The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows

by Olivia Waite

  Every time Sydney left the house, Agatha wondered if today was the day the uprising would start, and Sydney would be the one marching at the front with the banner. Making himself a proper target. She wondered if she’d ever see him again, and even though she knew she was being ridiculous, her heartbeat stuttered in her chest. Radical papers praised the recent civil wars in Naples, Spain, and Portugal, while soldiers arrested radical writers and seized their printings in bulk; Peterloo and Cato Street were revived in the public imagination; Tory papers complained that the rabble would take up arms, and the soldiers would refuse to confront them, and good English patriots would be slaughtered in their sleep by pitchfork-wielding mobs, or beheaded by the guillotines that were surely being erected on every village green and in every London square.

  Each time Sydney came back, he’d found another writer begging Griffin’s to print a pamphlet whose rhetoric could get them fined, arrested, transported, or worse.

  Agatha rejected most of these offers outright—Griffin’s had a reputation as scientific and artistic, rather than radical or political—but with the streets in such turmoil, sales of picturesque landmarks and tranquil tour scenes were suffering. Something had to bridge the gap.

  “A broadside edition of one of the Queen’s letters, then,” Agatha yielded with a sigh.

  “At least it’s not technically sedition, to reprint the words of the Queen,” Eliza offered.

  “Not until she’s divorced, anyways,” Agatha muttered. “Though if that happens, I expect we’ll have larger matters to worry about.”

  Sydney’s face lit up at the thought of speaking out and getting his message heard—any message, even if it wasn’t as fiercely radical as he might have hoped. “I’ll set the type myself, if you like, after the workmen have gone home. That way nobody will know where it came from.”

  Agatha snorted. “You think the journeymen don’t know every nick in every piece of type we use? But it’s a good precaution, all the same.” She narrowed her eyes. “Do you even remember how to compose type?”

  Her son only grinned. “I’m sure it will come back to me.”

  It did, to his mother’s mingled pride and irritation. Late that evening, with the shop quiet and the streetlamps flickering orange outside, Agatha cast a practiced eye over the finished forme: the bundle of leaden letters and bits of wood, tied up tight with twine to hold all the smaller pieces together. They’d pull a proof to check for errors, but any decent printer could decrypt the backwards letters in the composing stick by the time they finished their apprenticeship, and Agatha’s practiced eye spotted no mistakes.

  It only took two people to operate the iron Stanhope press, so Agatha let the young people do the bulk of the work. Sydney set the forme in the galley, and the galley in the press-bed; Eliza skimmed the congealed skin off the top of the ink, and used a knife to spread a thin liquid layer on the glass-topped table next to the press. A single sheet of paper went into the tympan, atop layers of cloth padding to soften the blow of the plate; the frisket came down to protect the edges from ink, its cut-out center square framing and presenting the blank page like a yeoman holding a snowy sheep in place for shearing.

  Eliza daubed a thin layer of ink onto the letters of the forme, filling the air with the dark, lush scent of oil; Sydney lowered tympan and frisket onto the bed, and pulled the rounce—a bar that slid the whole arrangement into the heart of the press.

  All that was mere preparation: now came the moment of truth.

  A single pull of the long central lever brought the flat, heavy platen down with a thump Agatha felt from her heels to her heart. She flinched internally, and hoped the noise wasn’t audible to anyone in the street outside.

  Normally it was her favorite part of the process. The instant when all the layers of padding, paper, ink, and type were squashed together—and something new came out.

  Sydney pushed the lever back, turned the rounce, and opened the frisket. There it was, in black and white, shining wetly: the words of Queen Caroline to her subjects and supporters. Sydney held it out for Agatha’s approval, suddenly and adorably shy.

  Agatha’s heart softened. He’d looked just like that the day he pulled his first proof out of the press, as a young apprentice. It had been Thomas he’d handed it to then, of course.

  How fast the years went by, when you had worries to keep you busy.

  Swallowing her nostalgia, Agatha eyed the proof, pronounced it good, and hung the paper up to dry. Eliza was already daubing the forme with another layer of ink, and Sydney slipped another page into the press. Another thump, and a new broadsheet to hang from the lines strung across the top of the workroom. And so on, as the minutes spun by.

  Press-work made for a comforting rhythm—like the beating of a very large, very slow heart. Agatha hung up another broadsheet and paused to read through a few sentences, taking in the meaning now rather than simply looking for mistakes. “‘General tyranny usually begins with individual oppression.’ This is much more radical stuff than I would have expected from any monarch.”

  “They say William Cobbett wrote this one,” Sydney said, his hero’s name lingering on his tongue like a benediction. “According to Prestwich, who dined with him privately the other evening, Cobbett sees the alliance between the Queenites and the radicals as a natural bond: both have been oppressed, exiled, punished, and spied upon by the government, merely for asserting the rights to which they are legally and morally entitled. If we can harness popular support for Caroline, we might be able to push through actual changes—they say now that Cobbett has her ear, we might get her to support the expansion of suffrage, or even more reforms . . .”

  He went on in this way for some time, laying out elaborate plans of negotiation and leverage, most of which were rhetorical, and all of which had at least seventeen separate steps yet were somehow both inevitable and predictable.

  It made Agatha feel as though the very stones beneath her feet couldn’t be trusted to stay steady.

  She remembered what Penelope Flood had said about Thisburton: He treats it like a game. All the arguments and the strategies and even the enthusiasm: it was about winning, about scoring points and defeating opponents and being the person who was the most right. Sydney and the young radical men followed political debates the same way their aristocratic nemeses followed horse races—and whenever they talked about revolution, the assumption was that they would be ones on top at the end.

  You could almost hear Robespierre laughing from the other side of the guillotine blade.

  “Tell me,” she blurted, to banish the image, “if you could alter one thing about government—only one thing, but you could change it instantly, without having to argue with anybody—what would you change?”

  “Just one thing?” Sydney thought about it for the whole time it took to print another copy of the Queen’s address. “I’d revoke the sedition and libel laws,” he said at last. “Because a free press is the key that helps you unlock every other door. You can’t change what you can’t openly talk about.”

  “Not the vote?” Eliza asked, using one forearm to brush her hair back from her forehead. “I know the press is important, but if the people in power have no reason to listen to you—and unless you’re electing them, they don’t—how is disenfranchisement any different from censorship?”

  Sydney pulled on the press-arm, grunting a little with effort. “So you’d institute universal suffrage: give every man the vote.”

  “Man and woman. Otherwise it’s not really universal, is it?” Eliza coolly rolled out another layer of ink for the daubers.

  Sydney chortled. “And they say I’m the radical one!” He grinned. “Sorry, Mum. You’re outnumbered.”

  “Don’t mind me,” Agatha said dryly. “I’m just a cranky old woman with no vote, biding my time until death. The future is yours to worry about.”

  “So what would you change?” Eliza asked. “Just one thing.”

  Agatha took the newest broadsheet, and pinned it
up for drying. The other sheets fluttered as the string vibrated, billowing like the sails of a ship. She thought of a sailor’s wife with gold-and-silver hair, and her husband somewhere far across the sea. Her throat felt tight with the unfairness of it. “I’d make divorce simple. And cheap.”

  Both Eliza and Sydney stopped, the former with daubers raised, the latter with a fresh broadsheet in one hand. The heartbeat rhythm of the press stopped with them.

  London had never sounded so quiet.

  Belatedly, it occurred to Agatha that her son might take that as a glancing reference to how she’d felt about his father. But what was she to do? She couldn’t tell him: Oh, don’t worry, it’s only that I’m lusting after my friend who is inconveniently married.

  She plucked the broadsheet from Sydney’s hand and hung it up with the rest. How convenient that the stretch of white paper and black ink hid her face for a moment. “I only mean to say, look at all the fuss currently, on account of one unhappy marriage,” she said, too loud in the silence. “Imagine if the King and Queen could simply agree to part—perhaps we wouldn’t be standing on the precipice of a revolution.”

  “Perhaps we need a revolution,” muttered Sydney, glancing at Eliza.

  “Perhaps,” said Eliza tartly, “we need several.”

  Sydney grimaced at that and chewed his lip—a habit he’d inherited from his father, that showed up when he was most anxious. Agatha hadn’t seen him do it in a while now, she realized—for all her own worry about the state of the nation and the tenor of the times, Sydney had been nothing if not eager to throw himself into the fray. If he’d been able to choose what Griffin’s printed, he’d have been right there on the radical edge with Cobbett and the rest of them.

  What was the use of keeping the press going for him, if he was only going to use it to get himself jailed or worse? She knew he was old enough to make his own choices—but did they have to be these choices?

  Agatha’s heart was a wriggling worm in her breast. She groped for a change of subject. “How have you been getting on with the Menagerie correspondence, Eliza?”

  Her apprentice shrugged. “It’s not that different from the wholesalers, to be frank. They make offers of things to write, and they ask when they’re getting paid, and they apologize for articles that turn up late or go missing, all that kind of thing. I expected them to talk more about—I don’t know, about the things they’re writing the articles about? I thought we’d be discussing art, or music, or fashion, about what all those things mean and how to do them well.” She shook her head, adding more ink to the forme. “Then again, it’s clear they have money and education, so maybe they can tell that—well, that I don’t. Our critics write for people who can afford to buy paintings, or sit in a box at the opera. Not for someone who pins up an engraved print or sits in the stalls.”

  Sydney pulled extra-hard on the press-arm, making the plate thump doubly loud. “What about someone who knows the melody of every popular ballad in London? And who learns new ones as soon as she hears them?”

  Eliza went allover pink. “Those are just tunes. Easy enough to learn by ear.”

  He shook his head. “Doubt any of your music critics have learned half as many.”

  Eliza’s eyes were lowered, but the curl at the corners of her lips showed how pleased she was. Sydney went back for more paper, the tips of his ears turning red.

  Behind the drying broadsheets, his mother rolled her eyes and hid a smile.

  At one hundred sheets, Agatha declared the work enough for now. Eliza sponged the ink from the form and then the glass, while Sydney tied the forme up again and set it in a drawer for tomorrow night’s work. They’d have to wake early to pull the dried pages down and bundle them up before the workmen arrived.

  As Eliza had said, it wasn’t technically sedition—but this was not an argument Agatha was prepared to make in any official legal capacity. Better to avoid the authorities’ notice altogether.

  They trooped up the stairs, and to bed. Agatha diplomatically took no notice of her son’s hand, straying briefly toward Eliza’s for a single soft touch, a silent good-night.

  They all went separately to sleep—or so she hoped.

  Chapter Nine

  The summer sun beat down on the Melliton high street. Agatha fancied she could hear the flagstones of the main square sizzling, and had a sudden anxious vision of the stack of broadsheets in her hand bursting spontaneously into flame.

  “It’ll be cooler in the woods,” Flood assured her. The hives had been well tended for the past few months and any damaged skeps replaced, so the wheelbarrow was no longer an everyday necessity: today, Flood carried slung over her shoulder a bundle with the smoker and its fuel, and a few other small tools of the beekeeper’s trade.

  Agatha shifted her grip on the lyric sheets to let the air cool her hot palms. “Then let’s hurry, after we stop at Nell Turner’s.”

  The Turners lived one turn off the high street in a cottage ancient as the hills, whose venerable thatch was almost entirely moss. The lane passed the door as if reluctant to linger, and spent itself in a wheat field behind a low fence; the crop stretched to the foot of the hill beyond, silky and yellow-green as newborn envy.

  Agatha expected Flood to knock, but instead the beekeeper went past and around to the garden at the back of the house. This was a functional potager, worlds away from either the ornamental labyrinth and extensive kitchen garden of Abington Hall or even Mrs. Stowe’s cozy cottage roses. Cabbages, onions, radishes, lettuce, and celery, with smaller patches of various herbs, climbed up everywhere out of the dark earth. And in the middle, on a small stool just like the one behind Agatha’s print-works, a new skep hive, straw gleaming like gold, young worker bees entering and leaving as they went about their tireless honey production.

  Mrs. Turner was defending the onions ruthlessly against the encroaching weeds, and looked up with a start as the two women approached. “Mrs. Flood! Mrs. Griffin!” she exclaimed, springing to her feet and brushing the earth from her hands. “Is there something amiss?” She glanced at the hive, then back at Flood. “I haven’t been doing anything wrong with the bees, have I?”

  “Not since I checked yesterday afternoon, Mrs. Turner. We won’t keep you long.” Flood’s cheery voice allowed no room for embarrassment, and Mrs. Turner’s hands lowered. “We were just stopping in on our way up Backey Green.”

  “Do you have somewhere I could set these?” Agatha hefted the bundle of broadsheets she carried: a second printing of “Inexpressibles,” plus two other new ballads specially selected for Melliton tastes.

  Mrs. Turner wiped her hands clean on her apron and led them into the house.

  Inside was all low ceilings and dark wood beams, and the heat from the hearth where that evening’s bread was baking. The furniture in the main room seemed as old as the house, but the bread smelled wonderful and the wood of the floor had been scrubbed within an inch of its life. A tumbled pair of beds, one large and one small, could be seen through a doorway in the next room—Mrs. Turner hurried over to pull the door shut with an embarrassed squeak of the hinge. “So,” she said, “they’ve been selling well in London?”

  “Faster than most,” Agatha confirmed. She set the new broadsides down on the long central table, paper and ink covering the scars in the wood. “I’ve been told by Griffin’s resident ballad expert that you probably already know melodies for the other two?”

  Mrs. Turner cast an eye over the two new sets of lyrics, and nodded. “I have something that will suit.”

  Agatha clasped her hands, trying not to sound too eager. “I was also wondering if you had any more original songs I could persuade you to let me print.”

  “It would be a pleasure,” Mrs. Turner said affably. “Just as soon as you deliver the latest payment.”

  Agatha was confused. “But . . . Mr. Turner came by and collected it earlier this week. Eliza mentioned it.”

  Flood’s sunny smile faded, and Mrs. Turner set down the broadside with a
small, pained sigh. “I see.” Her mouth had gone tight, her eyes anxious. She smoothed her skirts over her knees, and folded her hands. “I would ask you to deliver any payments to me personally in the future, Mrs. Griffin. If that is possible.”

  “Of course . . .” Agatha said faintly, cringing internally. How foolish she’d been not to have considered before that Mr. Turner might not have been the most reliable custodian of the money his wife had earned. Even if he did have a right to it, according to the common law. At least he had not received the total sales amount, only the most recent quantity. Agatha cleared her throat. “You have my word that all future monies will be put directly into your hands, Mrs. Turner.” Mrs. Turner nodded but still looked tense and wary; Agatha couldn’t blame her one bit.

  “What song are you working on now, Nell?” Flood asked.

  Mrs. Turner’s expression softened as she looked at Penelope Flood. “I’m fiddling with something about Jack Calbert’s ghost.”

  Flood chuckled in delight. Agatha’s ears perked up. “Whose ghost?”

  “I suppose it’s ghosts, plural,” Mrs. Turner said, and some of the warmth came back into her golden skin. “Since there’s a whole shipful of them.”

  Agatha’s laugh was a surprised burst of sound. “What?”

  The ballad singer straightened in her chair, shaking tension from her shoulders. “When the Armada sailed from Spain to overthrow Good Queen Bess, the navy harried the Spanish ships out of the Channel as the winds forced them north. They fled up along the coast—all except one ship, the Florencia, which had taken too many English cannonballs broadside. The galleon sank to the bottom of the sea, just past the mouth of the Thames. The navy kept pursuing the surviving Armada—but one sailor by the name of John Calbert marked the Florencia’s final resting place in his journal.”