by Olivia Waite
What a change a few short months could make: where it had once felt odd to walk the bee circuit in reverse with Agatha Griffin at her side, now it was the old, original method that felt strange and wrong. Penelope was focusing so much on the person who wasn’t there as she walked along the high street that it took her a few minutes to notice how many more people there were around her than usual.
Some of them had white sashes or rosettes, the insignia adopted by Queen Caroline’s supporters. Some had banners and handmade bunting. And they were all walking in the same direction: the rectory.
Penelope lengthened her strides until she caught up to Mr. Thomas, in his broad-brimmed hat. “What has Mrs. Koskinen arranged now?” she asked. Somehow the woman was able to gather people without the authorities learning about it beforehand—Penelope had yet to figure out how she arranged it.
“A protest,” Mr. Thomas replied. His creamy complexion was unusually flushed, and his blond curls were flyaways where they stuck out from the hat. “We’re going to demand Mr. Oliver restore the Queen’s name to the liturgy.”
Penelope’s lips pursed. Striking Caroline’s name from beside his in the Anglican church service had been one of the ways George had publicly insulted his wife and assaulted her privileges in recent months. It had been an unpopular move, angering the normally royalist churchgoers as well as the radical Queenites.
Penelope thought it was, in a word: mean. Kings ought to be above meanness—that was the whole point of them, wasn’t it? If they were supposed to be superior to other folk, then they should be better. Her resolve solidified. “I don’t suppose you mind if I join in?”
“The more the merrier, of course,” Mr. Thomas replied, tipping the brim of his hat.
So Penelope turned left instead of right at the village square, and joined the crowd now gathering outside St. Ambrose’s rectory.
She had been in a riot before, of course. Nearly everyone in Melliton had. There had been demonstrations after the killings at Peterloo last year, and bread riots during the long years of the war before that. Riots were a proud country tradition, and long practice had worn them into a comfortable pattern: you showed up, you shouted and waved a banner or two, you went home once you’d made your point. Perhaps you did a bit of conscientious liberating of property—Penelope remembered one such occasion, when the mob had seized Squire Theydon’s corn from a Sweden-bound ship. They had sold it at once to local farmers and villagers at traditional prices, they’d given the squire his profits afterward, and nobody at all had been hurt. It had all been very disciplined and neatly organized.
When you didn’t have the vote, sometimes you had to take what power you could grasp with your own two hands.
An action against the vicar, though . . . That was unusual. Mr. Oliver was an unrufflable man, happy to trust that the Lord knew best even in the midst of the fiercest disagreement. His sermons were as bland and easily digestible as porridge: you never could say you enjoyed them, exactly, but they seemed hygienic in some indefinable way. They made you feel good about being good without you having to do anything at all.
Penelope and Mr. Thomas reached the space in front of the rectory and stopped, on the edge of where the crowd was thickest. The building itself was humble and cozy, a plain two-story stone cottage with a luxuriant garden Mr. Oliver always referred to as “a little Eden.”
While more people thronged up around and behind them, Penelope craned her neck, looking around at all the familiar faces. There were plenty of the local reformers and radicals she expected—Mr. Thomas, Mrs. Price the baker, but also Mr. and Mrs. Wybrow and Mr. Northcote and his son—but those familiar ranks were bolstered by a number of women she was used to seeing only in the pews at Sunday services. Mrs. Galloway, whose cousin was a baronet, had her hands demurely folded and a white rosette pinned to her bodice; Mrs. Plumb the mercer’s wife and her daughter Felicia, twisting her hands excitedly in her skirts; old Mrs. Midson, who used to be a governess, peering around at the crowd as if she would be administering an exam to everyone at the end of the riot.
Griffin had been right: the Queen’s cause had much broader support than any radical or reformist Penelope had seen. Not even Orator Hunt had gotten so many of Melliton’s middle-rank citizens out of their parlors and into the streets.
These were not only the poorer folk whose happiness rose and fell with the price of bread or corn: these were village wives of traders and merchants with comfortable incomes, finally roused to anger by George’s repeated injustices to his royal wife.
When Mrs. Koskinen judged the time had come and the crowd was good and thick at her back, that stout-hearted lady marched up to the rectory door, knocked sharply, and called out: “Mr. Oliver! The farmers and freeholders and good people of Melliton want to talk to you!” Then she stepped beside her husband, who stood silent and immoveable.
It was a few moments before the vicar appeared, tugging at the sleeves of his hastily donned jacket. He took in the mob arrayed before his door with one quick glance, counting names and faces as Penelope had, but his smile was everything polite and self-effacing. “Good afternoon, friends. What can I do for you?”
The leader tilted her head back and pitched her voice to carry. “We want the Queen’s name back in the liturgy.”
“Hear hear!” Mrs. Price called.
The crowd rumbled in support, like a wave breaking on the shore.
Mr. Oliver’s smile never wavered. His eyes darted left, and widened when he saw his own deacon standing in the lane, a white sash wrapped around his stocky torso. “Mr. Buckley?” he said, in a voice shaky with surprise and betrayal.
“We want the Queen’s name back in the liturgy, sir,” the deacon called staunchly, folding his arms and nodding at Mrs. Koskinen as the crowd cheered him on. “We want to pray for both our rightful sovereigns, as we ought to. It’s the right and Christian thing to do.”
Mr. Oliver spread his hands. “Unfortunately, the Church disagrees.”
“Who are the Church?” Mrs. Koskinen demanded. “The bishops? Or the common folk?”
“Both, I’m sure,” Mr. Oliver said calmly.
“Then let the people pray for their rightful Queen!”
“The Dissenters pray for her!” Mrs. Midson called out.
Two red spots appeared in the vicar’s cheeks. “The Dissenters must apply to their own consciences in the matter,” he said, a little more tartly. “My duty is less flexible.”
The whole crowd scoffed at this, and objections rang out.
“The Queen!”
“Aye, the Queen!”
Mrs. Koskinen raised her banner and shouted: “The Queen forever, the King in the river! The Queen forever, the King in the river!”
The crowd took up the chant. Penelope cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted the slogan along with the rest, doing her part to add to the sound.
Mr. Oliver’s mouth was now a thin, unhappy line. “I cannot do what you demand!” he cried, a tinny echo drowned by the voice of the mob.
“The Queen forever, the King in the river!”
Penelope widened her stance and prepared to stand her ground for the next hour. This was all very much part of the pattern: it left one with a sore throat next day, but that was all. Eventually, things would wind down. They always had before. Mr. Oliver was a magistrate and knew how this game was played—he was already reaching into his coat for the text of the Riot Act, the reading of which would fix a time for the crowd to disperse.
Then Felicia Plumb threw a stone.
It was not a large stone, but it was well-aimed, flying straight and true toward the rectory. Penelope watched it arc through the air, and for the first time a trickle of fear iced through her. The window on Mr. Oliver’s right shattered, raining glass down on the shrubbery beneath. The sharp sound cut through the shouting, made every throat pull in a surprised breath—then the voice of the mob redoubled, half in fear, and half in delight.
The crowd broke and ran.
Mr. Oliver yelped, ducked inside his door, and slammed it shut. Half the people in the lane dashed forward, Mrs. Koskinen included, grabbing up more rocks and hurling them toward the remaining windows, slipping around to all sides of the house.
The rest of the mob scattered in fear, pelting away down the dirt road and into the safety of the side lanes. Mr. Buckley was hollering for everyone to stay calm; Mr. Thomas was shouting more radical slogans and waving his hands fiercely in the air. Glass cracked and shimmered in the sunlight. Someone screamed, someone laughed, and absolutely everyone else shouted louder.
Penelope pressed herself against the rectory’s low garden wall and clung to the stone like an anchor to avoid being swept away.
When there were no more windows left to break, the tension eased. Mrs. Koskinen brandished her banner in triumph and led the mob away toward the pub singing. Their voices took a long, long time to fade from Penelope’s ringing ears.
Penelope walked as softly as she could around the low wall, and waited a good ten feet from the door.
About five minutes later, Mr. Oliver’s door creaked open. The vicar poked his head out, his eyes wide and watery, his face wan with fear. He started when Penelope waved, and craned his neck around, as if he could see around corners to survey the whole of the rectory.
“It’s alright,” Penelope reassured him. “They’ve all gone down the pub.”
“Ah.” Mr. Oliver straightened, and sighed. “I was rather worried there, for a moment.”
“I thought I might help you sweep up the glass,” Penelope offered.
“Yes.” The vicar swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down convulsively. “Yes, that’s very kind of you.”
He retrieved a broom and a bin and together they knocked the glass shards from the leaves and swept it up from the ground as best they could. The rich scent of loam rose up around them; the vicar kept his garden well-tended.
Mr. Oliver cleared his throat. “I was surprised to see Mrs. Koskinen at the head of such a group,” he said, his eyes fixed on the work his hands were doing. “I never pictured her as a rabble-rouser. She’s such a soft and feminine little thing.”
Penelope was suddenly, awkwardly conscious of the heft of her body, and the trousers bagging at her knees and tucked into the tops of her boots. She ignored the prickle of embarrassment in her cheeks, tugged on her gloves, and worked on prying the larger glass pieces out of the window frame, tossing them in the bin with the rest of the debris. “Mrs. Koskinen lost her cousin Beth at Peterloo last year. Sabered by one of the Yeomanry.”
Mr. Oliver grimaced. “I see. Such a waste of a good soul.”
Penelope didn’t know whether he meant Mrs. Koskinen or her cousin. She couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t sound rude, so she bit her lip to keep quiet and plucked at more glass fragments.
They moved slowly around the house from window to window. “How is your guest faring?” Mr. Oliver asked. “I hope she is finding a little solace now that the first shock has passed?”
Penelope paused, looking down at the shard of glass in her gloved palm. “It’s only been three months. Nothing to set against thirty years.”
Mr. Oliver brushed a tangle of leaves and glass and soil into the bin. “Three months is three times longer than Achilles grieved for Patroclus.”
“Perhaps,” Penelope retorted, “but at the end of the month Achilles stormed back into battle with murder on his mind. Joanna is not quite at that pitch of mourning.”
Mr. Oliver chuckled, but Penelope couldn’t share his amusement. She kept turning his reference over in her mind: Did it mean he knew about Joanna and Isabella being as good as a married couple? He had to, didn’t he? Most of the countryside knew, after all, or at least suspected. Surely the vicar, with all his learning, couldn’t have missed so many clues and rumors? Achilles and Patroclus were famous for their friendship, but to anyone who knew how to read the signs it was definitely that kind of friendship. The kind that got men whipped or transported or even hanged. Romantic friendship. Passionate friendship. Very often naked and desperate to fuck each other friendship.
Perhaps he felt differently about men loving men, than about women loving women? The vicar’s long-ago words to her brother whispered in her memory: Men of that sort might find life in the city more to their taste.
Had Mr. Oliver really meant it like that? Penelope couldn’t be sure. The uncertainty tied her stomach in knots.
Because if he disapproved of Joanna and Isabella, of their decades-long devotion and fidelity, which broke no laws at all, how much more easily would he disapprove of Penelope’s more transitory, flagrantly carnal affairs? It wasn’t only her current lust for Mrs. Griffin, that secret that beat like a second heart beneath her breastbone. She’d been eager enough to act on her past desires.
And Penelope was a married woman. Yes, her marriage was unconsummated, an arrangement rather than a union, and no, she still couldn’t have married any of the women she had loved over the last ten years—but it still wasn’t good that her vows had been broken beyond repair before the wedding cake had even gone stale.
If Mr. Oliver knew, he’d want to send her away, too.
Sometimes Penelope felt she deserved every last drop of the world’s scorn. She knew what the rules were, but rather than openly flout them, she’d merely hidden her affairs behind locked doors and light smiles and plausible excuses.
No wonder all those lovers had left her, in the end. Passion was for the bold—and Penelope’d never been able to fling herself from the cliff while screaming Damn the consequences! She valued the town’s opinion a little too much.
She dropped the last shard from the window frame into the bin. “Has Lady Summerville found the Napoleon snuffbox yet?”
Mr. Oliver made no reply at first, his pale hair waving in the light summer breeze. “I have not asked her,” he said eventually. “My sister has been so often in London.”
Penelope frowned at the back of the vicar’s head. “That snuffbox was a particular bequest.”
His tone sounded pinched. “I was there when the will was read, Mrs. Flood. I remember.”
“I’m sure that having it will go a long way toward helping Joanna move on,” Penelope tried. For all she knew, it might be true.
“Are you so eager to hurry your guest out of your home, Mrs. Flood?”
Penelope blinked. “No, I . . .”
“I should think you would be happy to be less alone in that great empty house of yours. Too much solitude can be poisonous to the delicate female constitution.”
Penelope flinched, then was instantly relieved the vicar hadn’t seen her reaction to his words. He didn’t mean it like it sounded, she told herself firmly. He’s had a difficult afternoon. Anyone would be snappish in the circumstances.
If you cry for such a petty reason, you have no one to blame but yourself.
The vicar brushed the soil from his hands and stood, staring into the empty windows of the rectory. “I’ll bring it up the next time I see my sister,” he said, “but if she hasn’t found it yet there’s nothing more I can do.”
Penelope held her tongue, telling herself sternly that such consideration was more than she deserved.
Chapter Eleven
Lady Summerville returned on Tuesday, Penelope wrote to Griffin, and immediately paid for new glass for the rectory windows. She also invited me to tea—a singular occurrence—and for one brief, shining moment I really did believe she’d located the snuffbox, and had invited me over because it stung her pride less to give it to me than to hand it directly to Joanna herself.
But when I arrived at Abington Hall I found it wasn’t a social occasion: it was a political luncheon.
Lady S and a few other of the Melliton fine ladies had composed an Address to the Queen: they read it aloud and asked the rest of us women to sign it, and invited anyone who wished to go with them to London at week’s end to present it to Queen Caroline at Brandenburg House. I think Lady S is practicing her poli
tical hostessery for the day when her husband inherits the earldom and its seat from his father.
She dodged all my inquiries about the snuffbox, alas. Joanna is growing restive about it, and mutters about making a formal complaint to our local magistrate, but since that is also Mr. Oliver, I have no hope that will make the situation less awkward for any of us. It will all be an awful muddle until someone relents.
But! For what may be the first time in my life, I am excited about the prospect of a holiday! It’s been years since I’ve been to London, and I am both elated and terrified at the idea. The presentation itself will take the better part of a day, but I plan to do some exploring the evening before—dare I ask you to spare some time to show me the city, as an inhabitant and a trusted expert?
Would you object to my staying with you as a guest for a night or two? The other ladies have been offered hospitality by friends of Lady Summerville’s—but I would feel much braver about the whole adventure if I knew the person whose roof I would be sleeping under. I know it’s an awful presumption to invite myself and you have many demands on your time.
But could I, all the same?
Penelope chewed her lip and wrinkled her nose at the page. It was an unusually rambling letter, even by her admittedly loose standards.
But if she dithered over word choices and rephrasings, she’d never post it at all.
She signed it, folded it, and sent it at the earliest opportunity.
And received this beautifully brief note in prompt reply:
Flood,
You will always be most welcome. Come whenever you please.
Griffin
It was broad daylight when Penelope read those lines, but she shivered like it was a starlit evening and the invitation had been purred into her ear. Of course Griffin hadn’t meant it like that—but Penelope couldn’t resist wishing that she had. And imagining what Griffin might ask her to do next.
There was no use even thinking about such impossibilities. But they haunted her dreams for the next three nights, until the afternoon she packed her things, marched up to Abington Hall, and spent a rough and rackety hour bumping over the roads and into the heart of England’s capital city while making the smallest of talk with Lady Summerville and Mrs. Midson, who was far too eager to entertain them both with tales of her great-nieces and -nephews. Penelope suffered through several amusing childhood traumas and was grateful to be let off with her luggage outside a gemlike building a-glitter with windows, where a sign proclaimed Griffin’s Print-Shop in stern, sober letters.