The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,21

the other dipped the quill into the ink. She would not write to Mrs. Flood again unless it proved necessary. The days were so busy. Agatha’s time would be much better spent keeping up with more urgent correspondence—the Roman antiquarian, for instance, or Madame Tabot the modiste. She would not write to Mrs. Flood.

Agatha glanced down to find that her hand had kept pace with her thought—but only in part. Only long enough to write Flood at the top of the new sheet of paper lying smugly on the desk in front of her.

Paper was expensive. And this was the good paper, Agatha’s finest stock. Used for the ladies and artists and artisans who contributed to the Menagerie, and who would respect her more if she was obviously using high-grade linen paper, not the cheaper cotton stuff.

A whole sheet wasted. Wasted, that is, if she wanted to address anybody except Penelope Flood.

Agatha sighed, and yielded, and began writing.

Flood,

Six brothers! My deepest sympathies. I only had one myself. But such a one! Trouble enough for six, I’d wager, and laughter enough for a dozen. We fought incessantly, but heaven help you if you looked at either one of us crosswise.

He’s gone now—he died at Lyngør, with the navy. Sometimes I imagine he’s really still out there somewhere at sea. I know it’s not true comfort, but it gets me through the worst of the pangs.

Agatha scowled down at the paper, her hand itching to cross those lines out. Instead, she dipped her pen again and tried to hastily deflect, as though the earlier paragraph hadn’t happened at all:

Do any of your siblings still live close by?

She didn’t dare write any longer, for fear of what else she might say. And she’d left off the honorific in the salutation, so she signed it simply:

Griffin

The letter hadn’t been sent out an hour before Agatha was ardently regretting every last mortifying word.

How had she managed to fit so much embarrassing material in such a short note? Stale wit, childhood tantrums, and a truly treacly flight of fancy involving a dead relative.

Such a letter deserved to be discarded.

It deserved to be burnt.

Annually, as a caution against similar sins.

It ought to be shown to schoolchildren for the next hundred years to teach them how not to write melodiously in English. Like an anti-Shakespeare, or the opposite of Burke.

It was worse than poetry.

Agatha felt as though she’d wantonly sliced off a piece of her beating heart and sealed it within the envelope. How would Penelope—how would anyone?—react to being the recipient of such a gory, messy missive?

She cut the lines of her next engraving extra deep out of pique, and was particularly sharp about Jane’s inattention and poor Crompton’s perfectly common compositing errors—but her agony only subsided when the Tuesday post brought a reply that was obviously several pages in length.

Agatha tucked it hastily into her skirt pocket, where it smoldered like a banked coal until she could dismiss her employees for the day, send Eliza and Sydney off to the theater, and lock herself in her study with the curtains drawn.

Dear Griffin, the letter began, and set Agatha’s heart racing in gorgeous terror:

My condolences on the loss of your brother. He sounds like a charming, stubborn, eminently lovable young sailor.

It is terribly hard having family at sea. My father was a merchant captain and his sons mostly followed him into the trade—the brother I mentioned in Edinburgh runs accounts for a shipping company there. My youngest brother, Owen, was the vicar here until we lost him some years back. My second-youngest brother, Harry, and my husband are in whaling, and often gone for two or three years at a stretch. They could have been drowned or devoured or anything years ago, and the letter just not reached me yet.

They could be dead even as I write this.

I think about it sometimes and it chills the breath right out of me. You are right, it is a solace to think that should they perish, I could stave off grief for some short while by imagining them still braving the swells together somewhere.

At this point the words started dancing and Agatha had to put down the paper to dash the water from her eyes.

It was nothing. Truly nothing. She’d thought she would embarrass herself, and she hadn’t. That was all. She’d sent a tender, bleeding part of her heart blithely off on a thoughtless impulse, and such an error obviously deserved to be consigned to the yawning depths