She had come to Elmfern for the week of the ball with three trunks, a maid, a companion, and her pearls. The pearls were famous: they were a long rope of them, a wedding present from her late husband, and she wore them even at tea, wound twice around her throat where the light could find them.
They were at tea on the terrace when the swarm came. It came out of a skep in the kitchen garden over the wall, and the first anybody knew of it was a sound like rain coming across a field. Then the air above the terrace was full of bees—a great, turning cloud of them, so thick it put a shadow on the tablecloth.
Somebody screamed. A cup went over. The ladies ran for the house with their skirts gathered up, and a gentleman shouted for the footmen to bring fire. And for a moment, the whole elegant terrace was nothing but noise.
Then the cloud began to settle. It drew in on itself as swarms do, and hung from a low branch of the old lime tree that shaded the steps. In a few minutes, it was a great brown beard of bees as long as a man's arm, humming and shifting and very slightly steaming in the heat.
Two footmen came out with a lantern and a bundle of straw. A gardener's boy came running with a pail of pitch. They were going to burn it out of the tree, the way it had always been done at Elmfern.
Isabel stood up. She did not decide to; she simply found herself on her feet with Lady Livia's shawl still over her arm. Her mother had kept bees on a hill very far from here before she married a gentleman, came down into the flat country, and died of it. Isabel had been a small girl then, but she remembered her mother's hands going into a swarm as calmly as into a basket of washing. She remembered her mother saying that a swarm is the gentlest thing in the world, because it has nothing yet to defend.
"Isabel," said Lady Livia from the doorway, very low. "Sit down."
She did not sit down. She went to the head gardener, who was standing at the end of the terrace with his mouth open, and asked him for an empty skep and an old sheet. He looked at her as though she were mad. Then something in her face made him go and fetch them.
She spread the sheet on the flags under the branch. She stood on a garden chair with the empty skep held upside down in both hands under the hanging bees. Then she said to the footmen, quite pleasantly, that she would be very much obliged if they would put the fire out.
Then she gave the branch a single sharp knock with her wrist.
The swarm fell into the skep in one soft, heavy lump, like wet sand. A few hundred bees went up into the air around her, loud and bewildered. They walked on her sleeves, and on her hands, and in her hair. She did not move.