He seldom came to the garden and was struck at once by the early-autumn scent of it, so different from the pure tang of the woods. The air smelled of fresh-dug earth and composted manure, the bitter scent of turnip tops and cabbages and pungent onions, with through it all a wafting smell of late flowers, stronger than the sweet, heady scents of high summer, with faint odors of resin and anise.

Claire had planted sunflowers, thick against one wall of the palisades, and at the sunflowers’ feet, coneflowers—he could tell those, they stuck up in the middle—and goldenrod, and a lot of other flowers he couldn’t name, but liked. There were pretty purple ones he thought were cosmos, with tiny white-and-yellow butterflies flitting through them, and some that were red and yellow; he’d have to ask her.

“For the bees,” she’d said, telling everyone about them at dinner.

The bees were enjoying themselves now among the flowers; he could hear their hum, like the vibration of a loose, plucked string.

“Hey,” he said to them, suddenly but softly. “I’ve had a letter from Davy Caldwell. I think it’s on. I think—I hope—I’m going to be ordained. A Minister of Word and Sacrament, that’s what they—we—call it. Presbyterians, I mean,” he added, assuming that these might be Catholic bees and thus unfamiliar.

He didn’t suppose that “ordained” meant anything to a bee. They all hatched out of their wax cells with an unshakable sense of their purpose in life, after all; no need of decision or ceremony. It felt good to say it out loud, though.

“Ordained,” he repeated. “I’ll be going to Charles Town, to ease the way. Ye like to know things like that, Claire says. Brianna and the kids are going, too; they’d like to see the ocean, walk barefoot on the beach.” If there aren’t a lot of British warships floating in the water … “And then we’ll go on to Savannah. Brianna’s going to paint someone’s portrait.”

The sound of children yelling and laughing down by the creek came to him faintly, as soothing as the hum of the bees, and he felt as though he could stand here forever, in a state of happy peace.

Then there was a sudden, much louder screech, and he forgot peace instantly. He leapt to his feet, searching for the direction of the scream, heard it again, and shot out of the garden as though the sound had been a fork jabbed into his back.

He saw it at once as he burst through the trees onto the creek bank—a square of white, floating, swirling, in the middle of the creek. The wind had maybe taken it—

But before he could reach the edge of the stream, Cyrus’s long body launched itself from the opposite shore and crashed into the water, arm outstretched, and he saw Cyrus’s enormous hand close on the sodden paper in the instant before both were submerged.