Sydney pushed the lever back, turned the rounce, and opened the frisket. There it was, in black and white, shining wetly: the words of Queen Caroline to her subjects and supporters. Sydney held it out for Agatha’s approval, suddenly and adorably shy.
Agatha’s heart softened. He’d looked just like that the day he pulled his first proof out of the press, as a young apprentice. It had been Thomas he’d handed it to then, of course.
How fast the years went by, when you had worries to keep you busy.
Swallowing her nostalgia, Agatha eyed the proof, pronounced it good, and hung the paper up to dry. Eliza was already daubing the forme with another layer of ink, and Sydney slipped another page into the press. Another thump, and a new broadsheet to hang from the lines strung across the top of the workroom. And so on, as the minutes spun by.
Press-work made for a comforting rhythm—like the beating of a very large, very slow heart. Agatha hung up another broadsheet and paused to read through a few sentences, taking in the meaning now rather than simply looking for mistakes. “‘General tyranny usually begins with individual oppression.’This is much more radical stuff than I would have expected from any monarch.”
“They say William Cobbett wrote this one,” Sydney said, his hero’s name lingering on his tongue like a benediction. “According to Prestwich, who dined with him privately the other evening, Cobbett sees the alliance between the Queenites and the radicals as a natural bond: both have been oppressed, exiled, punished, and spied upon by the government, merely for asserting the rights to which they are legally and morally entitled. If we can harness popular support for Caroline, we might be able to push through actual changes—they say now that Cobbett has her ear, we might get her to support the expansion of suffrage, or even more reforms...”
He went on in this way for some time, laying out elaborate plans of negotiation and leverage, most of which were rhetorical, and all of which had at least seventeen separate steps yet were somehow both inevitable and predictable.
It made Agatha feel as though the very stones beneath her feet couldn’t be trusted to stay steady.
She remembered what Penelope Flood had said about Thisburton:He treats it like a game. All the arguments and the strategies and even the enthusiasm: it was about winning, about scoring points and defeating opponents and being the person who was the most right. Sydney and the young radical men followed political debates the same way their aristocratic nemeses followed horse races—and whenever they talked about revolution, the assumption was that they would be ones on top at the end.
You could almost hear Robespierre laughing from the other side of the guillotine blade.
“Tell me,” she blurted, to banish the image, “if you could alter one thing about government—only one thing, but you could change it instantly, without having to argue with anybody—what would you change?”
“Just one thing?” Sydney thought about it for the whole time it took to print another copy of the Queen’s address. “I’d revoke the sedition and libel laws,” he said at last. “Because a free press is the key that helps you unlock every other door. You can’t change what you can’t openly talk about.”
“Not the vote?” Eliza asked, using one forearm to brush her hair back from her forehead. “I know the press is important, but if the people in power have no reason to listen to you—and unless you’re electing them, they don’t—how is disenfranchisement any different from censorship?”
Sydney pulled on the press-arm, grunting a little with effort. “So you’d institute universal suffrage: give every man the vote.”
“Manandwoman. Otherwise it’s not really universal, is it?” Eliza coolly rolled out another layer of ink for the daubers.
Sydney chortled. “And they say I’m the radical one!” He grinned. “Sorry, Mum. You’re outnumbered.”
“Don’t mind me,” Agatha said dryly. “I’m just a cranky old woman with no vote, biding my time until death. The future is yours to worry about.”
“So what would you change?” Eliza asked. “Just one thing.”
Agatha took the newest broadsheet, and pinned it up for drying. The other sheets fluttered as the string vibrated, billowing like the sails of a ship. She thought of a sailor’s wife with gold-and-silver hair, and her husband somewhere far across the sea. Her throat felt tight with the unfairness of it. “I’d make divorce simple. And cheap.”
Both Eliza and Sydney stopped, the former with daubers raised, the latter with a fresh broadsheet in one hand. The heartbeat rhythm of the press stopped with them.
London had never sounded so quiet.
Belatedly, it occurred to Agatha that her son might take that as a glancing reference to how she’d felt about his father. But what was she to do? She couldn’t tell him:Oh, don’t worry, it’s only that I’m lusting after my friend who is inconveniently married.
She plucked the broadsheet from Sydney’s hand and hung it up with the rest. How convenient that the stretch of white paper and black ink hid her face for a moment. “I only mean to say, look at all the fuss currently, on account of one unhappy marriage,” she said, too loud in the silence. “Imagine if the King and Queen could simply agree to part—perhaps we wouldn’t be standing on the precipice of a revolution.”
“Perhaps we need a revolution,” muttered Sydney, glancing at Eliza.
“Perhaps,” said Eliza tartly, “we needseveral.”
Sydney grimaced at that and chewed his lip—a habit he’d inherited from his father, that showed up when he was most anxious. Agatha hadn’t seen him do it in a while now, she realized—for all her own worry about the state of the nation and the tenor of the times, Sydney had been nothing if not eager to throw himself into the fray. If he’d been able to choose what Griffin’s printed, he’d have been right there on the radical edge with Cobbett and the rest of them.
What was the use of keeping the press going for him, if he was only going to use it to get himself jailed or worse? She knew he was old enough to make his own choices—but did they have to bethesechoices?
Agatha’s heart was a wriggling worm in her breast. She groped for a change of subject. “How have you been getting on with theMenageriecorrespondence, Eliza?”
Her apprentice shrugged. “It’s not that different from the wholesalers, to be frank. They make offers of things to write, and they ask when they’re getting paid, and they apologize for articles that turn up late or go missing, all that kind of thing. I expected them to talk more about—I don’t know, about the things they’re writing the articles about? I thought we’d be discussing art, or music, or fashion, about what all those things mean and how to do them well.” She shook her head, adding more ink to the forme. “Then again, it’s clear they have money and education, so maybe they can tell that—well, that I don’t. Our critics write for people who can afford to buy paintings, or sit in a box at the opera. Not for someone who pins up an engraved print or sits in the stalls.”
Sydney pulled extra-hard on the press-arm, making the plate thump doubly loud. “What about someone who knows the melody of every popular ballad in London? And who learns new ones as soon as she hears them?”
