The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,67

earnest faces beamed at Agatha, afire with purpose and the determination to engage in a war of words.

The printer sighed, recognizing a losing battle before she bothered to fight it. “As long as we don’t print the ‘Lady S’ piece.” She pursed her lips in resignation, while Sydney whooped and Eliza beamed. Mrs. Molesey’s knowing gaze awakened her suspicious soul. “Would you be publishing this under your own name, Mrs. Molesey?”

“Heavens, no.” The lady’s eyebrows shot up into her hairline as she pretended shock. “A sophisticated lyric poet like Joanna Molesey, publishing common tunes for the unlettered public? What would Mr. Wordsworth say?”

“Or his sister,” Eliza said with a snort.

“Tempting as it is to try and shock the pair of them, we’ll need a pseudonym,” Mrs. Molesey went on, gaze growing distant. “Something—irksome, but not fatal. Feminine. Caustic. Irrepressible. A spur, not a sword or a spear.”

“Mrs. Mordant?” Eliza offered.

“Grandmother Gossip,” Sydney added.

Mrs. Moseley shook her head. “Too gentle. We want something sharper.”

Agatha thought of bees, and stings—but bees put her in mind of Penelope Flood and her kind heart. Yet there was another creature that could work . . . “The Widow Wasp,” she blurted out.

Mrs. Molesey’s head snapped around at once. “Yes,” she said, like the voice of an oracle. “Yes, that will do.”

The poet took the three of them to Walcott’s for dinner, and by dessert there were three more absolutely vicious ballads and parodies of popular tunes for Sydney to begin setting type for the next day. Eliza worked up a few small illustrations: the Queen herself, London as a wasp’s nest, a very sharp-limbed wasp-lady with lacy wings that folded around her like a shawl, and striped skirts that belled below the waist before narrowing to a knife-like stinger. Agatha set aside a few reams of paper and had the whole set made up as a chapbook.

She’d expected it to sell; it was perfectly pitched to the tenor of the times.

She had not expected it to sell out the first day. They scrabbled to print more that evening: those sold. They printed a third run, twice that of the first—people bought that, too, and before long you couldn’t walk more than one mile in any section of town without hearing one of the Widow’s songs being sung out on a street corner or from a patron-filled tavern.

Pirate editions sprang up like mushrooms from the less ethical presses, to Agatha’s grim resignation and Sydney’s blazing indignation (“How dare someone copy Eliza’s woodcuts!”).

He was mollified somewhat when some of his favorite radical philosophers and thinkers began dropping the Wasp’s lyrics into the pages of Medusa and The Republican (“Carlile quoted my line about the green bags!”).

Even Catherine St. Day, Countess of Moth, had heard the ballads. She had come by Griffin’s to arrange the printing of her foundation’s next volume, a treatise by a lady chemist. “Lucy will not stop singing them! Particularly the one that made use of a tune Mr. Frampton had composed,” she relayed, eyes twinkling. “He found himself on a walk through Westminster, surrounded by people singing his melody, but with lyrics he’d never heard before!”

“I hope it wasn’t too disconcerting—I didn’t realize he was composing now,” Agatha replied.

The countess nodded. “He works up one or two songs a year: they supplement the income from his teaching and working on his mathematical—”

She was interrupted when Eliza burst into Agatha’s office without knocking. “Ma’am, there’s soldiers—”

Agatha was up and around the desk and striding into the storefront before she had time to reflect on the prudent course of action.

Eliza was right: there were three soldiers, their red coats blood-bright in the sun spilling in the windows. “Mrs. Agatha Griffin?” said the one in front, whose coat was a more vivid officer’s scarlet, rather than the thick madder dye sported by the other two.

“That’s right,” Agatha said, sending an anxious glance at her son.

Sydney was standing behind the counter, rigid and tense as a piece of metal under strain. His eyes were as cold and angry as Agatha had ever seen them.

The soldier flourished a piece of paper at her; Agatha took it and discovered a writ of seizure.

It was very official: signed and sealed. Her gut twisted, and sweat broke out on the back of her neck.

She was so shaken she missed most of what the officer said next—except for the words seditious libel, which made her snap painfully back to awareness. “We aren’t here to harm anyone. We have orders to take away