Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

WILLIAM HAD NODDED in automatic response to Mrs. Elmsworth, but then actually heard what she’d said and jerked as though stung by a bee.

“Her brother,” he repeated carefully, and both the old people nodded. “Her brother. What was his name?”

Mr. Elmsworth, who was now lighting his long-stemmed clay pipe, removed it from his mouth long enough to say, “Eh?”

“He don’t know,” Mrs. Elmsworth said, shaking her capped head in apology. “I was workin’ in the orchard when the man came, and by the time I came back, they’d gone away together. Dorothea left a sweet note, thanking us for looking after her, but she said nothin’ about her brother’s name in it, and my husband was too deaf to understand what they said, beyond them making signs to him.”

“Ah.”

It was possible that Mr. Elmsworth had misunderstood the situation entirely, William reflected, but it was just possible that it had been Henry. When last he’d seen Henry Grey, the man had been living in Philadelphia with a very handsome Negro landlady who might or might not be a widow, recovering slowly from having lost a foot or two of his guts after being shot in the abdomen. William supposed that Denzell might have paused in Philadelphia on his way to New Jersey and given Henry word of Dorothea’s presence, and either had asked Henry to go and fetch her or Henry had determined to do so on his own.

A sudden thought struck him, though, and he inflated his lungs, leaned down close to Mr. Elmsworth’s hairy earhole, and shouted, “Did he wear a uniform?”

Mr. Elmsworth started and dropped his pipe, which his wife fortunately caught before it could shatter on the floor.

“Goodness, young man,” he said reprovingly. “’Tisn’t manners to shout indoors. That’s what I was always taught as a young’un.”

“I beg pardon, sir,” William said, in a slightly lower tone. “Mrs. Hunter has … two brothers, you see; I wondered which it might be.”

Henry had been invalided out of the army, but his elder brother, Adam, the middle one of William’s three cousins, was captain in an infantry battalion.

“Oh, ah,” said Mrs. Elmsworth, and set about questioning her husband in a high-pitched howl, eventually eliciting a dubious opinion that the young fellow might have been in some sort of uniform, though with so many folk going about with guns and colored britches and fancy buttons these days, ’twas hard to say.

“We don’t hold with vanity, see,” he explained to William. “Being Friends, like. Not with armies nor guns, neither, save they’re for hunting. Hunting’s all right. Folk have to eat, you know,” he added, giving William a faintly accusatory look.

William kept his patience, there being no choice, and was rewarded with a more promising thought. He turned to Mrs. Elmsworth.

“Will you ask your husband, please—did the man who came for Dorothea resemble her?” For Henry and Benjamin were slender and dark-haired, like their father, but Adam looked like his mother, as did Dottie, both being fair-haired and pink-cheeked, with rounded chins and large, dreamy blue eyes.

Mr. Elmsworth had grown somewhat tense during the questioning and was puffing on his pipe with an air of agitation, but relaxed when this was put to him. He exhaled a great cloud of blue smoke and nodded, hard.

“He did, then,” he said. “Very like, very like.” Adam. William relaxed, too, and thanked the Elmsworths profusely, though they refused any gift of money.

As he prepared to take his leave, he had another thought.

“Ma’am—do you still have the note my cousin wrote to you?”