Three men stand clustered ahead of Agnes, holding paste buckets and stacks of posters, each wearing bronze pins engraved with Hill’s lit torch. There’s something vaguely unsettling about them—the odd synchrony of their movements, maybe, or the fervid glaze of their eyes, or the way their shadows seem sluggish, moving a half-second behind their owners.
“Tell your husband—vote Hill!” one of them says as she passes.
“Our light against the darkness!” says the second.
“Can’t be too careful, with women’s witching back on the loose.” The third extends one of the posters toward her.
Agnes should take it and bob her head politely—she knows better than to start shit with zealots—but she doesn’t. Instead she spits on the ground between them, splattering the man’s boots with cotton-colored slime.
She doesn’t know why she did it. Maybe she’s tired of knowing better, of minding her place. Maybe because she can feel her wild younger sister with her in the city, tugging her toward trouble.
Agnes and the man stare together at the spit sliding off his boot, glistening like the snotty trail of a snail. He stands very still, but Agnes notes distantly that the arms of his shadow are moving, reaching toward her skirts.
And then she’s running, refusing to find out what those shadow-hands will do to her, or what the hell kind of witchcraft is on the loose in New Salem.
She runs down Twenty-Second and turns on St. Jude’s and then she’s back in Room No. 7 of the South Sybil boarding house, panting and holding her barely showing belly. She withdraws Zina’s brown paper bag from her apron.
Pennyroyal and a half-cup of river-water: all it takes to keep that circle drawn tight around her heart. To stay alone, and survive.
She did it once before—drank it down in one bitter swallow, felt nothing but rib-shaking relief when the cramps knotted her belly—and never regretted it.
Now she finds herself setting the brown paper sack on the floor, unopened. Lying down in her narrow bed and wishing her oldest sister was here to whisper a story to her.
Or to the spark inside her, that second heart beating stubbornly on.
Queen Anne, Queen Anne
You sit in the sun
Fair as a lily and white as a wand.
A spell to shed light, requiring heartwood & heat
Beatrice Belladonna dreams of Agnes that night, but when she wakes only Juniper is there in the stuffy dark of her attic room.
She knows by the damp gleam of Juniper’s eyes that she’s awake, too, but neither of them mentions their middle sister. There are many things they don’t mention.
Yet Juniper keeps sleeping in her room and Beatrice keeps letting her, and she supposes it could just go on this way: Juniper spending her days busy with the Association and coming home with pins and sashes and rolled-up signs that need painting, Beatrice spending her library shifts following whispers and witch-tales toward the Lost Way, never quite telling her little sister what she knows or thinks she knows—maybe because it feels too unlikely, too impossible; maybe because it doesn’t feel impossible enough.
Maybe because she worries what a woman like Juniper might do if the power of witching is won back.
Spring in New Salem is a gray, sulking creature, and by the middle of April Beatrice feels like a tall, bespectacled mushroom. Juniper has taken to lighting her pitch pine wand in the evenings just to feel sunlight on her skin, talking wistfully about the bluebells and bloodroot in flower back home.
Beatrice asks her once when she plans to return to Crow County—she’s sure their cousin Dan would let Juniper live in Mags’s old house for nothing or nearly nothing, even if he is a dumbshit—but Juniper’s face closes up like a house with drawn shutters. The witch-light fades from the wand-tip, leaving them in chill darkness. Beatrice adds it to the list of unmentionable things between them.
The next morning Juniper leaves early for the Association and Beatrice reads her paper alone at the breakfast table. She has recently become a subscriber to The New Salem Defender in addition to The Post. This, she assures herself, is merely part of her increasing interest in political news and has nothing to do with the tingle in her fingertips when she sees the name C. P. QUINN printed in small capitals. She wonders what the P stands for, and if colored women have mother’s-names.
Beatrice is assigned to the circulation desk that afternoon. She helps a white-bearded monk with his biography of Geoffrey Hawthorn (G. Hawthorn: The Scourge of Old Salem) and lights lamps for a cluster of haggard students who look as if they would rather change their names and flee into the countryside than finish their spring term. By afternoon she’s at the desk, supposedly processing recent arrivals—a new edition of Seeley’s Expansion of England, an account of the East India Company’s campaign against the thuggee witches of India; a bound version of Jackson Turner’s The Witch in American History, which argues that the threat and subsequent destruction of Old Salem defined America’s virtuous spirit—but is really watching the whale-belly sky through the mullioned windows, feeling her eyelids hinge shut.
She wakes to an amused voice saying, “Pardon me?”
She unpeels her face from The Witch in American History and snaps upright, adjusting her spectacles with mounting horror.
Today Miss Cleopatra (P.) Quinn has her derby hat tucked politely beneath one arm. Her gentleman’s coat has been replaced by a double-buttoned vest and her hair is swept into a braided crown. It must be raining, because water pearls over her bare skin, catching the light in a way that Beatrice has no name for (luminous).
Beatrice manages a strangled “What are you doing here?”
Miss Quinn adopts an arch, censorious expression, although a certain irreverence glitters in her eyes. “I was under the impression that libraries were public institutions.”
“Oh, yes. That is—I thought—” You came to see me. Beatrice closes her eyes very briefly in mortification. She tries again. “Welcome to the Salem College collections. How may I help you?”
“Much better.” The irreverence has escaped her eyes and now curls at the corners of her mouth. “I’m looking for information on the tower last seen at St. George’s Square, and the Last Three Witches of the West.” Her voice is far too loud.
Beatrice makes an abortive movement as if she might launch herself across the desk and press her palm over Miss Quinn’s lips. “Saints, woman! Anyone could overhear you!”
“So take me someplace more private.” She gives Beatrice another of those highly inappropriate looks and Beatrice swallows, feeling like a harried pawn on a chessboard.
Mr. Blackwell agrees to cover the circulation desk and watches the pair of them retreat to Beatrice’s office with a doubtful expression. He comes from broad-minded Quaker stock, but there are rules about people like Miss Quinn lingering too long in the Salem College Library. The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but the important rules rarely are.
Beatrice clicks her door closed and turns around to find Miss Quinn reading the spines of stacked books and peering at the black leather notebook that lies open on the table. Beatrice snaps it shut.
“As I told you on a previous occasion, I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the events at the square, or the Last Three. You are of course welcome to search our collections.”