The crowd took up the chant. Penelope cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted the slogan along with the rest, doing her part to add to the sound.
Mr. Oliver’s mouth was now a thin, unhappy line. “I cannot do what you demand!” he cried, a tinny echo drowned by the voice of the mob.
“The Queen forever, the King in the river!”
Penelope widened her stance and prepared to stand her ground for the next hour. This was all very much part of the pattern: it left one with a sore throat next day, but that was all. Eventually, things would wind down. They always had before. Mr. Oliver was a magistrate and knew how this game was played—he was already reaching into his coat for the text of the Riot Act, the reading of which would fix a time for the crowd to disperse.
Then Felicia Plumb threw a stone.
It was not a large stone, but it was well-aimed, flying straight and true toward the rectory. Penelope watched it arc through the air, and for the first time a trickle of fear iced through her. The window on Mr. Oliver’s right shattered, raining glass down on the shrubbery beneath. The sharp sound cut through the shouting, made every throat pull in a surprised breath—then the voice of the mob redoubled, half in fear, and half in delight.
The crowd broke and ran.
Mr. Oliver yelped, ducked inside his door, and slammed it shut. Half the people in the lane dashed forward, Mrs. Koskinen included, grabbing up more rocks and hurling them toward the remaining windows, slipping around to all sides of the house.
The rest of the mob scattered in fear, pelting away down the dirt road and into the safety of the side lanes. Mr. Buckley was hollering for everyone to stay calm; Mr. Thomas was shouting more radical slogans and waving his hands fiercely in the air. Glass cracked and shimmered in the sunlight. Someone screamed, someone laughed, and absolutely everyone else shouted louder.
Penelope pressed herself against the rectory’s low garden wall and clung to the stone like an anchor to avoid being swept away.
When there were no more windows left to break, the tension eased. Mrs. Koskinen brandished her banner in triumph and led the mob away toward the pub singing. Their voices took a long, long time to fade from Penelope’s ringing ears.
Penelope walked as softly as she could around the low wall, and waited a good ten feet from the door.
About five minutes later, Mr. Oliver’s door creaked open. The vicar poked his head out, his eyes wide and watery, his face wan with fear. He started when Penelope waved, and craned his neck around, as if he could see around corners to survey the whole of the rectory.
“It’s alright,” Penelope reassured him. “They’ve all gone down the pub.”
“Ah.” Mr. Oliver straightened, and sighed. “I was rather worried there, for a moment.”
“I thought I might help you sweep up the glass,” Penelope offered.
“Yes.” The vicar swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down convulsively. “Yes, that’s very kind of you.”
He retrieved a broom and a bin and together they knocked the glass shards from the leaves and swept it up from the ground as best they could. The rich scent of loam rose up around them; the vicar kept his garden well-tended.
Mr. Oliver cleared his throat. “I was surprised to see Mrs. Koskinen at the head of such a group,” he said, his eyes fixed on the work his hands were doing. “I never pictured her as a rabble-rouser. She’s such a soft and feminine little thing.”
Penelope was suddenly, awkwardly conscious of the heft of her body, and the trousers bagging at her knees and tucked into the tops of her boots. She ignored the prickle of embarrassment in her cheeks, tugged on her gloves, and worked on prying the larger glass pieces out of the window frame, tossing them in the bin with the rest of the debris. “Mrs. Koskinen lost her cousin Beth at Peterloo last year. Sabered by one of the Yeomanry.”
Mr. Oliver grimaced. “I see. Such a waste of a good soul.”
Penelope didn’t know whether he meant Mrs. Koskinen or her cousin. She couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t sound rude, so she bit her lip to keep quiet and plucked at more glass fragments.
They moved slowly around the house from window to window. “How is your guest faring?” Mr. Oliver asked. “I hope she is finding a little solace now that the first shock has passed?”
Penelope paused, looking down at the shard of glass in her gloved palm. “It’s only been three months. Nothing to set against thirty years.”
Mr. Oliver brushed a tangle of leaves and glass and soil into the bin. “Three months is three times longer than Achilles grieved for Patroclus.”
“Perhaps,” Penelope retorted, “but at the end of the month Achilles stormed back into battle with murder on his mind. Joanna is not quite atthatpitch of mourning.”
Mr. Oliver chuckled, but Penelope couldn’t share his amusement. She kept turning his reference over in her mind: Did it mean heknewabout Joanna and Isabella being as good as a married couple? He had to, didn’t he? Most of the countryside knew, after all, or at least suspected. Surely the vicar, with all his learning, couldn’t have missed so many clues and rumors? Achilles and Patroclus were famous for their friendship, but to anyone who knew how to read the signs it was definitelythatkind of friendship. The kind that got men whipped or transported or even hanged. Romantic friendship. Passionate friendship. Very often naked and desperate to fuck each other friendship.
Perhaps he felt differently about men loving men, than about women loving women? The vicar’s long-ago words to her brother whispered in her memory:Men of that sort might find life in the city more to their taste.
Had Mr. Oliver really meant it like that? Penelope couldn’t be sure. The uncertainty tied her stomach in knots.
Because if he disapproved of Joanna and Isabella, of their decades-long devotion and fidelity, which broke no laws at all, how much more easily would he disapprove of Penelope’s more transitory, flagrantly carnal affairs? It wasn’t only her current lust for Mrs. Griffin, that secret that beat like a second heart beneath her breastbone. She’d been eager enough to act on her past desires.
