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