The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [25]
I was surprised, as this was the longest speech I had ever heard him deliver, but assured him that I intended to spend many hours in the open air. At the train station I caught a glance of myself in a mirror and could see what he meant. I had not realised how drawn I was look-ing, and the purple smudges under my eyes troubled me.
The next morning the alien sounds of silence and bird song woke me early. I pulled on my oldest work clothes and a pair of new boots, added heavy gloves and a woolly hat against the chill March morning, and went to find Patrick. Patrick Mason was a large, slow-moving, phlegmatic Sussex farmer of fifty-two with hands like something grown from the earth and a nose that changed direction three times. He had managed the farm since before my parents had married, had in fact run with my mother as a child (he three years older) through the fields he now tended, had, I think, been more than half in love with her all his life. Certainly he worshipped her as his Lady. When his wife died and left him to finish raising their six children, only his salary as manager made it possible to keep the family intact. The day his youngest reached eighteen, Patrick divided his land and came to live on the farm I now owned. In most ways this was more his land than mine, an atti-tude both of us held and considered only right, and his loyalty to his adoptive home was absolute, if he was unwilling to suffer any nonsense from the legal owner.
Up until now my sporadic attempts to help out with the myriad farmyard tasks had been met with the same polite disbelief with which the peasants at Versailles must have greeted Marie Antoinette’s milk-maid fantasies. I was the owner, and if I wanted to push matters he could not actually stop me from dirtying my hands, but other than the seasonal necessity of the wartime harvest (which obviously pained him) My Lady’s Daughter was taken to be above such things. He ran the farm to his liking, I lived there and occasionally wandered down from the main house to chat, but neither he nor I would have thought of giving me a say in how things were run. This morning that was about to change.
I trudged down the hill to the main barn, my breath smoking around my ears in the clear, weak winter sunshine, and called his name. The voice that answered led me through to the back, where I found him mucking out a stall.
“Morning, Patrick.”
“Welcome back, Miss Mary.” I had long ago forbidden greater for-mality, and he in turn refused greater familiarity, so the compromise was Miss and my first name.
“Thank you, it’s good to be back. Patrick, I need your help.”
“Surely, Miss Mary. Can it wait until I’ve finished this?”
“Oh, I don’t want to interrupt. I want you to give me something to do.”
“Something to do?” He looked puzzled.
“Yes. Patrick, I’ve spent the last six months sitting in a chair with a book in my hands, and if I don’t get back to using my muscles, they’ll forget how to function altogether. I need you to tell me what needs do-ing around here. Where can I start? Shall I finish that stall for you?”
Patrick hurriedly held the muck-rake out of my reach and blocked my entrance to the stall.
“No, Miss, I’ll finish this. What is it you’d like to do?”
“Whatever needs doing,” I said in no uncertain terms, to let him know I meant business.
“Well . . .” His eyes looked about desperately and lit on a broom. “Do you want to sweep? The wood shavings in the workshop want clearing up.”
“Right.” I seized the big broom, and ten minutes later he came into the workshop to find me furiously raising a cloud of dust and wood par-ticles that settled softly onto every surface.
“Miss Mary, oh, well, that’s too fast. I mean, do you think you could get the stuff out the door before you fling it in the air?”
“What do you mean? Oh, I see, here, I’ll just sweep it off of there.”
I took the broom and made a wild sweep along the workbench, and an edge of the unwieldy head sent a tray of