She thinks of Cleo’s eyes on her face before they parted, studying her as if she were precious, even vital. “Or necessary.”
“Even better.” Mr. Blackwell raises his glass. “Give Miss Quinn my warmest thanks.”
They sip their wine. Bella imagines a version of her life where she never met Cleopatra Quinn, where she married Mr. Blackwell and lived in this pleasant red-brick house until she was a crone in truth, reading witch-tales by the fireside in winter and dreaming of better worlds. She thinks of the old story of the witch who buried her heart in a silver box beneath the snow so that she might never be hurt. A chill shivers up her spine.
Blackwell sets his glass among the checkers. “Did you truly find it?”
Bella knows from the soft reverence of his voice what he means. “We did.” She can’t help the note of pride in her voice.
“And is it truly gone?”
Her voice this time is a graveside whisper. “It is. Although—” She withdraws her little black notebook from her skirt pocket and runs her thumb across the cover. “It has been recently brought to my attention that not all witching was lost, that night.”
“Oh?” It’s the sameoh?he used to give her over lunch in the College library, which granted her permission to lecture to her heart’s content about the lives of Saints or the execrable handwriting of monks. Bella smiles a small, wistful smile for those quiet, safe days, and tells him more or less everything there is to tell.
She tells him about Old Salem and the sewing sampler and the owl winging toward her through the trees; living in the lost library of Avalon, outside of time and mind, and standing in its ashes; Araminta’s spells, which rely on stars and songs rather than rhymes and herbs, and her growing suspicion that witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.
She tells him far more than she needs to, and he listens with considering nods and small smiles and a fewmy words.
“I was hoping to ask Araminta about the scarification process and their mother’s-names, but then Hill’s shadows turned up in New Cairo. Oh! The wards!”
Bella stands so abruptly that her blood thuds in her skull. She reels to the front door and pours a line of salt and thistle across the threshold.Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Guard the bed that I lay on.
She’s on her sixth window before she notices the yellowing grains of salt already lying on the sills. “Did you ward your house already?”
Mr. Blackwell looks a little sheepish. “Not nearly so well as you are, I’m sure. It’s just that fever—the Second Plague, some are calling it now—has been creeping north. It strikes me as uncanny, so I thought perhaps a little uncanniness might keep it at bay.” He nudges his spectacles back up his nose. “My great-aunt taught me a few little charms here and there.”
Bella would like to ask more about all this—a man working witchcraft, an uncanny sickness—but at that moment Juniper emerges from behind the bookshelf. She is wrapped in a dark cloak, limping badly without her red-cedar staff, her eyes the green-lit gray of the sea before a storm. She pauses to sweep the two of them a bow before slipping out the front door and vanishing into the deepening night.
“Whatisshe doing, at this hour?”
“Whatever she can. Whatever might help.” Bella sighs. “I imagine we’ll read about it in tomorrow’s papers.”
Juniper has never cared much for reading (or any of the others of Miss Hurston’s three R’s), but over the next few weeks she acquires the habit of reading the paper over breakfast. Or at least the headlines: SISTERS EASTWOOD STILL AT LARGE; NEW SALEM CHIEF OF POLICE RESIGNS AMID RUMORS OF NERVOUS BREAKDOWN; HILL’S RALLY INTERRUPTED BY BAYING DOGS AND STRONG WINDS.
The other Sisters tell Juniper that Mayor Worthington is leaning onThe Postnot to print the most hysterical stories: that the Eastwoods can transform themselves into black birds or possibly bats; that the Crone herself is currently living on the south end, keeping company with colored women; that the Mother gave birth to a little devil-child with hair the color of Hell itself.
“Bet the bastards wish they’d just given us the vote when we asked nicely,” says Electa Gage, with no small degree of satisfaction. “Too late now.”
The previous week the City Council issued a statement that the suffrage question could not possibly be entertained in the current climate. “And frankly,” Mr. Hill had told the papers, “if this is what happens when women gain some measure of power, we have grave doubts about the advisability of granting them more.”
Following this announcement, several members of the New Salem Women’s Association had found their way to the Sisters, their jaws gritted, looking for witch-ways and words.
The Sisters rarely congregate, these days. They speak instead by mockingbird and smoke-signal, by letters that can only be seen by friendly eyes and notes that ignite after reading. They meet only for furtive exchanges of spells and safe houses and disperse before they can be found by the things that hunt them: the mobs of men with brass badges and torches, the steel-jawed officers on white horses, the eyeless shadows that twist up from sewer grates and reach after them.
But they are prey with teeth and claws of their own, now. They have the spells they stole from Avalon before it burned, still stitched into hems or written in recipe-books; they have the words and ways taught to them by their grandmothers and aunts and neighbor-ladies, now shared between them; they have August’s little boys’ Latin and Araminta’s songs, chanted prayers from a pair of dark-eyed Russian girls, and even a few shuffling dances from the Dakota woman. And Bella is still gathering more. Everywhere they stay she asks for their stories or spells or songs, whatever ways they’ve found to talk to the great red heartbeat on the other side, and adds them carefully to her collection. Her little black notebook has become a sort of patchworked grimoire, part spell-book and part diary. Juniper has seen Bella writing in it long into the evenings and suspects her of adding wholly unnecessary narrative; she figures it comes of reading too many novels as a girl.
So Juniper and her Sisters run, but they run with salt and snake’s teeth in their pockets, ninebark and angelica root, honey-wax and black feathers and scraps of tanned hide. They tangle their pursuers in cobwebs and rose-vines, they slip into crowds and come out the other side wearing different faces. They vanish through ordinary-seeming doors and emerge hours later, smelling of roots and earth.
Not all of them get away. There are arrests and detentions, beatings and brutalities. A man in Bethlehem Heights finds witch-ways in his wife’s sewing box and ties her to the bedpost until the authorities retrieve her; one of Pearl’s girls is found bloodied and barely breathing with the witch-mark drawn on her back; an entire tenement on the west side is set ablaze by a gang of mean-eyed boys who claimed to have followed a black cat with red eyes.
It proves difficult to keep a witch behind bars. Workhouses suffer from rusted locks and shattered bars, missing shackles and stolen keys. Guards are discovered sleeping or missing or terribly confused, convinced they are lost in deep woods. Cells are found empty except for the wild smell of witching.
The smell is everywhere, now. The whole city reeks of wet earth and green things, char and crushed herbs and wild roses. It rises like steam from the alleys between tenements and the lawns of fashionable homes, as if some great dragon is rousing beneath the city, breathing smoke through the cracks. The streets heave over the bones of tree roots that grow faster than they should; thistle and pye weed sprout between bricks. Sometimes at night the stars shine more brightly than they have any right to, as if there aren’t gas-lamps and bulbs buzzing beneath them, as if they’re shining down on a black wood or an empty prairie. The wind is sharp and too cold for the final days of summer, as if the ghost of Avalon still lingers, haunting the city.
Almost, Juniper begins to believe it will be all right. That the women of the city will stand strong against mobs and shadows, that Gideon Hill will lose his election in November and slink back under whatever rock he came from. But their stores of witch-ways are running thin, and every midwife and herbalist has been driven out of town. The sickness is worsening, too—evenThe Postnow calls it the Second Plague—and panic worsens with it. The shadows coil thicker and darker, like fattened flies, and Gideon Hill’s face smiles down from every window and wall.Our light against the darkness.
Juniper and her sisters make it four nights at Mr. Blackwell’s before Agnes spots a shadowless man standing on St. Jerome Street, staring blankly through the windows, waiting. That night they say farewell to Mr. Blackwell, who sends them with several bottles of wine and a hooked cane for Juniper. A Daughter escorts them north through the tunnels to stay with Inez and Jennie in the glamorous near-mansion Inez’s deceased husband conveniently left behind.
