The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,49

took her a few minutes to notice how many more people there were around her than usual.

Some of them had white sashes or rosettes, the insignia adopted by Queen Caroline’s supporters. Some had banners and handmade bunting. And they were all walking in the same direction: the rectory.

Penelope lengthened her strides until she caught up to Mr. Thomas, in his broad-brimmed hat. “What has Mrs. Koskinen arranged now?” she asked. Somehow the woman was able to gather people without the authorities learning about it beforehand—Penelope had yet to figure out how she arranged it.

“A protest,” Mr. Thomas replied. His creamy complexion was unusually flushed, and his blond curls were flyaways where they stuck out from the hat. “We’re going to demand Mr. Oliver restore the Queen’s name to the liturgy.”

Penelope’s lips pursed. Striking Caroline’s name from beside his in the Anglican church service had been one of the ways George had publicly insulted his wife and assaulted her privileges in recent months. It had been an unpopular move, angering the normally royalist churchgoers as well as the radical Queenites.

Penelope thought it was, in a word: mean. Kings ought to be above meanness—that was the whole point of them, wasn’t it? If they were supposed to be superior to other folk, then they should be better. Her resolve solidified. “I don’t suppose you mind if I join in?”

“The more the merrier, of course,” Mr. Thomas replied, tipping the brim of his hat.

So Penelope turned left instead of right at the village square, and joined the crowd now gathering outside St. Ambrose’s rectory.

She had been in a riot before, of course. Nearly everyone in Melliton had. There had been demonstrations after the killings at Peterloo last year, and bread riots during the long years of the war before that. Riots were a proud country tradition, and long practice had worn them into a comfortable pattern: you showed up, you shouted and waved a banner or two, you went home once you’d made your point. Perhaps you did a bit of conscientious liberating of property—Penelope remembered one such occasion, when the mob had seized Squire Theydon’s corn from a Sweden-bound ship. They had sold it at once to local farmers and villagers at traditional prices, they’d given the squire his profits afterward, and nobody at all had been hurt. It had all been very disciplined and neatly organized.

When you didn’t have the vote, sometimes you had to take what power you could grasp with your own two hands.

An action against the vicar, though . . . That was unusual. Mr. Oliver was an unrufflable man, happy to trust that the Lord knew best even in the midst of the fiercest disagreement. His sermons were as bland and easily digestible as porridge: you never could say you enjoyed them, exactly, but they seemed hygienic in some indefinable way. They made you feel good about being good without you having to do anything at all.

Penelope and Mr. Thomas reached the space in front of the rectory and stopped, on the edge of where the crowd was thickest. The building itself was humble and cozy, a plain two-story stone cottage with a luxuriant garden Mr. Oliver always referred to as “a little Eden.”

While more people thronged up around and behind them, Penelope craned her neck, looking around at all the familiar faces. There were plenty of the local reformers and radicals she expected—Mr. Thomas, Mrs. Price the baker, but also Mr. and Mrs. Wybrow and Mr. Northcote and his son—but those familiar ranks were bolstered by a number of women she was used to seeing only in the pews at Sunday services. Mrs. Galloway, whose cousin was a baronet, had her hands demurely folded and a white rosette pinned to her bodice; Mrs. Plumb the mercer’s wife and her daughter Felicia, twisting her hands excitedly in her skirts; old Mrs. Midson, who used to be a governess, peering around at the crowd as if she would be administering an exam to everyone at the end of the riot.

Griffin had been right: the Queen’s cause had much broader support than any radical or reformist Penelope had seen. Not even Orator Hunt had gotten so many of Melliton’s middle-rank citizens out of their parlors and into the streets.

These were not only the poorer folk whose happiness rose and fell with the price of bread or corn: these were village wives of traders and merchants with comfortable incomes, finally roused to anger by George’s repeated injustices to his royal