the heavy tones of a funeral bell. Fortunately, Lady S has not the funds for such alterations. The bee garden remains safe.

  But my heart tells me the detente cannot last. I fear the most for the apple trees, so ancient and yet so delicate in their spring finery. Their fruit is the sweetest in Melliton in the autumn, and it would be a shame to deprive future generations of the childhood ritual of clambering over the wall to steal them.

  Flood

  Agatha tipped the apple blossom into her palm and peered down at it. Its petals had been perfectly, lovingly pressed of all moisture, leaving it so light it trembled at even the slightest whisper of breath. Most of the flower was white, but the tips of the petals still bore traces of a blush pink that would have been irresistible beneath the summer sky in a hilltop garden.

  Clearly, Agatha had the same taste in flowers as bees did.

  She carefully tipped the fragile blossom back onto Penelope’s letter, refolded the pages, then tucked the latest missive away with the others in her new hiding space: between the pages of a manuscript copy of the Scotswoman’s bee book. The bulk of it occasioned no notice sitting on her desk among her other papers, yet it gave Agatha a little frisson to see it and know it held a secret.

  That little flower haunted her the rest of the day, hovering on the periphery of her thoughts, pale petals fluttering like wings in the edges of her vision. She found herself idly doodling it in the corner of her sketchbook, when she ought to have been working on other things. There was something alluring about the shape of it—she couldn’t help wanting to trace every line of the delicate veining, or use her scribe to follow the curves and points of each individual petal.

  A shame it was so delicate. The years were not kind to fragile things.

  She reached out for a small stub of boxwood, almost before the thought had completed itself. Soon the table beneath her busy hands was filled with curls and corners and shavings, as she carved away everything but the flowing, flowery outline.

  Flood,

  Thank you for the apple blossom—it brought a moment of sunshine and good country air into a day that was otherwise a cloudy one. Such flowers are not so easy to come by here in the city, but I have sent you one anyways, at the end of this note. Woodcuts are slowly beginning to grow popular in printing circles—they lack the pr
ecision of copperplate, or the dramatic shading of mezzotint in the English style—but I learned to engrave first in wood, and it has always seemed to me the more appropriate material for natural scenes and figures.

  More importantly, they last. A well-done wood engraving will let a printer make impressions for centuries, long after other kinds of plates have been worn down by use and the weight of the press.

  Even if Lady Summerville has her wish, some small part of your bee garden will survive.

  Griffin

  Agatha knew her trade, and had done her work well. The apple blossom printed at the end of the letter was an exact copy of the one Penelope had enclosed. She’d even brushed strokes of pink watercolor onto it, to breathe a little life into it.

  Another piece of her heart, tucked into a fold of paper and sent into another’s possession. Strange, how it got a little easier every time.

  Chapter Five

  Flood,

  Forgive the delay in this response—as you may have heard, our long-absent Queen Caroline landed at Dover on 5 June and everything since has been near anarchy. The King is aghast that an entire continent no longer separates him from his wife, whom he decries as unfaithful, Parliament is anxiously debating how much money it will take to persuade her back to Italy, and everywhere the common people (spurred on by the radicals and reformers) are hailing her as their champion. She is William the Conqueror, or Henry VII come to claim his throne—or she is Bonaparte, returning from exile to make one last play for undeserved power. Everyone in the Strand, it seems, has a pamphlet to write, a newspaper to sell, or a crude satire to sketch on the subject, myself included—I’ve enclosed our latest one from Thisburton, with the Queen as a well-fed and feathered goose, and the reformers as foxes licking their teeth at her approach.