Juniper speaks into the quiet, heedless. “It was witching that saved me in the street yesterday, and it’s witching that will win us the vote. More than just the vote—back in the old days women were queens and scholars and generals! We could have all that back again. My sister—Bella, I mean; this is Agnes, our other sister”—a look of genuine horror crosses Miss Stone’s face as she contemplates the prospect of another Eastwood—“anyway, Bella has been doing some research about that tower we saw on the equinox. I think it’s . . .” Juniper’s eyes cross Bella’s, and Bella knows that Juniper has guessed what the tower is, what the sign of three circles must mean. “I think it’s important. That it might bring witching back to the world.”
Juniper looks around at the stone-still women. “What do you say?”
None of them answer. Miss Stone exhales a very long sigh into the silence and lowers herself into her chair. She leans back, regarding Juniper with an almost bewildered expression, as if she can’t understand how someone so young could be so powerfully irritating. “Miss West. The Women’s Association has no interest in your wild theories or dangerous ideas.”
The smile slides off Juniper’s face like frosting off a too-hot cake. “Well, as a member of the Women’s Association, I think—”
Miss Stone produces a bitterhaof laughter. “Oh, you are certainly no longer that.”
“Excuse me?”
“I, as president of the Association, do officially expel you from our company, and deeply regret ever having granted you membership.”
Juniper is standing now, fingers white around her staff. “Howdareyou—”
Miss Stone counts on her fingers, voice very cool. “You organized an illegal assembly against the will of the Association. You made a public demonstration of witchcraft. You endangered the lives of the six fools who followed you into your treason. Saints only know what else you did—the rumors are nearly too wild to believe. Perhaps you have a pair of black horns on your head. Perhaps you can fly. Perhaps you set a demon-snake on an innocent child.” Beatrice flinches. No one notices.
“Look, you wanted to get people’s attention, and we got it. If you’re going to get upset that Idefendedmyself, I don’t—”
Miss Stone raises her voice very slightly. “Miss Wiggin, the head of the Women’s Christian Union—and, I might add, the adopted daughter of a member of the City Council—was injured in the riot. She claims it was an act of witchcraft, and I am disgusted to say I am unsure whether she is lying.”
Juniper’s mouth is open again, but Miss Stone ignores her. She leans forward over the desktop, hands knitted. “I have dedicated the better part of my life to the uplift of women. I was there at Seneca, at the very beginning.” Her fury seems to have blown itself out like a summer storm, leaving her winded and tired. “They laughed at us. Derided us, mocked us, printed vicious cartoons in every paper. We kept working. We built organizations all over the country, saw suffrage laws passed in three states, brought attention to the plight of our sex—but now they are no longer laughing, Miss West. Now—thanks to you and your accomplices—they are afraid. And we could lose everything.”
Juniper strides forward and places her palms on the desk, wearing a look of such blazing intensity that Beatrice feels it scorch her cheeks as it passes. “Or we could win it all. If we stop worrying so much about what a woman should and shouldn’t do, what’s respectable and what’s not. If we stand and fight, all of us together. Imagine if there’d been seventy of us marching, instead of seven!” Miss Stone looks faintly ill at the thought. “There’s this book Bella used to read us when we were little, about these three French soldiers—what’s the thing they said?” She throws the question sideways to Beatrice.
Beatrice clears her throat, cheeks pinking. “All for one and one for all.”
“That’s it.” Juniper’s face is lit now by some internal glow, a passion like the sun itself. “It has to be all for one and one for all, Miss Stone.”
Every eye is on the young woman with the crow’s-wing hair and the long jaw and the summer-green gaze—like and not like the feral girl-child Beatrice remembers—and for a wild moment Beatrice thinks they’re going to listen to her.
Miss Stone laughs. It’s not a cruel laugh, but Beatrice sees it hit Juniper like a slap. “Goodbye, Miss West. I can’t wish you luck, for the sake of the city.”
Juniper straightens from the desk, all the glow gone from her eyes, face pinched tight, and gives the room a mocking bow. She limps out the office door without looking back. She never let their daddy see her cry, either.
Agnes follows. She pauses to hold the door behind her and looks up at Beatrice, almost as if she’s waiting for her. As if they are still little girls tumbling into the farmhouse, one-two-three, holding the door carelessly open behind them for the next one. “Well?” Agnes sounds annoyed, whether with herself or her sister Beatrice can’t tell.
Beatrice feels Miss Stone’s eyes on her face. “I don’t know you, Miss Eastwood, but you seem a respectable woman. That sister—thosesisters of yours will lead you astray.”
Beatrice hesitates. She thinks about the fates of girls who go astray in all the stories, the hot iron shoes and glass coffins and witches’ ovens. (She thinks about St. Hale’s, a prison built especially for straying girls.)
But then Beatrice looks at Agnes still waiting for her, half scowling, and thinks about what else awaits those gone-astray girls: the daring escapes and wild dances, the midnight trysts and starlit spells, a whole world’s worth of disreputable delights.
Beatrice bows her head as she leaves. “So I hope, Miss Stone.”
Agnes is just about to give up and close the damn door behind her, to hell with Bella and the suffragists both, when Bella finally makes up her mind. She goes sailing past Agnes, spine uncrooked, cheeks pink with some private pleasure. Their eyes meet, then slide away.
Juniper is already stamping down the street, clacking her staff with such aggression that passersby scuttle aside. “Thosethrice-damnedboot-lickingshit-witches! Too cussed cowardly to take a damn stand—to hell with them!” She spins to face the plate-glass window of the Association headquarters and crosses her fingers in a gesture of such exceptional rudeness that Bella chokes, “June.”
Juniper spins back to face her sisters. Her eyes are bright and green as fox-fire. “So. What do you say?”
“To what?”
Juniper looks at Bella like she wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “Towitching! To the Lost Way of Avalon!”
Bella shushes her, casting worried looks at the genteel bustle of the street: mothers with their hats just so and children with their clothes starched stiff, maids with baskets of fresh white laundry and gentlemen checking their pocket-watches. It strikes Agnes suddenly how ludicrous it is that they should be plotting the second age of witching in the middle of a sunny, orderly street on the north end, surrounded by clerks and investors and clean limestone. Surely it calls for a haunted moor or a misted cemetery.
Bella says, low and urgent, “Juniper, I don’t know what you know or think you know about that tower, but I assure you I don’t have the secret recipe for Avalon stuffed in my socks.”
