The Honey and the Sting

by E C Fremantle

  ‘What’s that I can smell?’

  ‘Rabbit pie,’ Hester tells him, as they enter the kitchen. ‘Rafe trapped the rabbit himself. Skinned and gutted it without any help.’

  There is a moment of silence and Hope wonders if they, like she, are remembering the lieutenant.

  He is never mentioned at Orchard Cottage, as if he never was.

  ‘Where is young Rafe?’ asks Ambrose.

  ‘He’ll be in the outhouse.’ Hester leads the way round to the back where they can see the child, deep in concentration, cross-legged on the floor tying a length of twine. He doesn’t look up, though he must be aware of their arrival. Since their homecoming, Rafe has turned in on himself, become a taciturn presence, which Hester is convinced is only a phase. ‘He’ll grow out of it.’ But Hope wonders about the invisible scars beneath the surface of his tender skin that have pulled him out of shape.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asks Ambrose.

  ‘Tying snares.’

  ‘I hear you’re becoming a wizard with them.’

  Hope remembers Ambrose using exactly the same expression about Lark, which causes her to smart with longing.

  ‘I have something for you. A belated birthday gift.’ Ambrose takes Rafe’s hand and leads him outside to where his horse, a compact, fine-looking creature, is snatching at a few stray clumps of grass. ‘A young man of nine years needs something to ride, don’t you think?’

  Rafe breaks into a rare smile. ‘Is he really mine?’

  As we watch him ride the horse round the yard, Ambrose begins to talk about a number of staff he has had to let go at Littlemore. ‘You were right, Hester. My cook’s daughter, Joan, was spying for him. To think I’ve known her since infancy.’ He continues, talking about the new arrangements he has decided to make. ‘I’ve found a buyer for the Hall in the Forest and persuaded the Giffords to come to Littlemore. Margie’s such a fine cook and they have shown us all such loyalty, I don’t want to leave them to a new owner I know nothing about.’

  ‘All three of them? Even Lark?’ A small thrill catches in Hope’s breast.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about Lark. We were wondering if she might come and help you here. I know how short-handed you are now …’ He stops himself before mentioning Melis’s absence. ‘I’m afraid she’s insisting on bringing her goats.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything better.’ Hester claps her hands. ‘What a tonic she will be for us.’

  Hope runs her fingers through her hair. It has already grown a few inches. She is thinking about their laughter in the stables at that tumbledown coaching inn, heads pressed together.

  Hester

  Ambrose announces gleefully that Felton was hanged today, just as I am cutting into the rabbit pie. I stop a moment, knife in my hand, and shake my head minutely, gesturing in the direction of Rafe. I don’t want it discussed in front of him, not when he is so happy about the horse, not ever. But he seems to be paying little attention.

  We discuss the Giffords’ arrival as we eat. Hope is cheerful, as if someone has stoked a fire in her. I try to join in with their merriment but can’t help dwelling on the fact that both men are dead by my invention and wondering what that suggests about the state of my soul. I may not have wielded the blade but I have to live with the knowledge of what I set in motion and must pay the price on the Day of Judgment.

  When Rafe has gone to bed – we all sleep together these days, Hope, Rafe and I, a habit we acquired at the lodge – Ambrose brings up Felton once more. He raises a glass to the triumph of good over evil. I sip the wine – it is slightly sour. Secrets tangle about me, a welter of untruths. There is a hardness to me now – the price of survival.

  Once Ambrose has left, I break a sprig of lemon balm from the bunch in a jar on the table and set a pot of water to boil to make an infusion. When it is done, I pass Hope a cup of the hot, fragrant liquid.

  ‘Lemon balm always reminds me of Melis.’ I am struck with an image of her covered with stings. We don’t speak for a while, listening to the sound of a distant dog howling.

  ‘It’s a wonder, really,’ I say, ‘that we weren’t all stung, with that great hive in the loft.’

  ‘I was, by a wasp in the blue room.’

  This is the first time we have spoken about our time at the lodge.

  We fall back to silence. I am reminded of Melis’s deathbed prophecy. Would it have happened without my intervention? I will never know. I blow gently on the hot infusion, scented steam rising over my face.

  As we go up to bed, Hope is talking about Lark and which room we will give her when she arrives. It is good to see her so happy.

  We undress in silence, just the soft sigh of my dress falling to the floor and the sound of Hope folding hers carefully. Some habits stick fast.

  I hold up the candle to look at my sleeping son in the middle of the large bed, on his back, one hand behind his head, eyelids twitching in a dream, and I know it was all worth it.

  I slip between the cool sheets, sinking my head into the pillow, as I count my blessings. A sudden sharp pain rips through my temple. I shoot up with a cry, holding my hand to my head, the pain still smarting.

  Hope rushes to my side. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something stung me.’

  Together we inspect the pillow.

  ‘It’s this!’ Hope has an object between her thumb and forefinger. It is one of the long, sharp leatherwork needles.

  Rafe has been roused by the commotion. I look at him. He is haloed in a golden circle of candlelight. I catch a cruel smile flicker over his face. I recognize it.

  Melis whispers: We’ve a wasp in our nest.

  ‘It must have fallen out of the sewing basket,’ Hope is saying. ‘Are you all right? Shall I fetch the salve?’

  I am still looking at Rafe.

  That cruel smile is not his father’s.

  It is mine.

  Author’s Note

  The Honey and the Sting sprang, not from the life of a notable, or notorious woman, as with my previous novels, but from two central ideas: the corrupting effects of power, and revenge. Both were drawn from the Jacobean drama that has long fascinated me. In these revenge tragedies, women are invariably cast as the catalysts for the collapse of moral order. I wanted to turn this around, give women – ordinary women – the opportunity to resist the patriarchy, to fight back, to have retribution. As such my novel, though it is set in a specific past, might be regarded as more fantasy than history.

  Frances Bacon said of revenge that it is a ‘kind of wild justice’. In his essay, Bacon, a lawyer by trade, is arguing for the law as a tool for an ordered vengeance rather than the chaos of self-generated revenge. However, I couldn’t help but think of those without access to the proper process of the Early Modern justice system. This seeded my central characters as outsiders, the kind of invisible women whose stories would never have been a matter for the historical record.

  Early Modern women were the chattels of their fathers, husbands or brothers, they were obliged to obey and be silent; if they resisted, they were punished. Women who spoke out of turn, commonly derided as nags or scolds, might be forced to wear iron bridles and led about town like animals, as a warning to others. Men were sanctioned to beat their disobedient wives with a stick no wider than the thumb, as long as they avoided killing them. In marriage a woman was required to be sexually available to her husband whether she wanted to or not. Rape was considered the defilement of the property of a man, rather than a crime against a woman. Women who didn’t belong to men were unprotected and those who lived apart – old women, unmarried women – were often regarded with suspicion and susceptible to aspersions of witchcraft. It was this class of vulnerable women, whose lives went unrecorded, that I wanted to address in The Honey and the Sting.

  Though the three sisters are purely fictional creations, the two men at the heart of the novel are not. However, I have taken great liberties with my depiction of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. He was not guilty o
f the crimes described in the book and I imagine most historians will balk at my characterization of him. The real Villiers was an intriguing figure, the lover of a king, about whom many rumours of corruption circulated, even that of regicide, and who managed to wriggle out of Parliament’s attempt to impeach him. But he exists in my novel as a fictional emblem of moral turpitude. I felt this was fitting as he was a man in possession of more charisma than ability, who was supremely powerful but used his power to promote himself above all. Parallels in political leaders of today are entirely intentional.

  By 1628, the year in which the novel is set, Villiers had become a figure of loathing in the wake of a series of ill-managed military campaigns, the aforementioned rumours of regicide and the failed parliamentary impeachment. Many had come to expect he would meet an inauspicious end. Indeed, his close advisor, the occultist Doctor Lambe, had been brutally torn limb from limb, as described in the novel, a gruesome act which was widely regarded as a proxy attack against Villiers. The story of his assassination by John Felton at the Greyhound Inn in Portsmouth is true. Very little is known of Felton’s life or the reasons behind the murder. Most deemed him merely a disaffected soldier motivated by having been passed over for promotion. It is possible that he had known Villiers as a young man and that they were educated at a military school in France together, as I have depicted. His biography is, at best, vague, but these possible connections provided a tempting background for fiction.

  It was Villiers’ treatment of his sister-in-law, Frances Coke, that particularly sparked my imagination. She was an heiress, forced into marriage with Villiers’ deranged brother and then hounded into hiding by Villers, with her young son, under a charge of adultery. Frances was headstrong and determined not to be subjugated by her formidable brother-in-law. Her story became a jumping-off point for the novel. I had initially hoped to include her in the narrative, but ultimately found myself limited by the bounds of her biography, and so my trio of fictional sisters sprang to life.

  Each of the sisters, all outsiders in their own way, were inspired by different sources. It was Frances Coke’s determination to protect her son at all costs and resist Villiers’ domination that gave rise to Hester. Through her I wanted to explore the question of the lengths a mother might go to to protect her child.

  The idea for the visionary Melis came from a curious figure, Eleanor Davies, an early seventeenth-century prophet and author. Davies correctly predicted several events of political significance, one being the demise of Charles I; another was, significantly, the assassination of George Villiers. Much like Cassandra, she was ignored, considered mad and endured imprisonment in Bedlam.

  For Hope I drew my inspiration from Miranda Kauffman’s recent book Black Tudors, in which she demonstrates that Early Modern England was a place of greater racial diversity than has long been supposed and that people of colour were not exclusively slaves or servants. Hope represents this largely forgotten cohort.

  These three sisters are every-woman: ordinary, yet extraordinary, each of them outsiders, resisting oppression in their own way and, though the price is high, each of them is in some sense triumphant.

  Acknowledgements

  I have discovered that writing fiction doesn’t become easier with experience and so I am particularly fortunate to be surrounded by a number of brilliant people who have guided me expertly in the creation of this novel. Firstly, I have a huge debt of gratitude to Jillian Taylor, who helped shape The Honey and the Sting from an amorphous mass of disjointed ideas and dealt patiently with me when I threatened to abandon the project altogether. Thank you also to Maxine Hitchcock, and the team at Michael Joseph, my agent, Jane Gregory, and her team at Gregory and Company, all of whom I couldn’t manage without. Special thanks go to Hazel Orme for her hawk-eyed copy-editing, Stephanie Glencross for much-needed early help, Lauren Wakefield for her beautiful cover design and my dear friend, Glyn Reed, who gave me confidence to keep going when I was losing hope.

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  First published 2020

  Copyright © E. C. Fremantle, 2020

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Jacket illustration by Nick Hayes

  Author photograph © JP Masclet

  ISBN: 978-1-405-92015-5

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