Lady Wisteria's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Lady Wisteria had one week to print the season's gossip, and her printing press would not turn. She stood in the back room of her tea house, behind the curtain no guest ever passed. Here she brewed a secret trade. Every scandal in Skelington passed through her ears, and she sold them all in Whispering Wisteria, her anonymous column. But a column cannot exist without pages. The press dominated the room. Its lavender frame gleamed, its metal wheels heavy and still. She turned the crank. The rollers scraped and jammed. She tried again. Nothing moved but a dry groan of iron. A tin cup of ink sat beside it, untouched. She had columns copied out in her own hand, ready to set. Copying each issue by hand would take her the whole season. By then the gossip would rot into old news. She pressed a bony thumb to her teeth and thought. The rollers held a bar between them, wedged tight. Someone had shipped the press with a brace still bolted inside. She fetched a lamp and leaned close. Two iron pins locked the bar in place. No copying would fix that. Only her own two hands would. Wisteria opened the white cabinet along the wall. Ink bottles crowded its shelves, dark glass in tidy rows, beside jars of pigment and stacks of printing supplies. She found a small wrench among them. She worked the first pin free. Her sleeves gathered ink at the cuff. The second pin fought her. She braced her heel against the frame and pulled until it gave. The bar dropped out and rang against the floor. She set it aside and turned the crank once more. The rollers spun clean and smooth. She fed a sheet of lavender paper through and pumped the wheel. The press bit down, then released. She lifted the sheet. There it was, in black ink on pale purple: Whispering Wisteria, the full first column, sharp and clean. She printed the rest until her arm ached. She hung each wet sheet on the drying rack and stacked the dry ones on the shelf of stacked paper. By the end the room smelled of ink and lavender, and a hundred copies waited in neat piles. She stacked a bundle on the small table by the curtain, ready to slip into hands tomorrow. Wisteria wiped her fingers and smiled. Then she read the top column again, the one she had set first. It named a certain young lady's secret meeting near the Queen's stable. She had printed it a hundred times over. Tomorrow every skeleton in Skelington would read it. Only now did she remember: the lady in the story was her own nephew's chosen match. She had sold a secret she could not take back.