Darius Bell and the Crystal Bees (12 page)

Darius knew that he would have to tell the Fishers. Mr Fisher had said he could wait until the end of the week, but Darius had told Marguerite he would have an answer within a couple of days. If he didn't tell her himself, she would ask him. And if he avoided her, she would work out for herself why he was doing that, which would be just as bad.

He didn't see her on the way to school the next morning, but he caught up with her as they were walking home. She took one look at him and knew the outcome even before he spoke.

‘It's not going to work, is it?'

Darius shook his head.

‘Couldn't Mr Cuthbert find anyone who wanted to bring their hives?'

‘No. That wasn't the problem.'

Darius told her everything that had happened. Marguerite was silent when he finished.

‘I'm sorry, Marguerite.'

‘Why? You shouldn't be sorry, Darius. It's not your fault. You did everything you could.'

‘I wish there was something else I could do.'

‘My father's waiting to hear. If it's not going to work, he said he'd send his acceptance of the job straight away. There's no point keeping them waiting.' Marguerite took a deep breath. ‘I'll tell him, shall I?'

Darius nodded.

They walked on in silence.

‘Daddy says we should be grateful for all the years we've had here. We'll go somewhere else and after a while we'll be happy there as well.'

‘But you're coming back, aren't you?' said Darius. ‘Next year, when there are new bees.'

‘I don't know. What if the disease doesn't go away?'

‘Why shouldn't it?'

‘My father says it must be a possibility.'

‘But all the bees are dead.'

‘What if the disease comes back?'

‘What if it doesn't? Will you come back then?'

Marguerite shrugged. ‘My mother says I shouldn't count on it. Don't bank on it, Darius. I'm not.'

Darius didn't say anything to that.

‘Someone else might come to live here,' said Marguerite. ‘They might be nice. Nicer than us.' She paused. ‘Nicer than Maurice, anyway.'

Darius smiled for an instant.

‘Things change, Darius. That's what my mother says. In the end things always change, and you have to accept it. You have to make the best of it.'

‘That's what my mother says as well. But sometimes you can stop it. Sometimes there's something you can do.'

‘But not this time. You tried, didn't you? You did everything you could.'

They had reached the entrance to the Bell estate. They crunched up the drive together. In the distance, Darius saw Mr Fisher among his blueberries. Why was he still out there working when he was about to leave?

‘What's he doing?' asked Darius.

‘Pollinating,' said Marguerite.

Darius looked at her quizzically. ‘What?'

‘He's doing the job of the bees, taking pollen from one flower to the next.'

Darius stared at her in amazement. ‘You mean he can do that?'

‘Of course. As long as you know how. You just need a little stick with some cottonwool on the end.'

‘Well, then . . . what's the problem?' Darius laughed. ‘You don't need the bees! You can do it yourself.'

‘Darius, have you got any idea how many flowers there are? And in the next couple of weeks they'll all need pollinating. Pumpkins, tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers . . . not to mention the fruit trees. We'd need . . . I don't know how many people we'd need.'

‘Well, there's your family, and I could help, and I'm sure Paul and Oliver would help . . .'

Marguerite was shaking her head. ‘It needs lots of people, Darius. Lots. And not just for a couple of hours. Not just when they feel like it.'

Darius frowned. He knew what Marguerite meant by that. That was all he ever did – help Mr Fisher for an hour or two when he felt like it, when the sun was warm and he had nothing else to do and he thought it would be nice to spend some time in the fields.

‘I'm sorry,' said Marguerite. ‘I didn't mean to say that.'

‘No, you're right. It's the truth.'

‘It would really take a lot of people. We'd have to pay them. Where would we get the money?'

Darius was silent. He continued to watch the figure of Mr Fisher, bending over a plant, working at its flowers, and eventually moving to the next.

‘I don't understand,' said Darius. ‘If it's not going to make a difference, why's he doing it?'

‘You know what Daddy's like. He can't just stand by and do nothing. Besides . . .'

‘What?'

‘He thinks that at least there'll be a few fruits and vegetables if he does. We might be gone, but at least you'll still have something.'

Darius looked at Marguerite in disbelief. She shrugged, and then she walked off to tell her father the news.

Darius gazed at the gardener. He knew that he had done everything he could to help the Fishers, as everyone kept saying, and yet he couldn't help feeling a terrible sense of guilt for having failed. Especially when he saw Mr Fisher out in the field, still working in order to leave something behind. Mr Fisher shouldn't have been doing that. It was he, Darius, who should have been out there. Watching Mr Fisher just made him feel guiltier.

Suddenly a thought came into his head, a thought he had tried to push down when it seemed that everything was going to be all right. Why hadn't the Deavers suggested bringing in new hives? If they had suggested it before the apiarists even met, the mayor would never have found out about it and it would already have been done. He couldn't believe the Deavers hadn't known it was possible. Why hadn't they mentioned it?

Darius knocked on the door of the buttery. Mrs Deaver answered, wearing a long white apron. She smiled at him.

‘What can I do for you, Darius?'

Darius hesitated. ‘I have a question,' he said.

Mrs Deaver gazed at him expectantly.

‘I wanted to ask both of you. Mr Deaver as well.'

‘Come in,' said Mrs Deaver brightly.

She took him into the honey room. The shelves on the honey wall, which were normally crammed with jars, were almost empty. Mr Deaver stood at a table wearing a long white apron as well.

‘We were just blending the last of last year's honey,' explained Mrs Deaver. ‘There's not much left, but we'd like to do what we can for our customers.'

Darius nodded. He watched Mr Deaver slowly pour- ing a measured quantity of honey into a bowl in which another honey had already been poured, stirring it as he did so with a metal stirring rod.

‘What did you want to ask us, Darius?' said Mrs Deaver.

‘I wanted to know . . .'

He stopped. Mrs Deaver waited. Mr Deaver looked up at him expectantly, stirring the honey.

Darius took a deep breath. It would be an insult even to ask them. It was more of an accusation than a question. But he just couldn't believe they hadn't known about the possibility. He
had
to know the truth.

He forced the words out. ‘I want to know why you didn't suggest to Mr Fisher that people could bring their hives instead of yours. I want to know why you didn't suggest that before I went to the meeting on Saturday.'

Mr Deaver stopped stirring. He and his wife glanced at one another.

And Darius knew, even without being told, that it wasn't because they didn't know it was possible. The look they exchanged was enough to tell him that.

‘Why? You must have known it could be done.'

‘The new bees might have died,' said Mr Deaver.

‘That would have been the beekeepers' risk. They would have known about it. No one would have hidden it from them.'

‘Still, as a beekeeper it's not something you want—'

‘Oh, Herbert, be quiet,' said Mrs Deaver. She sat down at the table and put her head in her hands and heaved a deep sigh. ‘I was so glad when Mr Cuthbert suggested it. It was such a weight off my mind. You're right, Darius, we knew it was possible. We thought about suggesting it, but we didn't. And by the time of the meeting, if we said it then . . . how could we have explained why we didn't say it before?'

‘And why
didn't
you say it before?' demanded Darius.

Mr Deaver shook his head. ‘We thought . . . I don't know what we thought.'

‘We thought that whoever came would ruin our reputation,' said Mrs Deaver. ‘That's the truth, Darius. We've seen it happen in other places. They come in, these people, and some of them are perfectly good bee- keepers, but they don't know the place, they don't know the flowers, the honey they get is never any good, I mean, it's good, but it's not . . .'

‘It's not like our honey. The Bell honey . . .'

‘The Bell honey's extraordinary.'

‘Exceptional.'

‘But it takes care.'

‘Experience.'

‘Knowledge.'

‘It takes . . .' Mr Deaver shook his head and let out a long sigh. ‘Years. Years and years of experience.'

‘They would have messed it up,' said Mrs Deaver. ‘Everything Bell honey is known for – purity, quality . . .'

‘They would have messed it up.'

Darius stared at them. ‘But it was only for one year!'

‘I know,' said Mr Deaver. ‘But the damage you can do to your reputation in one year, Darius . . . You can spend ten years getting it back.'

‘And so you were going to let Mr Fisher go? You were going to let him leave?'

‘We didn't think he really would.'

‘But he told you! I heard him! I was here!'

‘People exaggerate when they're angry,' said Mr Deaver.

‘We thought he was exaggerating,' said Mrs Deaver. ‘We didn't imagine in a million years he'd actually do it.'

‘We didn't know he'd really have to leave. We thought he'd . . . manage. Anyway, he doesn't have to go now, does he? It will be all right.'

‘No, it won't!' said Darius. ‘He does have to leave. He's got a job. And now he's going to accept it!'

Both the Deavers looked at him in surprise.

‘Why?' asked Mrs Deaver. ‘Won't the beekeepers bring their hives?'

‘The mayor's blocked it. The council passed a resolution. No one's allowed to bring in any hives until after the winter.'

There was silence. Mr Deaver sat down heavily beside his wife.

Darius stared at them.

‘It isn't easy for us, either,' said Mr Deaver. ‘If we let other beekeepers in, we can keep some of their honey. That's how it works, you know. We've lost that.'

‘Oh, be quiet, Herbert,' said his wife. ‘That's nothing compared with what Mr Fisher's losing.'

Mr Deaver nodded glumly.

They sat silently, staring at the table, like a pair of old, sad, wizened apples.

Darius watched them. He wanted to tell them how stupid they had been, how selfish, how petty. But he could see that they knew that already, and nothing he could say would speak more loudly than the voices of shame and guilt inside their own heads.

He turned around and left.

The roof glittered. Crystals in the rock glinted red and yellow and white. Between them ran veins of mineral that glistened like gold. Darius lay still, looking up at them, his body rising and falling gently with the movement of the water beneath him.

He had discovered the glitter pool the previous year, after the earth tremor that had restarted the clock in the clock tower. The tremor had barely been strong enough to do any damage, and no one in the city had been injured but one old lady who had been poked by a needle she was sewing with at the time. But the movement of the earth had been sufficient to overturn an old fountain that stood in a clearing in the wood of the Bell estate and reveal the opening to an underground cavern beneath it. In the cavern was a pool, and reflected in the water of the pool was the roof with its twinkling mineral display.

With the help of Mr Ostrovich, the carpenter, and Mr Bullwright, the builder, Darius had had steps put in so people could get down to the cavern, and lights on the wall that made the crystals glint and sparkle in the darkness and showed off the roof in all its dazzling beauty. Mr Ostrovich had also built him a simple boat with a paddle, and Darius had explored the glitter pool and discovered that it ended about forty metres away, where the water ran out into a narrow gap, and that the water came in elsewhere via a vertical crevice in the wall, and that it was only a metre or so in depth. Sometimes Darius came down to float on the water, navigating around the crystal formations that hung from the roof, pretending that he was in some other world where there was never any sun and he was on an inky black ocean and the glittering roof above him was the sky, unlike any sky on earth, but with stars that were ruby-red and yellow and white, with streaks of gold dust curling through the heavens. Sometimes he came with his friends and one of them, Peter Glick, would bring a small rubber boat that belonged to his father, and they would inflate it, taking turns to puff into the valve until they got dizzy, and then they would have a battle on this strange dark sea in the two boats, three or four kids in each one, their shouts echoing off the glittering roof, weaving between the crystal formations and crashing into each other until one boat managed to capsize the other and the people in the capsized boat ended up in the water. Sometimes everyone in both boats did. Then they would go up the steps into the sunlight, wet and bedraggled, dragging Peter Glick's rubber boat up the steps, and they would sit on a fallen log in the clearing and eat slices of cake from Mrs Simpson as they dried out in the sun.

But sometimes Darius came here by himself, as he had done today after leaving the Deavers, and he would get in the boat and row slowly, in silence, and he would allow the boat to drift and he would lie back and gaze at the roof as the boat rocked, as he was doing now, letting his eyes wander across the expanse of the alien sky above him, like someone who had landed on another planet and was seeing its stars for the first time.

So many of them, he thought. So many stars, so many twinkling shades of red and yellow and white, so many curling, branching, golden swirls of stardust between them. You couldn't count them if you tried. With every bob of the boat, as the angle of his vision changed, some disappeared and others caught the light and sparkled. If you had to count them, he thought, where would you start? And anyway, why would you want to?

Why did people do all kinds of things? There was so much that had happened in the past few days, and so much of it was unexpected. Even today! What was Mr Fisher doing, hand-pollinating flowers for fruit he would never harvest? And what about the Deavers? They could have solved the problem, but they didn't, thinking it wasn't as bad as Mr Fisher said, and now that they saw that it was, it was too late, and all they could do was sit there and stare at the table. Stare at the table and feel sorry for what they should have done, but hadn't.

By now Marguerite would have told her father that Darius's plan to have new hives brought to the estate had failed. Soon Mr Fisher would send his acceptance of the job. Maybe he had already done it. Darius shook his head, still unable to accept that after everything he had done, he had failed. It was so unfair! The boat rocked under him, and the crystals in the roof glittered. They were like bees, thought Darius. Like a swarm of buzzing, hovering bees. Move your head slightly, and it was as if the swarm moved. Darius craned his head back and saw them in the roof behind him. The boat bobbed, and the swarm came and went in front of his eyes, catching the light and losing it. If only they could be real bees, thought Darius, instead of crystals. If only he could transform them. Much as he loved the sparkle of the glitter pool, right now he would gladly exchange it for a swarm of bees. He imagined the crystals in the roof starting to quiver, to buzz, then detaching from the roof – first one, then a few, then a thick, glittering mass of them – and somehow, on wings of glass, flying away to pollinate Mr Fisher's crops. A swarm of crystal bees. One for every glint above him, one for every shimmer of red or gold.

Or a person for each one!

Darius sat bolt upright. The boat rocked wildly under him. That would be just as good – not crystals, but people to do the pollination. He stopped for a moment, thinking about the idea that had just struck him, then grabbed his paddle and made for the edge of the pool. He got out and ran up the stairs, forgetting to turn the lights out as he went, remembered when he was halfway across the clearing, ran back, raced down, turned them off and raced up again.

He ran towards the gardener's lodge. As he raced past the pumpkin field, he glimpsed Mr Fisher walking down the drive towards the entrance of the estate.

‘Mr Fisher!' he cried.

The gardener didn't hear him.

‘Mr Fisher! Mr Fisher!'

Mr Fisher looked around.

Darius waved his hands. ‘Wait! Please!'

The gardener stopped, watching Darius as he ran towards him.

‘What is it, Darius?' asked Mr Fisher when Darius caught up with him.

‘Have you . . . said yes . . . to the job?' asked Darius, not waiting to catch his breath. ‘Please . . . say you haven't.'

Mr Fisher pulled an envelope out of his pocket. ‘I was just going to post my acceptance. They want it in writing.'

‘Don't! Please!'

Mr Fisher shook his head. ‘Darius, Marguerite told me what happened. You tried and I'm very grateful. It's more than I could have asked for. There's nothing else you can do.'

‘Yes there is!'

‘Darius, at some point you just have to accept—'

‘If you can't get bees, you need people to help with the pollination, isn't that right?'

‘Where would I find people?'

‘But if you did, that would solve the problem, wouldn't it? Would it? Tell me.'

‘Yes, but I need too many people.'

‘How about thirty?'

Mr Fisher's eyes narrowed. ‘Where would you get thirty people, Darius? I have no money to pay them.'

‘Don't worry about that. What if I could get them? Would that be enough?'

‘Darius, where are you going to get—'

‘How long would you need them for?'

Mr Fisher stared at him.

‘How
long
, Mr Fisher?'

‘Two weeks,' replied the gardener. ‘Next week and the week after. Those are the crucial ones.'

‘So if I could get you thirty people for the next two weeks, that would be enough?'

‘Darius, why are you talking like this?'

‘Mr Fisher? Would that be enough? Yes or no? Would that mean you could stay?'

The gardener scratched his nose. ‘Cucumbers, beans, strawberries, tomatoes,' he said, numbering the items off on his other hand. ‘Peaches, cherries, aubergines, pumpkins, blueberries . . . Too late for the apples, too early for the plums.'

Darius watched him impatiently. ‘Would that be enough for you to stay, Mr Fisher?'

‘Probably, but I don't see where you're going—'

‘Don't send that letter, Mr Fisher! Please don't send it!'

Mr Fisher sighed. ‘Darius, I can't keep waiting.'

‘You said they gave you until the end of the week.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘That's what you said! You can wait until the end of the week!'

The gardener gazed at him. ‘Darius, you've done what you can. This is just making it worse.'

‘Please, Mr Fisher! Don't send that letter. Give me until the end of the week. Just three more days. That's all I ask.'

Mr Fisher gazed down at the letter, as if weighing it in his hand.

‘Trust me, Mr Fisher. I have a way. Honestly, I do.'

Mr Fisher looked at him. Finally he nodded. ‘All right.'

‘Yes!'

He put the envelope back in his pocket. ‘Until the end of the week, Darius. But that's it. I can't wait any longer.'

‘Thank you. Thank you, Mr Fisher.'

‘I still don't know where you're going to get thirty people.'

Darius grinned. ‘I'm going to get you thirty-two.'