"And if you stop drumming?"
"Then they stop climbing, and you've wasted your morning." She looked at him. "It takes a long time. Your arms will ache."
He took off his coat. He knelt down on the other side of the tub without being asked, and put his hands flat against the old straw, and looked at her.
She showed him the beat with her own hands on her side of the skep. He found it at once. He was a man, it seemed, who found most things at once, if you only showed him properly.
And then they were kneeling face-to-face across the tub in the early sun, the two of them, drumming softly on the straw with the flats of their hands. Inside, under the drumming, the whole colony began to hum and stir and rise. It was very strange. She would remember it all her life: it was like talking without words.
They did not speak for a long while. There was only the soft thud of their hands and the deep, rising roar of the bees, with a lark going up somewhere over the heather. And there was his face across from her, intent and quiet with the early light on it. She could see the lines that the year had put there. She could see a small muscle jump in his jaw when a bee walked across his knuckles, and see him keep drumming anyway.
"You didn't give the ball this year," she said at last. She did not know how she knew it; she simply knew.
"No." He did not break the beat. "The first year since my mother died that it wasn't given. The county was very put out. They sent me letters."
"Why didn't you?"
"I was in Somerset." He glanced up at her. "There's a church in Somerset with no tower. It has a bell in a cage in the yard. Not a yew. I stood in the yard for most of an afternoon before I was sure."