Page 60 of Rears & Vices

Vitaliy nodded. He looked pleased. “Yes, it is.”

“How the devil did you manage this? I was there when you purchased the other! What kind did you…”

A press was a thing, a tangible, beastly piece-of-property thing. But a useful thing. It didn’t merely sit and exist; it produced, produced information and knowledge⁠—

“May I see it?” Everard asked at last.

Vitaliy pulled down the lantern. Flickering light bloomed. “Of course.”

Everard yanked a crowbar from its tiedown on the bench and cracked open the crate most easily reached: which happened to be largest. Nails fell dully onto the floor as he shoved at the top; then Vitaliy came to his assistance, and they lifted it clear. Everard buried his fingers in straw that smelled sharp and metallic, as though someone had just bled all over it.

“Aha,” he said, and laughed, a little maniacally. “It cannot be.”

“Careful—rats,” Vitaliy murmured. Everard barely heard him. He touched cold, greased cast iron, felt down the rough curve of an arc, squat and bell-shaped.

“It is a Stanhope!” Everard exclaimed. “But so few of these exist this side of the Atlantic…” His right hand traced over letters, revealed them: STANHOPE, INVENIT. And beneath that: № 76.

“Aided by thee,” Everard whispered, “O Art sublime! Our race spurns the opposing bonds of time and space.” He shoved straw to and fro, revealing more and more black iron. “With Fame’s swift flight to hold an equal course, and taste the stream from Reason’s purest source…” She was immaculate, not a speck of rust on her. “Vice and her hydra sons, thy powers can bind, and cast in Virtue’s mould the plastic mind.”

“Hydra sons of vice.” Vitaliy had a smile in his voice. “I have met one or two, maybe.”

Everard looked up and grinned. “Printer’s Grammar, 1808. There’s a print of a Stanhope as frontispiece. The poem is McCreery—pray do not ask me to recite it in entirety; it’s thirty-some pages.”

“I won’t.” Vitaliy’s eyes glowed in the lanternlight. “Though it reminds me of another… do you know it? ‘On the Freedom of the Press’?”

Everard sat back on haunches, crowbar over his knee, and thought for a moment. “Offhand… I need a visual callback, an image, a page, a pamphlet… Who wrote it?”

“Franklin; the Almanack. No need,” Vitaliy said quickly, as Everard opened his mouth in sudden recall, “I know it.” And he recited:

The Press from her fecundous Womb

Brought forth the Arts of Greece and Rome;

Her Offspring, skill’d in Logic War,

Truth’s Banner wav’d in open Air;

The Monster Superstition fled,

And hid in Shades her Gorgon Head;

And lawless Pow’r, the long kept Field,

By Reason quell’d, was forc’d to yield.”

Everard knew he’d never, so long as he lived, forget this moment. While it wasn’t exactly remarkable for him to remember a moment—especially words read or recited—he’d never seen anyone do it quite as eloquently or as… beautifully. Vitaliy had a deep, soft voice, and they weren’t even in theatre, but a dusty, unexpectedly resonant woodshop in the heart of a pirate ship.

Everard cleared his throat. “That one is very like, now you mention. A bit less abstract. Ah—and a rather longer piece, for Franklin, isn’t it?” He stood, put his hands on his hips, and stared down at the new press so that he wouldn’t stare at Vitaliy, make the man feel awkward. “You’re quite familiar, then?”

Vitaliy made a small, amused noise. The quiet subtlety of it emphasised just how close he stood, not that Everard wasn’t very, very aware⁠—

“Not as well as you, perhaps. Philadelphia was my boyhood home,” Vitaliy said. “And my mother, political.”

“Ah.”

“Yes.”

“And yet ‘It comes in many crates’?”