The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite

Chapter One

May 1, 1820

The corpses were giving Agatha the most trouble. They looked too much like people.

She chewed the end of her graver while she frowned down at the wax, only half-covered with lines carved by the sharp steel point. It wasn’t that her son Sydney’s notes about the event weren’t detailed. They were. He’d been quite gruesomely observant about the whole execution, from the first drumbeat to the last dangle. “Afterward,” he wrote in his hurried scrawl, “the hangman cut the bodies down from the scaffold and laid them out for beheading, bare as a row of teeth.”

But what kind of teeth? A jagged, feral twist of fangs, like a snarl frozen in time? Or more like the matched tombstone set you’d see in the grinning skull of a memento mori?

There was a time and place for poetic expression, and it was not when you were describing a scene so someone else could make an accurate picture of it. Agatha’s efforts to educate her son after his father’s death had never prioritized make sure the boy can convey his ideas in clear and precise metaphor, but maybe they ought to have.

Thomas would have been so flummoxed, rest his soul.

Agatha had been widowed three years now, raising a boy on the cusp of manhood and running Griffin’s print shop and never more than an inch shy of catastrophe. Even something as familiar as copper plate etching, which she’d learned at her mother’s knee, seemed only another opportunity for everything to go wrong.

She spun the graver vexedly in her hand and cursed all teeth.

If she were a history painter in the Royal Academy—like the ones whose work she’d so often copied for the Menagerie—she’d strive to make each dead man unique. An outflung hand here, over there an agonized crooking of limbs. Careful composition would allow the varying shapes and poses to mirror and counterbalance one another, and create a whole greater than the sum of its individual parts. The viewer wouldn’t be aware of this—but they would feel it, deep in their gut.

But this work wasn’t high art. This was a sensationalist sketch of this afternoon’s hangings for those who hadn’t or couldn’t attend in person, and the simpler she made it the faster and more easily she could print it. Right now the execution of the Cato Street conspirators was the city’s favorite subject, and every hack and handpress owner on the banks of the Thames would be rushing to offer cartoons and etchings and pamphlets. She wasn’t even taking the time to sketch the scene beforehand: this design was being cut directly into the smoked wax ground of the plate.

She knew simpler was better, because simpler was faster, and faster meant more sales before the public’s ghoulish fascination moved on.

Yielding to necessity, she made the corpses all identical, the line of bodies as stark, stern, and terrifying as sharp metal could slice. Dead, those harsh lines said. Dead, still dead, none more dead, so aggressively dead it borders on rudeness.

But her artist’s sensibilities couldn’t be entirely ignored. She found herself drawing the living onlookers as individuals: a tall woman, a fat man, a pair of friends with straw hats and walking staves, come in from the country to see the execution; a child pointing and clutching its mother’s hand. Looming over everything stood the tall figure of the hangman, heaving up the first severed head for the mob’s approval.

They hadn’t approved, Sydney’s notes explained. They’d booed and hissed and thrown things at the executioner, crying out against state violence and the tyranny of wealthy, self-interested men.

And no wonder. Everyone knew the government was corrupt, from the magistrates to the House of Lords to King George himself.

Agatha carved the hangman’s outlines especially deep into the wax, so the acid would bite deep and the rich black ink would be sure to fill the space thickly. He ought to inspire fear—though he wasn’t the man who scared her most in this business.

George Edwards had been second in command of the assassination attempt; it had been his urging that had spurred the plot onward, and his knowledge of Cabinet members’ movements that had helped them fix on a time and place.

But George Edwards had been working as a government informer the whole time. He’d only played the part of a co-conspirator. For all anyone knew, Mr. Edwards might have come to witness the execution—might even have stood beside one of the condemned men’s mothers in the crowd, offering a polite handkerchief to