Mary stood at the gate and watched the cart until it was only a sound, and then only a memory of a sound, and then nothing at all. She turned to the cottage.
The door hung a little off its top hinge. The lintel had cracked in a slow diagonal that would want a beam under it before summer. The single front window had lost one pane and gained a rag stuffed in its place. Inside, when she pushed the door with her shoulder, she found a cold hearth, a broken chair, a rope-strung bed with no tick upon it, a rough deal table scarred with knife marks, and on a shelf above the fireplace, a row of small stoneware jars, empty, their wax seals long since gone soft and gray.
She set her basket on the table. She stood a long moment in the cold blue light from the doorway and let herself feel, only once, and only for the count of 10, how alone she was. Then she folded that feeling small and put it away where the rest of her grief lived, and she went out to look at the bees before the last of the light failed.
The hives sat under a thin crust of old snow. Bramble had grown up between them. One skep had been knocked to its side and lay half rotted on the earth. Another had a hole in its crown where a mouse or a bird had worked through. The air about them was still.
She bent to the nearest box hive and laid the flat of her hand upon its lid. And though she could not have said what she was listening for, she listened. Somewhere deep inside the timber, faint as the beating of a moth's wing against a lantern, she felt it. A hum. Small. Alive. She closed her eyes.
What Mary Reed had felt through the wood of that hive was only the first faint note of a music the whole estate had forgotten how to hear.
That night she slept in her cloak on the rope bed with her basket at her feet, and the wind moved through the sagging thatch as though it were combing wool. She rose before first light. The frost had stiffened the mud in the yard to iron. She wrapped her shawl over her cloak and set out for the village with three coppers knotted into her handkerchief.
Merefield village lay a mile back along the lane Hollis had brought her by. Smoke was rising from cottage chimneys, and the cobbles of the market square shone black with damp. A boy with a milk yoke stopped and stared. A woman drawing water at the pump straightened and did not look away when Mary passed. Word had gone before her the way word does in villages that eat their winters slow.
She bought a loaf and a twist of salt and a small pat of butter wrapped in cabbage leaf from a woman at the door of the bakehouse. The woman took Mary's coppers without a word, but her mouth moved when Mary turned to go. Two men in flat caps leaning at the smithy laughed low. One said something about the Duke's fool. The other said something about the bees having her out before Candlemas. Mary heard both. She did not turn her head.
At the far corner of the square, before the low stone wall of the churchyard, an old woman in gray stood with a bundle of firewood held against her hip. Her face was seamed and dark as walnut, and her eyes were the pale blue of ice water. She was watching Mary as though she had been standing there watching that particular door for a long while and waiting.
"You are the girl for the skeps," the old woman said.
"I am."
The old woman shifted the wood to her other hip. She looked once at Mary's mended boots, and once at her hands, which were red at the knuckles from the cold, and once at her face. "Feed them through the hunger gap," she said, "and they will feed the parish through his."
Mary did not know what she meant. She said thank you, because she had been raised to say thank you. And the old woman inclined her head half an inch and moved on with her wood.
Mary was still watching the gray shawl retreat down the lane when the hooves came behind her. Three or four horses ridden loose and easy, and the voices of gentlemen calling one to the other. She stepped aside against the wall.
The Duke of Merefield rode at the head of them on a tall bay. He wore a caped riding coat and a top hat cocked back off his brow. He saw Mary and drew rein, and turned in the saddle so that the men behind him would see her too.
"Look here, gentlemen," he said, loud enough for the pump and the smithy and the bakehouse door. "My tenant, my beekeeper. The parish's newest woman of property."
The men laughed as men laugh when the laughter is required of them.