The yellow carriage went away east on Monday morning, very early, before the bees were out. Kezia said, when she heard it all, that Isabel was softer than butter in August, and she'd not have given the woman the steam off her tea. Then she went to the shelf and took down the last jar of the heather honey, the one she had been keeping. She made Isabel eat a spoonful of it straight out of the jar, the way she had done when Isabel first came up that track with her shoes worn through, and she would not say why.
That evening, they sat on the bench by the wall again, with the two letters folded in Isabel's apron pocket and the valley going blue below them. The light by the ford was lit. The Duke sat turning a stalk of heather in his fingers, and she let him turn it, because she had learned that the things he said after a silence were always worth the waiting.
The bees were coming home over the heather in the last of the sun, low and slow and heavy, and she was watching them when he spoke.
"I have nothing to give you," he said, "that you haven't already got for yourself: your name, your work, this hill. You did all of it without me." He was looking at his hands. "So I shan't pretend I'm offering you anything. I'm only asking. Will you marry me, Isabel?"
She had known it was coming. She had lain under the eaves the night before with her eyes open, thinking about what she would say. She had thought about the hives, and about Kezia, whose hands could no longer lift a skep. She had thought about the chandler, the stall in the square, and all the things she had built on this hill out of nothing. She had thought she would have to choose between them and him. And somewhere in the small hours, with the wind going over the roof, she had understood that she did not. That was the whole of her answer; she had only to say it.
"Yes," she said. "Before the heather comes out, in the church down there with the bell in the yew."
He turned and looked at her. She could not see his eyes in the dusk, but she could see how still he had gone.
"And some of the hives come with me," she went on before her courage failed. "To Elmfern, to stand under your limes. And Kezia comes to us for the winters, because the wind on this hill will kill her one of these years, and she's too proud to say so. And every summer, when the heather is out, we come back up here, you and I, for as long as the bees will have us." She stopped for breath. "Those are my terms, Oswin."
"Yes," he said.
"You might at least pretend to think about them."