The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,10

Yesterday she had set one of the newer apprentices, Jane, to cutting the bolt of shimmering brocade into precise squares, ready to be tipped in with the printed pages and bound with the magazine.

It had been one of Thomas’s best ideas, including fabric from all the finest weaving works—not only silks, but wool and chintzes and patterned calicos, and the occasional lush velvet in winter. It also gave them an excuse to solicit advertisements from London modistes, to tempt ladies who wanted something more complex or ambitious than their own needles and skills could supply.

“Of course, ma’am,” Eliza said, tucking an errant lock behind her ear. “Will you be stopping over in Melliton?”

Agatha was impressed despite herself: the girl’s question had almost sounded innocent. Though she was obliquely asking if she and Sydney were to be left alone for an entire night.

“Absolutely not,” she said repressively, and had the satisfaction of seeing her apprentice’s face fall just a little. The print-shop always took precedence over romance; it took precedence over everything. “We have Mr. Thisburton coming round tomorrow morning, remember.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Eliza bobbed a curtsey—an occasional tic from her old life as a maid in the Countess of Moth’s house—and hurried to wash her face and dress for the day.

Agatha made her way downstairs to unlock the workroom and let in the half-dozen workers clustered on the threshold. They all streamed in with the dawn, nodding to their employer. Soon the early morning quiet yielded to noise as everyone went about the makeready: preparing formes, woodblocks, paper, and ink for the day’s jobbing. Eliza had gathered her tools and a pewter plate readied with musical staves, then settled into the shop front, tidy and smiling and ready to punch notes and hand-engrave crescendos until the day’s first customers arrived.

Agatha paused in the doorway between shop and workroom and surveyed her small kingdom, letting herself briefly bask in the sounds of a machine in good working order. The business would probably tick along steadily until evening—but Griffin’s Menagerie was still the bulwark on which the business stood firm. For now, anyway. And the Menagerie had to be printed on the speedier press at Melliton.

So Agatha buttoned up her coat, climbed into the wagon, took the reins firmly in her gloved hands, and made her way northeast.

The roads weren’t bad, especially once she got out of the city. The hired horse, Augustus, was a focused, plodding sort of animal, and Agatha had only to keep a little tension on the reins to guide him on the way. The sun was out and the wind was fresh and birds were singing in the meadows and fields on either side.

Agatha cordially loathed all of it.

It wasn’t that it wasn’t beautiful. It would have made a very salable engraving. Wildflowers and birdsong and all that rot. Such picturesque scenery ought to have been peaceful, according to every poet that she’d ever heard of. The problem was that getting outside London, away from high walls and narrow streets and the press of people, made Agatha feel every inch of the loneliness she usually was so good at distracting herself from.

The wide, blue stretch of sky that arced above only served to remind her that she carried something just as blue and stark and empty inside her breast.

She chewed her lip and distracted herself from the pangs by listing off every color she would use to illustrate the scene: lapis and azure and aquamarine, of course, then lead white, ochre, vermillion . . .

Finally, just when Agatha was about to perish from impatience—roughly an hour—she turned off the main road, followed the drive a half mile more, and turned the last corner before the printworks itself.

A journeyman spotted her from a window and ran out to begin hauling in the bundled silk samples, while Agatha made sure one of the printer’s devils saw to the horse’s comfort. Once Gus was brushed and fed and cropping happily at the small fenced field to one side, Agatha reluctantly turned toward the building itself.

The Melliton printworks had started life as a flour mill, and there was still something bakerish about the way the light warmed the red brick and wooden beams. Here was where they printed the Menagerie and book-length works, as opposed to the single-page broadside prints and pamphlets produced by the London shop. Thomas had built an extra wing on one side of the building to store Griffin’s collection of stereotype plates, and converted the central space into