‘Yes, we’re both married.’
Grace was sure she sensed a heaviness in those words. ‘Yes, isn’t it lovely,’ she replied, ashamed that her voice sounded flat.
He looked at her with affection, as if her naïvety amused him. ‘So, tell me what to do. I’m your assistant now. The ladder? I suppose there’s no stopping you scaling it like a squirrel.’
‘Yes, the ladder. I need to climb it to get to the bees.’
‘Then I’ll hold it for you so it doesn’t wobble. Nothing worse than a wobbly ladder when one’s at the top of it.’ He chuckled and bent down to lift it off the grass. Once he had set it securely against the wall of the house, as near to the bees as possible without disturbing them, he turned to Grace triumphantly. ‘How’s this for service?’
‘It’s perfect.’
‘Are you going to climb with that basket – or skep, as you call it? Shouldn’t I hold it for you until you’ve reached the top?’
‘I can manage, thank you.’ With that she stepped closer and put her foot on the first rung. Rufus was right beside her now. She could smell the lime scent of his cologne and the tobacco on his breath.
‘Do be careful up there,’ he said.
She began to climb. Rufus held the bottom of the ladder and watched her as she ascended towards the ball of sleeping bees. ‘Are you there yet?’ he asked. ‘Don’t fall, I can’t promise I’d catch you, though I’d try my damnedest.’ When she reached the bees, she steadied herself, placed the basket beneath them, then swept them deftly off the wall with the other hand. Rufus watched her take both hands off the ladder and held onto the bottom of it with all his strength. ‘Grace, you’re making me very uneasy down here. What the devil is Mr Heath doing, leaving you to risk your life like this? Hurry up and come down. I insist. I won’t have you up there a minute longer.’
When Grace reached the bottom she was laughing so much that her stomach was hurting.
‘What are you laughing at?’ he asked indignantly.
‘You,’ she replied. ‘You were going on and on . . .’ She laughed again.
‘Well, you worried me, that’s all.’ He watched her put the lid on the basket. ‘Did you get them all?’
‘All of them.’ She took off her hat. ‘Thank you, Lord Melville.’
‘Rufus. Dear God, we know each other well enough to use our first names. I told you to call me Rufus six years ago. Besides, I can’t call you Mrs Valentine. That’s absurd. I’ve just saved your life.’ Now he smiled with her. ‘You’re mocking me, Grace.’
‘You should hear yourself.’
‘I’m showing you concern. You should be grateful.’
‘I am,
very
grateful. You’ve made my day.’ He couldn’t know how true that was. They both laughed together.
‘Come, I’ll drive you home.’
‘Hadn’t you better tell someone where you’re going?’
‘Oh, they’ll be drinking champagne and discussing cows for a good while yet. Besides, I told Johnson I was coming out to help with the bees.’ He put his hand in the small of her back and guided her through the garden.
‘There’s something wonderfully alluring about the night, don’t you think?’ He inhaled the air enthusiastically. ‘All those little animals scurrying about. One doesn’t know how many pairs of eyes are watching from the bushes. Foxes, badgers, rabbits, pheasants, mice? I like the stars and the blue velvet sky. It excites me with its sense of danger and romance.’
‘I like it too,’ she agreed. ‘Most people are frightened of the dark.’
‘But not you and me, Grace. I bet you love the smells and sounds that only come out at night. Georgie has to sleep with the light on in the corridor. I find that very tiresome as I love to sleep with all the lights off and the curtains and windows wide open so I can experience the night in all its glory.’ He chuckled softly. ‘You and I are creatures of the night, perhaps. Unique in our delight and wonder.’
‘It
is
very mysterious,’ she agreed, intoxicated by the deep resonance of his voice. It was soft and granular, like fudge.
‘If I didn’t have to get back for dinner and you didn’t have to get back to Freddie, I’d invite you to sit on a bench with me and listen to the rustlings of the garden.’
‘I’d have liked that,’ she said.
‘I swear that one can hear the trees breathing. In the darkness our hearing is more acute because our eyes can’t see and our ears have to work so much harder. One can hear the garden breathing, in and out, in and out, and it’s the most intriguing sound in the world.’
‘Truly? Can you really hear the garden breathing?’
‘I tell you it’s true, Grace. Perhaps one night, if we find ourselves alone in this little paradise, I’ll show you.’
They reached the car at the front of the house and Rufus placed the basket carefully on the back seat. ‘I hope they don’t all wake up with the roar of the engine and swarm the car,’ he said.
‘They won’t,’ she replied. ‘They’re very dozy, and anyway, the lid is on firmly.’ He opened the passenger door and she climbed in. Once again she savoured the smell of leather and polish, barely daring to believe that she was alone with Rufus and that he was promising to show her the gardens at night.
‘So what will you do with the bees when you get them home?’ he asked, climbing in beside her.
‘I’ll put them into a new hive.’
‘Did you build it especially?’
‘No, Dad had a few hives he wasn’t using so I chose one of those. I’m hoping they’ll like it and start producing honey.’
‘And it’ll arrive in jars on our breakfast table for our toast and tea.’ He sighed and stared at the road ahead. ‘I hope Freddie knows how lucky he is.’
‘I’m sure he does,’ she replied, then added hastily, ‘And I’m very lucky, too.’
‘Of course you are. I’m so pleased, because you’re a treasure, Grace. I hope you don’t mind me telling you that. It’s rather forward of me, I know, but I’ve never been very good at keeping things to myself. You’re a very special girl. I saw it when you were only a child and that quality hasn’t gone; in fact, it’s blossomed. You’ve grown into a very special
woman
and I hope Freddie sees it and appreciates it and cherishes it, because you deserve to be cherished.’
Grace had gone very hot. Her face burned and her chest was like a furnace inside her protective suit. ‘Oh, Freddie’s very loving,’ she replied, wishing he’d talk about something else.
‘I’ve embarrassed you. I’m sorry,’ he said suddenly. ‘It was wrong of me to assume that Freddie hasn’t recognized your qualities. Of course he has. He’d be blind not to. Tell me, will he help you put the bees in their new hive or can you manage on your own?’
‘I can manage on my own.’
‘Do you just pour them in like gravel?’
‘Yes.’ She giggled at his simile. Rufus had a funny way of describing things.
‘They’ll be rather disorientated when they wake up in the morning.’
‘I suspect they will. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. As long as the queen is there, they’ll know exactly what to do.’
Rufus drew up in front of her cottage. The lights were on but Freddie wasn’t home, because his bicycle wasn’t in its usual place. Grace suspected that he was still at the pub and was relieved, because she knew he’d feel jealous if he saw that Rufus had driven her home.
‘I shall send Lemon with your bicycle tomorrow.’
‘Don’t worry, I can walk round and pick it up.’
‘Why should you? If I was still going to be at home I’d insist you came to collect it, just so that I could talk to you again. But I’m leaving early in the morning for Bovington.’
Grace felt a sense of dread building in her chest. She thought of the impending war and his part in it. She wanted to tell him to be careful, but she wasn’t his wife. She had no right to tell him anything at all. ‘Thank you for driving me home,’ she said instead.
‘No, thank
you
for removing the bees. We shall all sleep better tonight knowing that Georgie is happy.’ He smiled wistfully and climbed out of the motor car. He helped her carry the basket to the hives. ‘I’d like to watch you do this, but I fear I shall be late for dinner.’
‘Perhaps you can tell your mother and Lady Georgina that if they are at all worried about looking after animals, I’d be very happy to help.’
‘I will tell them,’ he said firmly. ‘That should put an end to their quarrelling.’
He gazed at her for a long moment. Only the darkness filled the gap between them, and it was thrilling and mysterious. Grace forgot to breathe. The weight of his stare was almost unbearable. ‘Goodnight, Little Bee,’ he said at last.
‘Goodnight, Rufus.’
Suddenly he was gone, and the garden seemed to shrink and cool until it was quiet and empty again. She took a deep breath and fought the longing that now crept over her with its sharp and ever-tightening grip. She was married. It was wrong to think of Rufus in this way; it was even worse to love him. But once she had emptied the bees into the hive and replaced the lid she stood very still and tried to hear the whispering breath of the garden at night.
Chapter 19
The bees took to their new home as Grace had hoped they would. She sat watching them, remembering her evening with Rufus, replaying their conversation over and over until she could hear the deep timbre of his voice as if he were sitting right beside her. She envisaged the endearing way he hunched his shoulders when he chuckled, a sheepish expression softening his finely chiselled face, and found a surprising vulnerability there that she hadn’t noticed before. That moment by the ladder, when they had laughed together at his concern, had somehow brought him down to her level. He was no longer the lofty aristocrat on a pedestal, but a man who, for reasons she couldn’t understand, cared about her.
In the evenings, while Freddie was at the pub with his father and friends, she began to make Rufus a blue silk lavender bag to help him sleep at night. She would have liked to embroider an
R
on the front, but she feared Freddie might find it. So she sewed a picture of a bee instead. She justified her project by telling herself that it was merely a way of thanking him for the very generous flowers he had sent her on her wedding day. There was no reason to feel guilty. She wasn’t betraying Freddie; she was simply making a gift for a friend.
After the headiness of that evening Grace settled once more into married life and tried to focus on her husband and her duty as a wife. She took up Mr Heath’s offer of gardening lessons, but every time she arrived at the Hall Rufus’s motor car was absent. She couldn’t help hoping he would appear around the corner as he had that evening with the bee swarm, but he never did. Instead, she occasionally saw Lady Georgina on the terrace with her mother-in-law, Lady Penselwood, and well-dressed women in pale sun hats who had come to stay. Their laughter resounded across the lawn as Johnson and the other servants brought them drinks and delicious-looking things to eat. Grace was invisible to those ladies as she trailed Mr Heath in a pair of brown dungarees with her hair tied up in a scarf. But once, when she happened to be helping him in the herbaceous border near the house, she looked up to see Lady Georgina staring at her, a cigarette smoking in its ebony holder a few inches from her crimson lips, a frown creasing the delicate white skin between her eyebrows. Grace dropped her eyes into the alchemilla mollis but she could feel the woman’s gaze upon her back as if it were burning through her clothes. She wondered feverishly whether Lady Georgina had minded her husband driving her back with the bees, or had she perhaps overheard them talking as she scaled the ladder? As her mind swirled with possibilities she wasn’t listening to a word Mr Heath was telling her. Eventually the old man turned to her and smiled. ‘What’s playing on your mind, Grace, because you’re miles away?’
June slipped into July and Freddie’s days stretched into long evenings in the fields as he brought in the wheat and barley, returning late covered with dust and smelling of sweat. He was never too tired to ask her about her day and to listen to her stories as she served him supper in the kitchen. Sometimes, when it was very warm, they took their plates outside and ate in the garden, and Freddie would take her hand and reminisce. He loved more than anything to remember the first time he had kissed her down by the river.
The light grew mellow and Grace wondered whether this would be the last summer of life as she knew it. War was now certain. Freddie had joined the Dorset Yeomanry; Mrs Emerson told her that Rufus had followed in his father’s footsteps and joined a tank regiment with the Blues & Royals. The men were no longer
playing
soldiers, they really
were
soldiers, and many would sacrifice their lives in a war which was only too real. She tried not to think about it, but when she went to check on the hives and all she could hear was the gentle knocking of a woodpecker, the light tweeting of finches and blue tits and the melodious song of the blackbird, her heart was filled with sadness for all that might be lost. From the serene beauty of her garden she looked to a horizon of darkness and death with a terrible dread. War was approaching, and like a mighty cyclone it would sweep away everything she loved.
On 3rd September Britain declared war on Germany. Grace huddled around the wireless with Freddie, May, Michael, Josephine and the locals in the Fox and Goose. It was better to hear it all together in the pub where they could seek comfort and support from each other. Grace ran her eyes over the rosy faces and feverish eyes of the young men, who were whipped into a state of patriotic fever and indignation at the audacity of Adolf Hitler. But she didn’t see adventure and excitement as they did. All she could see was certain death and the misery of those, like her, who’d be left behind. She looked over to May and saw that she was crying.
When Grace said goodbye to Freddie she held him tightly, hoping that her fierce embrace would somehow make up for the lavender bag and her affection for Rufus. She closed her eyes and felt the tears squeezing through her eyelashes and onto his jacket, and silently asked God to forgive her and to preserve her darling Freddie, whose love she didn’t deserve. Freddie kissed her passionately, but his eyes gleamed with excitement and her weeping only made him more determined to prove himself on the battlefield and return to her a hero – a hero who would think nothing of a bee sting.