Chapter 7
GOLDENWYCH, PRESENT DAY
Caitlin lowered her veil and glanced down to check she had everything she required: her smoker, J-shaped tool and spare gloves. I must tell the bees, she thought.
It was an ancient tradition to keep the bees informed of family news.
One inspired by the belief that bees were a link between the physical and spiritual worlds.
Not only could they carry messages to the other side, they also guided the lost spirits of the dead to other planes.
To Caitlin, this made perfect sense; bees were, in her opinion, the wisest and most magical creatures on the planet.
Despite Lee’s reassurances, she knew her unease about her father’s condition would remain until she had completed this ritual.
When she and Lee had been awoken by the first fingers of sunlight rising between the Three Sisters at the stone circle earlier that morning, they had watched in awe as the sky had turned a kaleidoscope of colours, wispy with morning mist and dew.
Exhausted but elated by the wonderful display played out by nature, they had basked in its beauty before, eventually, gathering the remains of their picnic and driving back to the village.
‘Try to get some sleep,’ Lee had said as he dropped Caitlin at her cottage.
‘You too. Are you working today?’
‘Not until later,’ he replied.
Her phone had bleeped and she had expected to see a message from Stan, but it was Sindy.
How’s your dad? I’ll open up the café. Mum is going to help me, don’t worry about a thing.
‘Stan?’ Lee had asked.
‘No, Sindy,’ she had replied and when Lee had made a noise of disapproval for once, she did not defend her fiancé’s behaviour. ‘She and Vicki are going to open up.’
‘What about the hair salon?’
Vicki Simmons was Sindy’s mother. A single parent who had raised Sindy alone, she ran a busy hairdressing salon in the village.
For years, Vicki had cared for her own mother, dividing her time between the flat above the salon where she and Sindy lived and her mother’s home.
After the old woman had died, Vicki had inherited her cottage, which was a few doors down from Caitlin.
When Sindy’s marriage to Ricky Mansell had collapsed a year earlier, Sindy and her daughter Rosalind – who only answered to Rosie – had moved in with Vicki.
Sindy had suggested she rent the flat above the salon from her mother, but Rosie’s asthma had made it impossible.
The hairspray and other chemicals had triggered multiple attacks before Vicki insisted they live together.
‘There’s plenty of room,’ she had said, ‘and you’re three doors away from Caitlin.’
‘She didn’t say,’ Caitlin had said to Lee with a pang of guilt, ‘but knowing Vicki, she’ll have organised cover. She’s a dynamo. It’s good of her to step in at such short notice.’
‘It really is,’ Lee had agreed. ‘Right, I’d better head off. Sweet dreams.’
He’d hugged Caitlin tightly before driving away.
Caitlin had not expected to sleep but, to her surprise, as soon as she’d laid on the bed, she was unconscious.
‘The bees,’ she had murmured when she awoke several hours later. ‘Mum would want me to keep them informed.’
* * *
Now, showered and dressed in her beekeeping suit, she made her way down the long but narrow garden to the small orchard at the end.
The two beehives were positioned near the trees, but not under them, and beside a natural stream that cut across her garden before disappearing underground.
Her mother had always claimed it was the source of a sacred well.
‘How could you possibly know?’ Caitlin had asked in amusement when her mother had accompanied her on her first viewing before buying the cottage several years earlier.
‘I know these things,’ Miranda had replied, and despite the fact they were laughing, Caitlin had a strange sense that her mother did see and know more than most people.
‘Hello, bees,’ she said as she passed the row of lavender bushes that surrounded her hives.
She puffed a small amount of smoke into the entrance and waited for the bees to calm.
‘I need to check all is well with you,’ she said in a quiet voice, ‘and also to tell you Dad is ill, but we’re hopeful he’ll make a full recovery.’
The steady hum seemed to momentarily intensify, then three bees flew around her head. They paused in front of her veiled face before flying in a figure of eight and heading upwards and away.
‘Tell the others,’ Caitlin murmured as she watched their tiny shapes disappear.
She removed the lid from the calm hive and lifted off the metal queen excluder before gently wiggling the dummy frame from its position at one end of the super – the box which held the honey frames.
Using the metal tool with the J-shaped end, she loosened one of the frames to examine the honeycomb.
The oblong frame hung vertically in the super and as she lifted it out, she smiled; it was oozing with golden honey.
‘Soon,’ she whispered to the bees as she continued her inspection, ‘it’s nearly time.’
With great care, she checked both hives and, content they were healthy, she stepped away, listening to the gentle buzz of their song.
As the hum enveloped her, she gazed at the stream, watching the ripples, the rush of the water over the stones, and as she did, the rest of the conversation she had shared with her mother drifted into her mind.
‘Tell me then, Mum,’ she had teased. ‘How do you know this is a sacred spring?’
‘The genius loci is standing over there and she’s nodding her approval.’
‘The genius loci?’
‘The deity of the water.’
‘What does she look like?’ Caitlin had asked. She had always been intrigued by her mother’s uncanny nature and her ability to glimpse things that were invisible to others.
‘Tall, slender, long dark hair and with a headdress of antlers,’ Miranda had replied.
‘A headdress of antlers,’ gasped Caitlin now as a cold shiver ran down her spine.
The calm created by spending time with the bees dissipated, but not wishing to startle her apian friends, she walked slowly away from the hives. However, once past the lavender bushes, she raced through the garden and back into the cottage.
‘Genius loci,’ she muttered as she hurried into the bright sunny kitchen, removing her heavy beekeeping suit as she went, kicking off her shoes and running barefoot through the house into her study where she kept her mother’s notebooks.
An avid journal keeper, Miranda King’s writings were numerous and Caitlin had them lovingly arranged on an antique bookcase.
The colourful books contained Miranda’s recipes, sketches, anecdotes and poems. Caitlin had inherited these along with her mother’s café.
When she had offered Gillian and Rachel the choice of any they had wanted, both had refused.
‘They’re yours,’ Gillian had snapped.
‘We don’t want them,’ Rachel had said. ‘They’ll only gather dust.’
Even though Caitlin had been wounded by her sisters’ words, there was part of her which had exhaled in relief. She had always cherished the books and was unsure whether Gillian or Rachel would have treated them with the same reverence.
‘Genius loci, the presiding deity or spirit of a place, this is the one,’ she muttered as she ran her finger along the spines, her dark hair crackling with energy.
She pulled a leather-bound navy-blue notebook from one end of the shelf and flicked through the pages.
Her mother’s handwriting and her exquisite drawings filled every page, each one a memory for Caitlin, bittersweet with love and grief.
Today, she skimmed past the images until she found the sketch of the vision her mother had seen when they had viewed the cottage.
Caitlin stared at the line drawing in wonder. The woman was identically dressed to the one she had seen in the hospital and, even more startling, this image bore a close resemblance to herself. She wondered why she had never noticed before, perhaps she had never looked closely enough in the past.
‘Who are you?’ she whispered. ‘You’re not the goddess of the spring or you would never have been able to travel to the hospital. You’d be rooted here.’
Caitlin studied the page properly for the first time, reading the comments her mother had added over the years.
One was dated from many years earlier when Caitlin had been in her teens:
She spoke last night but I couldn’t hear her message, it’s frustrating. I think she said, ‘Everywhen’. I’ve looked up the term and it’s a spiritual plane where the ancestors are supposed to reside.
Another dated a week later:
Tonight she said, ‘The third daughter of the third daughter’???
and then underneath:
Henbane tea?
It was then Caitlin noticed the date her mother had written beside the original image. She had presumed it would have been at the time she had bought the cottage, but the date recorded in tiny digits was three days after her birth.
‘No…’ she whispered, but the buzzing of her phone with Stan’s ringtone distracted her.
‘You poor darling,’ he exclaimed as she answered. ‘I rang as soon as I heard the message.’
‘Stan, it’s midday. I left the message at seven o’clock last night.’
‘You know what these conferences are like,’ he said. ‘Busy, busy, busy, like your bees, darling. How’s your father?’
‘Doing well, it was a TIA, a—’
‘I’m aware of what it is,’ he interrupted. ‘Most people make a full recovery, but until then, no matter what he needs, we’ll ensure he has the best care available.’
Caitlin bit back her irritation, this was not a decision for Stan. It was for her and her sisters, Larry was their father and his care would be decided by them, no one else.
‘The staff at the hospital said he should be fine, Lee checked his charts and—’
‘What was he doing there?’ snapped Stan, his sympathetic tone disappearing.