“Grandmother Gossip,” Sydney added.
Mrs. Moseley shook her head. “Too gentle. We want something sharper.”
Agatha thought of bees, and stings—but bees put her in mind of Penelope Flood and her kind heart. Yet there was another creature that could work... “The Widow Wasp,” she blurted out.
Mrs. Molesey’s head snapped around at once.“Yes,”she said, like the voice of an oracle. “Yes, that will do.”
The poet took the three of them to Walcott’s for dinner, and by dessert there were three more absolutely vicious ballads and parodies of popular tunes for Sydney to begin setting type for the next day. Eliza worked up a few small illustrations: the Queen herself, London as a wasp’s nest, a very sharp-limbed wasp-lady with lacy wings that folded around her like a shawl, and striped skirts that belled below the waist before narrowing to a knife-like stinger. Agatha set aside a few reams of paper and had the whole set made up as a chapbook.
She’d expected it to sell; it was perfectly pitched to the tenor of the times.
She had not expected it to sell out the first day. They scrabbled to print more that evening: those sold. They printed a third run, twice that of the first—people bought that, too, and before long you couldn’t walk more than one mile in any section of town without hearing one of the Widow’s songs being sung out on a street corner or from a patron-filled tavern.
Pirate editions sprang up like mushrooms from the less ethical presses, to Agatha’s grim resignation and Sydney’s blazing indignation (“How dare someone copy Eliza’s woodcuts!”).
He was mollified somewhat when some of his favorite radical philosophers and thinkers began dropping the Wasp’s lyrics into the pages ofMedusaandThe Republican(“Carlile quoted my line about the green bags!”).
Even Catherine St. Day, Countess of Moth, had heard the ballads. She had come by Griffin’s to arrange the printing of her foundation’s next volume, a treatise by a lady chemist. “Lucy will not stop singing them! Particularly the one that made use of a tune Mr. Frampton had composed,” she relayed, eyes twinkling. “He found himself on a walk through Westminster, surrounded by people singing his melody, but with lyrics he’d never heard before!”
“I hope it wasn’t too disconcerting—I didn’t realize he was composing now,” Agatha replied.
The countess nodded. “He works up one or two songs a year: they supplement the income from his teaching and working on his mathematical—”
She was interrupted when Eliza burst into Agatha’s office without knocking. “Ma’am, there’s soldiers—”
Agatha was up and around the desk and striding into the storefront before she had time to reflect on the prudent course of action.
Eliza was right: there were three soldiers, their red coats blood-bright in the sun spilling in the windows. “Mrs. Agatha Griffin?” said the one in front, whose coat was a more vivid officer’s scarlet, rather than the thick madder dye sported by the other two.
“That’s right,” Agatha said, sending an anxious glance at her son.
Sydney was standing behind the counter, rigid and tense as a piece of metal under strain. His eyes were as cold and angry as Agatha had ever seen them.
The soldier flourished a piece of paper at her; Agatha took it and discovered a writ of seizure.
It was very official: signed and sealed. Her gut twisted, and sweat broke out on the back of her neck.
She was so shaken she missed most of what the officer said next—except for the wordsseditious libel, which made her snap painfully back to awareness. “We aren’t here to harm anyone. We have orders to take away everything by the Widow Wasp,” he said.
The officer’s eyes stayed on Agatha, and his face was manfully expressionless—but not so the other two. One was eyeing the window glass with gleeful intent; the other was letting his gaze roam across the many watercolors, scenic prints, and loose manuscripts stacked everywhere in the shop.
Everything here could either break or burn, Agatha realized with a chill. She was surrounded by destructibles, her body the only thing between these soldiers’ weapons and the roomful of vulnerable people behind her—and the men in front of her looked weathered enough to have seen action during the war. They’d know a thing or two about destruction. About violence. About hurt.
She froze, unable to protest or call out a warning or even move. One droplet of sweat slithered from her neck down beneath her collar. She fought not to shiver, painfully aware of the light, ticklish movement.
“I beg your pardon,” came an icy voice from behind her.
Agatha turned her head stiffly and saw the countess standing in the doorway, one hand braced gracefully on the doorframe. She was not a tall person, but the fineness of her clothing and the steel of her posture could not have saidaristocratany clearer than if she’d had it written on a placard and carried above her head by a troop of liveried servants.
The lead soldier bowed and regarded her warily. “We are here on the King’s business, ma’am.”
The countess was looking down her nose at the officer, despite being the shortest person in the room. “I am the Countess of Moth, and of course you must carry out your orders,” she said smoothly. “To the letter—and no further.”
“Yes, my lady.” The officer’s mouth went thin, and his two subordinates shuffled themselves slightly more upright.
The countess turned to Agatha. “Where are the Wasp’s songs?”
Agatha pointed at the central table, full of what broadsides and lyric sheets and chapbooks they still had.
