Of all her brothers and sisters, Nettle came most often in those early years. I could tell she longed to hold her sister, but Bee reacted to her touch much as she did to mine, and so Nettle had to be content with being beside her sister but unable to tend to her needs.
Very late one night as I left my private study, my route took me past the door of Bee’s nursery. I saw a light burning through the half-open door and paused, thinking perhaps Bee had taken sick and Molly was sitting up with her. But as I peered in I saw not Molly but Nettle sitting by her sister’s bed, looking down at her with a face of tragic wistfulness. She was speaking softly. “For years, I dreamed of a sister. Someone to share dreams with, to braid each other’s hair and tease about boys and take long walks with me. I thought I would teach you to dance and we would have secrets and cook together late at night when everyone else was asleep. And here you are, at last. But we will have none of that, will we? Yet this I will promise you, little Bee. No matter what happens to our parents, I will always care for you.” And then my Nettle lowered her face into her hands and wept. I knew then that she mourned for the sister she had imagined, just as I still longed for the perfect little girl I had dreamed we would have. I had no comfort for either of us, and I left that scene silently.
Since her birth, Bee had accompanied Molly everywhere, in a sling or riding on Molly’s hip or tottering along behind her. Sometimes I wondered if she feared to leave the child alone. When Molly went about her regular tasks at Withywoods, from supervising the servants to managing her own hives, honey, and candlemaking, tasks she still seemed to enjoy, Bee was with her, watching and listening. Now that the babe had discovered she could make sounds, Molly redoubled her efforts with her. She did not speak in the babyish singsong I’d hear the servants use on the rare occasions when they spoke to Bee. Instead Molly earnestly explained every aspect of her work as if Bee might one day need to know how to smoke a hive or strain hot wax for candles or polish silver or make a bed. And Bee, in her simple way, mirrored Molly’s earnestness, peering at what she was shown and earnestly gabbling back at her. My most unnerving experience was when I went to seek Molly one summer day and found her tending her hives. Over our years I’d become accustomed to Molly’s calm acceptance that her bees might blanket her arms in the course of her beekeeping. What I did not expect was to see small Bee standing beside her mother, holding a bucket and cloaked in bees. The child was smiling beatifically, her eyes almost closed. Every now and then she would giggle and give a tiny wiggle as if the fuzzy creatures had tickled her. “Molly,” I said in a soft warning voice, for my lady was so intent on her tasks that I was not sure she had seen what was happening to our child.
She turned slowly, ever mindful of her buzzing charges.
“The baby,” I said with quiet urgency. “The bees have her.”
Molly looked down and behind her. A slow smile appeared on her face. “Bee! Are you tending the hives with me?”
Our little daughter looked up and babbled something to her. Molly laughed. “She’s fine, dear. Not scared at all.”
But I was. “Bee. Come away. Come to Papa,” I coaxed her. She turned and looked past me. She never willingly met my eyes. She babbled at her mother again.
“She’s fine, dear. She says you are worried because you don’t know the bees like she and I do. Go along. We’ll be along presently.”
And so I’d left them, and spent an anxious hour in my study. I wondered if my child were Witted, and if were possible for a Witted child to bond to a hive of bees. Don’t be ridiculous, the wolf in me snorted. And insisted that if it were so, he would have sensed it. I could only hope so.