"I'll be back by Sunday," he said.
And he went down the track in the dusk at a run, and she heard the horse go out of the innyard at a gallop a quarter of an hour later. He was going east to the posting house in the market town, where he could have a fresh horse at every stage.
On Saturday, Isabel went down to the market as she did every week, with her jars in a basket on her arm and a slab of new wax wrapped in a cloth for the chandler. Kezia told her flatly that she was a fool, and that the whole town would have heard by now: Lady Livia's maid had been sitting in the taproom of the inn every evening since they came, talking to anybody who would buy her a glass.
Isabel said she knew that. She said she had sold honey in that market every Saturday for a year, and if she did not go this Saturday, then the story would be true, whether it was true or not.
Kezia pursed her lips at her from the bench, and then told her to take the good basket, the one with the lid, so the jars would not rattle.
It was not easy. She would never pretend afterwards that it had been. A woman she had sold honey to since the autumn walked past her stall without looking at it. Two girls by the pump put their heads together and laughed. The parson's wife bought a jar very kindly and a little too loudly, the way people are kind to somebody who has been ill.
But the chandler took her wax as he always did, and weighed it on his scale, and paid her the same as always. He said, not looking at her, that he had been buying wax for forty years, and he knew honest wax when he saw it—and the woman who made it. She stood at her stall in the square with her head up until the church clock struck noon, and she sold every jar in the basket, and then she walked home up the hill.
He did not come on Saturday. She had not really thought he would; it was a very long way to London and back.
On Sunday morning, the bell rang in the yew for church, the way it did every Sunday. She was standing among the hives when it began. The sound came up the hill on the still air, round and soft. She saw the bees at the doors of the skeps stop what they were doing just for a moment and lift their heads, as her mother had always said they did.
She was still watching them when she heard the horse. It was not his big brown horse, but a hired one from the last posting house. It came up the track slowly because it was very tired, and the man on its back was mud to the thighs and had not shaved, and he had quite plainly ridden through the night.