"How does the estate suit you, Miss Reed?" the Duke said. "Have the bees welcomed their new lady yet? A sting or two by Sunday, I should think. A dozen by Lent. I have a wager laid on Easter Monday."
Mary said nothing. She looked at the ground between the horses' hooves and waited for him to be finished with her.
The Duke laughed at her silence as though the silence were part of the joke he had made. And he touched his heel to the bay and rode on.
She walked back to the cottage with the bread and the butter and the salt in her basket, and she did not weep, though the wind on the open lane found the water at the corner of her eye and drew it out.
By the time she reached the gate, the sky had lowered, and a fine gray rain had begun that was not quite snow. The cottage looked smaller in daylight than it had at dusk. The thatch bellied inward at the ridge. The whitewash was gone from the front wall in long weathered scars, and the stone beneath showed gray and lichened. A robin sat on the broken sill and watched her come through the gate and did not fly.
She set the basket inside the door and stood in the middle of the single room and made a list in her head the way her father had taught her, out of the largest need working down to the smallest: fire first, then the door, then water, then the hives.
She found in the lean-to a small stack of split ash under a lid of oilcloth, dry enough, and a bundle of faggots gray with age. She carried an armful in and knelt at the cold hearth and cleared the old ash with her hands, and laid a fire the way she had been shown when she was seven years old: kindling in a lattice, small sticks over it. The flint and steel from her father's tinderbox that she had carried through all of it in the pocket of her cloak. The first spark took on the third strike. She fed it in silence until it was a small living thing throwing warmth against her wrists.
The door she braced with a length of broken rafter from the lean-to, wedged from the flags to the top corner, holding the sag. She could do no better till she had proper tools. She stuffed the empty pane with a folded strip torn from her older dress and pressed it firm. She found a wooden pail behind the lean-to and broke the ice on the water butt at the corner of the cottage with the heel of her boot, and carried in half a pail of black cold water and set it by the fire to warm.
Then she went out to the bees.
The rain had thickened into slow, soft flakes. They settled on her shoulders and on the lid of the box hive as she knelt beside it. She did not lift the lid. It was not the season, and she knew better than to break the cluster's warmth for the sake of her own curiosity. She only laid her ear against the timber and listened.
The hum was there. Fainter than the night before, she thought, but perhaps that was only the cold pressing it inward. She moved from box to box and skep to skep, and laid her hand upon each and listened. Two of the box hives answered. One of the standing skeps answered, very faint, like breath heard through a door. The others were silent.
She counted the silent ones. She counted the living ones. She said the numbers aloud to the falling snow because there was no one else to say them to, and hearing her own voice steadied her.
That night she ate half the loaf with a smear of butter and drank warmed water and lay down on the rope bed with her cloak drawn over her and the fire banked low. The wind rose. The thatch creaked, and through the wall, faint and low and continuous as a heart she did not own, she could hear the bees.
The morning came gray and slow. The snow of the night before lay thin over the yard like a cloth flung down and forgotten. Mary rose stiff from the rope bed and stood a long while at the window before she moved, watching the light come up behind the orchard trees. The robin was on the sill again, or perhaps another like it.
She opened the door carefully, so as not to unseat the propped rafter, and stepped out into air that smelled of cold wood and wet thatch. She meant only to look at the skeps by daylight and count them once more. That was all.
But as she came around the side of the nearest box hive, kneeling to brush the fresh snow from its lid, her hand passed over something raised in the timber and stopped. She wiped the lid clean with her palm and looked. Set into the wood, flush and blackened by weather, was a small brass plate no larger than a shilling. She rubbed it with her thumb until the frost gave up its hold. A device showed through the tarnish: a bee above a pear, and beneath them a single letter, M, cut sharp and deliberate. Below the plate, burnt into the timber itself with a hot iron, was a number: 7.
Mary sat back on her heels. She looked along the crooked half-circle of hives. Snow lay on all of them, but she knew now what to look for. She went from box to box, brushing each lid, and where the timber had not rotted through, she found the plates. And where the plates were gone, she found the burnt numbers still faintly legible in the grain: 3, 9, 11, 4. Not in order, not in any pattern her eye could catch at first, but numbered, all of them, by a hand that had meant them to be counted and kept.
The skeps had no plates, being straw, but two of them stood on small square boards, and on the underside of one board, when she tipped it gently, she found the same device burnt in: bee, pear, M.