“I—I spent two days in the woods, sir. Not wanting to leave Ma and the little ones and not knowin’ what else to do. My brother Georgie snuck some food to me, and then finally Ma got out long enough to bring me my things—” She nodded at the forlorn little sack on the floor at her feet. “She said I should come to you. You were so kind and good to us, maybe …” She stopped and swallowed, hard.
“So I came,” she concluded, in a very small voice. She sat with her head bent. The room had grown dark by now, and the firelight flickered softly over her, as though the warmth reached out to her.
Fanny got up suddenly, came over to Agnes, and squatted down in front of her. She took Agnes’s hand in both of hers and patted it.
“Can you cook?” she asked hopefully.
66
Diaspora
I SNIPPED SEVERAL SMALL chunks of sugar off one of the loaves Jamie had brought back from Salisbury and carried them up to the garden, wrapped in my handkerchief. Long before I reached the garden itself, bees began to appear, circling me in interest.
“Just how far away can you smell it?” I asked. “Be patient; you’ll get your snack in a minute.” There were still flowers blooming on the mountain—asters, stonecrop, goldenrod, fall crocuses, Joe-Pye weed—but there were also caterpillars in a greater abundance than I was accustomed to, and the ones called woolly bears were noticeably larger and woolier than usual; sure sign of a hard winter, according to John Quincy, who ought to know. I wanted to make sure the bees would have enough honey to keep them ’til spring, so I augmented their diet with a treat of sliced fruit or sugar-water every few days.
Inside the garden—with the gate carefully closed against intrusions by deer or raccoons—I dipped water from the barrel with the shallow bowl I kept there and crumbled the sugar into it, stirring it with my finger. Bees at once lighted on the bowl, my clothes, the high stool I used as a workbench, and on my hand, their feet tickling with busy interest.
“Do you mind?” I said, shaking them off and carefully brushing a few strays from my face. I had had the forethought to wrap my hair in a cloth, having more than once had the unnerving experience of trying to disentangle a panicked bee from the floating strands.
“All right, then,” I said, putting down the dish of sugar-water with a sense of relief. “Go to it!” They didn’t need encouragement; bees were already clustered shoulder-to-shoulder on the rim of the dish, greedily sucking, then flying back to their hives—I had eight now, in the garden, and three more in the woods, all thriving—to be instantly supplanted by more.
“Well, then.” I stood back and watched them for a moment, with a sense of satisfaction. The thrum of their wings was a low, pleasant sound and I relaxed into the sense of the garden in early autumn, cool-leaved and pungent with the sharp scents of turnips, potato vines, and turned earth. I’d dug a deep trench for the spring peas along one side of the garden, one for pole beans on the other; Jamie or one of the girls would need to carry up a few baskets of manure for me to mix with the earth before filling them, so it could decay peacefully over the winter. A few late tomatoes glowed in the shadow of the northeast corner, and I went to pick whatever might be usable off the slug-tattered plants; they wouldn’t last much longer.
“So,” I said to a bee that had obligingly accompanied me to the tomato patch, “you already know about Roger and Bree and the children—I imagine you could smell the sauerkraut for miles. I hope they’ve made it to Charles Town by now and that things are all right between Germain and his family. I don’t think I told you about Rachel and Ian, though—they’ve gone off with Jenny—you know her, she was smelling like hickory nuts, goat’s milk, and bannocks the last time I saw her—to New York.
“Yes, that is a long way,” I continued, unrolling the small mat of woven reeds that I knelt on for weeding. “The only good thing is that there won’t be any more fighting up north—it’s all coming down here. But there was fighting up there, so they’ve gone to see Ian’s ex-wife and make sure that she and her children are all right. Rachel’s not happy about that, naturally, but her inner light obviously sees that Ian has to go, and so she’s going with him. With the baby,” I added, with a twinge of apprehension.
“Anyway, it’s quite the little diaspora—I suppose you’ll know what that is; you do it every day, don’t you?” But then you come back at the end of the day, I thought.