The Honey and the Sting

by E C Fremantle

  He was unsure how to respond to her distress, had never seen her so unravelled.

  ‘You’ll have to kill people.’ Her expression was horrified.

  ‘Not people – the enemy. It’s what I’ve trained all these years to do.’

  ‘What if … what if …’

  He had known what she was unable to say. She was inconsolable, twisting her necklace until the fine chain broke. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’

  He wonders, thinking about that last encounter with Bridget, if she hadn’t had some instinct, some sense of foreboding, that they would never see each other again, for that had been the case. The irony assails him now that it was she who had died, not him.

  ‘Lieutenant.’ A tugging on his sleeve brings him back from the past. ‘Is this the right tincture?’ Hope is waving the phial in front of his face.

  Hester takes it from her and drips it into Melis’s mouth. Felton feels its desperate draw, resisting the urge to snatch it from her and drain it himself. They wait in silence for it to take effect, while Felton agitates over how he will be able to instigate a second accident without rousing suspicion.

  Hester will not leave her sister’s side and the others hover silently nearby, like wraiths. As well as the opium tincture, Melis has been given some kind of strong sleeping draught, procured by Hester, so she lies like a corpse on the big table in the hall, which has been turned into a makeshift bed. A little too much of that draught would surely put her out of her misery. The bottle sits nearby but Felton can’t get a moment alone with the injured woman to finish her off. It occurs to him that it would be the humane thing to do but he is thinking primarily of his own convenience.

  They all hover, with nothing to do but wait.

  Rafe appears to have cast off his initial hysteria and, restlessly, throws a ball for the puppy. Felton is pleased to note this steel in the child, though he might not be so quick to recover when his mother meets her end.

  The dog’s claws clash and skid loudly against the flagstones, returning the ball, yapping excitedly for it to be thrown again. Hester, exhausted with grief, suggests Felton find some means of occupying the boy.

  ‘Can we go and set rabbit traps?’ Rafe’s timing is impeccable. His mother’s defences are down. He knows exactly how to get what he wants – just like his father.

  ‘This isn’t the time, Rafe.’ Felton doesn’t want to leave his watch, not now. What if she comes round? If she was able to see her own fate she may also be able, by some devilish skill, to expose him.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Hester dithers. ‘It may be a good distraction.’ Hope makes a small disapproving cough. Felton has noticed before how the youngest sister is critical of the way the eldest yields to her son’s wishes. He makes a mental note of it as something he may be able to exploit. ‘As long as you are armed, Lieutenant, I can’t see it doing any harm. The diversion will do him good.’

  Both Hester and Rafe are looking at him expectantly.

  ‘Or perhaps I could teach you to play dice?’ The child’s face sinks.

  ‘Take him out, Lieutenant.’ Hester smiles wanly. ‘I’d appreciate it.’

  He is left with no choice.

  Rafe, judging by the spring in his step, is glad to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the house and the grim wait for his aunt’s death. They meander a little way off the main track onto a narrow path banked by nettles that reach across in places. Felton attempts to break off a slim stick of willow to beat them back but it is green and stubbornly resists his twisting and bending. ‘Shame we don’t have a penknife,’ he says casually.

  ‘I have one.’ Rafe produces a small folding blade from his pocket, which cuts easily through the young wood.

  ‘That’s a useful tool. Where did you get it?’

  ‘Mother gave it to me,’ he replies, without missing a beat.

  So, the boy is a liar as well as a thief. He cuts off another stem, hands it to the child, and they walk, thwacking back the nettles on either side. Rafe is stung and they find a dock leaf to rub on the rash.

  ‘If you grab a nettle’s leaves firmly, they won’t sting you,’ Felton explains, surprised the boy doesn’t know this already. ‘Like pinching out a candle.’ He demonstrates by gripping a leaf hard, then opening his hand to show the boy he is not hurt. Rafe, without hesitation, grabs a fistful, laughing, seeming delighted with this new piece of knowledge.

  ‘What’s that on your hand?’ Rafe points to the ugly mark on Felton’s palm.

  ‘Just an old scar.’ He doesn’t want to be reminded of the past, his blood pact with George, but inevitably he is.

  It occurs to him that the grabbing of nettles makes a good metaphor for life. Perhaps he has not taken hold of life firmly enough. He once had aspirations. He had allowed his spirit to be crushed by that one event, the fulcrum on which his fate swung.

  He thinks of George’s climb to greatness. Had Felton not killed that boy and allowed his guilt to divest him of spirit, who knows what he might have become, what doors might have opened. He is nobody now, just a hunk of muscle with a useless arm, hired as an assassin, a failure to boot. To think he’d envisaged himself in charge of an army. He still holds stubbornly to this hope. That is why he is here, he reminds himself.

  As they walk on, something catches Felton’s eye. His hackles rise. He is as sure as he can be that it was a shadow in the shape of a man flitting between the trees, some fifty yards away. He puts his hand in front of the boy, indicating for him to stop, and presses his index finger over his lips, his hand going to the pistol in his belt. All he can hear is the cry of a buzzard. It has taken to the sky and is circling above.

  ‘What is it?’ whispers the boy.

  There is no sign of movement now, and he wonders if he imagined the shadowy figure. ‘Nothing. Must have been a deer.’ He makes himself sound calm but his nerves are still clashing.

  They reach a clearing where he can see several rabbit holes among the roots of an oak and points them out, crouching to show the boy how to recognize a rabbit run, where the grass has been flattened making a hollow passage through the vegetation. He demonstrates how to suspend the loop of twine across the hollow. They set several snares, the boy following his instructions, taking the task with absolute seriousness.

  ‘So, the rabbit runs in, and the slipknot tightens round its neck?’ Rafe has his hand pressed to his throat.

  ‘That’s right.’ Felton stoops to place one last trap.

  He appears thoughtful. ‘Like a hanging.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a hanging, Lieutenant?’

  Felton can’t prevent himself from snapping that of course he’s been to a hanging. ‘Hasn’t everyone?’ He has been reminded of the man who was hanged in his place for the death of that boy in France and guilt grabs his innards, as if it was yesterday.

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘You’re still too young.’ He wishes the child would stop his comments and questions. ‘We’ll come back tomorrow morning and see if we’ve caught anything.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Rafe’s disappointment is clear, his shoulders drooping. Felton remembers being a boy and how a single hour seemed an eternity, let alone a whole day and night.

  ‘It’s the way with traps. Takes time. We can come out early, before anyone else is up.’ He tries to make it seem exciting.

  An idea is forming. His mind is alive, whirring, as he pieces his plan together.

  ‘I wonder if your mother would like to come with us. Take her mind off things.’ He realizes that the chance of getting Hester to leave the house is very small, while she is in the throes of grief for her dying sister. His mind plots. Hester can’t refuse her son anything – it is her Achilles’ heel. It must be the boy who asks her to come into the forest. How will he distract the child once he has lured her out? He will think of something.

  Hester

  The hall is as quiet as a morgue, Melis’s breath coming in laboured rasps through the stale air. Sh
e is pallid, the colour of despair. But the fine structure of her face is intact, her beauty persisting where her body is a map of bruises. The sleeping draught has put her into an uneasy slumber, her eyelids twitching, scribbled with veins, as if a child has taken a pencil to them.

  I sit beside her in limbo, waiting and praying, my heart squeezed out, like an old dishcloth. As a physician’s daughter, my immediate thought was to send for a surgeon but I knew the moment I saw her on the steps – no, before: I knew the moment she fell – that there was no hope. She had seen this. A day’s ride to Ludlow and back would be pointless. Now all I can pray for Melis is swift oblivion. I try to picture her soul, imagining it as a filament of vapour, barely visible, reaching upward from her breast.

  It chills me to consider how close I came to facing my own end. Hope saved my life. She is sitting nearby in a state of quiet agitation, shredding the edge of her cuff, scattering white lint over her dark dress. I can’t hold Hope together too, not now.

  Rafe and the lieutenant return. I don’t want my son to have to witness the heavy approach of death, so I ask Hope to take him upstairs. The lieutenant refuses to sit, standing beside the door like a sentry.

  Time wavers. Margie tries to press food on me and some kind of pungent infusion of herbs. ‘For shock,’ she says. I can’t eat but sip the drink, which is as bitter as a bad almond.

  Melis’s lips take on a blue tinge, her lids are still and I fear she has died while I was distracted with the bitter drink. I lean in to listen for a sign of breath when her eyes pop open, she grabs my arm and is somehow levering herself to sit up, as if risen from the dead.

  Her voice is straight and clear, eyes chips of glass, sliding from side to side. ‘I can see George.’ Her mouth crumples in disgust, as if she can’t stomach the taste of his name.

  ‘You’re imagining things, my love.’ All I want is for her to be in peace, not racked any more by hallucinations.

  ‘I see his death. An assassin’s blade, his blood spilling. He’s falling to the ground.’ She stops to catch her breath, and the ghost of a smile plays over her lips. ‘There will be rejoicing in the streets. I know the day. It flies to us. He will not see September. The twenty-third day of the eighth month will be his last.’

  Understanding alights, fragile as a butterfly. It is my sister’s fantasy. She wants to leave this world believing her family will be safe. If only it could be so.

  The lieutenant, behind me, makes a small incomprehensible sound. He is close, too close for this private moment. I ask him to leave us alone. He seems reluctant to go. I say it again, a command this time, surprised by the force of my tone, and he breaks away towards the door.

  Melis, her grip inhumanly strong, pulls me close. She whispers, ‘You know I’ve seen death before. You remember, don’t you?’ Her breath stutters.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I pretend not to know she is referring to her vision of Father’s accident and am forced to consider that, as she also correctly predicted her own, she might truly have seen George’s death. ‘Lie down or you will suffer more.’ She doesn’t appear to be in pain, though, seems to have reached a place beyond suffering.

  She still grips my arm. I can smell death on her now. ‘This time you … you must make it happen. You think there is a reward for goodness, Hessie. There is not. God sees far beyond.’ It is a relief to hear her speak of God: I had feared her lost to Him. She has fixed me with a stare. ‘The bees know it – honey and sting. Sweetness and sharpness. That is what you need.’

  ‘Yes, sweetheart,’ I say to soothe her, even though my mind is completely muddled and I don’t understand what she is trying to tell me with her riddle, what it is I must make happen.

  ‘It will come clear.’ Her body stiffens and she spits out a single, final word, ‘Justice!’ before collapsing back with a quiet hiss of breath, the hair’s-breadth moment between life and death breached.

  ‘Justice?’ I repeat, at a murmur, desperate now to bring her back so she can explain, so she is not gone. But she is gone.

  I cannot cry. I fear if I do we will all drown in a life’s worth of unspent tears. I feel nothing at all. My existence makes no sense. She, Rafe and Hope were the three legs of my stool. Now the stool has only two legs and I do not know how it will stand.

  We all gather in the chapel, where coloured light from the windows falls over her in a carnival of stripes.

  The lieutenant suggests we say a prayer and I kneel, docile, glad someone else is making a decision. I recite the only prayer that hasn’t flown my mind. ‘Guide us, Lord, in all the varieties of the world …’ The words seem heavy and God distant. When the prayer is said we are silent for a long moment, in which I stare at Melis’s glass eyes, unable to accept she has gone.

  The lieutenant reaches out a hand to close them. Hope is weeping, floods of heaving tears. I am not crying. Why can she cry when I cannot muster even the smallest sob? I am dried out, like an old riverbed, without even the memory of moisture.

  ‘I understand,’ the lieutenant says, putting his hand on Hope’s shoulder and offering her a crumpled handkerchief. Turning to me, he adds, ‘I, too, lost a beloved sister.’

  I want to tell him he couldn’t possibly understand the contradictory muddle of my emotions, for I don’t understand it myself.

  I can hear Margie and Gifford discussing in whispers that she will have to be buried quickly because of the heat.

  ‘If you have anything to say, say it to me directly.’ I don’t hide my anger. Melis’s words are circulating in my head: Honey and sting. Sweetness and sharpness … I have scrawled them on a scrap of paper. Perhaps one day they will make sense. ‘I won’t have her buried in unsanctified ground, like a sinner. We’ll take her to Ludlow. Prepare the cart, Gifford.’

  ‘With respect, madam,’ Gifford clasps his cap in his hands, ‘I think it unwise for you to leave the safety of the lodge.’

  I turn on him, my nerves too frayed to keep my self-control. ‘It is not for you to decide.’

  He stands his ground. ‘I beg you. It is too late in the day to think of travelling so far.’

  I know he makes sense and regret my snappish response to this man who has been nothing but kind. ‘Very well, then, Gifford. First thing in the morning.’ As I say it, I realize there is no question of my leaving Rafe alone here, even under the guard of Felton, and it would be equally unwise to take him to Ludlow with us. There seems no solution and I’m too crushed to think about it now.

  They all tactfully file out, leaving me and Hope. I am glad that Melis will not be buried in the Iffley churchyard, where the entire village would cast furtive glances at each other, pretending to pray but whispering behind their hands. In Ludlow it will be anonymous. It will simply be the sad burial of a beautiful stranger, whose time has been cut tragically short.

  Lark returns, sliding quietly into the room, drawing Hope aside to comfort her. I can hear their hushed voices. I am glad, for I haven’t anything left in me to offer Hope by way of consolation. Eventually they leave and I sit, suspended in time, with my thoughts.

  When I finally leave the chapel, I am surprised to find it is dusk and Rafe is already tucked up in bed, fist furled around his toy monkey, the puppy at his feet. I haven’t the heart to push the animal off the bed.

  I watch my son sleeping, the occasional twitch of his lips or sigh of breath proof he is alive. I feel love expanding in my chest, painful as heartburn, and sense, more intensely than ever, the looming threat from George, distant though it may seem in this remote place.

  Hope

  Hope is shattered by the day’s horrific events, numbed by sorrow. She left the others in the kitchen, thinking she wanted to be alone, but now that she is, she can’t stop thinking about her sister falling, the sound of her body breaking against the ground.

  She can’t get Melis’s words out of her head: There’s something bad in this house. Hope has heard talk of houses that turn on their occupants and always believed it was nothing but stories, but now sh
e knows differently.

  She feels panic crashing through her. If she keeps her mind on the lieutenant, there will be no space left for the other thoughts, no space for the ‘something bad’ that killed her sister.

  But it is hard to keep thinking of him. Fear renders threatening everything that is ordinary – the puppy scratching at the door becomes a clawed devil, each creaking beam the cry of a trapped soul, the bowed ceiling in the bedroom the pregnant belly that will birth a demon, and the strange hum that rings through her ears is the song of a siren that will force her to fling herself from the window.

  Stop.

  She forces her thoughts back to him and how kind he has been to her.

  The image of Melis’s body laid out in the chapel returns.

  Don’t think about that, she tells herself. Think about him. Think about him. Think about our secret.

  She finds herself outside the door of his room, impelled to enter, to look at the place where he sleeps, see the dip in his pillow. She picks up the laundry basket to give herself an excuse should she need it.

  It is dark inside, the shutter pulled to. She swings it open, allowing the last of the gloaming to cast its thin light over the small space. He is scrupulously tidy, as you’d expect from a soldier. His few things are neatly ordered, one or two books on the shelf, bed linen folded. The phial of tincture is back exactly where she had rushed to grab it from a few hours ago.

  She lies on the bed, her face sinking into the sheets, breathing in his smell, listening for sounds on the stairs.

  His locked box sits beside the bed. When she had seen it earlier, she knew in her bones it must contain some clue to him, to who he is, to whom he loves. She must look inside, cannot help herself. His bag hangs from the back of the door. She rummages through it, searching for the key, each interior pocket, right into the corners, thinking she has found it. But it is only a silver hat badge, set with a garnet. She searches the shelf, behind the books, beneath the mattress, in the pockets of his coat. Sewn inside the collar is his name: Bloor. She wonders what his given name is.