“Oh,” I said, uncertainly. I’d kept bees now and then, but the relationship hadn’t been in any way ceremonial. “Did he happen to say what sort of blessing the bees might have in mind?”

“Not to me,” she said cheerfully, taking the bloodstained bag from my hand. “But he probably knows. He says he’ll meet you in the garden.”

THE GARDEN STOOD like a small, spiky brown fortress inside its deer-proof palisades. The fence wasn’t proof against everything, though, and as always, I opened the gate cautiously. Once I had caught three huge raccoons debauching themselves amidst the remains of my infant corn; on another the intruder had been a huge eagle, sitting atop my water barrel, wings spread to catch the morning sun. When I opened the door suddenly, the eagle had uttered a shriek nearly as loud as mine before launching himself past my head like a panicked cannonball. And …

A brief, violent shudder went through me as I thought of the beehives in my old garden—knocked over by the flight of a murderer, the scent of honey from the broken combs mingling with crushed leaves and the sweet, butcher-thick smell of spilled blood.

This time, though, the only foreign body inside the fence was John Quincy Myers, tall and ragged as a scarecrow, and looking quite at home among the red-flowered bean vines and sprouting turnips.

“There you be, Missus Fraser!” he said, smiling widely at sight of me. “You’re well come in your time, as the Good Book says.”

“It does?” I had some vague notion that the Bible might include some mention of bees—perhaps John Quincy’s blessing came from the Psalms or something? “Er … Brianna said that I should come and … bless the bees?”

“Fine-lookin’ woman, your daughter,” Myers said, shaking his head in admiration. “Seen precious few women that size, and none of ’em what you’d call handsome. All pretty lively, though. How did she come to wed a preacher? You wouldn’t think a prayin’ man would be able to do right by her—I mean, in the ways of the flesh, as you might—”

“The bees,” I said, somewhat louder. “Do you know what I should be saying to them?”

“Oh, to be sure.” Recalled to the matter at hand, he turned toward the western edge of the garden, where the battered bee skep had been placed on a board atop a rickety stool. To my surprise, he reached into his bulging knapsack and withdrew four shallow pottery bowls made of the soft white glazed porcelain called creamware, which lent a disconcertingly formal note to the occasion.

“For the ants,” he said, handing me the bowls. “Now, there’s a mort o’ folk what keep bees,” he explained. “The Cherokee do, and the Creek and Choctaw and doubtless some kinds of Indian I don’t know the names of, too. But there’s the Moravians, down to Salem—that’s where I got the ant bowls and the skep. And they got their own ways, too.”