7

THE LATE NIGHT AT THE TAVERN AND THE CONVERSATION WITH Jack didn’t make for a good mood the following morning. Neither did the mess at home, which Kristos had added to when he left for work. I nudged dirty stockings off the bread trencher with an exaggerated gag no one was there to see. Kristos had also left another pamphlet on the table. I brushed it aside, annoyed. He was as close to an adult as I expected him to get; couldn’t he clean up after himself? Unless, of course, he left the little book there hoping I would see it. Not unlikely, I admitted, as I picked up the thread-bound paper. Freshly printed, freshly bound. It still smelled of ink, the now-familiar printing house crest decorating the title page. I turned the pamphlet over in my hands.

“Vindication of the Laboring Class: A Primer of Rights,” I read. I rolled my eyes—adding fancy words to Kristos’s rants didn’t make them any more appealing, especially after listening to a solid two hours of them the night before. I glanced at the rest of the cover. In which we attempt to explain the artificial divisions between classes and illustrate the benefits of removing legal division, creating a democratic government, and providing for laborers’ rights. By K. B.

Those were Kristos’s initials. I set the booklet down with a trembling hand. The ink had stained my fingers. I knew he was reading the pieces, that the League was producing them, but Kristos was writing them? I didn’t dare read the rest of what the booklet said—the cover was damning enough. This wasn’t an educational primer. Vindication—this was potential treason. Kristos was not only promoting active anti-monarchism; his name was on a treasonous paper. This was worse than any of the activities he’d undertaken already—organizing meetings, contacting different groups of workers, dragging hordes of League members to lectures, selecting motifs like the caps. Those had all been ephemeral, talk in moments passing quickly. This was permanent, and he could be held accountable.

I couldn’t stay at home, waiting for Kristos to roll out of bed to talk to him, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. He hadn’t told me he was putting his name on treason, probably with good intentions. Not only did he know exactly how I would react, he must have understood that affiliating with his dangerous thoughts wasn’t exactly safe for me. The less I knew, the better.

I almost appreciated his thoughtful protectiveness.

Still, my mood hadn’t improved by the time I got to work.

“Penny, these ruffles are a mess,” I said without meaning to sound as harsh as I did.

Penny flushed and took the sleeve ruffles she had made back from me. The hems were too wide and the gathers were uneven—work I knew she could do well.

“What happened?” I asked, more gently this time.

“I don’t know,” Penny snapped, cross. She softened. “I’m sorry. I think I was distracted.”

“Well, we can’t have you distracted this week. We have a full slate of orders, plus we need to work on that court gown.” I watched Penny. After the scolding I’d given her, she could use some confidence. “I had wanted you to take the lead on beading the court gown. Can you do that?”

She brightened. “Of course!” And I knew she could—when Penny focused, her work was not only meticulous but had a creative flair.

She bustled off to rework the ruffles while Alice fiddled with the sheer layers of an ornate cap. I pulled a bolt of midweight linen from a high shelf and, with only my measuring stick and my memory, cut three sets of underthings for Lady Viola.

“We don’t use that weight of linen very much,” Alice said, gesturing to the bolt of nearly sheer fabric. She was right—though most of us wore simple linen shifts under our corsets and clothes, our shop didn’t have a habit of making very many of them. We made the complicated clothing people couldn’t sew by themselves; any idiot with a needle and thread and some practice could make a shift.

“Lady Snowmont had a clever idea,” I answered. “Charmed underthings.”

“That was all she wanted?” Alice replied, clearly disappointed.

“She also wanted a gown.” I folded the linen carefully. I knew that the simple shifts should take priority, but a gown for a noble like Viola Snowmont would infuse the atelier with a bit of liveliness to combat the dreary rain and slowing orders that late autumn brought us. “I’ll start on sketches this afternoon. She wants pink—get me a swatch of every pink silk we have with enough on the bolt left for a gown.”

Alice complied, and Penny was still busy with her ruffles.

I stitched for most of the morning in my screened corner, then emerged, prodded by the list of receipts and invoices I’d remembered I had to tally. Alice was adding a finishing ribbon to the cap she’d been working on, but Penny was gone.

“Where’s Penny?” I asked.

Alice looked up. “She must have gone outside for lunch—she said she was going to step out for a midday break, since it’s warm again.”

It was unseasonably warm. But it wasn’t lunchtime yet, and the stack of invoices I’d asked Penny to sort sat untouched on the counter. I sighed. Distracted, indeed.

I stepped out onto the little stone landing and glanced around. No Penny.

But I heard a distinctive giggle coming from the alley between my shop and the next.

I pursed my lips. Was there any way to avoid barging in on Penny and her apparent tryst mate without sounding like a scolding fishwife? Probably not, I acknowledged. But I couldn’t tolerate inattention to work.

“Penny!” I called in my most authoritative voice, striding into the alley. “You are absent from work without permission.” As I spoke, I saw her face clearly, snuggled on the shoulder of a tall man with clubbed dark hair. “And I absolutely cannot tolerate canoodling on company time—oooh!”

Penny’s gentleman friend had turned around.

“Kristos! You rake!”

“Canoodling? Are you eighty, Sophie?” Kristos laughed, and I was seeing red. “Canoodling! That’s rich!”

“Penny,” I said through clenched teeth, “get inside and begin sorting the invoices that you were supposed to complete this morning.”

She probably muttered something like “Yes, mistress,” but I was too focused to hear. As soon as I heard the door click on its latch, I turned on Kristos.

“What in the world are you thinking?”

Kristos shrugged. “It’s not really any of your business whom your employees ‘canoodle’ with.”

“It is when they are shirking work to do so,” I replied. “Besides. One of the best employees I’ve had. You know I have a hard time keeping good help—they find other work. Ellie, Greta, Florence—all in the past two years.”

Kristos’s ears were growing red, and he had a markedly awkward expression spreading over his face.

“You! You didn’t! You—you fooled around with my employees! That’s why they … oh, I am going to skin you alive in your sleep!”

“I think I’ll wake up for that,” Kristos said. “Yes, I may have … dabbled with Ellie and Greta. Not Florence. She was too short for my taste.”

“Is that why they left my shop? Because you broke their little hearts? You cad!”

“Hey! Hey, now. No, I didn’t do any heartbreaking. Maybe Ellie took things a little too seriously at first, but no—it was all in fun and they had fun, too. They left because it was time to add another shop to their reference list.”

“Fine.” I huffed. “But Penny—she’s so young!”

“She’s sixteen. Old enough to make her own choices.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Old enough to get married if she wanted, legally speaking.”

“Oh, lovely. You must have talked to Jack.”

“It’s to your credit that he said it was the kindest outright rejection he’s ever gotten.” Kristos ran a hand through his disheveled hair. “Sophie, why? How many options do you really have left?”

“Options—who said I was looking for options?”

“Anyone with any sense. I’m worried about you. You’re twenty-seven—”

“I’m twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six. Who are you waiting for, anyway? Are you going to put off getting married forever?”

“That’s the plan,” I retorted, but his words stung. I wasn’t waiting for anyone. I didn’t think that highly of myself. “I won’t lose my shop to a husband. Or his family. Or anything at all.” Did any of his pamphlets, with their academic language and fancy typesetting, consider the rights of women? I doubted it, a fresh ember of anger glowing in my chest.

“It’s just—if anything happened to me, I wouldn’t want you to be all alone.”

“If you like marriage so much, quit fooling around with the pretty girls I employ and get married yourself.”

“I’m not just fooling around.” Kristos’s face had softened into something honest, approachable. His usual smirk and swagger gone.

“You’re not?”

“I really like this one.” He cleared his throat. “Penny’s a fine girl.”

“She is.” I wavered, feeling lost. She was so young—but no younger than plenty of Galatine girls when they married. After all, she could legally sign my annual employment tenure. And, I recalled with a smile, I had been convinced of my own maturity at sixteen. Penny was certainly convinced of hers. “Just don’t come around when she’s not on break. She gets distracted easily, and we have too much work for that. Fair enough?”

“Fair,” Kristos said with a grin. “I’m getting too busy for dropping by on her during the day anyway.”

“With work?” I asked pointedly. Clearly he hadn’t made an effort to get work today.

“Don’t start in. There’s a big construction job starting tomorrow, and I’ve got it on good authority from the masons that they’ll hire me to tote bricks. No, I’ve been busy with the League. I’ve got that big demonstration planned tomorrow.” He looked at me hopefully.

“You planned a demonstration?” Kristos could barely plan breakfast.

“Not by myself, no,” he said. “Niko got the word out and Jack helped. And Venko—he can see the whole picture of a thing, like he’s looking at it from the top down. He says I’ve got a gift for motivating everyone to follow it.”

“Kristos, I can’t protest with you all. My reputation—”

“Is important, I know. I won’t ask you to march around holding a sign. No, just come see us. See how serious we are. How many people we have on our side.”

I couldn’t deny him that. “Wear your cap,” I told him.

He grinned. “You got it. And that’s another thing—that professor, Venko, he wants to meet you. I told him about the caps.”

“What does he care about a charm-casting seamstress?” I laughed.

“He studies it, Sophie. Studies magic.”

“No one studies magic,” I scoffed. “It’s—it’s like saying someone studies brickmaking or does research in the nuances of mud puddles.”

“He does. He’s—really, Sophie. A genius. And I kind of told him I’d bring you by this afternoon.”

“Kristos! First you distract Penny half the morning, and we have a full slate of orders, and I’m behind on drafting the pattern for the caraco jacket Mrs. Norris ordered, and she’ll be in tomorrow for a fitting, and—”

“And I’m sure you’ll finish all those things in plenty of time, like you always do. I know as well as you do that you build in about a week of extra time on every order you take.” I flushed—he was right, but it was smart practice to count on delays. “Professor Venko really wanted to meet you, and I don’t want to disappoint him. Now, how about a sausage on a stick for lunch? I’ll buy. There’s this vendor who grills them up with onions—it’s perfect.”

I sighed, but I let Kristos drag me down the street.