Before she could manage to set her work aside, block his way, and forestall an exit, Sydney reappeared at the foot of the stairwell. He’d changed his brown coat for one of bottle green, and the flush on his pale cheeks spoke of haste and excitement—but also, to his mother’s keen sight, of guilt. “Going out again, Mum,” he called cheerily. “Back late. Love you!”
“—print this plate—” Agatha managed, but not quickly enough. The doorway was empty, and the chime of the shop bell was the only reply she got.
So much for filial duty.
This was the bane of Agatha’s current existence: she couldn’t very well leave the business to her son if he was never around to run it.
Her temper surged like a storm cloud, and descended upon the only object available. Her apprentice, whose dark head lifted, and whose creamy complexion went rose red at the sight of her mistress’s narrowed eye.
Lord, but weren’t the young astonishing? Even at the end of a day so long as this, Eliza radiated keenness and energy. “Break for dinner, ma’am?” the girl piped. “I know it’s Betsy’s night off, so I could run to the Queen’s Larder for a pie, if you like. One pie ought to be plenty for the two of us.”
An attempt at distraction. It would not work. “Eliza,” Agatha said, with careful clarity, “do you know where my son is off to this evening?”
The girl’s glance flicked down, then back. “I couldn’t say for certain, Mrs. Griffin.”
Agatha’s voice was cool as a razor. “Perhaps he is attending one of the Polite Society’s chemistry lectures.”
Eliza ducked her head. “Couldn’t say, ma’am.”
“A poetry reading? A concert? A play in some theater or other?”
Eliza shook her head.
Agatha drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “Dare I ask whether my son has developed a passion for Mr. Rossini’s latest opera?”
Eliza sighed wistfully. “If only.”
Agatha snorted.
Her apprentice blushed and bit her lip. “That is—I don’t think so, ma’am.”
“So.” Agatha drummed her fingers again, four tiny beats like a guillotine march. “That leaves only one possibility. Eliza, tell me my precious, precocious Sydney is not bound for the Crown and Anchor, to drink bad ale and cheer for whoever is spouting tonight’s most radical nonsense.”
“It wouldn’t be right to tell a lie, ma’am,” Eliza said plaintively.
Agatha pinched at the bridge of her nose to keep her head from exploding in maternal vexation.
She knew part of this was her fault, really. She and Thomas had raised the boy in a print-shop, surrounded by persuasive pamphlets and cases of type waiting to be reordered and rearranged into new flights of rhetoric. Sydney swam in arguments like a fish—but Agatha was worried that only made him ready to be hooked and filleted.
Her voice ground out the old complaint. “I never expected him to be a paragon. He’s a young man, after all. It’s best to keep your expectations low if you want to avoid disappointment. I just wish his vices kept him more often at home!”
She cocked an eyebrow at Eliza, who was still squirming, even though the girl had done absolutely nothing to squirm about.
Unless . . .
“At least he doesn’t seem prone to debauchery,” Agatha said, watching carefully. “That’s something.”
Ah, yes, there it was, the flush spreading from the girl’s cheeks to the tips of her ears. It was as good as cracking open her diary to read it in plain ink on paper.
Her son and her apprentice were more than merely friendly.
Not surprising, really. They were both healthy and young—oh, so young! Agatha could remember when nineteen seemed mature and wise and fully grown. It took nearly two decades to reach it, after all. But nineteen looked very different when you looked back on it from the lofty heights of forty-three. And forty-three would probably look green as grass from the cliffs of seventy-five, should Agatha be lucky enough to attain such a venerable age.
Time tumbled you forward, no matter how hard you fought to stay put.
Agatha sighed and looked down at the image on the copper plate, with its burrs and burnishing. All those little figures, waiting for the acid bath to draw their lines sharp and true. Today they were everything; tomorrow they would be forgotten.
Well. No point in dwelling on the philosophical. Especially not when there was dinner to think of. And absolutely nothing was less philosophical than a steak and kidney pie. “Two pies, actually, Eliza,” she said. “Two for us, and a third for Sydney—wherever and whenever he returns.”
The apprentice nodded and was out the door in a flash, eager to escape while she was still in the luster of her mistress’s good graces.
Agatha rose and threw open the door to the yard behind the workshop, letting the early summer night flood in. She sucked in deep lungfuls, savoring the rare moment of peace.
After dinner she would sink the copper into a basin of eye-watering aqua fortis to let the acid bite into the metal, then polish the rest of the wax away so the new plate would be ready for use when the journeymen came back in the morning. The presses would ring out, and another day’s work would begin.
It was good work, constant and familiar, and Agatha liked it. But every now and again, especially in these moments of quiet, Agatha would peer up at the lamplight-dimmed stars and imagine taking her hand off the tiller, even for a moment.
What might it feel like, to not sense Time’s drumbeat so close against the back of her neck? What vistas could she see, if she were able to lift her eyes for more than a moment from the rocky road beneath her hurrying feet?
She grimaced. Griffin’s would go bankrupt within a week without her.
A print-shop needed a firm hand—Thomas had been steady and brilliant, but not forceful. Agatha had been the one to haggle over prices with the colormen who sold them ink and the stationers who sold them paper; Thomas had collected all the artists and poets and architects and fashion experts whose names graced bylines in the Menagerie—but it was Agatha who’d had to arrange payment and proofread their pieces and etch all the embroidery designs, copies of art, and furniture illustrations that made the Menagerie so popular among the ton. And it was Agatha who penned the scolding letters when a contracted writer let firm deadlines sail blithely by. She was the one who made all the journeymen jump to when she entered the workroom, and whose voice sent all the apprentices scrambling.
Not a ship captain, she thought, nor a steersman: they had set watches and times for rest. No, Agatha was more like . . . the wind in the sails, keeping the vessel on course.
If she ever stopped, it would be a disaster for everyone.
She was still frowning up at the sky when Eliza returned with the pies. And her worry didn’t leave her when she got back to work. It haunted her like a little ghost, mournful and insistent, until she blew out the last tallow candle and tucked herself into her bed on the upper floor. It kept her from sleeping deeply, so she heard the precise moment when her son’s footsteps thumped out an unsteady welcome on the stairs, to the musical echo of Eliza’s answering giggle.
No doubt they thought they were being discreet.
Well, if they were making fools of themselves for love, they weren’t the first. The real danger was Sydney’s passion for political talk. What would his quiet, self-conscious father have thought about his son’s gadding about with silver-spoon philosophers and revolutionaries?