Bee Sting Cake

by Victoria Goddard

  He daubed at his eyes with his handkerchief again. “I am too overcome with emotion to speak of practical details.” He reached out and took my hand again—I seemed incapable of keeping it from his grasp—and pressed it to his heart. I permitted him with a sort of horrified fascination to see what he would do next.

  “I am sorry I cannot stay for luncheon,” he said, looking at Master Dart. “But I have said my piece, and words fail me. Words fail me.” He sighed hugely. “How happy I am to know my brother’s name can be cleared of the ignominy that has attached to it. My dear nephew—we will speak again soon. Very soon.”

  And he plunged out of the room, through the door the footman was holding open, and left us all staring at one another.

  I wiped my hands thoroughly with the handkerchief I had finally extracted from Mr. Dart’s waistcoat pocket.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Dragon has Another Idea

  WE WERE NOT ABLE TO discuss the matter, because even as we trailed out after Master Dart to ensure that Sir Vorel had indeed left the premises, the footman on duty turned back to the front doors and opened them on the resplendent figure of the Honourable Roald Ragnor.

  “Hullo the Darts!” he said, taking off his hat politely and shaking out his golden curls in a spray of water drops like diamonds. I tried to suppress the wave envy that always arose at the sight of the baron’s son (for I was never going to be so handsome, so broadly muscular, or so tall, whatever else I might manage to make of myself), but I was feeling unsettled after the strange interview with my uncle, and woefully inclined to rejoice in the sight of the Honourable Rag’s sodden appearance.

  “Come for lunch, have you?” Sir Hamish said genially. “Your grace, may I present to you the Honourable Roald Ragnor, Baron Ragnor’s son and heir? Master Roald, this is Mr. Greenwing’s friend from Morrowlea, the Duke of Fillering Pool.”

  “How d’ye do, your grace,” the Honourable Rag said, sweeping a bow.

  Hal nodded with a suspicious access of ducal hauteur. “Master Roald.”

  “Did I see Sir Vorel cantering off down the drive?” the Honourable Rag said, following us to the dining room. “It’s a wet day for calling.”

  “And yet you’re here,” Sir Hamish said.

  The Honourable Rag laughed robustly. “So I am.”

  But he declined to explain.

  Over lunch the conversation turned largely on the likely aftereffects of wireweed seedlings in the Dart bottomlands, the autumn flooding having washed down seeds from the Talgarths’ into their fields. I didn’t have much to contribute to this topic, since Hal knew far more than I did about the botany. Once I’d said my piece about reading that wireweed was a perennial legume from Kilromby, and that the Rag flooded in early autumn after the snow melted from the mountains, he launched into a thorough lecture on the varying properties of legumes vis-à-vis removing the seedlings, and only the protestations that the bottomlands would be ankle-deep in mud from the morning rain prevented him from leaving the table to go investigate the matter.

  It felt decidedly strange to be back in the role of a proper young gentleman, familiar as the comfortably elegant dining room at the Dart manse was. The week at Mrs. Buchance’s, working at Mrs. Etaris’, doing my best to be bourgeois, all that fell away. Even the Honourable Rag spoke to me on equal terms with the others, calling me Greenwing and guarding nothing of his speech.

  My thoughts fell away to wondering about my uncle and his effusions. It was far easier to believe he had somehow arranged for my father—

  But I couldn’t condemn the man on no proof simply because I disliked him and because he used to make my mother cry.

  “You’re woolgathering, Greenwing.”

  I looked up from the pile of walnut shells next to my plate. The Honourable Rag was smiling genially at me. “Penn’orth o’ herring for your thoughts?”

  There was something so odd about the Honourable Rag now, I thought.

  I didn’t think I wanted to say ‘Why are you behaving so much as if you haven’t a thought in your brain?’ to him, and was not much more inclined towards further public discussion of my uncle, so instead I smiled with an effort of lightness. “Oh, just woolgathering, indeed.”

  “Thinking about the Fair competitions?” the Honourable Rag asked, smirking.

  Life is a game of Poacher, I reminded myself. And Mrs. Etaris had asked me to string him along. “Yes, Hal and I are thinking of putting our names in for the cake competition. I was contemplating which recipe we should try.”

  “Your mother used to make that honey cake,” Mr. Dart said, giving me an appreciative grin. “What was it called again? Beehive Cake?”

  “Bee Sting Cake,” said Sir Hamish, his eyes quizzical, smile sardonic. “Always something special, with honey from the Woods. I don’t think she ever made it for the Fair, did she, Tor? Even though the best were always with the autumn honey.”

  Master Dart was also looking from the Honourable Rag to me, as if he were reading lines from a book I couldn’t see. He snorted softly. “Not the Lady Olive, no. And there won’t be much honey from the autumn blooms if the weather doesn’t clear soon.”

  “Oh, it’ll clear,” Mr. Dart said confidently. “It’s clearing already, actually. It’ll be dry enough for the oats in the early part of the week.”

  Hal looked at him. “Weather-working in your family?”

  The Honourable Rag laughed with more exuberance than the question, or the answer, permitted. “Don’t ask him that, your Grace. M’father’s not keen on magic, not keen at all.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. Mr. Dart and I had seen him wandering the woods by the Talgarths’ house last week with a werelight—which if he’d bought it was one thing (though still problematic), but if he’d made it himself was quite another.

  He kept smirking, dropping his eyes meaningfully to my right hand, which was resting around the stem of my goblet, and to the ring I wore there.

  To my annoyance, I was fairly certain he’d won that round.

  Master Dart, apparently oblivious to this interchange, smiled at Hal. “The winter rains will be settling in soon. We tend to have rain in September, then the Emperor’s Summer for about three weeks starting a fortnight or so after the autumn equinox. Dartington’s held the Harvest Fair the second week in October since, oh, time immemorial.”

  “Since the accession of the Empress Zangora the XIII,” Mr. Dart said, “who declared a jubilee year throughout all the empire as a thanksgiving for her coming to the throne safely after the successive deaths of her four elder siblings. Northwest Oriole used to run to Midsomer fairs and Winterturn markets in honour of the Lady of the Green and White, but the harvest fair caught on in many principalities. The Empress’ Accession Day was the tenth of October, and Dartington still keeps its fair on the week-end closest to that date.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. It was perfectly obvious no one else had, either.

  “It’s in the History of Northwest Oriole. Diggory Ezalinel of Avalen.”

  We all nodded appreciatively. After a moment, Hal said, “Is your weather really that regular? You always have the Emperor’s Summer? Even since the Fall?”

  “Since the Interim finished, yes,” Master Dart said. “The rains come after, then snow the week of Winterturn.”

  “How extraordinary.”

  “Accidents of geography, no doubt,” said the Honourable Rag, pushing himself back from the table. “And I have some geography to cover this afternoon, so I’ll bid you g’day.” He made a careless bow to Hal, nodded at the rest of us, and loped off, tall, handsome, muscular, and confident as always.

  I sighed.

  Hal said, thoughtfully, “He should have bowed to you, Jemis. If the weather’s clearing, we should definitely go call on your grandmother this afternoon.”

  “WHERE DID YOU LEARN that?” I asked abruptly as we rode down the long carriageway from Dart Hall to the road. “To be all—ducal—like that? Were you taught that?”

>   Hal gave me a strange look. “Was I being very ducal just then? I’m sorry if I was.”

  “I think he probably means last night,” Mr. Dart said, nudging his horse up along my other side. “When you told off Sir Vorel so thoroughly he came crawling back this morning.”

  “And wasn’t that interesting. We shall have to talk about what it means further. No—well, I suppose the answer is ‘yes’, because I was taught how to comport myself, how to behave. But not that, specifically. My grandfather—my mother’s father—was an extraordinary man. A gentle soul, generally very kind, very interested in everyone, always listening regardless of rank. Except sometimes he forgot ...”

  “To be gentle?”

  Hal chuckled, looking out at the meadows sloping down towards the hidden course of the East Rag on our right. “If you startled him when he wasn’t expecting anyone to be there—he loved insects, was a great entomologist, loved to spend the day by himself in the meadows looking for butterflies or beetles—how he reacted. Those first moments before he caught himself—it’s hard to explain. He would just look at you, with this expression of ... outrage? Outrage isn’t quite right. He would look at you as if the idea of someone daring to interrupt him was inconceivable. As if every time he was startled he was shocked to the core of all his philosophies.”

  “That sounds a bit strange,” I said.

  Hal grinned. “We must all have these eccentric relatives, eh? My grandfather was something of an enigma. He’d repudiated his family, his rank, his name, everything.”

  “To be an entomologist?” This was Alinor; such things happened.

  “To be ... something. He never told us the whole story. We never learned who he was—who he had been, anyway. He’d had some sort of argument with his brother, and he used to say, sometimes, that court was his brother’s domain. But he never told us who his brother was, why court came into it, except for how obvious it was he was from a very important clan. I remember there were a lot of discussions about it, just before the Fall. We were supposed to go to Astandalas so Elly and I could be presented to the Emperor when we were sixteen, but we wanted to go earlier—so we could learn some ‘polish’, I think was our argument.” He chuckled. “We so wanted to see the capital.”

  And that, right there, was why my uncle had come back grovelling this morning. He must have gone and looked up the Duke of Fillering Pool in the Peerage of Northwest Oriole. Hell, an Imperial Duke would be in the Book of the First Thousand Families of Astandalas.

  “And when you want to channel the most intense aristocratic behaviour possible?” Mr. Dart said, grinning.

  Hal whooped. “Yes, exactly. He didn’t get angry very often, but when he did ... Oh, look!”

  Mr. Dart and both jumped at the sudden change of tone, looking wildly around for dragons, ruffians, wicked priests, the Lady knew what else.

  But Hal was swinging off his horse, landing ankle deep in mud. He ignored the damage to his boots and plunged forward to examine a dozen or so light purple crocuses blooming in the dry lee of the hedge.

  “I thought crocuses bloomed in the spring,” I said finally, knowing we weren’t going to get back on any other topic until Hal had taken his fill.

  “Most do, but there are several autumn-blooming species, of which this is by far the most famous—the saffron crocus. Do you see the stigmas? They must be an inch long.”

  I grinned at Mr. Dart, who was shaking his head in amusement, and obligingly said: “They are a splendid orange.”

  “They’re not native here,” Hal said, pulling out a pen-knife from his waistcoat pocket. He cut one perfect blossom from the small patch and folded into his little notebook, a page or two on from the lesser scabious. “Do people grow them commercially anywhere roundabout?”

  Mr. Dart shrugged. “Not that I’ve ever heard.”

  “Most curious, since the saffron crocus is almost entirely vegetatively propagated—that is, it doesn’t set seed,” he clarified at our blank looks.

  I filed this piece of information away (for you never knew when I might need to know that fact about the saffron crocus). “So someone planted a few bulbs here?”

  “Corms. Yes ... though conceivably a bird could have—some jays are known to plant acorns and such—or a squirrel—but even so—where did they come from? I haven’t heard of saffron being grown this side of East Oriole.”

  “Indeed, it’s almost as strange as Jemis moving from ‘under no circumstances whatsoever’ to ‘hmm, well, perhaps I shall insinuate myself into the Honourable Rag’s gambling ring’.”

  “That wasn’t what I was doing!”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  My horse blew out its breath in a great whuffle. I felt this thoroughly expressed my sentiments.

  “Look,” I said, as Hal stowed away pen-knife and notebook and remounted his horse. “When the other topics of conversation were my father, my uncle, my grandmother, or myself, I felt that the Harvest Fair was preferable.”

  “You didn’t think we should go back to the dragon or the ruffians or—”

  “—Or the peculiar behaviour of your local witch?” asked Hal, grinning.

  “Not with Roald Ragnor. He’d’ve wanted to go dragon-hunting.”

  “Or witch-hunting?”

  Mr. Dart made a face. “The Honourable Roald Ragnor wouldn’t be caught dead fraternizing with witches. It’d be against his father’s express wishes.”

  “Tight leash.”

  “Not tight enough, apparently,” I said, “not if Mrs. Etaris is concerned. Mr. Dart, what are we going to do about this gambling ring?”

  “Do? Why, you seem to have done most of what’s needed already, and I believe—along with Mrs. Etaris—that the rest will follow naturally.”

  I tried not to grind my teeth. “Why does everyone care so much about me?”

  “Well, you are from nearly the only interesting family in South Fiellan, Jemis. No one else has plays written about them.”

  I muttered a curse. “And what about Magistra Bellamy?”

  “Not much we can do if she’s gone away up North.”

  Hal shook out his reins. “Why does it matter so much about this Magistra Bellamy? Her housekeeping is atrocious.”

  “Hush,” I said, as we came abreast of the Old Arrow—this time sans dragon, though the cat was lying curled in a patch of sunlight on the short wall along its garden side.

  “You’ve grown very circumspect,” Hal said, casting me a teasing glance. “No talking about magic at all?”

  “It’s not the witch so much as why she’s gone,” I replied awkwardly, just as Mr. Dart exchanged greetings with a farmer heading home with a jug of ale from the public house. Two women in middle-class garments turned, saw us, bobbed curtsies to Mr. Dart and Hal, and openly gawked at me. I sighed, and nudged my horse to go a little faster.

  We came to the crossroads, and turned to the bridge, leaving behind the small flow of traffic leading to the village. Hal twisted in his saddle to look back at the village. “Why isn’t the village built closer to the river? Does it have a tendency to flood?”

  Mr. Dart clopped up between us. “Not along here—our bottomlands do, upriver where the meanders are. This is the East Rag—the South runs past Ragnor Bella. No, it’s the old tradition in south Fiellan that nothing’s built at crossroads. Even hostelries are always at least a furlong away.”

  “Whyever not?”

  We clattered over the hump of the cobbled bridge. Mr. Dart looked at me. I said briefly, “Crossroads are sacred to the Dark Kings. It’s where you bury criminals and suicides. What do you reckon, Mr. Dart? Teller Road?”

  Teller Road led to the White Cross, where the Imperial Highway was crossed by three other roads, where the Arguty and Dart estates met the Commons and the baron’s home farm, and where my father was buried. Mr. Dart made a face. “Let’s try the Greenway. It shouldn’t be too wet for the horses under the trees.”

  I turned my horse accordingly onto the lane running behind a cluster of
dovecotes. The doves—white and cinnamon and grey—were sitting on their doorsteps like so many neighbours taking in the air, but our passage disturbed them and sent a flock wheeling up in a clatter of wings.

  “The problem with Magistra Bellamy,” said Mr. Dart, ostensibly to Hal beside him but loudly enough that I could hear him clearly, too, “is that Jemis needs a magic teacher.”

  “Is she the only practitioner in the barony?’

  “She and Dominus Gleason are the only acknowledged ones, and Jemis has taken an unaccountable dislike to Dominus Gleason.”

  “It’s not unaccountable,” I said, but didn’t clarify.

  We passed the last farm on that lane. The muddy ruts turned into the farmyard, leaving us with a greensward as firm and fair as any ride I’d ever been on, sprinkled liberally with pink and white daisies.

  “How lovely,” said Hal, as we came to the pair of standing stones that marked the place where the lane entered the Hildon Wood and the Greenway proper began.

  The Hildon Wood was not as large or as venerable as either the Arguty Forest or the Woods Noirell, nor nearly so mysterious nor dangerous, but it was beautiful in its autumn finery. The Greenway was bordered on either side with hawthorns and hollies, both bright-berried and even the hawthorn still green.

  “Let’s gallop,” I suggested, feeling a sudden urge for speed. Without waiting for their responses I gave my restive horse her head.

  The Greenway was as straight and level as an Astandalan road, though far older. It ran a good three miles through the Hildon Wood from Henring Farm at its northeastern gate to the Green Dragon at its southwestern. There were no houses, no crossroads, not even any branching paths; the only human work you could see was the roofline of the Woodhills’ manse through the trees about halfway along, though there was no connecting path to Holtwood.

  The only break in the long straight ride, in fact, was the place where the path forked to curve around a standing stone set into a perfectly circular pool just before you reached the Green Dragon.

  I pulled up my horse about fifty yards from the pool, for the dragon was there.