Chapter One
May 1, 1820
The corpses were giving Agatha the most trouble. They looked too much like people.
She chewed the end of her graver while she frowned down at the wax, only half-covered with lines carved by the sharp steel point. It wasn’t that her son Sydney’s notes about the event weren’t detailed. They were. He’d been quite gruesomely observant about the whole execution, from the first drumbeat to the last dangle. “Afterward,” he wrote in his hurried scrawl, “the hangman cut the bodies down from the scaffold and laid them out for beheading, bare as a row of teeth.”
But what kind of teeth? A jagged, feral twist of fangs, like a snarl frozen in time? Or more like the matched tombstone set you’d see in the grinning skull of a memento mori?
There was a time and place for poetic expression, and it was not when you were describing a scene so someone else could make an accurate picture of it. Agatha’s efforts to educate her son after his father’s death had never prioritized make sure the boy can convey his ideas in clear and precise metaphor, but maybe they ought to have.
Thomas would have been so flummoxed, rest his soul.
Agatha had been widowed three years now, raising a boy on the cusp of manhood and running Griffin’s print shop and never more than an inch shy of catastrophe. Even something as familiar as copper plate etching, which she’d learned at her mother’s knee, seemed only another opportunity for everything to go wrong.
She spun the graver vexedly in her hand and cursed all teeth.
If she were a history painter in the Royal Academy—like the ones whose work she’d so often copied for the Menagerie—she’d strive to make each dead man unique. An outflung hand here, over there an agonized crooking of limbs. Careful composition would allow the varying shapes and poses to mirror and counterbalance one another, and create a whole greater than the sum of its individual parts. The viewer wouldn’t be aware of this—but they would feel it, deep in their gut.
But this work wasn’t high art. This was a sensationalist sketch of this afternoon’s hangings for those who hadn’t or couldn’t attend in person, and the simpler she made it the faster and more easily she could print it. Right now the execution of the Cato Street conspirators was the city’s favorite subject, and every hack and handpress owner on the banks of the Thames would be rushing to offer cartoons and etchings and pamphlets. She wasn’t even taking the time to sketch the scene beforehand: this design was being cut directly into the smoked wax ground of the plate.
She knew simpler was better, because simpler was faster, and faster meant more sales before the public’s ghoulish fascination moved on.
Yielding to necessity, she made the corpses all identical, the line of bodies as stark, stern, and terrifying as sharp metal could slice. Dead, those harsh lines said. Dead, still dead, none more dead, so aggressively dead it borders on rudeness.
But her artist’s sensibilities couldn’t be entirely ignored. She found herself drawing the living onlookers as individuals: a tall woman, a fat man, a pair of friends with straw hats and walking staves, come in from the country to see the execution; a child pointing and clutching its mother’s hand. Looming over everything stood the tall figure of the hangman, heaving up the first severed head for the mob’s approval.
They hadn’t approved, Sydney’s notes explained. They’d booed and hissed and thrown things at the executioner, crying out against state violence and the tyranny of wealthy, self-interested men.
And no wonder. Everyone knew the government was corrupt, from the magistrates to the House of Lords to King George himself.
Agatha carved the hangman’s outlines especially deep into the wax, so the acid would bite deep and the rich black ink would be sure to fill the space thickly. He ought to inspire fear—though he wasn’t the man who scared her most in this business.
George Edwards had been second in command of the assassination attempt; it had been his urging that had spurred the plot onward, and his knowledge of Cabinet members’ movements that had helped them fix on a time and place.
But George Edwards had been working as a government informer the whole time. He’d only played the part of a co-conspirator. For all anyone knew, Mr. Edwards might have come to witness the execution—might even have stood beside one of the condemned men’s mothers in the crowd, offering a polite handkerchief to stem her desperate tears. Just as he’d offered false support to the son now on the scaffold.
Agatha didn’t approve of violent revolution. No decent person wanted England to go through what France had suffered these past decades. And the recent Radical War in Scotland this past spring had brought the specter of an uprising far too close to home for the government’s comfort. The laws had tightened, because the Lords were scared.
Agatha was no radical, herself. But every time she thought of George Edwards’s deception, well . . . it twisted her stomach into knots.
Or maybe that was only the ache of hunger. How late was it?
Agatha looked up from her work for the first time in hours, and realized the shadows on the walls were from streetlamps and not the setting sun. The two Stanhope presses lurked like rooks against the east wall of the workroom, their long wooden arms skeleton-still now that the apprentices and journeyman had gone home for the night. Drying prints were pinned up around and over them, waving softly like shrouds.
Well, technically speaking, not all the apprentices had gone home. The lamplight coming through the back window cast a halo over the dark hair of Agatha’s best apprentice, Eliza Brinkworth, who occupied the spare bedroom upstairs and who was working quietly and patiently at the next table over, adding careful layers of color to a print of Thisburton’s latest caricature. Her slender shoulders were hunched, her brow lightly furrowed as she brushed amber and ochre over the cartoonist’s dancing fox figures.
Eliza had come to Griffin’s with nothing more than a gift for sketching and a will to work. Now, four years later, she had blossomed into an able assistant in both copperplate engraving and woodcuts, and was the swiftest producer of sheet music blocks Griffin’s had. The ballads she illustrated had become a reassuringly steady profit stream, as subscriptions to the luxurious Griffin’s Menagerie ladies’ magazine declined under the new stamp taxes. If Eliza had been Agatha’s daughter, she would have been an ideal choice to take over the running of Griffin’s.
But Agatha had no daughter. Instead she had only—
Out front the shop bell chimed. Then the door between the shop and the workroom opened.
“Hello, Mum!”
Agatha’s heart soared skyward on helpless winds of maternal fondness at the sight of her son, returning from Birkett’s, where he’d gone to settle the weekly bill for paper. He’d grown so tall and sturdy these past three years, a far cry from the thin and sensitive boy who’d hidden in his room for a month after his father’s death. Nineteen-year-old Sydney was windblown and tousle-haired, bouncing with vitality, eyes bright with eager purpose, and just where the hell did he think he was going?
For after that hurried greeting, her son had vanished up the stair, with a clatter worthy of Hannibal and all his elephants.
Agatha frowned in suspicion. “Sydney Algernon Griffin!” she called. “You promised you’d—”