She turns back once before she sweeps into the recesses of the office, her apple-seed mouth unshriveling very slightly. “It’s not that I don’t understand. Every thinking woman has once wanted what she shouldn’t, what she can’t have. I wish . . .” Juniper wonders if Miss Stone was ever a little girl listening to her grandmother’s stories about the Maiden riding her white stag through the woods, the Mother striding into battle. If she once dreamed of wielding swords rather than slogans.
Miss Stone gives her shoulders a stern little shake. “I wish we might make use of every tool in our pursuit of justice. But I’m afraid the modern woman cannot afford to be sidetracked by moonbeams and witch-tales.”
Juniper smiles back as pleasantly as she knows how and Bella whispers “yes, of course” beside her. But there’s a look in Bella’s eyes as she says it, a struck-flint spark that makes Juniper think that her sister doesn’t intend to give up her moonbeams or witch-tales at all; that maybe she, too, wants another kind of power.
Beatrice Belladonna leaves the New Salem Women’s Association headquarters with her cloak pulled tight against the spring chill and an anxious knot in her belly.
She walks down St. Patience thinking about the way her sister looked as she added her name to the list of members, bold and foolish, and the way Beatrice’s fingers itched to copy her.
Thinking, too, about the words she found written in the margins of the Sisters Grimm and her growing certainty that, in speaking them aloud, she had touched a match to an invisible fuse. Begun something which could not now be stopped.
Because Beatrice’s eyes are on the limestone cobbles, her shoulders hunched around her ears like a worried owl, she doesn’t see the woman walking toward her until they collide.
“Oh my goodness, pardon me—” Beatrice is somehow on all fours, feeling blindly for her spectacles and apologizing to a pair of neatly shined boots.
A warm hand pulls her upright and dusts the street-grime from her dress. “Are you all right, miss?” The voice is low and amused, her face a blur of white teeth and brown skin.
“Yes, perfectly fine, I just need my—”
“Spectacles?” A half-laugh, and Beatrice feels her glasses settle gently back onto her nose.
The smudge resolves itself into a woman with amber eyes and skin like sunlight through jarred sorghum. She wears a gentleman’s coat buttoned daringly over her skirts and a derby hat perched at an angle Beatrice can only describe as jaunty. The only colored women on the north side of New Salem are maids and serving girls, but this woman is quite clearly neither.
The woman extends her hand and smiles with such professional charm that Beatrice feels slightly blinded. “Miss Cleopatra Quinn, withThe New Salem Defender.”
She says it breezily, as ifThe Defenderwere a ladies’ journal or a fashion periodical, rather than a radical colored paper infamous for its seditious editorials. Its office has been burned and relocated at least twice, to Beatrice’s knowledge.
Beatrice shakes Miss Quinn’s hand and releases it quickly, not noticing the way she smells (ink and cloves and the hot oil of a printing press) or whether or not she wears a wedding band (she does).
Beatrice swallows. “B-Beatrice Eastwood. Associate librarian at Salem College.”
Miss Quinn is looking over Beatrice’s shoulder at the Association headquarters. “Are you a member of the Women’s Association? Were you present for the events in the square on the equinox?”
“No. I mean, well, yes, I was, but I’m not—”
Miss Quinn raises a placating hand. Beatrice notices her wrist is spattered with silver scars, round pocks that almost but don’t quite make a pattern. “I assure youThe Defenderisn’t interested in any of that breathless witch-hunt nonsense printed inThe Post. You may be confident that your observations will be presented with both accuracy and sympathy.”
There’s a vibrancy to Miss Quinn that makes Beatrice think of an actress onstage, or maybe a street-witch misdirecting her audience.
Beatrice feels exceptionally drab and stupid standing beside her. She smiles a little desperately, perspiring in the spring sun. “I’m afraid I don’t have any opinions to offer.”
“A shame. Suffragists have a reputation for opinions.”
“I’m not really a suffragist. I mean, I’m not a formal member of the Association.”
“Nor am I, and yet I persist in having all manner of opinions and observations.”
Beatrice catches a laugh before it escapes and stuffs it back down her throat. “Perhaps you ought to join, then.”
She can tell by the flattening of Miss Quinn’s smile that it’s the wrong thing to say, and Beatrice knows why. She’s overheard enough talk at the library and read enough editorials inThe Ladies’ Tribuneto understand that the New Salem Women’s Association is divided on the question of the color-line. Some worry that the inclusion of colored women might tarnish their respectable reputation; others feel they ought to spend a few more decades being grateful for their freedom before they agitate for anything so radical as rights. Most of them agree it would be far more convenient if colored women remained in the Colored Women’s League.
Beatrice herself suspects that two separate-but-equal organizations are far less effective than a single united one, and that their daddy was as wrong about freedmen needing to go back to Africa as he was about women minding their place—but she’s never worried overmuch about it. She feels an uncomfortable twist of shame in her belly.
Miss Quinn’s smile has smoothed. “I think not. But the equinox, Miss Eastwood. Why don’t you tell me what you saw?”
“The same thing everyone saw, I’m sure. A sudden wind. Stars. A tower.”
“A door with certain words inscribed on it and a certain sign beneath them.” Miss Quinn says it mildly, but her eyes are yellow, feline.
