"We're to be married," said Isabel softly to the bees. "Before the heather."
This time he knocked, and this time she was on the same side of the door.
They were married at the end of July in the church with no tower, and the heather came out on the hill the same week, as if it had been listening. The bell rang in the yew. Old Kezia sat in the front pew in a new bonnet she complained about from beginning to end. The chandler came in his Sunday coat, and so did half the valley, and the little girl from the ford threw heather at them in the porch with both hands. Afterwards, she walked back up the track with her arm through her husband's. At the last notes of the bell, she saw the bees at the doors of the skeps lift their heads, and she thought of her mother and was glad.
A letter came from Bath in the autumn. It was not signed, and it did not need to be. It said that the glass had been sold for very little, and that a companion's life was not so bad as its writer had feared, and that the honey had been very dark, and that she had eaten it all.
And the next June, the Midsummer Ball was given at Elmfern again, with the long windows open to the terrace for the heat, and roses in every urn. The housemaid who had once found a note on a pillow was head housemaid now. She stood in the passage by the ballroom door that night, and saw the young Duchess slip out onto the terrace in the middle of a dance.
A swarm had come out of the hives under the limes and hung itself from the old branch by the steps, exactly where it had hung before. The Duchess took it in her silk gown with her bare hands while the county watched, and nobody screamed at all. She did it a little more carefully than she once would have: she was expecting a child at Christmas, which the whole house knew and was far too well-mannered to mention. Kezia had already written from the hill in a hand that wandered all over the page to say that she was coming to see the cradle and would not be told otherwise.
Later that night, when the carriages had gone, the Duke went up to bed and found a dance card lying on his pillow. On the front of it, there was a single name in his own hand: it was the card he had carried in his waistcoat for a year and given to her on the morning of their wedding. On the back, under the old penciled note she had once left on a pillow at dawn, she had written a new line:
Gone out to see the swarm safely home. I have taken nothing that was not mine.
He stood and looked at it for a long time, smiling. Then he put it inside his waistcoat very carefully, the way a man puts away something that might break, and he went down the stairs and out onto the terrace to find her.
And this time, he did not wait for the morning.