The housemaid who was clearing plates at the sideboard never forgot the look on his face: it was the look of a man who has dropped something into deep water and is standing on the bank watching the rings go out.
He looked for her for a year.
A year later and a long way to the west, the heather on the hill above the village had not yet come out. It was late June, a week past midsummer. The whinberries were still green and hard under the leaves, and the bracken stood up to a woman's waist along the track. But the lime trees down in the valley were in flower, and the bees knew it. They went down off the hill in the early morning in a thin, steady stream, like smoke blown sideways, and they came back heavy in the afternoon. You could hear the hill from the gate: it sounded like a kettle a long way off, just before it boils.
The hives stood in a row against a stone wall that faced the south. There were straw skeps on flat stones, each under its own little straw hood to keep the rain off, and the wall behind them held the warmth of the day long after the sun had gone. At the end of the row, a low cottage crouched into the slope as if it was trying to get out of the wind. The roof was stone. The door was painted a blue that had gone almost white. From the doorstep on a clear day, you could see into Wales.
Isabel Renbury was on her knees at the fourth skep with her sleeves pushed back and an old net veil tied down over her hat. She had been on the hill a year, give or take a fortnight. She was three-and-twenty. Her hands were brown now, and her forearms, and there was a small white scar across the back of her thumb where the honey knife had slipped in the autumn.
When she had first come, she had known her mother's stories, and her mother's way with a swarm, and almost nothing of the daily work of a hive. Now she could lift a skep an inch off its stone and tell you by the weight alone how the colony was doing.
"Too heavy on that side," said a voice behind her. "Tip it back."
"It's the comb, Kezia. They've built it crooked."
"Then they've built it crooked for a reason. Leave them be."
Old Kezia sat on the bench by the cottage door with her hands folded in her lap because she could no longer do much else with them. They were knotted at every joint like the roots of a thorn tree, and in the mornings she could not close them around a cup. She had kept bees on this hill for sixty summers. She had taught Isabel's mother a very long time ago, when Isabel's mother was a barefoot girl from the village who came up the track with a jug of milk and would not go home again. Now she taught the daughter from the bench by shouting.
Isabel tipped the skep back. She did not argue. She had learned on this hill that the bees were very seldom wrong, and Kezia was never wrong about the bees. What she had brought with her from her old life was a quiet temper and a pair of steady hands; she had learned the rest here.