by Olivia Waite
The Menagerie was their bread and butter, Agatha knew—but it still felt stiff and unnatural, like an old suit of armor she had to squeeze herself into. One that pinched at the toes and creaked at the elbows, because it had been made to fit someone else.
She shook herself. Clearly spending too much time with the poetical Penelope Flood was having an effect on her. Suit of armor, indeed. They were words, that was all, simple words on plain paper. Something she’d been doing for three years now.
Three endless, awkward, embarrassing years while she paged through etiquette guides and letter-writing manuals to find ways of saying what she meant in phrases that didn’t sound as blunt and impatient as she felt. It was a dance Thomas had excelled in, but which Agatha had always abhorred. She always had to look up the references, and never felt comfortable adding any unless they came direct from the manuals or etiquette guides. She lacked the will for wordplay or allusion or quotation—or else she lacked a certain fluidity of mind.
Something that youth would be far more adept at, Agatha realized.
She stared thoughtfully at the towering stack of letters and came to a swift, self-serving decision: she would delegate. Was this not precisely what apprentices were for? “Eliza,” she asked the girl working at the table by her side, “how would you like to take over some of the Menagerie correspondence?”
“Me?” The apprentice looked up from her music plate, her surprise a most imperfect mask for her eagerness. “Write to the lords and ladies?”
“Not yet—let’s start you with the artists and musicians.” Agatha sorted through until she found the most recent letters from the music reviewers who frequently sent pieces in for the Menagerie. “The experts and professionals. They’re quite a bit more entertaining than the lords and ladies, I assure you.”
Eliza accepted the letters as though they were as fragile as baby birds. “Then why do you want to be rid of them, ma’am?”
“Well,” Agatha started, and stopped in horror when she realized she was blushing. Good god, blushing at her age, how mortifying. “To be perfectly frank, I need to make time to travel back and forth to Melliton more often. Say, once a week instead of once a month.”
Eliza stared.
Agatha’s cheeks went hotter, and her mouth flattened into a steely line. “So our first wholesaler outside town is well stocked,” she insisted. “And there is always something in the queue that needs proofing. And I’ll be able to check on my beehive, too, of course.” She realized she was close to babbling, and snapped her mouth shut.
“Of course, ma’am.”
Eliza murmured obediently enough, but Agatha shriveled in her soul to see the question marks still hovering in the girl’s dark, curious eyes. She hurried to change the subject. “Let me walk you through the first one, and show you the book of sample letters . . .”
Still, even the embarrassment of a secret attraction to a married woman didn’t stop her from visiting Melliton again a week later. And the week after that, and the week after that, until it became an accepted part of the rhythm of her life.
Mr. Downes developed a nervous habit of twisting one bit of hair endlessly between his fingers, until it became clear that despite her more frequent appearances his employer spent as much time out of the print-works as in it. Agatha took to carting her sketchbook with her, since Mrs. Flood only rarely needed a second person’s help; the sketchbook’s scenes of London life and famous landmarks began to alternate with country views and cottage scenes and detailed studies of bees and wildflowers. Agatha also brought with her the profits from the first “Inexpressibles” run, new ballads for Mrs. Turner to sell, and whiled away evenings with the crowd in the Four Swallows or with Flood and Joanna Molesey at Fern Hall, before heading back to the solitary darkness of Mrs. Stowe’s spare room. When needed she would hire Gus and cart the Menagerie issues back with her, but most times she found a seat on the stagecoach, which was appreciably quicker and cheaper.
The blueness of the sky no longer seemed so empty, arching above her on the journey.
Agatha had sold all of Thomas’s things after he died, and so she walked every circuit in a pair of Mr. Flood’s cast-off trousers and the same blue coat. She was growing quite addicted to the freedom of long strides free of clinging skirts, and in the lack of pale petticoats to be brushed clean of mud and dust after a long day’s walk.
Nor was that the only change. The differences between city and country, once so stark in Agatha’s perception, began to fade. People were roughly the same in both places, after all, underneath the regional trappings of apparel and accent. She’d been foolish ever to think otherwise. Just like in London, people in the village argued, they teased, they worked, they loved.
And: they fucked. Because even lurid artworks, which Agatha had always thought of as a vice particular to the city, could be found in quiet, homely Melliton—provided one knew where to look.
It was her fourth circuit. Penelope Flood had walked with Agatha to show off her personal beehives at Fern Hall: two skeps with glasses on top, and an extremely scientific design by a Swiss apiculturist which Flood referred to as a leaf hive. This structure was a series of tall rectangular frames with glass sides, all joined with hinges at the back so they could be closed up tight, or fanned open wide. They looked, in fact, precisely like the pages of a book, connected at the spine and spread out in front. Instead of letters and lines of words, however, each glass-covered “page” was alive with buzzing, building, crawling, cleaning bees, packed so tight that in many places you couldn’t see the comb beneath.
Agatha remembered when that would have made her shudder. Now, she put one wondering hand on the glass and smiled to feel the heat of an active hive.
The whole structure was placed under a small red-tiled roof to keep off the wet, but which had the effect of making it look like a shrine—even before Agatha noticed it was overlooked by a small replica of the Medici Venus. A souvenir that had been brought home by one of Penelope Flood’s many seafaring brothers in his youth, the beekeeper explained, while Agatha sketched a fascinated study of the leaf hive in swift, precise lines.
Flood also pointed out the queen, larger than her commoner daughters but still hard to spot amid the thronging, buzzing crowd.
“Do you get a great deal more honey from this hive?” Agatha asked, as her pencil added the velvety insect shapes.
Flood tilted her head. “Well, yes, because it holds more bees. But in a skep you can use glasses, with wires to keep the queen below, so the honey harvest is a simpler process. With the leaf hive, I have to close off the passages between the two halves until the first half is empty of bees, so I can harvest honey unimpeded, and I still have to cut through the sides where the bees have glued it in place and then . . .” She checked herself with a wry twist of her mouth. “It’s complicated, shall we say.”
Agatha snorted softly. “So I see.”
“However . . .” Flood went on.
She was using her storyteller’s tone, which made Agatha automatically lift her eyes and still her pencil, curiosity chiming irrepressible notes inside her.
Flood stroked the side of the hive possessively. “The leaf hive’s great advantage is that it lets a person observe every hour in the life of a hive. Larval hatchings, the building and capping of comb, queens’ duels—”
“Duels?”
“Oh yes—when a new queen hatches before the old one’s set off with a swarm, the two bees will hunt each other through the hive. They pipe for one another, calling out threats, until they meet in some dark corner of the comb and then . . .”
Agatha was riveted. “And then?”
“And then: slash! Stab!” Penelope Flood’s mobile mouth was a mournful twist. “You can only ever have one queen to a hive.”
Agatha cast a newly anxious eye on the bees in front of her. “They sound almost as vicious as Jacobins.”
Flood laughed at that. “Not quite so bloody as that, to be honest. More like . . . Elizabeth and Mary, Que
en of Scots. Only one head can wear the crown.”
“Have you ever seen a queens’ duel?”
“Not myself—but plenty of naturalists have, and written descriptions in some detail. We are in a great age for beekeeping, you know. There have been great advancements made these past few decades; they’ve made harvesting honey more productive and more pleasant, for both bees and humans. It’s about understanding the true nature of bees, and working with that nature instead of against it.”
Agatha looked again at the queen, basking in a circle of her daughters, their small front limbs combing her attentively. “You mean, because bees are so well governed by their queen, it means they are governable by beekeepers?”
Flood’s lips thinned. “Some keepers think so. For myself, I find that bees do best when left to govern themselves as much as possible. A keeper is there to provide help, not to impose a human’s notion of order. Because as much as it looks like a monarchy, a hive does not depend on any individual bee, not even the queen—on her own, without her attendants or her drones or her daughters, she is nothing. And she keeps nothing for herself. The colony shares everything.”
“But surely the queen is needed to make more bees,” Agatha said. “Even I know that much.”
Flood’s grin was a revolutionary slash. “On the contrary: if a queen dies, the workers will simply raise themselves another. The lineage may be broken, but the colony endures forever.”
Agatha stared at the hive, and all its miniature architecture on display. Brown and ochre, spring green and bright gold—after she counted the tenth different shade in the cells of the comb she was compelled to ask: “What do the different colors mean?”
Flood looked up from her notebook, where she was penciling observations of the leaf hive. She smiled to see Agatha all but pressed up against the glass. “The colors tell you what kind of plant the bee visited,” she explained. “Different plants make different kinds of honey.”
Agatha could only stare at all those tiny hexagons, brilliant and beautiful as a church window. “How do you keep them separate?”
“You don’t. The bees do, when they find something that’s blooming well. Cherry and plum trees, heather, raspberries. They take as much as they can from one plant before moving on to the next.” Her smile widened. “It’s a good deal more fun if I show you.”
That was how Agatha found herself in Penelope Flood’s honey larder, sitting at the low table with a half dozen jars of honey awaiting her pleasure. “Start with the wildflower,” Flood urged, and held out a spoon.
Agatha took it warily, careful not to let her fingers brush Flood’s. The metal was warm from her hand, though, which was almost as bad for Agatha’s peace of mind. She took up the jar of wildflower honey and spooned up a small dollop: light amber, very clear.
It tasted, as she’d expected, like honey. Sweet and delicious. “Very nice.”
Flood’s smile turned impish. “That was from one of the hives near Backey Green,” she said. “Now: this is from Mrs. Stowe’s garden.”
This jar was slightly darker amber, with a mist of crystallization. Agatha scooped up a bit from the still-liquid part and put it on her tongue—and stopped. Still sweet, still honey—but the flavor was now a darker floral, almost perfumed, with notes underneath that were almost bitter. “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, it’s so different.”
“Your mother-in-law grows mostly roses and thyme,” Flood said. “You see how it affects the flavor?” She talked Agatha through more varieties: heather honey and apple blossom and a strong, herby one that came from the deepest part of the woods. “Honey is never all one thing,” Flood explained, while Agatha curled her tongue into the bowl of the spoon to get the last layer of sweetness. “It’s lots of little bits, which together make something unique.”
Agatha licked her lips. “Which honey is yours?”
Flood blushed a little and slid forward the darkest jar, almost ruby in color. “The woods near here are full of blackberries, so that’s mostly what my bees bring home.”
This time, Agatha filled the entire spoon. Flood gazed avidly as she raised it to her lips and opened her mouth.
Agatha swallowed, thick honey sliding lazily down her throat. She closed her eyes, sparks bursting against the back of her eyelids as one lush flavor after another poured through her. Sharp greens and deep purples and the tang of berries. The sweetness lingered on her tongue and clouded the air around her as she breathed out on a helpless, hungry sigh.
She opened her eyes just in time to see Penelope Flood’s throat work as she swallowed, hard.
Agatha wondered what it would taste like if she and Penelope—
No. Mrs. Flood was a married woman. Agatha clung to her respectability by the thinnest of threads. “Thank you,” she said instead, and hated how stilted it sounded to her own ears. “I had no idea that the location of a hive could make such a difference.”
Flood’s blue eyes cut to Agatha, sly and suggestive. “Would you like to see the oldest hives in Melliton?”
And that was how Agatha came to see the gardens of Abington Hall.
“The skeps are replaced as needed, of course,” Flood said an hour later, barely out of breath even though Agatha was still panting from their quick ascent up the hill path. “But the boles have been home to bees for who knows how many hundreds of years. So I like to think of them as the same hives, in essence, if not in actuality.”
Agatha could only nod, her voice not yet trustworthy. It was one of the first truly hot days of the season, hissing with crickets. She sucked in lungfuls of sweet, apple-and-herb-scented air while Flood walked the small enclosure, sweeping clear the doorways of each of the hives. The bee garden was pleasant enough—but the tall windows of the hall looming up beyond it were dark even in the daylight.
Agatha couldn’t shake the feeling those windows were watching her.
Flood caught the direction of her gaze and shook her head. “Viscount Summerville has gone north for a bit of shooting,” she said, “and his lady has gone to London, so is not here to trouble us. Not that I don’t have a duty to see to these hives, considering Isabella left them to my care.” She cast Agatha a sidelong glance, and even beneath the bee veil the curve of her lips made Agatha go breathless all over again. “So it’s also a perfect time to show you what else Lady Summerville inherited.”
The metal of the side gate latch was far too hot to touch barehanded: Agatha felt it even through the thick leather beekeeping gloves, before she swept the muslin veils away and bared her face to the sun. She followed the beekeeper through the gate and around the first few bends of a hedge maze Agatha hoped she wouldn’t have to navigate out of on her own.
By the third turning she was breathless again, and so disoriented that she was glad the bright heat of the sun in the sky above told her for certain which direction was up.
They turned one more corner and found themselves in the middle of an orgy.
Agatha wasn’t prudish; she’d been a wife and was mother of a son, and Griffin’s had occasionally taken commissions for the sort of private engravings that banished one’s prudery forever. But it was one thing to consider licentious poses on paper, from behind the safety of the frame—it was quite another to stand inches away from a sculpted satyr who was life-size in all ways except the one where he was enormously larger than life.
“Goodness,” Agatha said, and blushed to the roots beneath Mr. Flood’s broad-brimmed hat.
Flood’s answering grin heated her skin nearly as much as the sunlight did.
Was it possible to perish from a combination of arousal and embarrassment? Agatha cleared her throat and fought for something like aloofness, turning her eyes back to the satyr as the lesser of two temptations. Well, for a given definition of lesser, at any rate. “How would one even walk?”
“Quite carefully, I should imagine,” Flood said with a laugh. “Especially going around corners.”
“I fear for his fellow pedestrians.”
Flood coc
ked her head. “The nymphs don’t appear to be complaining.”
And indeed, the lithe figures scattered around among the hollyhocks and peonies looked every bit as louche as the satyrs. Admittedly, with more realistic physical proportions. Some were plump and sported dimples in cheeks and elbows; some were slender as birch trees with merely a whisper of bosom. The closer Agatha looked, the more each one felt . . . specific. The sculptress had not just captured the likeness of a model—she’d been recreating the forms and faces of people she knew deeply and well.
That realization was more shocking than the satyr anatomy, quite frankly: you felt that to look at any figure was to interrupt them at a most private, pleasurable moment.
The couple lounging in luxury at the center of the scene was even more easily recognizable—particularly to anyone who’d been engraving and publishing satires during the wars. “Good lord,” Agatha choked, “don’t tell me that’s—”
“Bonaparte,” Flood confirmed.
“A little more apart would have been appreciated.”
Flood cackled.
Agatha squirmed and gaped at the statue of the former emperor sprawled on a tiger skin, in all his natural glory.
The beekeeper’s voice was fond, as though discussing an old friend. “He’s dressed—well, not so much dressed, but depicting Bacchus, of course. You should see the one of him as Mars that Wellington brought home: it’s nearly twelve feet tall, which puts most people’s face right about . . . well, you can guess where.”
“Good lord.”
Agatha yanked her gaze away from the emperor’s glory to peer at the woman lounging at his side, hair crowned with stars, and a lingering sadness in her large eyes. She was covered in a flutter of drapery, which was as good as a nun’s habit in this setting. “And that’s Josephine as Ariadne, I expect.”
“Very fitting, don’t you think? Parted from her first love, then raised up to glorious heights by the second.”
“Oh, a very apt allusion. I expect this was sculpted before the emperor divorced her? Bacchus would have been ashamed to do any such thing.”