“He spends himself all over the place,” Mr. Thomas added.
Mr. Kitt elbowed him; Mr. Thomas squawked out a laugh, and Griffin rolled her eyes.
Mr. Kitt groused, “It’s easy to be prolific when you draw satires for both sides of any question. Doubles your audience in one stroke: you draw something pro-Parliament, then something just the opposite.”
“That doubled audience is perhaps what makes him so valuable to work with for us printers,” Griffin put in, with a wry twist of her lips. “Or so I keep telling my son, whenever he makes that same point.”
“Kitt would prefer the man confine his talents to the reformers’ side of the argument,” Mr. Thomas explained.
“Quite so,” Mr. Kitt confirmed. “As it is, Thisburton seems to have more fondness for money than political convictions.”
“Perhaps because one cannot eat political convictions?” Griffin suggested.
Mr. Thomas chuckled into his ale, as Mr. Kitt made noises of mingled amusement and outrage.
Penelope thunked her tankard down on the table. Beer sloshed over her wrist, but she didn’t care. “I agree with Mr. Kitt,” she declared.
“I’m a little surprised,” Griffin said at length. “I’d have thought you’d be more likely to appreciate a pragmatist, when it comes to the question of putting food on the table.”
“I daresay Mr. Thisburton is in no danger of starving, or even running short of work,” Penelope bit out. “And I think it’s certainly practical to say that his playing both sides of an issue might hinder our progress. The man has a great talent, and through his work he has the power to influence opinions in such a way as to sway the people to one belief or another. He ought to be deliberate about how he applies that influence, if he cares about the fate of his fellow countrymen. He treats it like a game—but one only he can win, while the rest of the nation loses.” She shook the liquid from her wrist, and folded her arms with finality. “You cannot get a ship to go anywhere by blowing on both sides of a sail.”
“Hear hear!” Mr. Kitt said.
Griffin’s smile was slight but sincere. “Trust a sailor’s wife to think of it in nautical terms.”
“Trust a sailor’s wife, full stop,” Penelope replied, and felt the tightness in her chest ease a bit when Griffin laughed in response.
The whole country had already been stirred up by the Queen’s return. Now the introduction of the Bill of Pains and Penalties struck the island like lightning, inflaming the populace to new flashes of fury. Agatha could barely keep abreast of what was happening. Revolution was called for in the taverns, while in marble halls, titled lips whispered the same word as though it were a curse to conjure with. Everyone had an opinion, but nobodyknewanything. Anxiety clouded the air more than the fog ever had.
Every time Sydney left the house, Agatha wondered if today was the day the uprising would start, and Sydney would be the one marching at the front with the banner. Making himself a proper target. She wondered if she’d ever see him again, and even though she knew she was being ridiculous, her heartbeat stuttered in her chest. Radical papers praised the recent civil wars in Naples, Spain, and Portugal, while soldiers arrested radical writers and seized their printings in bulk; Peterloo and Cato Street were revived in the public imagination; Tory papers complained that the rabble would take up arms, and the soldiers would refuse to confront them, and good English patriots would be slaughtered in their sleep by pitchfork-wielding mobs, or beheaded by the guillotines that were surely being erected on every village green and in every London square.
Each time Sydney came back, he’d found another writer begging Griffin’s to print a pamphlet whose rhetoric could get them fined, arrested, transported, or worse.
Agatha rejected most of these offers outright—Griffin’s had a reputation as scientific and artistic, rather than radical or political—but with the streets in such turmoil, sales of picturesque landmarks and tranquil tour scenes were suffering. Something had to bridge the gap.
“A broadside edition of one of the Queen’s letters, then,” Agatha yielded with a sigh.
“At least it’s not technically sedition, to reprint the words of the Queen,” Eliza offered.
“Not until she’s divorced, anyways,” Agatha muttered. “Though if that happens, I expect we’ll have larger matters to worry about.”
Sydney’s face lit up at the thought of speaking out and getting his message heard—any message, even if it wasn’t as fiercely radical as he might have hoped. “I’ll set the type myself, if you like, after the workmen have gone home. That way nobody will know where it came from.”
Agatha snorted. “You think the journeymen don’t know every nick in every piece of type we use? But it’s a good precaution, all the same.” She narrowed her eyes. “Do you even remember how to compose type?”
Her son only grinned. “I’m sure it will come back to me.”
It did, to his mother’s mingled pride and irritation. Late that evening, with the shop quiet and the streetlamps flickering orange outside, Agatha cast a practiced eye over the finished forme: the bundle of leaden letters and bits of wood, tied up tight with twine to hold all the smaller pieces together. They’d pull a proof to check for errors, but any decent printer could decrypt the backwards letters in the composing stick by the time they finished their apprenticeship, and Agatha’s practiced eye spotted no mistakes.
It only took two people to operate the iron Stanhope press, so Agatha let the young people do the bulk of the work. Sydney set the forme in the galley, and the galley in the press-bed; Eliza skimmed the congealed skin off the top of the ink, and used a knife to spread a thin liquid layer on the glass-topped table next to the press. A single sheet of paper went into the tympan, atop layers of cloth padding to soften the blow of the plate; the frisket came down to protect the edges from ink, its cut-out center square framing and presenting the blank page like a yeoman holding a snowy sheep in place for shearing.
Eliza daubed a thin layer of ink onto the letters of the forme, filling the air with the dark, lush scent of oil; Sydney lowered tympan and frisket onto the bed, and pulled the rounce—a bar that slid the whole arrangement into the heart of the press.
All that was mere preparation: now came the moment of truth.
A single pull of the long central lever brought the flat, heavy platen down with a thump Agatha felt from her heels to her heart. She flinched internally, and hoped the noise wasn’t audible to anyone in the street outside.
Normally it was her favorite part of the process. The instant when all the layers of padding, paper, ink, and type were squashed together—and something new came out.
