The Uncapping

The parish pays her to forget. It has never cost her anything before.

Annet Cobb is forty-four years old and has been hivewarden of Marl Green for twenty-two of them. The work is walls and weather and other people's bees, and she is very good at it. The office also carries the standing designation: four times a year she goes up the pasture at dusk, sits down on her grandmother's stone, opens a hive, and says out loud what the quarter has been. What she decided. Why. What she felt about it. The colony takes it and holds it whole.

Two hundred years of wardens have done this, and the parish considers it fine governance: the office asks a woman to be honest about her own decisions with nobody watching, and it does not ask her to remember having been.

So Annet has eighty-eight entries in a register and no recollection of the life they describe. She knows she was good at it because forty households tell her so. She has never had anything she minded losing.

Then the southern boundary dies.

Eight boxes dead of a thing she cannot name, and thirty more she has hefted and does not like the weight of. Annet takes the four questions to every gate on that boundary, and gets four true answers at each, and they add up to nothing. And when she climbs to her own stand, she finds the family hive that has stood there since before her grandmother cut back to the rib, four generations of comb taken out of the middle of it by a hand she cannot account for.

She has one person to think with, and he is the difficulty. Gil Hesketh is the parish taster, a joiner by trade, a man who thinks a thing entirely through before he says any of it and finds the moment has usually gone. He has carried the frames in and out at every giving for eleven years, and the designation is the warden's alone. He has all eleven of those years, first-hand, the ordinary way, by having been there.

And the second page of the taster's duties disqualifies any taster entangled with the warden whose comb he audits. There is one taster in Marl Green and there has never been call for two.

She has eleven years of feeling for him and not one afternoon of it she can hold.

For readers of Susanna Clarke, Kazuo Ishiguro and Sarah Perry. A working parish, a trade rendered in full, two competent adults in their forties who like each other enormously and have nowhere to put it, and a mystery in which nobody is a villain and everybody is trying.

The Marl Green Reliquary, Book One.