It’s difficult to forget when every story in the city—every rumor, every whispered conversation, every article—seems to be about them: the girls who busted out of prison, the woman who turned her husband into a pig, the witch doctor still running loose. But those were merely the stories witnessed by a sufficient number of people to be printed in the papers. Agnes hears dozens of less credible stories: colics cured and bones mended; lightning called and locks picked; machines busted and debts forgotten. None of the women appear to have any difficulty working the spells they are given. Agnes wonders if their witch-blood was awakened somehow by the return of the Lost Way, or if witch-blood never mattered much in the first place. She wonders what theories Bella and Quinn are working on and if Juniper has earned her familiar yet, if the Sisters are planning any more spectacles and if Gideon Hill has spies among them—
The baby thumps inside her.Never mind, baby girl. It’s just you and me.
By the beginning of July the mill is so hot four girls faint before noon. At five Agnes lines up with the other girls, their cheeks boiled red, their hair slicked to their necks. Even Mr. Malton hardly has the energy to pinch or leer, but merely sits, fanning himself and sweating whiskey. Agnes passes him with her head down, sewer-colored hair draped in front of her face.
She steps into the alley and takes a single breath of clean summer air.
“Agnes! Is that you?” Mr. August Lee is waiting for her, sleeves rolled to his elbows, hair tousled gold. He’s blinking uncertainly at Agnes’s hair and pox-marks.
She dips her head to him. “It’s Calliope, if you please, sir,” she says, but she meets his eyes with her own, thunder-gray, and relief spreads over his face.
He takes two steps forward, swaying as if he wants to step closer but doesn’t quite dare. “Of course. My mistake. Listen, I was hoping we could talk.”
“About what?”
“I only wanted to apologize. And help, maybe.”
Agnes knows she should tell him and his tousled hair to leave her alone, to go home and forget her name, but it’s been so long since she’s spoken to anyone but the fleas in her mattress. She nods once and takes the arm he offers.
The evening is thick and blue. It’s too hot to remain indoors for long, so the occupants of the West Babel tenements are crowded on stoops and balconies, summer-drunk. Several of them greet Mr. Lee by name; a few of them watch the sway of Agnes’s belly and raise their eyebrows at him. He doesn’t seem to care.
Mr. Lee steers her three blocks west to a pair of double doors, through which a great deal of noise and music and light are pouring out. Agnes arches her brow at him. “I’m in no condition for dancing, Mr. Lee.”
“Of course, Miss Calliope. But no one will overhear us here.”
They settle at a table in the dimmest corner of the dance hall, nearly invisible beneath the haze of tobacco and ether. Mr. Lee seems content simply to watch her in silence, his hands pressed to the frost of his beer glass, until she asks, “Why are you here, Mr. Lee? I thought you’d be back in Chicago, by now.”
He looks out at the press and swirl of bodies and doesn’t answer directly. “I grew up in West Babel, did you know that? My folks split a room with Annie and her family—twelve of us packed like fish into two rooms. My father worked for Boyle’s, over in the Sallows.” Boyle’s is a meat-packing factory crouched on the west side of the Thorn, all grease and offal and missing fingers. “People said he was a fighter, but he wasn’t really. He was a dreamer, always on about the eight-hour day and workers’ rights and utopia. It’s just that dreamers generally wind up fighting. He started having men over to our place, drawing up charters . . . He was a half-step away from a real union when they got him.”
“Who got him?” Agnes doesn’t know why he’s telling her all this, but she likes the warmth of his voice when he mentions his father. She wonders what it would feel like to mourn your daddy rather than merely outlive him.
Lee takes a drink, sets his glass precisely back in the damp ring it left behind. “Boyle’s men, we think. They said it was an accident, that he was fooling around on the line. But we saw him, after. I don’t know how a man could contrive to hang himself on a meat hook without a little help.” Another drink, much longer. Agnes wants to cover his hand with hers. She presses her fingers flat to the table. “Lawyers from the plant came to see us a few days after. They asked my mother to sign some papers swearing that her husband’s death had been his own doing. They sat at our kitchen table and handed her a pen. She looked at me—I was fourteen, old enough to know the truth—and then she looked away. She signed their paper and that was that.
“I wasn’t at home if I could help it, after. I fell in with Dad’s old friends, went looking for trouble. Found some, in Chicago.” He rubs the scar along his jaw. “And it was—well, it was awful, to tell the truth. Uglier and meaner than I thought it would be. But it was grand, too, to be part of something. To find a fight worth having.”
There’s an earnestness in his voice that makes him sound young and desperately naive; Agnes wonders if he’s a dreamer, too. She asks again, lower, “So why are you still here?”
That sweet smile, hitched sideways by his scar. “Because I found an even bigger fight, I guess.” His eyes flash up to hers. “And a woman who won’t look away.”
Her stomach sours with shame.Wouldn’t I, August?Agnes doesn’t say anything for a long time, digging her thumbnail into the soft wood of the table and thinking about when to fold and when to fight. She realizes her thumb is sketching three woven circles and stops.
“When is she due?” Lee is looking at the dent where her belly presses against the table.
“Barley Moon. The midwife says she’s big, though, so it could be sooner.” Agnes doesn’t mention the flutter of fear in her belly, the memory of her mother’s skin whiter than wax. Maybe Mama Mags could have saved her, but maybe not. Mags told her once their family lost more women to the birthing bed than they did men to the battlefield.
Lee’s voice goes a little lower, almost fearful. “Who was he?”
It takes Agnes a long minute to understand who he’s referring to; she hasn’t thought twice about Floyd Matthews all summer. “Nobody. A nice boy from uptown.”
“Did you love him?” She can tell by the braced shape of his shoulders that the question matters a great deal to him; she wishes it didn’t.
“No, August. I didn’t love him.” His whole body seems to exhale. “But the more interesting question is: did he love me?”
“Did he love you?” he asks obediently. There’s a puzzled crease between his brows.
“Only some of me. And I’m tired of making do with some, with half-measures.”
Agnes watches his mouth open and close and then open again, and she’s suddenly sure he’s on the verge of making some declaration or vow because he thinks, poor fool, that he loves all of her. Because he doesn’t know how cold and cruel she is beneath the softness of her skin, doesn’t know the anything-at-all she would do to survive.
