The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,43
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