by Olivia Waite
Mr. Painter puffed himself up like an irritable chicken. “We are special constables, of course. Appointed this very morning, by Mr. Oliver and Squire Theydon himself.”
“Of course you are,” Penelope said, so much honey dripping from her tones that Agatha’s own teeth ached to hear it. The blonde woman dabbed at her lip with a napkin and rose from the table. “If you gentleman will wait outside, Mrs. Turner and I will be with you shortly.”
Mr. Painter looked as though he wanted to argue this, but then Mr. Buckley seized him by the elbow. Nodding brusquely to Penelope, he towed his fellow constable outside, to wait in the lane.
Agatha waited until she heard the snick that meant Jenny had shut the door behind them. “What do we do, then?” she said to Penelope. “I take Mrs. Turner out the back and into the wood, while you stall and then eventually ‘discover’ she’s run off?”
Penelope grinned, a sunburst of a smile that made Agatha’s heart swell with joy. “I always knew you’d be a natural conspirator—but unless Nell wants otherwise, I think this is a problem we should face head-on.” Her smile turned evil at the corners. “All three of us.”
She walked down the hallway toward the kitchen, Agatha scrambling up from the table to catch up.
“She was singing the Wasp’s ballads for half the evening last night,” Agatha cautioned, balling her hands in her skirts so she could match Penelope’s determined stride. “Those have already been labeled seditious libel.”
“The printed broadsides, yes,” Penelope returned. “But singing them isn’t necessarily criminal. It all depends on how you argue the law.”
“And how do you think Mr. Oliver will argue?” Agatha returned.
Penelope’s hands clenched. “I intend to be there to find out.”
They collected Nell, who went grim at the news but who was not surprised: “Breach of the peace—that’s one of the ones they like to use against ballad sellers.” She accepted Penelope’s offer of help, and the three of them met the special constables in the lane.
Penelope walked arm in arm with Mrs. Turner, head high, an unaccustomed bonnet jammed over her curls. Mr. Painter went in front, huffing angrily into his mustache whenever the ladies behind walked too slowly for his taste.
Agatha went behind, dragging her boots in the dust.
It chilled her to leave the blue vault of the spring sky and step into the dead gray stone space of the vestry, musty with age, where the sunlight had to claw its way down through centuries upon centuries of pious dust. Mr. Oliver was sitting at a broad wooden desk, polishing his spectacles, and Squire Theydon was paging through the third volume of Burn’s The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer. They both rose when the party arrived.
The ladies were now officially outnumbered. Agatha tried not to let her nerves show in her face.
“Ah, Mrs. Flood,” said the vicar. “I wondered if you might come in person.”
“You know I always want to see the right thing done, Mr. Oliver,” Penelope replied. She dragged one of the heavy chairs over, and took a seat as close to Mrs. Turner as she could.
The vicar smiled beatifically. “Then let’s not dawdle.”
He proceeded to open the session with all proper oaths and forms, which ate up several minutes and caused Agatha’s eyes to glaze over and her brain to turn into porridge. Even Mr. Buckley was looking a little dazed by the time Mr. Oliver finished the forty-three separate attestations of loyalty and honor to King George. He pronounced each one quite as seriously as if the monarch would magically know if he skipped one or two of them.
Mrs. Turner was sworn in, and the twisty legal arguments began.
It was, as Penelope had said, not at all settled if Eleanor Turner had committed a crime or not. It depended on so many interwoven details: whether the “Lady Spranklin” tune referred to Lady Summerville, a full catalog of the ballad’s innuendoes—which were apparently something altogether else in legal terms than what Agatha understood them to be in everyday English; separately, whether the song was a public slander when sung, a libel when printed, or merely an insult delivered between private parties, whether performing the ballad counted as a new publication of that libel or not, how the character and context of the Four Swallows impinged upon all these questions . . .
Agatha found a lot of it impossible to follow—though Mrs. Turner apparently didn’t, and was quick to cite certain statutes and cases in her defense, a few of which had Squire Theydon flipping through the pages of Burn like a card sharp shuffling a dodgy deck. This was clearly not the ballad singer’s first time in front of a magistrate, but as the arguments went on and on and on, her voice grew higher and more frantic, and Penelope’s polite posture turned more and more wooden.
Agatha squirmed in her seat, and felt helpless, and tamped down the desire to hit someone—anyone—if it would speed things along. Trial by combat suddenly seemed an eminently sensible system.
Mr. Oliver, too, was looking more than a little frayed at the edges. “I do think you might be reasonable, Mrs. Turner,” he said with a long-suffering sigh. “I understand that the Four Swallows offers you gainful employment—though I do note that, as a churchwoman, you ought to be frugal enough to support your family handily on the salary your husband brings in, or to have him apply to the parish officers if you are in need of relief.”
Mrs. Turner snorted, either at the uselessness of the suggestion or the description of herself as a churchwoman.
“Perhaps you might consider more wholesome subjects of performance,” Squire Theydon offered. “My old nurse used to sing ‘An Hundred Godly Lessons’ to me before bedtime, and it always put me right to sleep.”
“I’m sure it did,” the singer muttered.
The good squire’s brows beetled.
Mr. Oliver sighed. “It showed exceedingly poor judgment, Mrs. Turner, that you picked such a notorious piece to perform before an audience who had already been worked up into a froth by the evening’s dramatics. I understand you are not the author of the slanderous song, and so are not originally liable for its harms where the law is concerned—”
Mrs. Turner, Penelope, and Agatha all breathed a little easier.
“—but I have to consider something more than the law: I have to consider what is good. For Melliton, and for the good householders of the parish. So if my fellow justice of the peace agrees with me . . .” Squire Theydon was already nodding. “Then I think it only fit to demand a surety for your future good behavior . . .” He licked his lips. “How does Burn put it, Mr. Theydon?”
“‘He—’ that’s us justices, of course ‘—he has a discretionary power to take such surety of all those whom he shall have just cause to suspect to be dangerous, quarrelsome, or scandalous; as of those who sleep in the day, and go abroad in the night; and of such as keep suspicious company; and of such as are generally suspected to be robbers, and the like—’”
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Theydon,” the vicar said. “I don’t know about ‘dangerous,’ Mrs. Turner—but ‘quarrelsome’ and ‘scandalous’ certainly seem to fit. Let the surety be set at: ten pounds.”
The singer gasped in horror. Penelope’s hand flew to her mouth.
And Agatha—well, Agatha felt grim certainty roll over her like the tide. The sum was astronomical, far more than Mrs. Turner could earn even if she sang for a year straight. This was deliberate. This was meant to ruin her.
It was pure and petty tyranny, done for spite’s sake.
“She cannot pay that, Mr. Oliver,” Penelope objected. “You must know she cannot.”
“Then she will be imprisoned,” Mr. Oliver said pleasantly. “Until such a time as she has worked off her debt. With her child, of course,” he said, nodding. “We are not monsters.”
This was too much. Agatha rocketed up out of her chair as though someone had lit a firework under her seat. “The surety will be paid, Mr. Oliver.”
Everyone swiveled to stare at her, even Penelope.
Agatha felt the heat rise in her cheeks, but barrel
ed onward. “I will vouchsafe the sum on Mrs. Turner’s behalf.”
“You know the money will be forfeit if she errs again,” cautioned the vicar.
Agatha almost laughed in his face, but managed to turn it into a cough and a demure widowly nod. “Mrs. Turner has been a successful composer of ballads for my press,” she said. “I value her work and have every faith in her character.”
Mrs. Turner blinked.
Mr. Oliver read out the closing ceremony for the session. Penelope was up as soon as he closed the book, nodding smartly and taking poor Mrs. Turner by the elbow.
Agatha clasped her hands behind her back—the better not to wrap them around Mr. Oliver’s comfortable neck—and followed the other two women out of the vestry.
Sunshine and birdsong and a blossoming world, every sweet note and scent of it an affront. The three women walked down the road: Mrs. Turner’s gait timid, as though she didn’t dare draw more of the world’s attention, Penelope’s stomping louder than you’d think possible without her sturdy boots.
And Agatha, lagging behind. She made her feet hurry until she drew even with the other two. “I’ll have Mr. Downes send the surety to Mr. Oliver by the end of today,” she said, for lack of anything better to offer.
Mrs. Turner nodded, but anguish still clouded her features. “I don’t know how I’ll pay you back, Mrs. Griffin.” Her mouth curved in a bitter twist. “I don’t suppose I can consider this an advance on the next fifty or so ballads?”
“If you like,” Agatha said, helpless to find any better response. “But I won’t be holding you to that, if it causes you pain.”
“Probably wise,” Mrs. Turner went on. “I don’t know when I’ll find the time to write even the next one, now. It’s just all so—impossible.” She stopped, hands clenching her sides. “I can’t escape him, not under the law. My husband’s never laid a hand on me in anger. He just—he just takes, that’s all. Whatever I try to hold back for Arthur or myself he swallows up, and asks for more.” She wrapped her arms around her torso, holding herself together. Her voice lowered to a sadder register. “I wrote love songs for him once, you know.”
Penelope smiled, and said: “I remember.” Mrs. Turner looked at her. “They were more beautiful than he deserved.”
They walked on. Agatha’s eye was caught by a bumblebee trundling blissfully over the hyssop blossoms by the side of the road, rounder and larger than any of Penelope’s honeybees. Her fuzzy legs were caked thick with pollen, almost full enough for her to carry back to the hive, where her sisters waited to help with the work—and where her brothers lounged in the doorway, like lazy lords, waiting to be attended . . .
“What if we could get you away from him?” Agatha asked.
Mrs. Turner’s step faltered. “What’s that?”
Penelope stopped dead in the middle of the road. “Griffin . . . By all the stars, Griffin, do you have an idea?”
“I might,” Agatha said. “Look, Mrs. Turner, I’ll have to ask her about it—but what if you moved in with Joanna Molesey?”
“The poet?” Mrs. Turner’s eyes were wide as the sky around them. “I’ve never even met her.”
“But you’ve been singing her ballads for months,” Agatha countered. “And now you’ve landed in all this mess because of them.” She flicked her skirts, shaking off the dust. “We could make a reasonable argument that she owes you some consideration for having put you in this position.”
“We could tell her how much it would annoy Mr. Oliver if she helped you,” Penelope said.
“And Lady Summerville,” Agatha added. “Especially Lady Summerville.”
Penelope began to laugh, stretching her arms out as though she could reach to the horizon.
“Joanna’s an elderly woman, on her own for the first time in decades,” Agatha went on. “Surely she’s in need of a companion? One who is as quick-witted as she is, and who appreciates the sharper sort of poetry?”
“What do you think, Nell?” Penelope asked. “Would it work? Would it help?”
“Would I have to leave Arthur?” Mrs. Turner asked instantly.
Agatha grinned. “Let’s write to her and ask, shall we?”
Joanna Molesey, it turned out, was ecstatic to thwart both Mr. Oliver and Lady Summerville, especially if it meant gaining a lively and musical companion. Before the end of the week Nell and Arthur Turner were safely ensconced in Gower Street, with promises that if Mr. Turner tried anything by way of the law, Mrs. Molesey would find the most ruthless solicitor London had to offer. Mrs. Turner and her son were safe.
Penelope and Agatha were insufferably proud of themselves.
The happy glow lasted until Agatha’s return the following week. Penelope walked with her up the hill to Abington Hall, through the hollowed-out sculpture gardens (Penelope stole a kiss in every place where a statue had been). But when they turned the corner to the bee garden, they found it crowded with Lady Summerville and a half-dozen gardeners.
Abington Hall’s mistress stood beneath the stippled shadows of a lacy parasol, though the winter sun could hardly pose a threat even to the palest complexion. She frowned at Agatha and Penelope’s entrance, sniffing at their dusty boots and baggy trousers. “May I help you—ladies?”
Agatha noticed the slight pause, and bristled.
Penelope hurried to smooth things over. “We didn’t mean to trouble you, Lady Summerville: we only came to see about the hives.” She glanced around at the workingmen around her. “Are you planning some changes to the bee garden?”
“I am,” Lady Summerville confirmed. Her smile was vulpine. “I am getting rid of it.”
“What?” Penelope choked.
Lady Summerville waved delicately at the ancient medieval wall in which the boles were set. “I fancy a lawn and a prospect, so I am having this all knocked down and smoothed over.”
Penelope looked around wildly at the growth of centuries: the lavender, the hawthorn and hyssop, the knobby apple tree that had been bearing fruit since Queen Elizabeth’s day. And the bee boles, which had sheltered countless generations of loyal insects. “But—but you can’t,” she said weakly, breathless with the shock. Then, more firmly: “Those hives aren’t yours to dispose of. Not according to your aunt’s will.”
“Perhaps not,” Lady Summerville said sweetly. “She left you the hives specifically, if I recall.”
“She did.”
“But not their products, I think?”
Penelope looked at Agatha, who only shrugged, equally baffled.
“You’ve been harvesting honey and wax from them, have you not?” her ladyship went on, in that same sugary tone.
“I’ve been giving it to Mrs. Bedford,” Penelope retorted hotly.
“All of it?”
“I took one jar to Mr. Scriven, last fall, when his throat was poorly,” Penelope allowed. “But the hives—”
“From a legal standpoint, Mrs. Flood, that could be considered stealing.”
And Lady Summerville smiled, as though she’d said something pleasant.
Penelope’s blood was running painfully hot in her veins. “And what does the law call it when you destroy someone else’s property for your own selfish gain?”
“Improvement,” said Lady Summerville.
A seventh gardener appeared. With an ax. Which he placed carefully near the roots of the apple tree.
Penelope thought she might be sick. “You have no right to touch those hives,” she bit out.
“Perhaps I don’t,” Lady Summerville allowed. “The will was so very clear, after all. But how do you think those hives will fare, when there are no more flowers here for them to feast on? Surely it is kinder to put them to the sulfur now, rather than leave them to suffer or to wander the countryside in high summer with no place to call home. I understand it would be difficult at this time of year for them to make enough honey to last through the winter.”
Penelope thought of starving bees, and shivered. “Why are you doing this?” she asked plaintiv
ely.
The viscountess pressed a hand to her chest, as though Penelope’s question had pained her. “Because you have chosen the wrong side, Mrs. Flood. You traipse about the countryside without a husband’s oversight. You encourage the lower orders to follow the most vulgar customs, which ought to shame any God-fearing parishioner. I organized a very proper, ladylike procession in support of our Queen—and you exploited that day to gain attention for yourself, with help from your scribbling friend. You have defended indecency, encouraged the worst kind of irreverence for the law, and interfered with those who would keep Melliton respectable and Christian and pure. And now I must ask you to leave my grounds.” She spun the parasol handle ever so gently, making the shadows pass over her face like birds fleeing a storm. “Before I have you removed for trespassing.”
Mr. Oliver, poring over the Aeneid at the long table in his study, was quite apologetic when Penelope and Agatha stormed in to report this news. “My sister has rather objected to your friend’s defense of Mrs. Turner, I gather,” said the vicar.
Agatha’s mouth set in a regretful, anxious line. Penelope clenched her jaw and rolled her eyes: this wasn’t Agatha’s fault. This was Lady Summerville’s malice, unpredictable and merciless.
“I could perhaps offer you a sum equal to the value of the bees,” Mr. Oliver went on. “In recompense.”
Penelope slapped one hand down on the varnished wood. “I do not want money,” she all but hissed. “I want to care for those hives. As your aunt wished me to do.”
His brows peaked apologetically, like hands at prayer. “If my sister will not allow you on the estate, I don’t see how it’s possible,” he said. “It is a question of following the law.”
“To the point of absurdity?” Agatha scoffed.
Mr. Oliver sent her a scathing glance, then recovered his face. “If you and my sister cannot work out some compromise, Mrs. Flood, I’m afraid I will have to agree the hives must be destroyed. You know as well as I do that they will not survive once she has made her improvements to the garden.”
Penelope ground her teeth so hard she feared they’d crack. “They can if they are moved.”