The Vampire’s Beekeeper

15 min read · Vampire romance · Free, complete, 18+

The bees got to Hazel Pardoe’s garden about sixteen hours before the vampire did, which was long enough for her to have them in a skep and the law on her side.

She found them at half past seven on a morning in the middle of May, hanging from the low branch of the oak at the bottom of the garden: a cluster the size of a rugby ball, dark and close, with a hum she felt in her breastbone. She was forty-one. She had kept bees for seven years, since the spring she walked out of a litigation practice in the City with a doctor’s letter and no plan, and she knew a swarm when she saw one. A swarm in May is worth a load of hay.

This one was not like any she had taken. The bees were bigger than her own and nearly black, and they hung very still. A swarm leaves home gorged on honey and too full to bother anybody; these were gentler than that. They were waiting, and she had the odd idea that they were waiting for the sun to go in.

It went on shining. At eleven she held the skep under the branch and gave the branch one hard knock, and the cluster dropped into the straw with the sound of a sack of wet sand. She turned the skep over on a sheet with a stone under the rim, and inside five minutes the bees at the gap were standing with their tails in the air, fanning, calling the others in. So the queen was inside. She wrote it in her hive record (Swarm, oak, very dark, very quiet. Origin unknown.) and went in to make tea.

Origin unknown was a lawyer’s answer. The oak grew on the far side of the wall, in the grounds of Marchwood House, where old Mr Ockenden had kept bees, always at noon, and never once let her through the holly to see them. He had died three years ago, at ninety. The house behind the holly had never opened its shutters.

At dusk she ran the swarm in the old way: a board propped against the entrance of an empty hive, a white sheet over the board, and the bees tipped out at the bottom so that they would walk uphill into the dark. Ordinary bees went up slowly, like a congregation leaving church. These went up as the light went, quick and wide awake, and she was kneeling with a torch in her teeth, looking for the queen, when somebody on the other side of the wall said, “Those are my bees.”

---

The Law of Swarms

He stood where the wall dipped lowest, in a long coat that was too warm for May and not new in any century she could name. Tall, pale, a narrow face made of angles. He looked about thirty-five and badly fed, and he was watching the swarm go in with the fond, mortified face of a parent whose children have walked into the wrong house at a party.

Hazel took the torch out of her mouth. “They were in my garden.”

“They were in my oak. It is rooted on my side. They merely hung from the part of it that leans.”

“Kearry and Pattinson,” she said. “Nineteen thirty-nine, Court of Appeal. A man’s bees swarmed next door, the neighbour wouldn’t let him in, and the court said hard luck. Bees are wild animals. You own a swarm while you can see it and follow it. Once you can’t, it belongs to whoever hives it.” She nodded at the sheet. “I’m hiving it.”

“I could see them. I watched them go from the window.”

“Could you follow them?”

He hesitated, like a witness who has seen where the question goes. “They left at sunrise.”

“So you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Then they’re mine.”

“Benedict Quarles. I live at Marchwood.”

“Nobody lives at Marchwood.”

“For some time now. You go to bed at ten.” He nodded at the hive. “I should like to buy them back. Name a price, and I will carry the hive over the wall myself, tonight.”

“You can’t. Three feet or three miles.” He looked blank, which pleased her. “Move a hive forty yards and every bee that’s out flying comes home to the empty stand and dies on it. You move a hive three feet at a time, or three miles away for three weeks until they forget. There isn’t a third way.”

“There are bees in Panama that forage at night,” he said. “These are more particular. They need things you can’t give them, Mrs Pardoe.”

“Ms Pardoe. And I’ve kept bees for seven years.”

“Not these,” he said, and was gone from the wall faster than she could turn her head.

She bolted the back door and did not sleep. At midnight she went to the window, and the bees were flying. In the dark. Hundreds of them, in a thin ribbon over the wall, towards a bed she had never been able to see from the house: pale flowers, wide open, faintly shining, as if they had soaked up the moon.

“Well,” Hazel said to the empty bedroom. “That’s new.”

At nine the next morning she knocked at Marchwood House. He opened the door on a dark hall and stood well back from the sunlight on the tiles, in an apron, with flour to the wrists. The house smelled of bread.

“I’ve been up all night,” she said, “watching your bees not exist. What are they?”

“Come out of the sun,” he said, “and I will tell you, and I will feed you, because you have plainly skipped breakfast for the pleasure of being angry on an empty stomach.”

She went in, because her anger, though sincere, had never held out well against fresh bread.

The kitchen was shuttered and lit by lamps. On the table stood a jar of honey that was silver, with a sheen like mercury. She tasted it off a spoon. Cold rain, some night flower she could not name, and under both, faint as a coin held on the tongue, iron. Then she was awake in a way she had not been since London, so awake that the clock on the dresser seemed to tick in colour.

He told her over toast. He was a vampire. He said it as another man might have said he was a Methodist. He had been made in 1771, at thirty-six, and had been thirty-six ever since. He had not drunk human blood since 1793. (“A man on the Winchester road. I did not stop. I have not started since.”) The pale flowers grew in beds he fed every March with his own blood. The bees worked them by night and nothing else, and the honey gave back what he had put into the soil, and a little more.

“It is the little more that I live on,” he said. “It is the only thing I have ever made that works.”

“And Mr Ockenden?”

“Arthur kept them for me for fifty-one years. You see the difficulty. They fly by night, and by night they are savage. By day they are as gentle as moths. They can only be opened, and moved, and kept from swarming, in the one light I can’t stand in. Nobody has opened them since Arthur died.”

“So they swarmed because nobody gave them room.” She buttered more toast, since it was there. “That isn’t a mystery. That’s management.”

“I know.” For a moment he looked very tired. “I would like to offer you his post. The terms were generous.”

She thought of the job before this one: a desk in Moorgate, a salary that worked like a lead on a dog, and the afternoon she had sat down on the floor of a lift and not been able to get up.

“No,” she said. “I don’t work for people. I did that, and it didn’t end well. But the bees are mine, and they’ll go over your wall whatever I do. So I’ll keep them, and take the honey off, and you’ll have every frame of it. No fee.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re my bees and that’s my job. You’re just the forage.”

He laughed, a short, startled sound, and it was the first point she had scored all morning that she actually wanted.

---

Three Feet or Three Miles

She opened the hive at noon, in full sun, because by day the night bees lay on the comb like sleepy black seeds. The queen was long and dark and unmarked, and Hazel dotted her white for the year. She gave them a super at the end of May and a second in June, when the comb in the first was drawn and filling with something that caught the light.

The rest happened after dark. She took to walking down the garden at ten with a mug and finding him already at the wall, and since a wall is a poor thing to talk across for long, by the second week he had cut a gate through the holly. The bees never stung him. He baked bread from his mother’s receipts. He had read everything, and argued about books she had not read until she read them out of spite. He asked about the lift in Moorgate, once, and listened to the answer and offered no advice at all, which nobody else had ever managed.

In the middle of June she went through the holly at noon and opened the old Marchwood hives. Two were empty boxes full of wax moth. The third, the one the swarm had left, should have raised a new queen by now. No eggs. No young brood. One queen cell with its cap hinged open at the tip, where the new queen had come out; the others torn open from the side, where she had killed her sisters. And from the whole box, a low, unhappy note that every beekeeper knows and none likes to hear.

She told him that evening at the gate. “She hatched, and went out to mate, and didn’t come back. A swallow, probably. That colony’s finished. Your swarm’s got the last queen of the line.”

He was quiet for a long time. “In your hive.”

“In my hive.”

She made her mistake a week later. A man at the beekeepers’ meeting in Alresford saw her photographs of the black bees and offered four hundred pounds for a nucleus, and she told Benedict at the gate because it was funny. She would not have sold a single frame. She thought that went without saying.

He didn’t laugh.

On the morning after midsummer she walked down the garden at seven and found her hive stand bare.

The bees were on it: a clot of them the size of two fists, clinging to the bare boards where their front door had been, and more in the grass all round, chilled and crawling and dead. She stood in her dressing gown and did the sum. He had moved them at night, which is when every book says you move bees, and at night these bees were out at work. Every forager had flown home at dawn to this.

Through the gap in the holly she could see the hive’s white roof, on Mr Ockenden’s old stand.

At noon she knocked at Marchwood and stayed on the step in the sun, so that he had to talk to her from the dark.

“You moved them at night.”

“That is when one moves bees.”

“Ordinary bees. Yours were out. As far as they’re concerned, you moved them at lunchtime.” She held out her cupped hand: forty or fifty of them, cold, one or two still moving. “There are thousands of these on my stand. Most of the field force. They were mine, Benedict.”

He looked at her hand and not at her face. “You might have sold them.”

“I might have been asked.”

“You would have said no.”

“I’d have said three miles,” Hazel said. “You just didn’t want to hear it from somebody who could say no.”

It went in. She watched it go in. For a moment he looked exactly as old as he was.

“What happens now?” he said.

“Now the rest fly back to my stand until they’re all dead, unless I take the hive three miles away. Today, at noon, while they’re asleep. You can’t help, so don’t offer.” She tipped the bees into her shirt pocket, which was absurd, but she could not drop them on his step. “Three weeks at Dunford’s farm. They forget both gardens. Then they come back.”

“To which garden?”

“I haven’t decided.”

He was quiet. Then: “There will be no honey at three miles. Not of mine.”

“No.”

“I have four jars left of Arthur’s last year. A fortnight, if I am careful.”

She had seen the larder. She found that her anger did not change the arithmetic, and the arithmetic did not change her anger. “Then be careful,” she said.

“That’s fair.”

“It isn’t fair,” Hazel said. “It’s beekeeping.”

She strapped the hive, foam in the entrance and a travel screen on top for air, and wheeled it through the holly on a sack truck. It weighed half what she did. She got it into the back of the Volvo by herself, with a plank and some language. At the farm she leaned a leafy branch across the entrance, so that when they woke they would bump into something strange and learn the place again.

---

Telling the Bees

She drove out to the farm every noon for a fortnight and did not go through the holly once. At Dunford’s the bees flew at night over a field of beans and made nothing silver. Each evening at ten she looked across the wall for the lamp in the Marchwood kitchen, which meant he was up, and each evening it was lit.

On the sixteenth night it was not. On the seventeenth it was not either, and at eleven she took the torch and went through the holly.

The kitchen door was unlocked, the range out, and he was sitting on the flagstones against the larder door with four jars beside him, scraped clean. He had gone the colour of a church candle. When the torch found him he turned his face from it.

“Go home, Hazel.”

“You said a fortnight.”

“I was careful for a fortnight. Go home. I can hear your heart from here, and I can’t stop listening to it.”

She sat down on the floor, out of his reach, and stood the torch between them. Behind his head someone had cut short lines into the paint of the larder door, in rows of ten. It took her a moment to see that there were two hundred and thirty-three of them, and that the last was barely weathered.

“One for every New Year,” she said.

“Since the Winchester road.”

She pushed up her left sleeve. Her right hand was her hive-tool hand, and she was not going to lose the use of that.

“No,” he said.

“You’re dying on a kitchen floor because I put your bees three miles away. That was my move. I’ll pay for it.”

“You don’t know the price.” He made himself look at her. “If I drink, those marks stop meaning anything. Two hundred and thirty-three years, and then I am a man who drinks again. That is my end of it. Yours is worse. I may not stop. The last time, I didn’t.”

“Then we agree a word.” She had drafted contracts with worse men than this, and for less. “My wrist, not my throat. When I say stop, you stop.”

“Say it now. So I have heard it before.”

“Stop.”

He breathed out. “And you are choosing this. Not because I’m—” He shut his eyes. “Not because of what I am. You’re choosing it.”

“Benedict. I keep bees. I let things sting me for a living. Yes.”

He took her wrist as carefully as she lifted a frame with the queen on it. The bite was a hot, clean sting, no worse than a bee’s, and then not pain at all: a pull, slow and steady, and the kitchen filling with the sound of her own pulse until it was the loudest thing in the house. His hand had been cold. It was warming. She counted the marks on the larder door to keep her head, and at the sixth row the edges of the torchlight began to go soft, and she said, “Benedict,” meaning to say the other word next.

She never had to. He stopped on his name.

He pressed a clean tea towel over her wrist and held it there, hard. His colour had come back; hers had gone somewhere. He made her tea with three sugars and stood over her while she drank it, and when she could stand he took a pencil from the dresser and wrote under the last row of cuts, in a small upright hand: 8 July. Given, not taken.

“So that it counts,” he said. “Differently.”

“Good,” said Hazel, and put her head between her knees for a while.

Two neat marks and a bruise like a thumbprint. On Saturday Gil Dunford looked at the bandage and said, “Hive tool?” and Hazel said, “Hive tool,” and let him tell her about his own worst one.

On the twenty-first day she brought the hive home at noon, asleep and strapped, and did not stop at her own stand. She took it through the holly and set it on Mr Ockenden’s old stand, ten yards from the pale beds, with a branch across the door. Then she sat on the wall and wrote heads of terms on the back of a seed catalogue.

He came out at dusk, saw the hive, and walked over to stand below her.

“The bees are mine,” Hazel said. “That doesn’t change. They stand on your land. I open them by day, every nine days from April to August. I’ll need a key, and a gate that stays cut. You provide the forage, and supper. No salary.”

“And the term?”

“Rolling. Reviewed every spring, at swarming.”

He took a key off his ring and held it up to her. “I will want it again,” he said. “What you gave me. I won’t pretend I won’t.”

“I know. You’ll ask, and I’ll say no nearly every time, and you’ll live on honey like a gentleman.”

“Nearly,” he said.

“Don’t push it.” She took the key and got down off the wall. “I’d like to kiss you, and I’d like you not to make a speech first.”

“I had one ready.”

“I know. Save it for the review.”

He kissed her slowly, as if she were the last of something, and she let him for a while, and then took his face in both hands and showed him she was not the last of anything, not by a long way. His mouth was cool and tasted of honey with iron underneath. When he lifted her wrist and kissed the inside of it, over the bandage, she felt it in the soles of her feet.

It grew dark. The bees woke. They came out past the branch and hung in the air above the hive, turning, learning where they were. Then the first of them found the pale beds, and the rest went after it in a long dark ribbon, and the flowers opened to take them.

Hazel did the last thing properly. She knocked three times on the hive roof with his key, the way her grandmother had knocked on her hives when somebody in the house died, because you tell the bees the news of the house, or they leave you.

“Mr Quarles is staying,” she told them. “So am I.”

She stayed until the bees came home, which with these bees was nearly dawn, and it was he who had to go in first. At noon she opened the hive on its new stand and wrote it up on her knee in the sun.

13 July. Marchwood. Temper: gentle. Queen seen. Eggs. No queen cells. Stores: building.

And under it, in the space for notes, after some thought: Told the bees.