Bee Sting Cake Read online

  He really would have been far happier as a second son, I thought with a pang, the one who could go off on the expeditions to hunt for plants in the mysterious regions of the world. Instead he was stuck being the sponsor of said expeditions and planning an arboretum that his people would probably not let him plant himself, either.

  We were who we were. Duke and hero-traitor’s son, our lives shaped by fate and accidents of birth.

  “You look very solemn, Jemis,” Hal said, and I jumped at finding him grinning up at me.

  “I was thinking about fate and families and how wonderful it was to ignore them at Morrowlea.”

  He scrambled to his feet and took in my coatless and rolled-sleeve state. “You look as if you’ve been put to work.”

  “I have. Come help me scrub cauldrons?”

  “Witch’s cauldrons? Assuredly! Where’s your Mr. Dart?”

  “Taken the dog. Hard to wash with a petrified arm.”

  “This is the most unusual place,” Hal said as we went back inside. It was a bright and cheerful cottage within, with white-washed walls and brightly coloured fabric curtains and cushions, the floor dark stone tiles or wood. I felt immediately comfortable on entering: it reminded me very much of the snug little cottage in a corner of the Arguty estates where my mother and I had lived while my father was off at war.

  Thumps were still coming from upstairs. Hal shook his head at a corn broom hung on the wall. “What on earth is the magistra doing?”

  “I have no idea, I’ve not actually met her.” I opened the kitchen door with a flourish and discovered in doing so that there were aprons hung behind it. I gave Hal the first one, which was a plain blue and white striped cotton and which he accepted in bemusement, and then looked at the second. It was a very feminine floral print, and matched the curtains we’d just passed.

  I considered the stack of pots and the fact that Mrs. Etaris and Mr. Dart had seen me in pink satin last week, and that Hal had been witness to the second-most unpleasant experience of my life, and that I had not actually brought a change of clothes with me, and so I put on the apron.

  Hal wordlessly went to the sink while I built up the fire in the range to heat up more water. When I turned he had the scouring pad in one hand, and said: “I take precedence.”

  I preferred drying, as he well knew, so I bowed as low as I could without hitting the table or stove. “As you wish, your grace.”

  He rolled his eyes and set in to washing. We fell quickly into the old familiar routine. After a few minutes he said, “I never thought I’d be doing this again. I rather miss working with my hands.”

  “Mm,” I replied, not sure what else to say, and then without intending to I went on: “My father was reported shot running away from a court-martial for high treason about a week after my tenth birthday. They said he’d opened the gates of Loe to the enemy and caused the worst single loss to an Imperial army ever recorded. About two months later we received another letter, this one commending my father for his extreme bravery and reporting him presumed dead across the Border on a scouting mission.”

  Hal passed me a pot to dry and set an iron cauldron in the sink to soak. “Your mother must have written to the command staff.”

  “She did. No answer ever came.”

  “It must have gone astray. There were a lot of letters after Loe. Did she try again? Go to the Seventh Army’s headquarters at Eil, even?”

  “My father had been gone seven months when the first letter came. She’d been with child, but lost the baby after the news. I don’t think she wrote again.” I frowned at the rag in my hands, which was getting damp. When I spread it on the rail next to the stove my hands were trembling. I tried hard not to dwell on that period.

  “What about your father’s people? Did they not write?”

  “He had two brothers and a sister. The sister had passed away a few years before. My older uncle was called Rinald. He and my father got on best, I think, of the four. He would have written or even gone, if—if he hadn’t died before the second letter came. Broke his neck out hunting. He was so angry,” I said in a lower voice, a memory stirring. People shouting, sneering, commenting, my mother crying, my uncle Rinald ferocious in his protection of us.

  His lifeless body brought back to Arguty Hall in a sad procession, my mother gripping my hand so hard I thought she’d break a bone. “He couldn’t believe my father would have done such a thing. And he died thinking that he had.”

  Hal turned as if to offer some comfort. I couldn’t look at him, plunged my hands into the sink and started to scrub vigorously. He moved over, picked up the dry cloth, and waited until I had scoured the pot clean. Then he said tentatively, “And your other uncle?”

  “You met my other uncle. Saw him, anyway. He was the one disdaining me outside the Ragnor Arms. He was quite happy to inherit the Greenwing estate after Uncle Rinald died, on the grounds that a traitor forfeits his patrimony.”

  “Oh,” he said quietly.

  “My mother and I lived in a cottage on the estates. Not too different from this one, really. My uncle didn’t try to evict us, precisely, but he made things very uncomfortable. We stayed, though. There wasn’t much money—my mother had a small independence, but it didn’t go far without my father’s income. No pension, of course, for a traitor’s widow. My mother started being courted by this Charese merchant who kept making excuses for why he was coming to Ragnor Bella all the time. Though in those days the Imperial highway to Astandalas went by, so we weren’t quite such a backwater. Then came the Fall, which was ... hard. Here as everywhere, though we didn’t have nearly as many problems as most places.”

  I thought about the stories we’d heard about Ghilousette and shuddered. Hal didn’t say anything; he didn’t need to, though I didn’t really know what had happened in Ronderell. I swallowed. “Mr. Buchance, the Charese merchant, came back eventually. He was about the first one to make it through the Arguty Forest after the Fall. When he proposed that time my mother accepted.”

  I scrubbed at another cauldron, this one caked with grease and burned bits. Neither my mother nor the second Mrs. Buchance was ever so lax in the kitchen, not even in those dark days during the early Interim when it was just my mother and me in the cottage and a half-day expedition to cross the grounds to Arguty Hall. Not that we’d gone very often begging to my uncle’s door; for it was begging, with Sir Vorel.

  “Mr. Buchance thought we should move to Chare, where no one would know us and we could be just the Buchances, but it was a long and dangerous journey, and my mother was desperate to make amends with my grandmother.”

  “Did she disapprove of her daughter marrying a foreign merchant?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Did she ever make up with your mother?”

  I shook my head, remembering again the only note I had ever received from my grandmother, after I had written to inform her of my mother’s passing. No salutations or words of comfort or consolation or acknowledgement. Just: My daughter has been dead these five years since.

  “There were some indications my grandmother was thawing—she sent me a birthday gift that year, when I turned thirteen, I remember, and my mother hoped she would come around. Especially when it turned out my mother was expecting another child.”

  I frowned at the sink. At this rate I was going to have a line permanently drawn between my brows, like one of the old fields ploughed so many years the same way the lines were etched into the ground five hundred years after they’d been turned to pasture.

  The kettle started to boil and Hal went to take it off the hob. I spoke to the sink. “My mother had just had Lauren when—when the doorbell rang and I answered. And there was my father.”

  I felt a burning in my eyes and my throat. People—Lark—teased me for crying too easily: a poem or a song or even a nice painting could make me well up. I frowned even harder, but I was thinking of that moment, of seeing the ghost on the doorstep. He was so thin, gaunt even, but clean-shaven and smiling that
familiar lop-sided grin, the smile that my mother always said was the only way I resembled him physically.

  I couldn’t bear to describe the ensuing scenes. His face when my mother came out with a new baby in her arms. Her face when she saw him. Mr. Buchance coming up behind her, furious at her upset. Me trying ... I tried not to think about them at all. I cleared my throat. “I think I was the only one unequivocally glad to see him. I believed him, you see, when he said he was no traitor, that he had been stranded on the far side of the Border when the Empire fell. Everyone else ...”

  I lost the rag under the water and spent some time fishing it out before deciding the water was too filthy to bother and unplugging the sink. Hal was standing beside the stove, drying cloth motionless in his hands.

  “Three weeks later they found him hanging in the forest. I found the note. But they wouldn’t let me see him.” I watched the water gurgling down the drain. “Or go to the funeral. Not that there was one. As a suicide and a traitor they buried him at a crossroads at midnight.”

  There was an appalling silence. I cast about desperately for some way to break it, to lighten it, to push back my emotions. I needed to be the detached ironic young gentleman of fashion or else I would start sobbing. I smiled crookedly. “No flowers.”

  “But your father wasn’t a traitor.”

  “The suicide was taken as admission of guilt.” I was proud of how dry my voice was.

  “Did you move to Chare after that?”

  I laughed wearily. “No. You’d think we would have at that point, wouldn’t you? My mother a bigamist, the doubts about my father laid to rest on the lurid side, my future looking bleak. Mr. Buchance offered to formally adopt me, but ... no. We stayed. My mother was not a strong woman physically, and she never really recovered from the shock. She died a year later when a bad influenza swept through. My stepfather married the nurse he hired, Miss Inglesides that was, and they had three more children—Elinor, Zangora, and Lamissa—while I was at Morrowlea. Then—”

  “You can come live with me.”

  I turned to look directly at him at last. He was holding the dishtowel with a death grip, his eyes wide with astonishment. He looked so stunned and dismayed and altogether discomfited that I started to laugh.

  I reached for the plug and the ring slid off my soapy finger and landed in the sink.

  Hal was used to my endless sneezing and at first, I’m sure, thought nothing of the fact that I started. I felt my nose and throat close up, and even as I fumbled for handkerchiefs I scrabbled at the sink with hands gone clumsy.

  “Ring—” I wheezed.

  Hal stared at me. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Ring—sink—” I keeled against the wood stove and recoiled from the hot metal. The sneezes weren’t stopping, they were building force. I tried to breathe through my mouth, count slowly, think of something else—all the old devices—but I could hardly draw breath before it exploded forth. I could see stars.

  “Jemis!”

  I buried my face in my handkerchief, trying desperately to catch my breath, sparks filling my vision and roaring my ears. I felt my knees start to give way and then someone was shouting and tugging and after a moment’s resistance I followed blindly where I was led, until I sank down on the ground, head aching, drawing in long shuddering breaths until I no longer felt as if I were suffocating.

  When I opened my eyes and raised my head, I saw I was sitting on the grass some distance from the cottage. Magistra Bellamy’s dog was sitting beside me, licking my ear. I petted it warily; it thumped its tail.

  “Are you all right?” Mr. Dart said.

  I took another few shaky breaths. “Yes. Think so.” I wiped my eyes on the back of my hand, unable to reach a clean handkerchief while sitting. I smiled awkwardly at Mr. Dart and then at Hal, who stood behind him still holding the dishtowel. “Sorry.” I felt I should say more but my throat was raw. “Water?”

  “I’ll get you some,” Hal promised, and went at a half-run to the cottage, the dog gambolling beside him.

  Mr. Dart pondered for a moment, then sat down beside me heedless of his velvet coat. “I saw the dragon again,” he ventured.

  I had entirely forgotten about the dragon. “Mm?” I managed by way of encouragement.

  “It was drinking from Taylor’s cow pond. It must be bigger than a cart horse. The dog started barking and it flew off north again.”

  “Mm.”

  “Any idea at all why Mrs. Etaris is here making us do Magistra Bellamy’s chores?”

  I smiled. “No.”

  “She’s coming back with Hal. His grace. Not very high-and-mighty, is he? I’m glad to meet him. I liked the sound of him in your letters.”

  Had I ever written about Lark? Or even Violet? Probably not very much. Lark had often insisted on reading my letters home, another thing that in retrospect should have raised suspicions, and sometimes she dictated parts, to make sure the stories were told properly, she’d told me. She had not wanted me to describe her in anything but the most glowing terms, and even then only rarely, as if she were a distant and unattainable object of my affections instead of the woman I spent nearly every waking hour and half the nights with.

  “Stop looking morose, Mr. Greenwing. It doesn’t suit you.”

  I used Mr. Dart’s shoulder for support and hauled myself to my feet. He bounced up next to me, grinning. Hal was carrying a water glass with exaggerated care, looking baffled by the apparently perfectly ordinary and perfectly respectable middle-class middle-aged woman beside him. It was a sentiment Mrs. Etaris prompted in me quite frequently.

  “Thank you,” I rasped, taking the water. “Hal, this is—” My voice gave out and I coughed.

  Mr. Dart shook his head at me. “Hal, this is Mrs. Etaris, the local bookmistress. Mrs. Etaris, this is Hal Leaveringham, Mr. Greenwing’s friend from Morrowlea.”

  “The one who stood beside you in your contretemps this spring? Of course. I am delighted to meet you, your grace. Oh, are you here incognito? Mr. Lingham, then.”

  “It’s spelled ‘Leaveringham’,” Mr. Dart said helpfully.

  “Did you tell everyone?” Hal demanded.

  I lowered my glass. “I didn’t think it a secret that you were a duke. As for the spring, certainly not.” I rubbed my throat. “I don’t see why my throat feels so raw. It never used to.”

  Mrs. Etaris looked at me as if I were being slow. “Quite apart from the fact that you’re not continuing to take wireweed, there was the fire.”

  “Fire?” Hal looked back at the thin column of smoke rising from the cottage chimney.

  “Mr. Greenwing and Miss Redshank rescued someone from a burning house last week.”

  “Violet,” I supplied.

  “Why was Violet in a burning building?”

  “No, she’s Miss—”

  “Violet Redshank?”

  “Mm.”

  “What in hell is going on around here?” Hal demanded, then flushed and presented a very courtly half-bow to Mrs. Etaris. “My apologies, ma’am. I had never expected anything from Ragnor Bella.”

  “No one does,” she agreed placidly.

  “What is going on here, Mrs. Etaris?” Mr. Dart asked. “Why are you here, and where is Magistra Bellamy?”

  “And why are we doing her dishes?” I added.

  Mrs. Etaris stared at us for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Oh my dears, did I not tell you? I thought Mrs. Buchance had sent you to help.”

  “We were on our way to Dartington to see where the dragon had gone.”

  Mrs. Etaris went very still. “I do beg your pardon?”

  “A dragon flew over,” Mr. Dart said. “Saw it again drinking from Taylor’s pond.”

  “A dragon,” Mrs. Etaris breathed. She did not looked alarmed; she looked delighted. She’d looked delighted when we’d had to storm the Talgarths’ house last week, too. Then her voice turned brisk and businesslike. “Are you certain it was a dragon, Mr. Dart?”

  “They don’t
exactly look like anything else,” he replied, obviously exasperated.

  “Could be a wyvern,” Hal said solemnly.

  “Or a fire salamander,” I suggested.

  “Or an illusion created by an overexcited student wizard,” Mrs. Etaris added firmly, and frowned at me.

  “I haven’t had any lessons,” I protested. “Magistra Bellamy wasn’t in when I came by, and I am not going to Dominus Gleason.”

  “And otherwise? I am glad to know it is mere lack of skill preventing you from tearing up the countryside, Mr. Greenwing.”

  I bowed elaborately to her, making my head swim dizzily. “What is going on, Mrs. Etaris? Mrs. Buchance didn’t mention anything about you needing help—though she was perhaps somewhat distracted by the arrival of her nephews for the evening, and we left in haste once we saw the dragon.”

  “Magistra Bellamy said to call today,” Mr. Dart interjected, “as she thought she might have a remedy for my arm. She wasn’t in when I knocked on my way to town. Nor obviously now, neither.”

  “Either,” Mrs. Etaris corrected absently. She bit her lip, a surprisingly girlish gesture, then seemed to come to some decision. “Do come within, gentlemen. There has been a complication and I would value your assistance.”

  “We shall most certainly be delighted,” Hal said, with a florid courtly bow. No heel-clicks, but there were elaborate curlicues. I smiled, thinking he’d well got the measure of Mrs. Etaris.

  Mrs. Etaris paused, head tilted slightly to one side. “Delight may enter into it, but then again—” She paused again, then smiled with a disquieting pleasure. “No, I think delight may indeed be involved. There is danger and derring-do and deviltry afoot, after all.” I stumbled slightly on a tussock of grass. She took my arm. “Fetching apron, Mr. Greenwing.”

  Chapter Five

  Theories on Sneezing

  WHEN I CROSSED THE garden threshold I began immediately to sneeze. Not quite so violently as before, but enough to make me stagger back from the gate. I pulled out another handkerchief from my clean handkerchief pocket. A week without sneezing more than normal people had not broken me of the multiple-handkerchief habit. Fortunately, I supposed.