The sheet was bare. The skep was gone back over the wall. Only a single bee lay on the flags, walking in slow circles, lost in the dark. She bent down and let it climb onto her finger.
She was standing there with it, trying to decide where a lost bee would most like to be put, when a voice behind her said, "Is it hurt?"
She turned. The Duke of Hensley stood at the end of the terrace in the shadow of the lime, where he must have been standing all along.
She had never spoken to him. She had seen him across rooms all that week: tall and dark and silent, with that early gray at his temples that made him look older than he was. She had seen ladies go up to him with their best smiles and come away again as though they had walked into a cold room. He did not dance. Everybody knew that. He gave the ball because his mother had always given it, and then he stood at the edge of it like a man waiting for a coach.
"Only tired, I think, Your Grace," she said. "It stayed out too late."
"What will you do with it?"
"Put it on the lime. It will find its way home in the morning when it's warm."
She reached up and set the bee on a leaf. He watched her do it. Then he asked where she had learned to take a swarm like that with her bare hands while the county screamed.
And perhaps because it was dark, and because she would never speak to him again, and because he asked as if he truly wished to know, she told him. She told him about her mother, who had grown up on a hill in the west where the heather came in August and turned the honey as dark as ale. She told him about the old woman who had kept the hives on that hill and who had taught her mother everything, and whom she had never met.
"My mother used to say you could find the place blindfold. She said the church in the valley has no tower—they never had the money to build one. The bell hangs in a yew tree by the porch on a bracket so old the bark has grown over it. She said when it rang on a still day, you could hear it on the hill and the bees would lift their heads."