Juniper grins at it, this thing that fell out of storybook and song to shine in her palm, real as anything. “Think I found our third spectacle.”
Ferrum rubigine, pernay o chronoss.
A spell to rust, requiring salt, spit, & considerable patience
The night after Agnes Amaranth shattered every stein and bottle in The Workingman’s Friend, Mr. August Lee knocks at the door of Room No. 7 in the South Sybil boarding house.
Agnes is bent over a map of New Salem with a handful of other Sisters, debating the best routes to approach their third spectacle, when a man’s voice husks, “Uh,hyssop,” from the hall. The room falls still. Worried glances dart like swallows between them.
Juniper rises from the bed, reaching for her red-cedar staff the way a man might reach for a loaded pistol. “It’s fine, June. It’s just Annie’s cousin.”
Juniper has already whipped open the door to reveal the lanky, shockingly dapper Mr. Lee. His shirt appears to have been ironed and his summer-straw hair looks as though it suffered a recent encounter with a comb; in his left hand he holds a red burst of carnations.
He touches a polite hand to his cap. “Evening, ladies. I’m here at the request of a Miss Agnes Ama—”
“We know who you are. What’re these?” Juniper snatches the carnations and inspects them. She plucks a few petals and crushes them between her fingers, sniffing suspiciously. “Don’t think my Mama Mags ever used these in her witching. What properties do they have?”
Mr. Lee is struck briefly silent by the uncivil young woman and her green-lit glare. “It’s not—they’re not aspell. They’reflowers, for Miss—” Mr. Lee looks a little frantically around the larger-than-it-ought-to-be room and finally spots Agnes leaning her hip against the kitchen table, fighting a smile.
She loses. “Let him in, June. Give me those.” Agnes rescues the flowers and arranges them in a chipped porcelain vase. They sag forlornly over the edge, looking distinctly misused. “So glad you could join us, Mr. Lee. You’ve already met my younger sister, Miss James Juniper. This is Miss Beatrice Belladonna, Misses Victoria and Tennessee Hull—”
Agnes circles the room, introducing both her sisters and Sisters. Mr. Lee, in an attempt to recover his footing, assays a charming smile at a pair of girls from Salem’s Sin; they return looks of such surpassing coldness that Agnes almost feels sorry for him. He redirects the smile to Bella, whose polite but profound disinterest is somehow even more crushing. Mr. Lee’s gaze swings back to Agnes in desperation.
She gestures to one of their mismatched chairs. “Shall we begin?”
In the end Mr. Lee’s first lesson in men’s magic is not so much a lesson as a hostile interrogation. Bella perches in a seat next to him with her little black notebook propped on her knees, interrupting every six or seven seconds with probing questions and obscure remarks (“How do celestial movements alter the efficacy?” “Are all your spells in the imperative rather than subjunctive mood?”). As Mr. Lee fumbles through answers that are mostly long pauses and pained expressions, Juniper sits on his other side, mangling the words at the top of her voice and complaining when they produce no obvious results (“Some good men’s magic is. What’s Latin forhorseshit, Mr. Lee?”). It’s clear that whatever work Mr. Lee did in Chicago—Annie said he was a lineman who became one of Debs’s left-hand boys, charged with arson and inciting to riot by the state of Illinois—it hadn’t prepared him for two hours with the Eastwood sisters.
Looking harassed, Lee withdraws a pinch of salt and a bent nail from his vest pocket and chants at the nail in rough-cut Latin until it looks marginally flakier and redder, as if it contracted a sudden rash.
“Neat,” Juniper sneers, “if you’ve got a year or two to spare.”
Lee slaps a hand on the table, his charm hanging in ragged tatters around him. “Listen. This exact spell took out a mile of track in Chicago and got me beaten damn near to death. When you’re out on the front lines—”
Agnes thinks he might be warming up to a real speech, full of aggrieved passion and chest-thumping, when one of the other girls at the table gives a soft, devastating snort. “You wouldn’t know a front line if it bit you, boy.” It’s Gertrude Bonnin, the clay-colored woman from one of the Dakotas.
Mr. Lee looks at her, not so much offended as despairing, and Juniper slings an arm around Gertrude’s stiff shoulders. “Our girl here fought in the Indian Wars out west,MisterLee. She and a bunch of other girls busted out of their boarding school—using Saints only know what kind of witching, because she won’t tell us—and joined their mamas and aunties on the front lines.”
Gertrude pats Juniper’s arm and says, without a trace of apology, “Not every word and way belongs to you.”
“What about the uplift of women around the globe? What about the universal union of our sex, and the comradeship of womankind?” Agnes is fairly sure Juniper’s store of three-syllable words has just been exhausted; she suspects her sister is quoting from a pamphlet they received from the Witches’ Franchise League in Wales. It was accompanied by a substantial donation to their cause from a Miss Pankhurst and an invitation to the summer solstice ritual at Stonehenge.
Gertrude gives another of her devastating snorts. “When I see you out west, standing beside us against the U.S. cavalry, I’ll consider us comrades.”
Juniper flicks the bent nail at Gertrude in response and mutters about stubborn Sioux girls and useless men. At this point the Hull sisters intervene, insisting that they wouldn’t need Mr. Lee at all if instead they summoned the dead souls of their ancestors for instruction. Juniper makes a lewd suggestion about where Victoria can stick her crystal ball, and the tone of the evening descends thereafter.
Mr. Lee watches the rising debate with his jaw slightly slack and his blond hair tousled. Agnes sidles closer and pitches her voice beneath the noise of the room. “What’s the matter, Mr. Lee? Is this not how you pictured our little women’s club?”
“I . . . not entirely.” He scrubs a hand over his jaw. “What’s all this?” He nods at a pile of black felt and silken scraps, a scattering of dark feathers.
“Oh, nothing that would interest you, I’m sure. Just anothershow.”
For some reason this provokes another of his bright, boyish grins. “Mywhat sharp teeth you have, Miss Eastwood,” he murmurs. “Will you be sprouting wings? Riding broomsticks across the Thorn?”
Bella, who was apparently eavesdropping, begins to say something about the absence of historical evidence that witches specifically preferredbroomsticks, and that such stories likely refer to any number of spells for flight or levitation—but Agnes interrupts her on the grounds that it’s boring and no one cares. “That information is for Sisters only, Mr. Lee.”
“August, please.” He looks up at her with a dare in his eyes. “And how would one petition to join the Sisters of Avalon?”
Agnes never liked to back down from dares, either. “Bella. The roster, if you please?”
