Chapter 187

Imogen

It took me three days to get there, and I spent most of them rehearsing what I would say, and none of it was any use.

That is the trouble with old women. You can plan a speech for a hundred miles, and the moment you walk into their kitchen and they look at you over the top of the teapot, you are fifteen again, and you have forgotten to shut the gate, and the goats are in the cabbages.

The house hadn’t changed. It never did. Long and low and gray, with its back into the hill above Blackridge and its windows looking out over the valley, and smoke going up from both chimneys, and the hives along the south wall wrapped in sacking for the winter, the way she had always wrapped them. Somebody still kept her bees. Of course they did. Nobody had ever been able to bring themselves to stop.

I stood at the gate for a while, in the snow, looking at the hives.

Then I went up the path and knocked, because I was not going to walk into that house as if it