‘Don’t worry,’ said Henne, his voice a hum low as the bees, ‘just breathe.’

She wanted to say it is hard in the mask, beneath the sun, but instead she did as he told her.

‘From here,’ he said, and touched her just beneath her breasts, where her belly was just starting to swell. His hand was hot and close and large. She felt she would disintegrate beneath it, like honey in water.

As he unlatched the clasps, bees came to settle on his hands, but he kept his actions slow, in time with the tide of his breath. She watched for signs of swarming, but it was as he said: they didn’t mind him at all. He lifted out the comb, dripping with honey and precious wax.

‘It is not yet full,’ he said. ‘But in a few days it will be. Then you’ll need to brush off any bees, like this—’ He ran a finger flush along the comb, the dislodged bees landing on his bare fingers and taking off again, landing and at last returning to the hive. ‘And then you take the combs inside.’

Henne replaced the comb, the wooden section he’d removed. He did up the clasps and lifted the wickerwork back over the hive.

‘Your turn. Slow.’

Henne caught her about the waist. She felt him breathing against her nape, his heartbeat between her shoulder-blades, and joined her breath with his. She would do it perfectly, she decided, she would give him cause to be proud.

She lifted the cone, then moved slowly to the back of the hive, flexing her hands in their too-large gloves. Even through the truncation of the wicker the bees showed gold and black and solid. She flicked open the fingernail-sized clasps, biting down on her lip to remind herself to be slow, to not fumble and drop the wooden segment that peeled off into her hands.

The motion brought her down level with the inner workings of the hive. It looked like a diseased body, the malignant clumps of black bees like tortured growths, the sweet reek of honey and wax filling her nostrils. Several bees alighted on the wicker, and she imagined them plunging their stingers into her eyelids, leaving them puckered as the man Henne once told her about.

A dark shape washed over her face, and it took her a moment to realise it was Henne’s hand, brushing aside the gathering bees.

‘They like your pulse, schatzi. We’ll make a beekeeper of you yet.’

He was right. Now it is easy as breath, easier than holding her husband. She may not be a good wife, a good daughter, a mother to living children, but this she has. The bees dance about her hands, their buzzing louder than her heart.

She wipes them gently from her skin and lifts the skep slowly, turning it so the combs are revealed, black with bees. She washes the rosemary smoke over them like a priest in church, and the bees fly from the combs as prayers to Heaven.