The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows

by Olivia Waite

  Dedication

  With gratitude to my great-grandparents—to Grandpa Lee, for the bees,

  and to Grandma Ruth, for the gardens

  and also for letting six-year-old me drink all that caffeinated black tea

  which explains why I always had so much energy for tree climbing.

  Map

  Epigraph

  The publication of a lascivious book is one of the worst offences that can be committed against the well-being of society . . . Let the rulers of the state look to this, in time!

  —Robert Southey

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  The Hellion’s Waltz

  About the Author

  Also by Olivia Waite

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  May 1, 1820

  The corpses were giving Agatha the most trouble. They looked too much like people.

  She chewed the end of her graver while she frowned down at the wax, only half-covered with lines carved by the sharp steel point. It wasn’t that her son Sydney’s notes about the event weren’t detailed. They were. He’d been quite gruesomely observant about the whole execution, from the first drumbeat to the last dangle. “Afterward,” he wrote in his hurried scrawl, “the hangman cut the bodies down from the scaffold and laid them out for beheading, bare as a row of teeth.”

  But what kind of teeth? A jagged, feral twist of fangs, like a snarl frozen in time? Or more like the matched tombstone set you’d see in the grinning skull of a memento mori?

  There was a time and place for poetic expression, and it was not when you were describing a scene so someone else could make an accurate picture of it. Agatha’s efforts to educate her son after his father’s death had never prioritized make sure the boy can convey his ideas in clear and precise metaphor, but maybe they ought to have.

  Thomas would have been so flummoxed, rest his soul.

  Agatha had been widowed three years now, raising a boy on the cusp of manhood and running Griffin’s print shop and never more than an inch shy of catastrophe. Even something as familiar as copper plate etching, which she’d learned at her mother’s knee, seemed only another opportunity for everything to go wrong.

  She spun the graver vexedly in her hand and cursed all teeth.

  If she were a history painter in the Royal Academy—like the ones whose work she’d so often copied for the Menagerie—she’d strive to make each dead man unique. An outflung hand here, over there an agonized crooking of limbs. Careful composition would allow the varying shapes and poses to mirror and counterbalance one another, and create a whole greater than the sum of its individual parts. The viewer wouldn’t be aware of this—but they would feel it, deep in their gut.

  But this work wasn’t high art. This was a sensationalist sketch of this afternoon’s hangings for those who hadn’t or couldn’t attend in person, and the simpler she made it the faster and more easily she could print it. Right now the execution of the Cato Street conspirators was the city’s favorite subject, and every hack and handpress owner on the banks of the Thames would be rushing to offer cartoons and etchings and pamphlets. She wasn’t even taking the time to sketch the scene beforehand: this design was being cut directly into the smoked wax ground of the plate.

  She knew simpler was better, because simpler was faster, and faster meant more sales before the public’s ghoulish fascination moved on.

  Yielding to necessity, she made the corpses all identical, the line of bodies as stark, stern, and terrifying as sharp metal could slice. Dead, those harsh lines said. Dead, still dead, none more dead, so aggressively dead it borders on rudeness.

  But her artist’s sensibilities couldn’t be entirely ignored. She found herself drawing the living onlookers as individuals: a tall woman, a fat man, a pair of friends with straw hats and walking staves, come in from the country to see the execution; a child pointing and clutching its mother’s hand. Looming over everything stood the tall figure of the hangman, heaving up the first severed head for the mob’s approval.

  They hadn’t approved, Sydney’s notes explained. They’d booed and hissed and thrown things at the executioner, crying out against state violence and the tyranny of wealthy, self-interested men.

  And no wonder. Everyone knew the government was corrupt, from the magistrates to the House of Lords to King George himself.

  Agatha carved the hangman’s outlines especially deep into the wax, so the acid would bite deep and the rich black ink would be sure to fill the space thickly. He ought to inspire fear—though he wasn’t the man who scared her most in this business.

  George Edwards had been second in command of the assassination attempt; it had been his urging that had spurred the plot onward, and his knowledge of Cabinet members’ movements that had helped them fix on a time and place.

  But George Edwards had been working as a government informer the whole time. He’d only played the part of a co-conspirator. For all anyone knew, Mr. Edwards might have come to witness the execution—might even have stood beside one of the condemned men’s mothers in the crowd, offering a polite handkerchief to stem her desperate tears. Just as he’d offered false support to the son now on the scaffold.

  Agatha didn’t approve of violent revolution. No decent person wanted England to go through what France had suffered these past decades. And the recent Radical War in Scotland this past spring had brought the specter of an uprising far too close to home for the government’s comfort. The laws had tightened, because the Lords were scared.

  Agatha was no radical, herself. But every time she thought of George Edwards’s deception, well . . . it twisted her stomach into knots.

  Or maybe that was only the ache of hunger. How late was it?

  Agatha looked up from her work for the first time in hours, and realized the shadows on the walls were from streetlamps and not the setting sun. The two Stanhope presses lurked like rooks against the east wall of the workroom, their long wooden arms skeleton-still now that the apprentices and journeyman had gone home for the night. Drying prints were pinned up around and over them, waving softly like shrouds.

  Well, technically speaking, not all the apprentices had gone home. The lamplight coming through the back window cast a halo over the dark hair of Agatha’s best apprentice, Eliza Brinkworth, who occupied the spare bedroom upstairs and who was working quietly and patiently at the next table over, adding careful layers of color to a print of Thisburton’s latest caricature. Her slender shoulders were hunched, her brow lightly furrowed as she brushed amber and ochre over the cartoonist’s dancing fox figures.

  Eliza had come to Griffin’s with nothing more than a gift for sketching and a will to work
. Now, four years later, she had blossomed into an able assistant in both copperplate engraving and woodcuts, and was the swiftest producer of sheet music blocks Griffin’s had. The ballads she illustrated had become a reassuringly steady profit stream, as subscriptions to the luxurious Griffin’s Menagerie ladies’ magazine declined under the new stamp taxes. If Eliza had been Agatha’s daughter, she would have been an ideal choice to take over the running of Griffin’s.

  But Agatha had no daughter. Instead she had only—

  Out front the shop bell chimed. Then the door between the shop and the workroom opened.

  “Hello, Mum!”

  Agatha’s heart soared skyward on helpless winds of maternal fondness at the sight of her son, returning from Birkett’s, where he’d gone to settle the weekly bill for paper. He’d grown so tall and sturdy these past three years, a far cry from the thin and sensitive boy who’d hidden in his room for a month after his father’s death. Nineteen-year-old Sydney was windblown and tousle-haired, bouncing with vitality, eyes bright with eager purpose, and just where the hell did he think he was going?

  For after that hurried greeting, her son had vanished up the stair, with a clatter worthy of Hannibal and all his elephants.

  Agatha frowned in suspicion. “Sydney Algernon Griffin!” she called. “You promised you’d—”

  Before she could manage to set her work aside, block his way, and forestall an exit, Sydney reappeared at the foot of the stairwell. He’d changed his brown coat for one of bottle green, and the flush on his pale cheeks spoke of haste and excitement—but also, to his mother’s keen sight, of guilt. “Going out again, Mum,” he called cheerily. “Back late. Love you!”

  “—print this plate—” Agatha managed, but not quickly enough. The doorway was empty, and the chime of the shop bell was the only reply she got.

  So much for filial duty.

  This was the bane of Agatha’s current existence: she couldn’t very well leave the business to her son if he was never around to run it.

  Her temper surged like a storm cloud, and descended upon the only object available. Her apprentice, whose dark head lifted, and whose creamy complexion went rose red at the sight of her mistress’s narrowed eye.

  Lord, but weren’t the young astonishing? Even at the end of a day so long as this, Eliza radiated keenness and energy. “Break for dinner, ma’am?” the girl piped. “I know it’s Betsy’s night off, so I could run to the Queen’s Larder for a pie, if you like. One pie ought to be plenty for the two of us.”

  An attempt at distraction. It would not work. “Eliza,” Agatha said, with careful clarity, “do you know where my son is off to this evening?”

  The girl’s glance flicked down, then back. “I couldn’t say for certain, Mrs. Griffin.”

  Agatha’s voice was cool as a razor. “Perhaps he is attending one of the Polite Society’s chemistry lectures.”

  Eliza ducked her head. “Couldn’t say, ma’am.”

  “A poetry reading? A concert? A play in some theater or other?”

  Eliza shook her head.

  Agatha drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “Dare I ask whether my son has developed a passion for Mr. Rossini’s latest opera?”

  Eliza sighed wistfully. “If only.”

  Agatha snorted.

  Her apprentice blushed and bit her lip. “That is—I don’t think so, ma’am.”

  “So.” Agatha drummed her fingers again, four tiny beats like a guillotine march. “That leaves only one possibility. Eliza, tell me my precious, precocious Sydney is not bound for the Crown and Anchor, to drink bad ale and cheer for whoever is spouting tonight’s most radical nonsense.”

  “It wouldn’t be right to tell a lie, ma’am,” Eliza said plaintively.

  Agatha pinched at the bridge of her nose to keep her head from exploding in maternal vexation.

  She knew part of this was her fault, really. She and Thomas had raised the boy in a print-shop, surrounded by persuasive pamphlets and cases of type waiting to be reordered and rearranged into new flights of rhetoric. Sydney swam in arguments like a fish—but Agatha was worried that only made him ready to be hooked and filleted.

  Her voice ground out the old complaint. “I never expected him to be a paragon. He’s a young man, after all. It’s best to keep your expectations low if you want to avoid disappointment. I just wish his vices kept him more often at home!”

  She cocked an eyebrow at Eliza, who was still squirming, even though the girl had done absolutely nothing to squirm about.

  Unless . . .

  “At least he doesn’t seem prone to debauchery,” Agatha said, watching carefully. “That’s something.”

  Ah, yes, there it was, the flush spreading from the girl’s cheeks to the tips of her ears. It was as good as cracking open her diary to read it in plain ink on paper.

  Her son and her apprentice were more than merely friendly.

  Not surprising, really. They were both healthy and young—oh, so young! Agatha could remember when nineteen seemed mature and wise and fully grown. It took nearly two decades to reach it, after all. But nineteen looked very different when you looked back on it from the lofty heights of forty-three. And forty-three would probably look green as grass from the cliffs of seventy-five, should Agatha be lucky enough to attain such a venerable age.

  Time tumbled you forward, no matter how hard you fought to stay put.

  Agatha sighed and looked down at the image on the copper plate, with its burrs and burnishing. All those little figures, waiting for the acid bath to draw their lines sharp and true. Today they were everything; tomorrow they would be forgotten.

  Well. No point in dwelling on the philosophical. Especially not when there was dinner to think of. And absolutely nothing was less philosophical than a steak and kidney pie. “Two pies, actually, Eliza,” she said. “Two for us, and a third for Sydney—wherever and whenever he returns.”

  The apprentice nodded and was out the door in a flash, eager to escape while she was still in the luster of her mistress’s good graces.

  Agatha rose and threw open the door to the yard behind the workshop, letting the early summer night flood in. She sucked in deep lungfuls, savoring the rare moment of peace.

  After dinner she would sink the copper into a basin of eye-watering aqua fortis to let the acid bite into the metal, then polish the rest of the wax away so the new plate would be ready for use when the journeymen came back in the morning. The presses would ring out, and another day’s work would begin.

  It was good work, constant and familiar, and Agatha liked it. But every now and again, especially in these moments of quiet, Agatha would peer up at the lamplight-dimmed stars and imagine taking her hand off the tiller, even for a moment.

  What might it feel like, to not sense Time’s drumbeat so close against the back of her neck? What vistas could she see, if she were able to lift her eyes for more than a moment from the rocky road beneath her hurrying feet?

  She grimaced. Griffin’s would go bankrupt within a week without her.

  A print-shop needed a firm hand—Thomas had been steady and brilliant, but not forceful. Agatha had been the one to haggle over prices with the colormen who sold them ink and the stationers who sold them paper; Thomas had collected all the artists and poets and architects and fashion experts whose names graced bylines in the Menagerie—but it was Agatha who’d had to arrange payment and proofread their pieces and etch all the embroidery designs, copies of art, and furniture illustrations that made the Menagerie so popular among the ton. And it was Agatha who penned the scolding letters when a contracted writer let firm deadlines sail blithely by. She was the one who made all the journeymen jump to when she entered the workroom, and whose voice sent all the apprentices scrambling.

  Not a ship captain, she thought, nor a steersman: they had set watches and times for rest. No, Agatha was more like . . . the wind in the sails, keeping the vessel on course.

  If she ever stopped, it would be a disaster for everyone.
>
  She was still frowning up at the sky when Eliza returned with the pies. And her worry didn’t leave her when she got back to work. It haunted her like a little ghost, mournful and insistent, until she blew out the last tallow candle and tucked herself into her bed on the upper floor. It kept her from sleeping deeply, so she heard the precise moment when her son’s footsteps thumped out an unsteady welcome on the stairs, to the musical echo of Eliza’s answering giggle.

  No doubt they thought they were being discreet.

  Well, if they were making fools of themselves for love, they weren’t the first. The real danger was Sydney’s passion for political talk. What would his quiet, self-conscious father have thought about his son’s gadding about with silver-spoon philosophers and revolutionaries?

  Agatha sat up and punched the pillow.

  As for the matter with Eliza, Thomas would have wanted to speak to the young couple directly, but despite the prickings of her conscience, Agatha was content to observe the pair for now. Best not to meddle in the affair until they were further along, or did one another some harm.

  Which they probably would.

  But secretly Agatha hoped they would make a real match of it. Eliza was sensible and clever, and Sydney for all his faults had inherited his father’s good heart and earnest soul. Not that the two of them would be thinking of such practical matters: with them it would be all swoons and sonnets. Not any different from Thomas and Agatha, in their youth.

  She only missed love when she took the time to remember it. That was the one thing that had never disappointed her.

  She fell asleep to the memory of kisses from decades past, and a pair of hands whose ink stains were twin to hers.

  Sometimes Penelope Flood imagined the small spire of St. Ambrose’s was reaching up joyfully toward the heavens. Today, however, it felt more like the church’s stone foundations were biting deep into the muddy earth.

  It was probably the funeral. Famed local sculptress Isabella Abington, descended from Earls of Sufton, had been laid to rest this morning in the vault of her illustrious forebears. Sleeping stone figures of the first earl, his wife, and his son stretched out in the northwest corner of the church, their limbs entwined in cold, bone-white vines spotted with marble bees, some of which still bore traces of ancient gilt. Mr. Scriven, who kept goats up on Backey Green, said that these first Abingtons had been entombed in pure honey, preserving their bodies from decay.