Sylvia raises her head. It has begun to snow. Before she quite thinks to coax Frieda from her toy, to lift her to the windowsill to witness the street diffuse and muted through the steady filter of snowfall’s early delirium, stray flakes plinking at the panes; to see lamplight absinthine at the curb where the fragile, six-fold crystals blow weightless through the lamppost’s brilliant cone; to see the gutters banking in a suspicion of white, snow scarving along the ornamental parapets of the houses across the street, the flanks of Primrose Hill smoldering in snow mist, the bare branches of the hawthorn trees tassled with scarlet berries; to see it before it melts away, a mirage—

—Before all this, in a moment that passes for a lifetime, past the pleats of honey-colored silk at Sylvia’s windows, through the petticoats of unhurried snow, she glimpses a future she’s already written, turned and shaken in its globe, the flakes falling calm as a blessing: apple leaves holding out their small, wrinkled palms to her, bees dusted gold and droning. Bulbs aching frozen in her garden beds, gladioli and daffodils and roses stoking spring beneath the soil. Her wintering’s pure dissolve.

37. “The Bee Meeting”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

“The Bee Meeting”

OCTOBER 4, 1962

COURT GREEN

The taxi flashes past the wavy ancient glass of the scullery window set deep in Court Green’s three feet of exterior stone. She almost doesn’t see it, the taxi; doesn’t hear it crunching over the cobbles into the back courtyard over the blast of the faucet, her bare arms soapy and wet to the elbows in dishes, steam rising from the sink. She shuts the water down, cranes her neck, apprehensive, to see.

The taxi, idling, ripples near the stable gate, the high russeting hedge, Ted’s unmistakable silhouette black in the backseat.

Sylvia steps back, wipes her hands on her apron, disarmed. She’s not seen him, not spoken to him since he left her in Connemara. Now, out of nowhere, no warning; he’d told her nothing—

A car door slams, augural. The trunk of the taxi croaks on its hinges.