Free Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth Page B

room. I could not help casting Sœur Seraphina an angry resentful glance. She smiled at me.
    As soon as chapter was finished, I followed Sœur Seraphina past the abbess’s rooms and through a stone tunnel in the high wall. As she opened the heavy oak door at the end of the passage, the sun slanted across her face and I saw her skin was finely webbed with lines, deepening into cracks at the corners of her eyes and mouth.
    Despite her age, she moved gracefully, leading me through to a peaceful garden, with bare trees espaliered against the walls and long beds of dank straw sheltering the bases of what looked like twigs sticking out of the soil. There was a small stone hut against one wall, with a quaint thatched roof that almost touched the ground.
    ‘We’ll find some hoes and spades in there.’ Sœur Seraphina gave me a look of laughing sympathy. ‘Come on, don’t look so sour. It’s a beautiful day. Surely you’d rather be out here in the sunshine than being whipped by Sœur Emmanuelle?’
    ‘I suppose so.’ I lifted my face to the warmth of the sun, took a deep breath and felt some of the weight of misery fall away.
    Sœur Seraphina went into the hut and returned a few moments later, her arms laden with tools. ‘Here are some gloves for you, to save your pretty hands.’ She tossed me two leather gauntlets and a broad-brimmed straw hat swathed with a veil, like a peasant woman mightwear. ‘Put it on. The sun can wreak havoc with your complexion.’
    Gazing at her in some puzzlement, for it sounded strange to hear a nun speak of pretty hands and complexions, I pulled on the gloves and hat, tossing my white cap onto the windowsill of the hut.
    ‘Let me check my bees first.’ Sœur Seraphina led the way across to the south-facing wall. Recesses had been built in the wall and stuffed with straw. ‘Help me unswaddle the hives. Take care, you don’t want to disturb the bees.’
    She began pulling away handfuls of straw and clumsily I helped her. A beehive made of plaited rushes was revealed beneath the straw, standing on a small round table with a single leg. ‘The straw helps keep the bees warm in winter,’ Sœur Seraphina explained. She pulled aside a stone shingle set on top of the beehive and set her ear to the hole. ‘Lovely. Listen to them hum.’
    Curiously, I bent my head down. To my delighted surprise, I could indeed hear a low droning sound.
    ‘It was a hard winter. I was afraid I’d lose a few hives,’ Sœur Seraphina said as we busied ourselves unswaddling a dozen or so of the round woven skeps. ‘The first blossoms are just beginning to show. The worker bees will soon be out and about collecting their nectar. And then the poor old queen will at last escape the hive and fly, for only the second time in her life.’
    ‘Queen? Don’t you mean the king?’
    She paused in her task. ‘There is no king. Only a queen, who spends her life entombed in the hive as surely as we are kept walled up in here.’
    I laughed. ‘That’s not right. Why, it is said that the beehive is the best example of how a kingdom should be run, with all the workers serving the king. And we’re always being preached sermons about how His Majesty the King must rule with both sweetness and the sting, just like the king bee.’
    ‘It is in fact a queen bee that rules the hive, not a king. A Dutch scientist proved it more than twenty years ago, when he dissected a queen bee and found her ovaries.’
    I gasped, never having heard anyone speak quite so frankly, and then began to laugh. Gusts of merriment shook me, so much that I had to lean my hand against the wall to stop myself from falling to the ground.
    ‘
Zut alors
. To think how I adorned myself in a dress embroidered withbees to do homage to the King … Would he know, do you think? He only sits and smiles whenever anyone calls him the King Bee.’
    ‘I don’t know … he’s interested in the sciences, isn’t he? Didn’t he establish the Académie?’
    I looked at