By this time the atmosphere in the house is awful, full of her sweat, and she knows she must air it but first she needs to reclaim her and her husband’s room fully. She nudges it open with her foot, stands in the doorway. There are boot marks to be polished out of the walls, a stray blond hair on the sheets of the bed. She stops herself from getting down on her hands and knees and feeling the floor for Eren’s black hair. She must not be wanton. Up, she tells herself, up and finish.

She sweeps the floor and finds a snapped string from his lute, laid flush against the wall, so perfectly hidden it could be that he left it there for her to find. She loops it around and around her finger, watching the skin turn from red to white, to paler white, bone yellow.

Only when she can bite the tip and feel nothing does she release it, allowing the pain to rush back. She throws the string on the fire and at last, as Ida’s baby starts to cry, throws wide the door.

Eighteen

Once the baby, dogs and chickens are fed, she goes to the bees.

She decides to make it holy. Now Eren is gone she is determined all her thoughts of him will be too, all the unclean grime swept out of her, made pure again for Henne’s return.

The sacred animals are at work. Henne told her how they are the only animal come unchanged from Eden, how Eve and Adam before their sin would have seen such creatures and tasted honey from their hives. She imagines herself a saint, then, to match them. Saints must suffer, and hasn’t she?

Taking the stick of ash and rosemary, she begins to smoke the apiary, walking the length of the skep yard until the whole world hums. She clears the damaged hives, rights the skeps. Her fingers cramp with care. She works slowly on each of the hives in turn, attending to it as a single rosary bead, turning the combs over in her hand, the wax bucket settled on the soil at her feet, touching each hive’s honey to her lips, soft as a prayer. With each exhale, she breathes out thoughts of Eren, casts them aside.

Her thoughts turn to Henne. Her husband has changed shape to her in his absence, in her fresh and terrible knowledge. He flickers at the edges, his passive solidity grown jagged. Must she love him, when he returns from his mission in Heidelberg? If they lose the bees, and she is left to be only his wife – she stops herself. This will not be the last time she tends them. For all his sins, his cruelties, Henne loves the bees too. Loves the child inside her. If she is to be a good mother, she must be a good wife. If Ida could, to such a man as Plater, Lisbet can go through the motions, at least.