Within a few minutes the first scatter of bees arrived. Cassie said nothing, though she smiled at Peyton as if they had wagered a bet on something and she was certain now of winning. “Take out your watch,” she said. She poured another dollop of molasses onto the paper and then opened the metal container, carefully shaking what looked to Peyton like some sort of red pepper or tiny metal filings onto the paper around the molasses.
Two fat bees landed on the paper and wandered about in skewed circles. When they lifted away, their bellies were red as a sunset. “Check the time,” Cassie said. She stood to watch the bees hover into the woods, using the compass to note their direction. Then she sat back beside him without a word. Within four minutes the first reddened bee returned to the paper. The second was right behind it.
“Now,” she said. She tilted her head and squinted into the sunlight as if making an intricate mathematical calculation. “That would be somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty yards, is my guess.” She stood and took the leather gloves and empty jar. They had carried a pouch of water from Charles Brook and Cassie told Peyton to put it on to boil for tea. “With any luck I’ll be back in twenty minutes or so.”
He was just beginning to realize what she was about. “You’ll never find it in there, Cassie,” he said.
She was sighting with the compass and didn’t look back over her shoulder. She marched off through the field, her habitual limp exaggerated over the rough rolling ground, and she disappeared into the trees without another word. Peyton set the water to boil and stared into it as it began to bubble at the base of the pot. He fished out the bag of tea and as soon as he had a full rolling boil he dropped in a handful of the leaves, then took the pot off the flame and set it beside the fire. He looked off in the direction she had gone.
“That’ll be froze over by the time she gets back,” he said to himself. He checked his watch. Seventeen minutes. Nineteen.
There was a sheen of sweat on Cassie’s face when she got back to the fire. She carried the heavy gloves under her arm and held the jar before her, filled nearly to the brim with honey and wax.
“I had to climb the tree a ways,” she said. There were half a dozen startling bright welts swelling on her neck and face.
“You’ve been stung,” Peyton said.
“Pour us a mug.”
He strained tea into tin cups and Cassie heaped a spoonful of wild honey into each. She passed Peyton one and lifted the other in toast. They drank together and even through the scalding heat they could taste the clear, rich sweetness.
“Where did you learn to do this?”
“My father took me out when I was a girl,” she said. “We spent Saturday afternoons tramping around the backcountry above St. John’s. He taught me —” She looked shyly across at Peyton. She’d barely spoken of her family since coming north with John Senior and she seemed to regret it coming up. “He taught me to swim, to fire a rifle. He taught me this,” she said, lifting the jar of honey. “It was this made my mother fall in love with him, my father told me. He took her off into the valley when she was not much above a girl and he’d mine honey from the woods this way.” She shook her head. “Mother always said falling in love with my father was the biggest mistake of her life.”
“How old are you, Cassie?” Peyton asked.
She watched him slyly from the corner of her eye, as if she was assessing him anew. “Why that is very forward of you, John Peyton. I am twenty-four years old.”
He turned his face to the sky and squinted against the sun as she had, making several quick calculations in his head.
“Is that older or younger than you expected?”
“Why did your mother say falling in love with your father was a mistake?”
Cassie looked off towards the border of trees. “My father drank a great deal. He squandered money, he refused to set foot in a church.” For the first time since coming to the northeast shore she spoke of the public house her father owned, one of the dozens of grog shops near the harbour where fishermen and sailors drank away their season’s earnings. She told Peyton the tavern’s motto: Drunk for a Penny. Dead drunk for tuppence. Free Straw. The fishermen drank dark Jamaican rum as long as they could afford it, then callibogus or king calli, a concoction of spruce beer mixed with rum or gin or a locally stilled alcohol that was so harsh and potent it could be set alight and burned like a candle. Men slept on the straw against the walls and urinated in their clothes, arguments and fistfights spilled out the door into the streets. Two or three impoverished prostitutes drifted from table to table in the poor light.