The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,11
a light and airy workshop. Behind the printworks the river Ethel was running high and frothy today, muttering like a mob with a grievance. The same water entered the building through a pipe to feed the ever-hungry boiler in the basement. Agatha had been down there only once, when the steam engine was first installed, but still felt her throat close up when she remembered the sounds and the heat and the hiss of it.
Enough wasting time, she chided herself. There was too much work to be done.
She brushed the dust of the road from her skirts, squeezed her fists for strength, and made her way toward the entrance on the south corner. The windows were wider here, letting in the early summer sun. Those sweet golden rays warmed everything except the hard, icy core of Agatha’s heart.
This place, more than anywhere else, reminded her of Thomas, and even after three years it gave her a jolt of grief to cross over the threshold.
It shouldn’t have been such a shock, should it? After all, aside from the fact that the press here was steam-powered and therefore faster, it wasn’t that much different from the London shop. Roughly the same size, the same smell of ink and metal and oil. The same anxious nods and greetings from journeymen and apprentices and devils, though the staff was smaller and the names were different: Downes and Jarden and the Ashton brothers.
Except Agatha had only ever been here occasionally, until Thomas died. He’d selected the building and hired everyone who worked here, making trips out while Agatha ran things in London. Three years later, it still felt as though they were all of them, Agatha included, simply carrying on temporarily until his return.
She took a seat at her usual worktable, brilliant with light from the tall front windows. Downes wasted no time in pleasantries, but promptly brought her a proof of the next issue as the two young Ashtons went to the stacked manuscripts and began inserting one silk sample near the end of every set.
“Mind you keep the corners neat for the binders,” Agatha said, mostly to have something to scold them for. She preferred to keep her apprentices on their toes.
She cast a skeptical eye over the proof but Downes knew his business, and the thing looked as neat as human labor could make it. Some new fashions in curtains, a view of Rome in ruins—copied from a painting Agatha had seen in last year’s Summer Exhibition—the next thrilling chapter of a sentimental serial. And at the end of it all the Crewe silk brocade, sky blue bordered with bouquets of wildflowers, lustrous and bright as high summer.
It twigged something in her memory, both painful and pleasant. She frowned forcefully down at the blossoms until her brain dredged up the answer: ah, yes, an old scrap of verse, back from when Agatha and Thomas were newly betrothed—he’d printed the lines for her special, on the sly, setting the type in secret late at night after the shop had closed. Something about to weave fresh garlands for the glowing brow, or thereabouts.
Her husband was not, of course, the poem’s author. Thomas adored poetry, but never attempted it himself. This was fine by Agatha, who had neither an eye nor an ear for poetry.
But she did like Thomas—and she liked to be thought of.
Griffin’s had published that poet, and the plates for her volume were stored not fifty yards away from where she sat.
“Anything amiss, ma’am?” Downes inquired, an edge of unwonted anxiety in his tone.
“Hmm?” Agatha said, then shook herself. “No, Mr. Downes, just strategizing.”
Those poems would make a very tempting little book at this time of year, when love hovered in the air, waiting for young lungs to breathe it in like so many wildflower scents.
Agatha let herself stroke one finger over shimmering brocade before handing the pages back and pronouncing the issue approved. “I’m going to pull some old plates from the back for reprinting,” she said. “What’s the queue like at the moment?”
“Not as full as I like to keep it, to be honest. We’ve got ten or so more pages in the new edition of Celestial Mechanics and then we’re clear,” Downes replied. “I’d planned on getting started on some of next issue’s embroidery plates, but there’s room if you want to add something.”
“I was thinking about a short run of Joanna Molesey. That first volume always sold well. And it’s close to the Romantics people love these days,