“That knife is dangerous,” Nash said after the third time.
“It’s not the knife,” she told him. “It’s the blackberry binding. I cut it into strips last summer and must have missed a few small thorns. They’re just nicks, nothing serious.”
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Making a skep.”
“A what?”
The children stared at his ignorance. “A skep,” Jane enunciated clearly, thinking he’d misheard. Then as he continued to look blank, she added, “For catching bees.”
“Bees?” Nash exclaimed. “What, you catch real, live bees?”
“Yes, of course,” Maddy said, laughing at his surprise. “How else would we get honey?” It was her first genuine response since the journal incident, and Nash wasn’t going to let it go to waste. Besides he’d never met a lady who kept bees before.
“Don’t you get stung?”
“Not very often. I wear a veil. And when I’m robbing the hives, I use smoke, or course.”
“Smoke?”
“It calms them.”
“You use smoke to catch them in that thing? How?”
John explained. “Every spring we go looking for swarms of bees in the forest, and when we find one, we tell Maddy. She brings a skep and knocks the bees into it—”
“But we don’t use smoke in the forest,” Jane corrected him.
“And then we bring the skep full of bees home,” Henry said in a cutting-a-long-story-short kind of way. Henry wanted to get back to the card game.
“And then the bees make honey for us all summer long,” Jane finished. “And wax.”
Nash was astounded. “You catch wild bees? Bare-handed?”
They all laughed merrily at his expression. “A fresh swarm isn’t usually aggressive,” Maddy explained. “And, of course, I wear gloves, as well as a veil.”
“Is it our turn yet?” Lucy asked with an impatient wriggle. Nash reluctantly returned to the game. Maddy caught and kept bees? He wanted to hear more.
From the corner of his eye he watched as the disc grew into a rounded basket shape and soon took on the familiar shape of a beehive. He’d seen them all his life and never once given a thought to how the honey was obtained: all he knew was that he liked to drizzle it on hot crumpets. He’d met a few beekeepers, too, but they’d been, without exception, grizzled men with large beards, not pretty, young women.
He watched her small, sturdy hands deftly shaping the hive. Damp straw, blackberry vines, and string. Maddy Woodford’s specialty: wresting something productive out of nothing. She was an extraordinary girl.
Woman.
After a while Lucy grew tired. Slowly she slumped against his chest, then gave a large yawn and wriggled into the crook of his arm, where she simply went to sleep, her cheek against his chest. The other children quietened their noise when he asked them to, but it only lasted for about three minutes. Lucy slept on, regardless.
He’d never felt a child fall asleep in his lap before. It was an extraordinary sensation. Total trust.
He glanced at Maddy to see if she’d noticed, but her head was bent over her beehive as she tied off the final coil. She stood and stretched wearily, then tidied up the mess.
She swept up the straw remnants and shreds of blackberry binder and tossed them into the fire. Flames flared brightly and a few fiery twirls of blackberry danced up into the blackness of the chimney.
“When that game’s ended it’s time for bed,” she told the children. She glanced at Lucy curled up asleep against Nash but said nothing. She collected the children’s nightclothes and warmed them before the fire.
“I’ll take Lucy.” She scooped the little girl from his lap. He could smell Maddy’s hair as she leaned across him.
The children washed, then changed into their nightclothes in front of the fire, the older ones helping the younger ones with buttons and buckles, while Maddy undressed the sleepy Lucy. It was cozy, domestic, and like nothing he’d ever experienced.
