She knelt in the snow a long while after that. The Duke had spoken of the hives as if they were nothing, a nuisance left by a dead man, a jest to be handed off with a laugh. But someone, once, had troubled to set the estate's own mark upon them, and to number them like the rows of a proper ledger. That was not the work of a cottager keeping a few bees for his own honey. That was the work of an estate that had reckoned these bees among its property, worth the price of brass and the trouble of a branding iron.
Mary did not act upon the thought. She set the tipped board back where it had been, and smoothed the snow over it as she had found it. She stood, brushed her skirt, and walked back toward the cottage with her hands pressed under her arms for warmth. But at the threshold she paused and looked once more along the line of hives, and the numbers she had read moved in her head like a small procession she could not yet name.
Inside, she banked the fire higher and set the pail nearer the flame, and cut a slice from the loaf for her breakfast. She said nothing aloud, but when she took her father's smoke bellows from the basket and laid it upon the table, she laid it with more care than before, as though it had grown heavier in the night.
Days passed, and Mary worked. There was no other way through the winter, and no other way to keep her mind quiet enough to hold what she had seen.
She began with the door, because a door that would not shut kept the fire from doing its work. She took the propped rafter down and studied the hinge. And with a stone from the yard, she beat the twisted iron flat enough to bite again into its socket. She hung the door on its lower hinge alone for a day while she worked at the upper. And when at last the upper caught and held, she leaned her forehead against the frame, and drew a long breath, and the door swung true.
She turned to the thatch next, though she could not mend it properly without a thatcher's needle and fresh straw. She climbed to the loft with a rushlight and found the ridge sagging where a rafter had cracked. She could not replace the rafter alone, but she could brace it, and she did, wedging a length of ash from the lean-to against it from beneath, and tying it fast with twine soaked in warm water and left to shrink dry.
On the third morning of this work, a cat came. It was a lean tabby with one torn ear, and it walked in at the open door as if it had walked in every day of its life, and had merely been detained elsewhere. It sat by the hearth, licked its shoulder twice, and looked at Mary with the level attention of a creditor. Mary set down a saucer of warmed water and a crust rubbed with butter. The cat ate and stayed. She did not name it. She only made room for it on the hearthstone. And thereafter, when she moved about the cottage, or crossed the yard toward the hives, the cat came a few paces behind, and sat where it could watch her.
She cleared the bramble from around the skeps a little at a time, working with a billhook she had found rusted to the wall of the lean-to, cleaning it first with sand and hot water and her father's oiled rag. Each afternoon, she cut a handsbreadth further into the tangle. Each afternoon, she uncovered a little more of what had been there before neglect.
Under the bramble at the foot of the third box hive, she found a flat stone laid deliberately. And when she turned it up, there was a shallow socket cut into its underside, as though something had once been pegged into it. Under the bramble at the foot of the sixth, she found another such stone. She set them back as she had found them and made no mark of the place. But she counted the stones as she counted the numbered lids. And the count began to sit in her mind beside the numbers, like two halves of a sum she had not yet been given leave to add.
In the evenings, she sat by the fire with the cat pressed warm against her ankle and the smoke bellows on the table before her. And she took the brass-cornered book from the basket at last and laid it beside the bellows. She did not open it. She only laid her hand upon its cover as she had laid her hand upon the lids of the hives and listened. Something in the cottage and something in the yard was speaking to her in language her hands were beginning to learn before her mind had caught up. She let it speak. She did not yet ask what it was trying to say.
A week before Candlemas, the frost broke for a single afternoon, and the thaw drew a dark line of damp along the base of the cottage wall. Mary took the chance to lift the flags nearest the hearth, meaning only to set the loose one back true before the next freeze cracked it worse.
The flag came up more easily than she expected. Beneath it lay packed earth. And beneath the earth, when her fingers found the edge of something that was not stone, a flat wooden box no longer than her forearm, bound in iron at the corners and shut with a small hasp gone red with rust.
She sat back on her heels. The cat at the hearth opened its eyes and closed them again. Mary did not move for some time. Then she fetched the pail of warm water and a rag and cleaned the box where it lay, brushing the earth from the lid a little at a time, the way one uncovers a bird's nest one does not wish to disturb. The iron gave beneath her thumb after three tries, the hasp lifting with a small dry sound.
Inside, wrapped in oilcloth gone yellow at the folds, was a ledger no thicker than a prayer book, and beneath the ledger, a folded sheaf of papers tied with faded green ribbon. And beneath the papers, a second smaller book bound in dark leather, its cover marked with the same device she had rubbed clean of frost upon the brass plate of hive number seven: a bee above a pear, and beneath them, the letter M.
Mary carried all three to the table. The fire behind her cracked once. She untied the ribbon first, because the ribbon was the thing her hands most wanted to touch. And the papers inside were letters, and the letters were in a hand she did not know, addressed in the year of her birth to a man called Merefield, who was not the present duke, but his father.
She read the first slowly. It spoke of the setting of pear and apple in the west orchard, of the number of skeps required to serve the blossom, of a yearly sum paid to the beekeeper for the keeping of the same, and of the understanding, written plain, that without the hives, the orchard would set no fruit worth carting to market.
She set the letter down. She opened the ledger next: column after column in a clerk's careful hand. Year, hive number, weight of honey rendered, weight of wax, and against each row a note of the orchard yield in bushels, apple and pear together, running back 30 years. The columns matched. In the years the hives were strong, the orchard was heavy. In the one year a sickness had taken half the colonies, the yield fell by more than half. And the margin beside it, in another hand, read only: As feared.
The smaller leather book she opened last, because her hands were shaking now, and she did not trust them. It was a beekeeper's own journal, kept by the man who had died in the autumn. His writing was small and slanting and patient. He had numbered his hives as the estate had numbered them long before him. He had drawn on the last full page a plan of the orchard and a plan of the yard, and between them, in small crosses, the pegged stones where the skeps had once stood in summer to catch the sun for the western trees. Two of those crosses, when she laid her finger on them, were the two stones she had found beneath the bramble.