Something moved at the corner of his mouth: not quite a smile, though almost.
When the music stopped, he bowed and she curtsied, and he took her back to the wall where she belonged and left her there. He did not dance again that night.
And Isabel, standing behind Lady Livia's chair with the fan in her hand and her heart going like a bird against glass, looked down and saw that Lady Livia was smiling. She was smiling at the room very sweetly, the way she always smiled, but the smile did not move: it looked as though it had been nailed there.
And her throat, where the pearls had been, was bare.
He came back up the hill in the morning, while the dew was still gray on the grass, and she was already at the hives. She had meant to be. She had lain awake half the night deciding that she would be busy when he came, with her back to the gate and her hands full, so that he would have to speak first.
And so he did. He stopped at the side of the row where she had taught him to stand, and said good morning, and asked what she was doing.
Isabel found that all her careful plans had come to nothing, because she was glad to see him, and she could not hide it, and she did not know what to do about it.
"The old skep at the end is rotten," she said. "The straw's gone soft at the crown. If it goes in the next rain, the whole colony goes with it. So we're going to drive them."
"Drive them where?"
"Up into a new house." She showed him. She had already turned the old skep mouth-upward in a wooden tub with the bees still clinging inside it, a dark, shifting mass in the combs. Now she set an empty skep on top of it, rim to rim, and bound the join with a cloth so that there was no gap. "You drum on the sides of the old one with the flat of your hands. Not hard—steady, like a heartbeat. They don't like it. They go up to get away from it, into the dark at the top. And after a while, the queen goes with them. And then you have them all in a clean house, and nobody has had to kill anything."