“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, with The New Salem Defender.”
She says it breezily, as if The Defender were 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 you The Defender isn’t interested in any of that breathless witch-hunt nonsense printed in The 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 in The Ladies’ Tribune to 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.
“Was there?” Beatrice asks lamely.
“There was. An old symbol of circles woven together. It’s of . . . particular interest to me and certain of my associates. Would you—a librarian, I think you said?—happen to know anything about that sign?”
“I—I’m afraid not. That is, circles are common in all sorts of sigils and spell-work, and the number three is a number of traditional significance, isn’t it? It could be anything.”
“I see. Although”—Miss Quinn smiles a checkmate sort of smile—“I don’t believe I told you how many circles there were.”
“Ah.”
“Miss Eastwood. I was just heading to the tea shop on Sixth. Won’t you join me?”
As she says it, she gives Beatrice a particular kind of look through her lashes, heated and secret. It’s a look Beatrice has spent seven years carefully neither giving nor receiving nor even wanting.
(When she was younger she permitted herself to want such things. To admire a woman’s peony-petal lips or the delicate hollow of her throat. She learned her lesson.)
She takes an anxious step back from Miss Cleopatra Quinn and her long eyelashes. “I—I’m afraid I must get to work.” She attempts a cool nod. “Good day.”
Miss Quinn looks neither offended nor discouraged by her abrupt departure, but merely more intent. “Until we meet again, Miss East-wood.” She gives Beatrice a sober tip of her derby hat and spreads her skirt in a gesture that is half-bow and half-curtsy. Beatrice blushes for no reason she can name.
Beatrice walks the three blocks back to the College with her eyes on her boots, not-thinking about moonbeams or witch-tales or the thin wedding band around Miss Quinn’s finger.
She barely hears the scintillated whispers of the passersby or the paper-boys darting like swallows through the streets, calling out headlines (Witches Loose in New Salem! Hill’s Morality Party on the Rise! Mayor Worthington Under Pressure!), and if the shadows on the streets behave oddly—peeling away from dark doorways and coiling out of alleyways, trailing after her like the black hem of a long cloak—Beatrice does not notice.
Bye baby bunting,
Mother’s gone a-hunting
A spell to end what hasn’t yet begun, requiring pennyroyal & regret
Two weeks after she found her long-lost sisters and lost them again, Agnes Amaranth is standing in a dim back-alley shop just off St. Fortitude. There is no sign or title on the door, but Agnes knows she’s in the right place: she can smell the wild scent of herbs and earth, just like Mags’s hut, out of place in the cobbled gray of New Salem.
The proprietress is a handsome Greek woman with black curls and dark-painted eyes. She introduces herself, in an accent that rolls and purls, as Madame Zina Card: palmist, spiritualist, card-reader, and midwife.
But Agnes hasn’t come to have her fortune told or her palms read. “Pennyroyal, please,” she says, and it’s enough.
Madame Zina gives her a weighing look, as though checking to see whether Agnes knows what she’s asked for and why, then unlocks a cupboard and tucks a few dried sprigs into a brown paper sack.
“Steep the pennyroyal in river-water—boil it good, mind—and stir it seven times with a silver spoon. The words cost extra.” Madame Zina’s eyes linger on the eggshell swell of Agnes’s belly. She’s barely showing, but only women in a particular state come to visit Zina’s shop asking for pennyroyal.
Agnes shakes her head once. “I already have them.” Mags told them to her when she was sixteen. She hasn’t forgotten.