She slides her spectacles up her nose and braces herself for a very long day. “We should begin with an initial catalog, I think. Are you staying? I’ll take the top two boxes, if you’ll take the third.”
But Miss Quinn isn’t looking at the boxes. She’s watching Beatrice with several conflicting emotions in her face. “Or,” she says, coming to some invisible conclusion, “you could accompany me to the Centennial Fair and buy me as many of those little fried cakes as I can eat. We deserve a day off, don’t you think?”
There is very little Beatrice would like to do more than escort Miss Cleopatra Quinn to the Fair and buy her little fried cakes.
A minute later the two of them are strolling into the honeyed heat of the afternoon, strolling north across the square. Quinn shakes her head as they pass the bronze pig.
“Oh, please. You seem to be perfectly capable of witching when it suits you, I notice—” But Beatrice is unable to continue this line of inquiry because Miss Quinn tucks her hand casually, almost thoughtlessly, around her elbow, and Beatrice becomes incapable of further speech.
They stride up St. Mary-of-Egypt’s, attracting sideways stares and sneers, not quite managing to care. They purchase a pair of yellow paper tickets and stride beneath the high iron arch of the Centennial Fair, where Beatrice buys Quinn a truly upsetting number of fried cakes. Afterward they share a watery beer, fend off two fortune-tellers, and win a gaudy brass ring with a glass diamond at a spin-the-wheel game.
Beatrice presents it to Quinn with a giddy flourish and Quinn laughs. “Oh, I think one is enough for me.” She taps her own wedding ring. “I don’t make the same mistake twice.”
Beatrice slides the ring onto her own finger, instead, and doesn’t feel anything in particular (a leaden weight, say, or a numbing chill) sinking in her stomach.
When she looks back up, Quinn has stationed herself in the line for the Ferris wheel, and is gesturing for Beatrice to catch up. Beatrice isn’t sure she’s interested in being stuffed into a small glass cage and dangled above the city, but the line shuffles forward and Quinn says, “Oh, hush,” and soon they are smashed hip-to-hip, spinning up into the hot blue of summer.
The cabin smells of stale beer and there’s something unfortunate smeared across the windows, but it doesn’t matter. The city lies distant and foreign beneath them, like the surface of the moon, and the wind rushes clean and bright over their skin. Beatrice closes her eyes and wonders if this is how witches felt astride their broomsticks, like hawks who slipped their jesses, who may never return to the leather fist waiting below.
The wheel creaks to a stop. Beatrice and Quinn sway together in the wide-open sky, wind-kissed. Quinn’s hand is still resting lightly on Beatrice’s arm, and Beatrice is paying no attention to it (the pearl shine of her nails, the smudge of ink on her sleeve, the warm smell of cloves rising from her skin).
Beatrice twists at the brass ring around her own finger. “Your husband,” she blurts, and feels Quinn go still beside her. “Is he—does he know how you spend your afternoons?”
Quinn’s smile is far too knowing, smug as a sphinx. “Oh, I doubt it. He’s often away.”
“I see. And do you—” Beatrice suddenly cannot imagine how she intended to conduct the rest of the sentence.
Quinn is still smiling. “We have an arrangement. Mr. Thomas is a veryunderstandingman.” She places a peculiar emphasis on the word, as if passing Beatrice a note written in a code she doesn’t know.
“Good. That’s good. That is, I didn’t think there were any understanding men.”
Her tone is too bitter; Quinn’s sly smile fades a little. “Your father really did a number on the three of you, didn’t he.”
The two of them have talked extensively about Miss Quinn’s past: her childhood in a crowded row house in New Cairo, all smog and sun and hopscotch; her aunts who petted and spoiled her and braided her hair; her mother who still runs a spice shop and comes home smelling of paprika and peppers; her father who used to cut out each of Quinn’s articles fromThe Defenderand paste them into a scrapbook, with which he assailed guests and neighbors at any opportunity.
But Beatrice hasn’t much mentioned her own family, for the same reason a person doesn’t much mention carrion at the dinner table.
Beatrice attempts a casual shrug. “I s-suppose.” She plucks at the brass ring on her finger. “He was—he could be very charming. I once saw him talk a pair of men out of a blood-feud with nothing but a smile and a round. But he could also be . . .”A devil, a monster, a wolf on two legs. “Different.”
Quinn makes a carefully neutral noise and Beatrice knows she could stop there, if she liked. She could skip over the rotten places in her past as she usually does and remain unblemished a little longer.
But the two of them are alone far above the city and Quinn’s hand is still on her arm, and surely a woman who turned a Saint into a pig might manage to tell the truth, however small and sordid.
Beatrice wets her lips. “It wasn’t only my father. It was—St. Hale’s.” Just saying the name sends a sick swooping through her stomach, as if the cabin has broken loose from its moorings and gone plummeting earthward.
Quinn sucks a sharp breath between her teeth. “That place has . . . an unfortunate reputation. Beatrice, I’m sorry.”
Beatrice can barely hear her over the memory of hot wax hissing on the back of her bent neck, the ache of her knees on the chapel floor. Her hands bound together in forced prayer, cords cutting deep. A dozen clever cruelties that drove every desire from her body save one: to make them stop.
Beatrice finds that she’s twisting violently at the brass ring. It slips from her finger. “Oh dear, pardon me—”
Quinn scrabbles after it but the ring falls between the steel seams of the cabin and twinkles downward. It vanishes in a final flash of cut-glass diamond.
A small silence follows while Beatrice reassembles herself, parentheses braced once more like a pair of cupped hands around her heart. “I apologize. I do not mean to be so hysterical.”
“I don’t know what they told you at St. Hale’s, but a few tears hardly make a woman a hysteric.”
Beatrice had not been aware that she was crying. She scrubs too hard at her cheeks, feels the wind whip them dry. “In any case, you are mistaken. My father did not send me to St. Hale’s.” Beatrice says it calmly, but there’s acid in her throat. “My sister did.”
