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I winced and Serena’s face fell. The young woman cast a pleading look at Ben. “Can you not help her financially, Count Castle?”
He smiled at our guest. “Aria wouldn’t take a handout even if she was starving. And please, call me Ben.” She blushed but gave a nod.
I took a deep breath and caught Ben’s eye. “Well, lead the way.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-NINE
Ben bowedhis head and guided our little group inside. The interior was bleak, with dust everywhere and very little light save for a half dozen oil lamps that hung from the open rafters at the rear of the large room that occupied the entire ground floor of the building. A half dozen huge printing presses stood in two rows, and one of them was working away with as much noise as stampeding cattle.
A woman barely five feet scuttled from the working machine to a long table that stood against the back wall. She wore a heavy leather apron over her front and her greasy hands held tiny little blocks that had numbers and letters etched onto them.
“Aria!” Ben shouted as we approached her.
The woman didn’t so much as glance at us, but she did reply. “Shut your trap for a moment or you’ll mess this up!”
Ben stopped us a few feet shy of the woman’s warpath as she moved to and fro. In a few minutes, she finished her sprightly pacing at the machine where she set a big bundle of blank newspaper into the hopper and pulled a large lever. The machine loaded one of the papers atop the many letter and number blocks she had placed in a tray, and a thin sheet of metal stamped down on the parchment. The metal was lifted and the machine spat out a printed page of a newspaper.
Aria slipped the page off the machine and held it up with both hands. Her eyes appeared to glow slightly in the dim light as she examined the contents. “Perfect, as always.” The woman lay the paper down in a deep tray and turned her attention to us. She leaned one elbow on the machine and looked Ben over. “Now then, what’s wanted?”
Ben feigned a hurtful expression. “Can I not visit an old friend?”
“Not after staying away from her for almost a year,” she quipped before she nodded at Serena and me. “And who are the girls?”
Ben stepped aside and swept an arm toward us. “These are my friends, Millie and Serena. This is Miss Aria Clark, typesetter extraordinaire.”
Aria crossed her arms over her chest and frowned at him. “Now I know you want something. Spit it out.”
Ben dropped the cat and cleared his throat. “We were curious to know about a certain individual, a woman who was thrown out of the Lady’s Book Club some time ago.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Why do you want to know that?”
“We wish to ally ourselves with the fellow outcast of Lady Trent’s goodwill and see if we can’t help another of our friends in the process,” Ben told her.
“Then you don’t have far to go,” Aria assured him as she jerked her thumb at herself. “I’m that rival paper.”
I examined the woman’s greasy attire and messy hair. “Did you belong to her group, too?”
Aria wrinkled her nose. “For a couple of weeks about three years ago. My dad was a lower lord, which got me into their snooty society. I thought it’d be a great way to start a running article, but the minute she heard about that she tossed me out. She didn’t want anybody muscling in on her subscription base, and that’s why that bitch tried to ruin me with those lies.” She swept her eyes over the dark and quiet room. “Very few people will advertise with me after that and I’ve had to lay everybody off.”
Serena’s hand flew to her mouth. “How horrible.”
Aria shrugged. “That’s Lady Trent for ya. What made you guys suddenly join the renegade party?”
“Isn’t knowing Lady Trent enough?” I countered.
She scowled at the thought. “Yeah, but something must have really grabbed your parchment to do something like this.”
I sighed. “She’s going to write up a bad article on a book a guy named Peter Munio is about to put out.”
Aria’s expression twisted into a mixture of disbelief and fury. She balled her hands into fists at her side as her whole body quivered. “That bitch is going to dowhat?!”
“You know of him?” Ben asked her.
She snapped her head around to face him. “Of course I do, you fool! We’re supposed to get married after this thunder race!”
You could have heard a pin drop in the room, and I certainly heard my jaw drop. I snapped it up and pointed at her greasy self. “You and Munio are engaged?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Is that so hard to believe?”
