The Beekeeper's Bullet Read online

  She smeared the gummy residue across the pilot’s palm, filling the jagged hole. She repeated this on the back of his hand, seeing in her mind how quickly his reflexes had reacted when she’d pulled the trigger. Had he been one microsecond slower, she would have shot him in the face.

  She forced the thought away. Satisfied that her impromptu patch would suffice, she bound the long scarf around his hand and tied it off between his fingers.

  The truck, as was often the case, failed to fire. Ellenor bit her lower lip and roughly repeated the routine until the engine coughed out whatever had been choking it and rumbled to uncertain life. Horses remained far more trustworthy. Most horses, however, had been requisitioned by the German government, along with the majority of the country’s young men, able-bodied or otherwise. After several moments of uncertain shifting, Ellenor got the vehicle trundling down the hill. She left behind the still-smoking pile of wood and wire that had once been a British plane.

  ****

  War had brought shovels to the Rhineland. Shovels, really, seemed to be more important than guns. Ellenor Jantz had watched crates of them being unloaded from trains, bundles of them cinched together with household twine, crude versions of them hammered into form at the blacksmith’s forge. Countless variations of shovels had been taken west on trucks and motorbikes and hay wagons. The object of this obsession, it seemed, was the trench. Men dug trenches like animals, like demons, like madmen. You dug faster than the French or you died.

  Father’s estate was situated just far enough from this furious digging to avoid being enveloped by the chaos but close enough that you could bear witness to the constant back-and-forth if you stood on the library balcony and trained the telescope to the west. Father often lingered there with his schnapps, bent over the eyepiece, thinking his thoughts. Ellenor, who once adored the telescope and the heavens it revealed to her, now wanted nothing to do with it.

  She guided the truck to the back of the stone barn, its masonry from a previous generation, its grand loft like something from a child’s tale. Since hostilities had commenced three years ago, Father had dismissed many of his household staff, but the old Jewish stable-master, Josef, remained steadfastly at his post. He groomed livestock for a living but fancied himself an American cowboy. If fate had been kinder, Josef would have been employed in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

  Ellenor wasted no time. “Joe?” She hurried into the barn through one of its many well-oiled wooden doors, shifting automatically into German: “Josef, are you here?”

  “Yes, Little Fox. Aren’t I always?” He emerged from the tack room, tall and gnarled, his round-rimmed glasses too small for his face. “How’s it look for this year’s honey harvest?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Since when does the American Joan of Arc need anyone’s assistance?”

  “A man was shot down in front of me.”

  He removed his spectacles, slowly, giving himself time to process what she’d said. “What do you mean shot down?”

  “A flyer. He nearly crashed into the truck.”

  “I saw the smoke in the sky but…you’re all right?”

  “Josef, please. I brought him here.”

  “You—you what?”

  She offered no further details. The longer the man lay out there in the open, the greater the chance he’d be discovered. Ellenor might have been brave on certain days, but she had no desire to be accused of harboring an enemy agent. “I need to get him inside, and I can’t do it alone.” She left the barn without waiting to see if Josef followed.

  The airman was still asleep, his face drained of color. By the time she got him untangled from the pulley’s rope, Josef was at her side, his agile hands making short work of the rope. Without further question, he gathered the pilot in his arms and carried him into the warm shadows of the barn. Ellenor had known Josef for only a year, but she trusted him as much as she’d ever trusted anyone. On her very first day at work here twelve months ago, he’d doffed his cowboy hat and said, “Howdy, ma’am,” just like a rancher in a dime-store novel. Since then, she supplied him with honey biscuits and he told her Teutonic fairy tales he’d learned as a boy.

  Josef settled the pilot to the floor in one of the empty stalls, then brought in a lantern for a closer look. “He fell from the sky, you say?”

  “Right in front of me.”

  “Those damn flying contrivances are deathtraps. Who is he?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “Briefly. I believe he’s from England.”

  “Of course he is. Cheeky bastards are hard to kill.” Josef studied the man’s injuries. “What about our boy?”

  “Our boy?”

  “The fellow from our side who sent this one here to the ground. Did you see a friendly plane circling overhead?”

  “I didn’t really think to look.”

  Josef used a rag from the pocket of his thick britches to dab the blood from the man’s mouth. “I suppose it could have been engine failure. Or the propeller could have snapped off. Or a wing could have disintegrated. A man strapping himself into a wooden bird with a motor attached deserves whatever he gets.” He looked up at Ellenor from where he squatted in the straw. “What do you intend to do with him? Tell Father that a puppy followed you home and beg to keep him?”

  Ellenor had asked herself the same question on the drive down the hill. She felt like crying over her lost hives. She felt like being sick with the thought of almost becoming a murderer. She felt, most of all, like an outsider. She’d been born in the New Mexico Territory, which wasn’t even a proper state of the Union until five years ago, and she’d spent the last year across the ocean in a country that had charmed her at first but now devoured its neighbors in never-ending war.

  “Little Fox?”

  “Will he live?”

  Josef looked down at the man and shrugged one substantial shoulder. “There is a Yiddish word: bashert. It is difficult to define in German, but bashert is what’s meant to be. There are no coincidences in the universe. If this fallen angel of yours dies, it is bashert.”

  “And if he doesn’t die?”

  “Same thing.” Josef pointed. “Now pull up that milking stool. You’re going to play like a nurse for a while and see if you can help bashert decide one way or the other.”

  Chapter Three

  Twenty-three hours before he crashed behind enemy lines, Alec Corbin-Dawes told the first lie of his adult life. “This corned beef pie is just as good as my mum makes back in Derby.”

  The Frenchman nodded, pleased. He’d been rich in his former life, before the war had forced him to share his chateau with a squadron of flyers who cared little for the sanctity of marble floors and the importance of the Degas hanging in the foyer. Though much of the man’s wealth had been leveraged for the good of his country, his name still resonated with power, and now Alec needed some of that power if he were to embark on his unsanctioned mission. Hence the lie.

  Nineteen hours before his petrol line was severed at five thousand feet, Alec carried the signed approval letter the Frenchman had given him and showed it to the guards at the munitions depot, gaining unfettered access to the weapons within. His plane was a barely adequate Avro 504, a two-seater used for training these neophytes who seemed far too willing to lift into the sky and die. Alec had been posted here across the Channel and far from home to teach them how to manhandle an aircraft that was likely to become their coffin. As a training platform, the Avro was not equipped with a gun.

  Fourteen hours before he fell, Alec finished mounting the Lewis machine gun on his crate, the Avro now casting a more sinister shadow on the ground. He loaded it completely, stuffing it with bullets, though hitting a flying target while careening through the air at ninety miles an hour was more luck than anything else. You were statistically more likely to shoot your own propeller off.

  Ten hours before he watched the ground rush up at him, he joined the Frenchies in their
canteen, smiling gently as they sang “La Madelon” and tried to drink enough to forget the math: the average lifespan of a flyer on either side of the Front was thirty days. Alec had been brought here to teach them because he’d managed to survive for over a year. They’d made him a lieutenant and counted his kills on a board behind the bar.

  Three hours before he closed his eyes upon impact, he awoke from scant sleep and slipped from his billet even before the first dawn patrol had departed. No one flew at night because there was no point; you simply couldn’t see. Alec pulled the chocks from the Avro’s wheels and paid a half-drunk enlisted man five francs to spin the prop when he fired her up. Without permission, without second thoughts, he wrapped a blue scarf around his neck and rattled the plane along the dirt track until one pull of the stick tugged him up toward a sky full of sparkling stars.

  One hour before he lay in the German dirt, too fractured to move, he remembered what his sister had said on the day she’d left England: “If you ever tire of drowsy Derby, little brother, come find me.”

  “You’re only one minute older than I am,” he’d reminded her.

  “One is enough.”

  “Stay,” he’d said.

  “Come find me.”

  Three minutes before he opened his one working eye to see a rifle in his face, an Albatros D.V whispered into position behind him. Alec enjoyed an uncanny symbiosis with airplanes, and had he not been stuck in the ungainly Avro, he could have shrugged off his pursuer and probably turned him into prey. As it was, the single-seat Albatros devoured him, its dual Spandau guns shredding the back half of his plane.

  The last thing he saw was a woman with green eyes.

  Chapter Four

  Josef shot a wild hog with a rifle he claimed was once owned by Billy the Kid.

  “I don’t believe you,” Ellenor told him after checking on the pilot who slept in the stall.

  “You shouldn’t. I am a daydreamer.”

  Josef field-dressed the hairy animal. Ellenor conducted an autopsy.

  The bees had died. The cause of death, however, remained unknown. The Apis Mellifera was the world’s most interesting creature, at least in her opinion, but so much of it remained a mystery. How did bees build with such precision, each hexagonal cell tilted at precisely thirteen degrees? How did they know to cap those cells when the honey inside reached less than eighteen percent water content? How did they measure such things?

  “With very tiny tools,” she said to herself as she bent over the table. Using a magnifying glass, she studied the dead. The possible culprits were manifold: disease, poor nutrition, accidental poisoning, predators. Or, equally likely, the queen had failed her colony, and the bees had been unable to produce another queen to replace her.

  At the far end of the vast barn, Josef hummed to himself as he butchered what would become the household’s evening meal.

  Ellenor looked for signs of abnormal wing shapes but wasn’t able to concentrate on the task at hand. She couldn’t stop thinking about the pilot. What had he said before passing out? I have to find her. That was not the kind of statement you expected from a man torn from the middle of a war. He might have said, Where am I? Or even, I need to return to my squadron. Those things made sense. Perhaps he’d been delirious from the pain.

  She saw no misshapen wings. She’d already discounted the dreadful ailment known as chalkbrood, which transformed bees into white mummies. Chalkbrood was a fungal disease with very visible signs, none of which she observed here. So what was the next most likely cause?

  The hog went straight from the barn to the kitchen. The brass bell at the back door would soon sound to call the staff to dinner.

  She opened the stall door.

  The flyer’s face, now cleaned, had relaxed in his sleep. His hair was blond, his cheeks smooth. He looked like the captain of one of those rowing teams she had seen in Boston before she boarded the ship for Europe. A horse blanket covered him. His injured hand lay atop the blanket. Josef had removed the scarf, commended Ellenor on her use of the bees’ propolis to stem the bleeding, and bound the wound in fresh linen. The Briton slept in peace.

  She knelt beside him. I have to find her. She now had two riddles to solve: what killer had destroyed her bees, and what woman was the object of this man’s quest?

  By the time the bell clanged, she had washed herself of bee residue and British blood, and she spent the next hour with her adopted clan, everyone gathered at Father’s enormous table made from a single slab of Black Forest oak. The yellow beeswax candles that Ellenor had made provided ample light, standing in ceramic dishes painted with scenes of the hunt. Everyone seemed in fine spirits, considering the circumstances. As was their custom, servants and family members dined together, enjoying human conversation as much as possible in the ugly shadow of war. The children, Karl and Truda, seemed immune to what was transpiring at the Front, sheltered by their dad and rendered immortal by their youth. They showed off their budding English skills and occasionally kicked each other under the table.

  And then Father stood up.

  Everyone quieted. Ellenor saw a change in the man who had hired her one year ago. Still robust, he’d relinquished a bit of his boyish candor. These days he kept many things to himself that he would have shared openly not so long ago. As patriarch, he saw his foremost duty to protect those within these walls, and that meant absorbing the full truth of what the Kaiser was doing with this endless war. Father had seen the torn-apart bodies being brought back from the so-called Hindenburg Line, the series of bulwarks the Germans had constructed to defend those parts of France they’d annexed. He’d seen the yellowed corpses of men who had choked to death on gas.

  “Please, if you may,” he said, and made a motion for them all to stand.

  Chairs rasped against the tiles as everyone complied. They lined up in front of him like school kids on the first day of lessons. On Ellenor’s right was the house’s longtime cook, Dagmar. On her left was Roswalt, the butler. Father stood before them, wearing his second-best suit, a slip of paper in his hands. He seemed to be gathering his thoughts. The silence grew.

  Ellenor, an optimist by nature, suddenly expected the worst.

  Finally Father cleared his throat. Ellenor always enjoyed hearing him speak. He used the German language in the style of his generation, with crisp enunciation and nary a slang word to be found. “This morning I received a wire from the office of the Luftstreitkräfte.”

  Ellenor knew it wasn’t good news. If the German air force had contacted Father, it meant only one thing. She waited for him to say it.

  “Due to the relative proximity of my acreage to the Front, and given the scope of my property and the diversity of its resources, it seems we’re all being…conscripted into the war effort.” He held himself composed, mostly majestic, allowing only the tiniest bit of emotion to show in his gray eyes. “The German High Command has seen fit to present us with a Jagdstaffeln, or hunting squadron, as they like to call it. The members of that squadron, under the command of Captain Gustov Voss, will make their residence here, in this very house, as early as tomorrow.” Father looked at each of them in turn, starting with his children and sweeping the room, ending with Ellenor. “We are to provide them with every courtesy for the duration of their stay, however long it might be. Am I understood?”

  They all spoke at once in the affirmative, family and staff ardently agreeing. He was, after all, Father. They would have agreed to swimming naked in the Rhine had he asked.

  “I apologize for the disruption this is sure to cause in our daily lives,” he told them. “But our boys are being slaughtered not far from here and dying on barbed wire. I’m sure the least we can do is abide with the slight inconvenience of hosting the military for a while.”

  Several nods confirmed this. Any citizen of Germany should be honored to do their small part, and if that meant giving up their bedroom to a weary soldier, so be it.

  Father must have seen something in Ellenor’s face. He stared at h
er. “Miss Jantz?”

  His sudden attention startled her. “Sir?”

  “Are you troubled by this idea?”

  “No, I…” She groped for some way to deflect him. “I’m just tired of all the fighting, I suppose.”

  “As am I. Is there something you’d like to say?”

  “No, sir,” she replied with her most reassuring smile, thinking about the British airman she’d hidden in the barn.

  ****

  Just like one of his beloved biplanes rising from the fog, Alec Corbin-Dawes came back to life. His eyelids fluttered. His first thought upon waking was not of the pain nor of his sister nor of the crash. He thought instead about The Dragon.

  The Scout Experimental 5 was the finest thing ever made in Hampshire, specifically in the thousand-year-old town of Farnborough. As an aircraft, the S.E.5 was nimble and deceptive, a wicked little crate with a V8 engine and a top end of one hundred and fifty miles an hour. Compared to the Avro he’d borrowed and subsequently crashed, the S.E.5 was a bolt of lightning from the clouds. Alec had flown one with St. George’s dragon painted under the wing. He’d killed enough Huns in The Dragon that the papers back home had called him an ace.

  His talent had kept him alive, and his longevity had earned him a reward in the form of a training assignment at a French aerodrome a few miles from the zigzag trenches of the Front. No longer did he lead patrols. No longer did he ride The Dragon like some goggle-wearing sorcerer, tormenting the German skies.

  He opened his eyes fully, inhaling the scents of straw and horse and old wood.

  Everything hurt like hell.

  His ribs were bad, but not as bad as his left knee, which in turn had nothing on his hand, which had been fine—more or less—until the woman with the American accent had shot him. Shot him. His hand throbbed, the pain webbing outward from his palm to excite the tips of his fingers. A headache raged at both temples. And he’d almost bitten through his goddamn tongue.