The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [30]
“This is very pretty,” he remarked.
“I have the others, at home,” she informed him. “That’s in London.”
“You only brought the one?”
“Mary brought it. She found it where I’d left it, at a friend of my Mama’s.”
“That was thoughtful of Mary.”
“Papa bought it for me in Shanghai, before we left. He gave it to me so I would have a reason to remember how beautiful the city was. But I don’t, really.”
“Still, it was a nice thought.”
“Mr Robert, do you think the baby deer will come out? Or should we give his serving to the bunny?”
Later that afternoon: I was now on a settee before the fireplace, while Estelle helped prepare supper, scrubbing potatoes while our host kneaded bread on a board.
“There’s a lot of potatoes,” she said in mild complaint.
“You can stop if you’re tired.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Sometimes when I’m doing a tedious job, I keep myself busy by singing.”
“I like to sing.”
“I thought you might. Do you want to sing something for me?”
She happily launched into a merry song with Chinese words. Despite the foreign tonality of the melody, her voice was pure and precise, skipping up the half tones without missing a one. At the end, Goodman clapped in an explosion of flour. I joined him, although the impact reverberated through my skull.
“Ha!” he laughed. “That was very fine. You must teach it to me one day.”
“You sing now,” she ordered.
Perhaps the task at hand or the demands of the kneading rhythm brought the song to mind: Goodman threw back his head and, in a rich and unexpected baritone, began to sing.
There were three men came from the west their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die.
I stirred and tried to catch his eye, but he was well launched into the song and beat his bread dough with gusto. I subsided; surely the child was too young to understand the words?
It is a rousing tune, to be sure, and he did skip over the more adult verses—it is a very old song, and whether it is a paean to fertility sacrifice, an evocation of Christian Transubstantiation, or simply a drinking song, John Barleycorn is put through the wringer—hacked, beaten, ploughed, sowed, and buried—before he is reborn as beer, and finally sprouts up anew. Goodman sang and thumped his bread, raising a fine mist of flour in the room.
To my relief, when the song ended, Estelle did not enquire into the significance of the words. She merely demanded another. Goodman started “Frère Jacques.” Instantly, she joined him. In French to his English, the high child’s voice and the man’s baritone wound around each other, creating sweet harmony from an unlikely cottage in a Lake District clearing.
During the afternoon, he juggled for her, four round oak galls, then threw himself into a game of hide-and-seek that had us both grinning with Estelle’s infectious giggles. Later, they went out to fetch the day’s eggs from the hen-house, stopping on the way to examine a flower of some kind.
“Let Nature be your teacher,” Goodman said—or rather, pronounced.
“I don’t go to school yet,” Estelle told him.
“It is never too early to have a teacher. Or too late,” he said, with a note of surprise.
“How is Nature a teacher? Does she stand in front of a classroom with a stick?”
“I believe Mr Wordsworth merely meant that we can learn much from the world around us.”
“Is Mr Wordsworth a friend of yours?”
“We have many friends in common, Mr Wordsworth and I. Such as the hedgehog you shall see this evening.”
Their voices trailed off then, in the direction of the hen-house.
* * *
Dusk. The mouth-watering odour of baking wheat permeated the universe, and although I had been up and around, I was again on the settee in front of the fire. Estelle and Goodman were seated side by side in the open doorway, waiting for a hedgehog to emerge after a saucer of milk. Every so often he reared back his head to look at her; he seemed fascinated by the shape of her eyes.
“There it is!” Estelle squeaked.
“Shh, don’t frighten him. Not to worry, he’ll come