by Olivia Waite
Whatever office Mr. Oliver had to recite, he’d finished it, and retired to a safe distance. Penelope waited, hoping against hope that perhaps she wouldn’t even need to—
But no, someone in the back called something foul, and someone else laughed. Mr. Oliver had his best vicarish face on, but there was a satisfied glow about him that Penelope resented.
A radish flew from the crowd and thunked against the wood by John’s right ankle. He flinched, clenched his jaw, and then shouted a retort.
More insults came at once—they would have, Penelope knew, even if John had held silent in the face of abuse. This wasn’t something he could stop: the point of this punishment was to make him a target, and everyone knew it. He was now a man people were officially permitted to do violence to.
Someone was bound to take advantage. There were people like that everywhere, even in Melliton.
Penelope had come today to stop those people from getting what they wanted.
She didn’t want to wait for things to get worse, either. She stepped forward, ducking a little as more vegetables flew out of the crowd. A puzzled murmur rose up—you weren’t supposed to get between the crowd and the person in the stocks. John’s eyes widened, and his mouth went slack with surprise, as she stepped up right beside him, and turned.
Her breath froze in her chest.
It was vastly different standing here, the focus of every eye, the center of this circle of angry folk and the hollowed-out remnants of a war. For a moment the steel in her spine softened, melting beneath the heat of the mob’s regard.
A flash of blue. Agatha Griffin, at the back wall, raising a hand.
Agatha Griffin, saluting. As one would to a general.
Just like that, Penelope could breathe again. Just like that, courage fountained up within her.
“Hello, everyone,” she called, her voice echoing off the red brick around her. She grinned, enjoying the wave of surprise that rippled over the crowd, their anger breaking like a wave against the cheer in her voice. “I’ll give you until the count of five.”
“Until what?” Mr. Downes called back.
“Until you wish you’d left when I told you to,” Penelope said. She pulled the muslin down, veiling her grin, and took the first clay jar out of her bag. “You all know I spend my time seeing to the beehives of the town,” she said. “The bees know me quite well at this point. They’re fond of me. They haven’t stung me in years. I wonder . . .”
She shook the jar, and the first few rows of people took an automatic step back when it began buzzing furiously.
Penelope said, as loud as she could: “I wonder if these bees know not to sting any of you.
“One.”
Mr. Downes was already making his way toward the entrance, his eyes wide and wild at the edges. Mr. Thomas had a hand over his mouth, and Mr. Kitt was laughing silently, eyes sparkling with vicious glee. Agatha, grinning, must have told them Penelope’s plan.
Penelope grinned back. “Two.”
Squire Theydon had pulled out one of Burn’s volumes and was hastily flipping through it, even as Mr. Oliver grasped his arm and glared at Penelope in mute rage.
She shook the jar again. “Three.”
One boy pelted out of the barracks, two other lads hot on his heels. The rest of the crowd shifted anxiously, muttering to one another. Knuckles went white on fists, and the soft mush of squashed vegetables squelched between tightened fingers.
Penelope raised the jar high. “Four.”
Mr. Oliver dropped Squire Theydon’s arm and started for her.
“Five!” Penelope looked the vicar dead in the eye, and hurled the jar to the ground at his feet.
It burst open in spectacular fashion, and a cloud of angry bees poured out.
The mob exploded into movement. People were running; people were screaming. Bees zipped every which way, bright gold and black against the earth and brick, all the more terrible for being so visible. The swirl of the crowd dragged Mr. Oliver away, until he had no choice but to turn and flee with the rest, legs pumping as he sprinted for safety, head clamped over his broad-brimmed hat. Penelope kept herself anchored with one hand on John’s shoulder, as the crowd scattered itself to the four winds.
A strangled cry from her husband; Penelope looked down to see him waving away a furious bee, which buzzed aggressively around his head. “It’s alright,” she said on a laugh, crouching down so only he could hear her. “They’re only drones.”
“Drones?” he echoed, head swiveling to stare up at her.
“They’re stingless. They won’t hurt you. They won’t hurt anybody.” She grinned. “But don’t spoil the fun just yet.”
For the next few hours, she stayed by her husband’s side. Every time someone approached, she would heft another jar in her hand and start counting.
Nobody lasted past three, after the first time.
It was almost anticlimactic, Penelope thought wildly. She’d made six bee bombs, and only gotten to use one. Later she could open the jars and let the unexploded bees find their way home again—but for now, best to keep all her ammunition intact in case she needed it.
But evening came on, and Mr. Oliver and the special constables returned to let John out. His punishment had technically been served under the law, after all.
Penelope considered a curtsey, but she was wearing trousers, and feeling more triumphant than polite. “Good evening, sir,” she called instead. “I take it you’ve come to release the prisoner?”
The vicar fingered the key to the stocks for a moment.
“I should warn you,” Penelope said, “if you dare proclaim my actions a breach of the peace, you’ll have to say the same of everyone who came here hoping to throw something at my husband.” She shrugged. “It might not hold up to a thorough examination, but any decent solicitor could make weeks of work out of it, I’m sure.”
Mr. Oliver’s face roiled with loathing, an expression so cold Penelope felt her triumph falter a little. There was open hatred there, such as she had never seen—and she knew, with a sinking in her soul, that this was the end of an old, old friendship.
Mr. Oliver tossed the key down to the ground. “You’ll pardon me for being chary of coming too close, Mrs. Flood,” he said, as Penelope bent to snatch the key from the dirt. The vicar’s pale brows slashed down in his rage-reddened face. “You should also know, today’s events will not be lightly forgotten.”
Penelope straightened, key in hand. “I should hope not, Mr. Oliver. We went to so much trouble, you see. People ought to remember.”
Penelope unlocked the stocks, and tossed the key back to the magistrates. Mr. Oliver and Squire Theydon turned and left without a word, as Penelope knelt to rub some feeling back into John’s aching ankles. Harry, Agatha, Mr. Thomas, and Mr. Kitt came striding up as soon as the justices were gone.
Penelope stepped back to let Harry take over. The captain bent down and clasped John’s shoulder, the two men’s foreheads pressing close in comfort and relief.
Mr. Kitt made a helpless noise in the back of his throat. Then another, hands clasped over his mouth. Sudden tears poured down his face, and he flung himself toward Mr. Thomas, whose arms embraced him without hesitation and held fast. The taller man murmured endearments, eyes screwed shut, face all but glowing with relief.
Penelope turned to Agatha, who sketched another salute. “My general,” she said, a world of warmth in her voice.
They had precisely one night to bask in their victory. The next morning found handbills up all around Melliton—hand-lettered, not printed—declaring every beehive in Melliton subject to seizure by the magistrates. From humble skeps to Penelope’s leaf hive to Mr. Koskinen’s complicated octagonal glass structure, every home of every bee in the village was to be counted up and taken away as weapons. Anyone who wished to retrieve their hive was required to make application to the Mendacity Society, so that, as the handbill said, “such disorderly and dangerous creatures may be placed in the stewardship of those who
se moral character has been sufficiently vouched for by the authorities.”
Penelope felt these words like a blow, when she read them. Agatha’s face went grim and she clasped Penelope’s hands tight, but she had appointments in London, and so soon Penelope was facing down those dread sheets all alone. The handbills read like an escalation in a war; they made either painful surrender or heightened rebellion her only options.
That it was personally directed against her, she could not doubt. Mr. Oliver knew her well enough to know how best to wound. Either you must give in, the declaration meant, or you must push back even harder, and be crushed beneath the wheel of the law.
Penelope refused—refused—to have her choices so constrained, to so great a disadvantage.
She had tried flouting the law, and though it had been a success, she knew it did not suit her as a constant strategy. John was still looking a little haunted, which made Harry look rather feral in protective response. They would both be a while recovering.
Penelope herself had felt queasy and frightened, once the day’s boldness had worn off. She wasn’t sure she was meant to be a revolutionary. Open rebellion was really more in Mrs. Koskinen’s line—and Mr. Kitt had come by and said Mrs. Koskinen had been speaking with the cottagers: offering to camouflage hives, tucking them deeper into the secret parts of the forests where the magistrates wouldn’t find them, that sort of thing. Melliton had a fair bit of smuggling history, after all: people knew plenty of tricks to evade the eyes of the law. That was good, and Penelope would lend as much help as she was able.
What Penelope wanted for herself was simply this: to make such risks unnecessary, if she possibly could.
There had to be some other way, something between doing nothing and brandishing pitchforks in the streets. Something that put more pressure on the law than on the people fighting back against the law. She could hire a solicitor, as she’d threatened—but that would take time, and they hadn’t enough of that.
Penelope wasn’t good with violence. She was good with words. And knowledge. And letters.
And she was willing to be a little underhanded, for a good cause.
It was really quite simple, when she thought about it. Mr. Oliver knew her weaknesses—but in his irritation, he had forgotten that she also knew his.
She gathered a few things, and made her way to the vicarage.
Mr. Oliver was in his little Eden at the back, among his own hives. Plain skeps, no glass jars, because he thought the old ways were best. Penelope had always found it rather morbid to visit his hives, since she knew he’d be slaughtering them all at summer’s end. It was one thing to know bees’ lives were short, and quite another to end them all at once for convenience’s sake.
She coughed a hello. The vicar waved to ask for her patience. He had one of the skeps tilted up, and was peering within it for something. He found it, eventually: a young queen bee, new and energetic. She squirmed in his fingertips as he gripped her at the waist, then raised a small pair of scissors toward her fragile, fluttering wings.
Penelope turned away before she saw the snip.
Some beekeepers thought clipping the wings of a queen kept a hive from swarming. The most words Penelope had ever heard Mr. Koskinen say at once had been a fifteen-minute impassioned explanation of why this was both absolutely untrue, and detrimental to both the queen and the hive.
Mr. Oliver replaced the poor clipped queen in her skep, and set the hive back onto its stand. “I am always disappointed that they turned out to be queens,” he said. “Not kings, as Virgil calls them.” His smile was sad, and fond, and for a moment Penelope felt as if she’d imagined their years of friendship.
His smile stayed sad. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Flood?”
Penelope put on her most polite tone. “I have come to speak to you about the beehives, Mr. Oliver.”
He pulled off his gloves one at a time. “Then let us go inside, where we may be more official.”
Penelope had once found the vicar’s study a comforting place: it smelled of old books, and leather, and candles burnt late into the night. But now she only noticed how dark it was with the curtains shut to keep out the sun, and the books all crammed together on the shelves like captured creatures in a zoo.
Mr. Oliver sat in his favorite armchair, folding his hands on the shining surface of the table; Penelope took a seat in a spindly chair with a wobbly leg, and braced her feet against the moth-eaten rug on the floor.
“I imagine you have some questions,” the vicar began cordially.
“Just the one,” Penelope said, just as carefully cordial. “A great many Melliton folk depend on their hives as a supplement to their income, you know: Mr. Scriven, Mr. and Mrs. Koskinen, Mr. Cutler, many of the smaller farms and cottagers.”
“I am well aware, Mrs. Flood. I am their vicar. Do you have a point?”
“Just this: are you truly certain you must take their hives away?”
He nodded piously. “They will get their hives back, if they deserve them.”
“Some may lose a great deal of their work, in the time that may take.”
The vicar steepled his fingers together and gave her a stern look. As if he were a teacher and she a recalcitrant student. As if they hadn’t been friends for twenty years, trading thoughts on centuries-old poems. As if that time counted for nothing now. His voice was sweet and syrupy as cordial: “If those cottagers had been more prudent, they would not be in a position to suffer from the loss of one or two hives.”
“Prudent enough to simply have more money, you mean?” Penelope muttered, and shook her head. “How can it be a fiendish crime to steal six hives from Abington Hall, but it’s justice when you steal bees from half the people in the village?”
“It is justice when the law does it, Mrs. Flood.” Mr. Oliver’s cordiality slipped, and he scowled openly. “You said you had only a single question—that was two, by my count.”
“Indulge me one more time,” she said softly. “Is there nothing I can say, to make you change your mind on this subject?”
He shook his head, pale hair floating on the air.
Penelope sighed. “Then I’m sorry, Mr. Oliver.” She pulled out a sheet of paper, scribbled over with a spidery hand. “This is a letter from Mr. Oglevey, a London antiquary who specializes in art with certain . . . carnal tendencies. He was quite happy to tell me all about the deals he’s brokered on behalf of Lady Summerville, for several high-quality works by the late and much-admired Isabella Abington. And here,” she said, laying down another sheet, “is a list of everything I could find that Lady Summerville has spent money on since the founding of her virtuous moral society. Handbill printing, special constables’ wages, informants’ bounties—even the rectory glass, after your windows were broken during the Queenite agitation. I’ve spoken to every artisan and tradesman on the list, to confirm that the sums are accurate and verifiable.”
Mr. Oliver’s eyes were coals now, hot and luminous in the dimness. “What are you getting at, Mrs. Flood?”
Penelope leaned forward. “Simply this: what would the good people of Melliton think, if they knew the Mendacity Society was almost entirely funded by the selling of obscene art?”
The silence was exquisite. Penelope let it flow around her, thick and sweet as honey.
“There is nothing illegal about what my sister has done,” the vicar said at last.
“Of course there isn’t,” Penelope said breezily. “Those statures were her inheritance, to dispose of as she wished. But I remember when the will was read: She wasn’t precisely eager to show them off to her friends, was she? Did she even tell anyone they now belonged to her?” She sat back, clasping her hands tightly in her lap to keep them from shaking. “It’s not about what’s legal or not legal, Mr. Oliver. It’s about what’s right. The Mendacity Society does exist to fight obscenity, does it not?” She tilted her head. “And if memory serves, yours is an auxiliary branch—imagine what the national organization would say if they were to fin
d out . . .”
The vicar’s teeth ground together so hard Penelope could hear them from where she sat. “Blackmail is a crime, Mrs. Flood,” he sputtered.
“Then bring me up on charges,” she replied cheerfully. “But you’ll need a second justice for that—perhaps Mr. Theydon, with his ‘Hundred Godly Lessons,’ could join you on the bench.”
Mr. Oliver blanched a very springlike greenish.
Penelope leaned forward again. “Let the villagers keep their bees, Mr. Oliver. Or else you’ll be at the center of the kind of scandal that gets talked about everywhere in England. Imagine your name in the hands of the caricature artists, or on the lips of every gossipy housewife from here to Scotland. I can hear the ballad lyrics now: ‘Mr. All-Of-Her, the Vicar of Vice.’”
Mr. Oliver shook his head, as though he could shake off her threats so easily. Penelope waited, while he attempted to stare her down. But she knew his weakness, and it was this: he must be thought to be virtuous. It was as crucial a need for him as breath.
He made the only decision he could, and slumped heavily in his comfortable chair. “Very well, you harpy,” he said. “You may have your bees.”
“You’ve made a very prudent decision,” Penelope said, and gathered up her letters. “In fact, since so many hives in Melliton are to be left in their proper place, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Abington hives found their way back to Melliton.”
“And just how will that miracle be accomplished?” Mr. Oliver asked bitterly.
Penelope only smiled. “The Lord works in mysterious ways, Mr. Oliver.”
It was all she could do not to skip on the walk home. This was the kind of feeling she’d been chasing, that she hadn’t gotten from the bee bombs. Not a single act of violence, sharp and sudden as lightning, but a shift in the way she moved through the world.
Penelope had gone up against Mr. Oliver, and she had won. The vicar would not forget this. She had taken back a little bit of ground for her own, and she intended to keep it.
It made her want to see what else she could have, if she were only bold enough to ask for it.