Agatha was impressed despite herself: the girl’s question had almost sounded innocent. Though she was obliquely asking if she and Sydney were to be left alone for an entire night.
“Absolutely not,” she said repressively, and had the satisfaction of seeing her apprentice’s face fall just a little. The print-shop always took precedence over romance; it took precedence over everything. “We have Mr. Thisburton coming round tomorrow morning, remember.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Eliza bobbed a curtsey—an occasional tic from her old life as a maid in the Countess of Moth’s house—and hurried to wash her face and dress for the day.
Agatha made her way downstairs to unlock the workroom and let in the half-dozen workers clustered on the threshold. They all streamed in with the dawn, nodding to their employer. Soon the early morning quiet yielded to noise as everyone went about the makeready: preparing formes, woodblocks, paper, and ink for the day’s jobbing. Eliza had gathered her tools and a pewter plate readied with musical staves, then settled into the shop front, tidy and smiling and ready to punch notes and hand-engrave crescendos until the day’s first customers arrived.
Agatha paused in the doorway between shop and workroom and surveyed her small kingdom, letting herself briefly bask in the sounds of a machine in good working order. The business would probably tick along steadily until evening—but Griffin’s Menagerie was still the bulwark on which the business stood firm. For now, anyway. And the Menagerie had to be printed on the speedier press at Melliton.
So Agatha buttoned up her coat, climbed into the wagon, took the reins firmly in her gloved hands, and made her way northeast.
The roads weren’t bad, especially once she got out of the city. The hired horse, Augustus, was a focused, plodding sort of animal, and Agatha had only to keep a little tension on the reins to guide him on the way. The sun was out and the wind was fresh and birds were singing in the meadows and fields on either side.
Agatha cordially loathed all of it.
It wasn’t that it wasn’t beautiful. It would have made a very salable engraving. Wildflowers and birdsong and all that rot. Such picturesque scenery ought to have been peaceful, according to every poet that she’d ever heard of. The problem was that getting outside London, away from high walls and narrow streets and the press of people, made Agatha feel every inch of the loneliness she usually was so good at distracting herself from.
The wide, blue stretch of sky that arced above only served to remind her that she carried something just as blue and stark and empty inside her breast.
She chewed her lip and distracted herself from the pangs by listing off every color she would use to illustrate the scene: lapis and azure and aquamarine, of course, then lead white, ochre, vermillion . . .
Finally, just when Agatha was about to perish from impatience—roughly an hour—she turned off the main road, followed the drive a half mile more, and turned the last corner before the printworks itself.
A journeyman spotted her from a window and ran out to begin hauling in the bundled silk samples, while Agatha made sure one of the printer’s devils saw to the horse’s comfort. Once Gus was brushed and fed and cropping happily at the small fenced field to one side, Agatha reluctantly turned toward the building itself.
The Melliton printworks had started life as a flour mill, and there was still something bakerish about the way the light warmed the red brick and wooden beams. Here was where they printed the Menagerie and book-length works, as opposed to the single-page broadside prints and pamphlets produced by the London shop. Thomas had built an extra wing on one side of the building to store Griffin’s collection of stereotype plates, and converted the central space into a light and airy workshop. Behind the printworks the river Ethel was running high and frothy today, muttering like a mob with a grievance. The same water entered the building through a pipe to feed the ever-hungry boiler in the basement. Agatha had been down there only once, when the steam engine was first installed, but still felt her throat close up when she remembered the sounds and the heat and the hiss of it.
Enough wasting time, she chided herself. There was too much work to be done.
She brushed the dust of the road from her skirts, squeezed her fists for strength, and made her way toward the entrance on the south corner. The windows were wider here, letting in the early summer sun. Those sweet golden rays warmed everything except the hard, icy core of Agatha’s heart.
This place, more than anywhere else, reminded her of Thomas, and even after three years it gave her a jolt of grief to cross over the threshold.
It shouldn’t have been such a shock, should it? After all, aside from the fact that the press here was steam-powered and therefore faster, it wasn’t that much different from the London shop. Roughly the same size, the same smell of ink and metal and oil. The same anxious nods and greetings from journeymen and apprentices and devils, though the staff was smaller and the names were different: Downes and Jarden and the Ashton brothers.
Except Agatha had only ever been here occasionally, until Thomas died. He’d selected the building and hired everyone who worked here, making trips out while Agatha ran things in London. Three years later, it still felt as though they were all of them, Agatha included, simply carrying on temporarily until his return.
She took a seat at her usual worktable, brilliant with light from the tall front windows. Downes wasted no time in pleasantries, but promptly brought her a proof of the next issue as the two young Ashtons went to the stacked manuscripts and began inserting one silk sample near the end of every set.
“Mind you keep the corners neat for the binders,” Agatha said, mostly to have something to scold them for. She preferred to keep her apprentices on their toes.
She cast a skeptical eye over the proof but Downes knew his business, and the thing looked as neat as human labor could make it. Some new fashions in curtains, a view of Rome in ruins—copied from a painting Agatha had seen in last year’s Summer Exhibition—the next thrilling chapter of a sentimental serial. And at the end of it all the Crewe silk brocade, sky blue bordered with bouquets of wildflowers, lustrous and bright as high summer.
It twigged something in her memory, both painful and pleasant. She frowned forcefully down at the blossoms until her brain dredged up the answer: ah, yes, an old scrap of verse, back from when Agatha and Thomas were newly betrothed—he’d printed the lines for her special, on the sly, setting the type in secret late at night after the shop had closed. Something about to weave fresh garlands for the glowing brow, or thereabouts.
Her husband was not, of course, the poem’s author. Thomas adored poetry, but never attempted it himself. This was fine by Agatha, who had neither an eye nor an ear for poetry.
But she did like Thomas—and she liked to be thought of.
Griffin’s had published that poet, and the plates for her volume were stored not fifty yards away from where she sat.
“Anything amiss, ma’am?” Downes inquired, an edge of unwonted anxiety in his tone.
“Hmm?” Agatha said, then shook herself. “No, Mr. Downes, just strategizing.”
Those poems would make a very tempting little book at this time of year, when love hovered in the air, waiting for young lungs to breathe it in like so many wildflower scents.
Agatha let herself stroke one finger over shimmering brocade before handing the pages back and pronouncing the issue approved. “I’m going to pull some old plates from the back for reprinting,” she said. “What’s the queue like at the moment?”