The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,42
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?