She sold the honey in stone jars at the market town below. She sold the wax to the chandler, who made it into church candles and paid her fairly. It was not a great deal of money, but it was hers. Every penny of it was hers, and it had been earned with her own hands, and nobody could take it off her in the night.
She was lowering the skep onto its stone when she heard somebody running up the track. It was the little girl from the house by the ford, who brought the milk up on Tuesdays and was paid in comb. She came through the gate at a flat run with her pinny flying, and stopped well short of the hives, the way she had been taught. She had to bend over with her hands on her knees before she could speak.
"There's a gentleman," she said, "down at the church on a big brown horse. He's asking the parson about the bell."
Isabel stayed very still with her hands flat on the straw of the skep. The bees went on coming and going about her wrists.
Down in the valley, the church sat in its round green yard, and it had no tower. It had never had a tower. It had a single old bell that hung from the lowest branch of a yew tree beside the porch, from an iron bracket so ancient the bark had grown over it. In her whole life, she had told exactly one person about that bell: she had told him on a terrace in the dark, with music coming through the open windows behind them.
"What sort of gentleman?" said Kezia sharply.
"A tall one," said the child. "All in black. He's got gray in his hair, just here." She touched her own temples. "He asked, was there anybody on the hill who kept bees? And the parson said, only old Kezia and the young woman. And he went all quiet, and then he asked the way up."
Kezia looked at Isabel. Isabel did not look at anybody.
She stood up slowly and shook out her apron. She gave the child a piece of comb from the dish on the wall, told her to go home by the lower path, and watched her go. Then she went back to the hives, not into the cottage, and she left the veil where it was. She would think afterwards that it was the bravest and the most foolish thing she had ever done: to stay there on her knees in the bees and simply wait for him to come.
She heard the horse before she saw it. It came up the stony track slowly, like a horse whose rider was in no hurry at all, or was afraid of what he would find when he got there. At the gate, it stopped. She heard him get down. She heard the gate open and close.
Then there were footsteps on the grass, and then they stopped too, a little way off to the side of the hives—not in front of them, where the bees flew in and out, but to the side. She had told him that as well, on the terrace a year ago: she had told him that you must never stand in front of a hive door, because you were standing in the bees' road home. You stand to the side, she had said, and you keep still, and they will forgive you almost anything.