She squints into a nearby doorway but can’t seem to make her eyes focus on the shape inside it. The voice whispers again and two figures come into sudden focus: a bearded man with a gambler’s grin and a red scarf, and a rosy-cheeked baby girl perched in the crook of his arm. Curls spill like flames from beneath her woolen cap.
The girl raises both arms to Agnes and demands, in the tone of a monarch who has been kept waiting longer than she is accustomed to by her underlings, “Mama!”
“Hello, loves.” Eve falls into her arms with a satisfied oomph and immediately grabs two fistfuls of Agnes’s hair.
Mr. August Lee watches them with his smile pulled crooked and wry. August returned to Chicago six weeks previously along with a smallish gang of men from New Salem, with the intention of spreading women’s witching among his old friends and malcontents, and seeing if perhaps certain concessions couldn’t be won from the Pullman Palace Car Company after all. He claims his work will be done before summer, when he will join Agnes with whatever fight she’s found for them next.
“Weren’t you two supposed to be lying low at the Everly Club?” Miss Pearl had provided Agnes with the name and address of a madam sympathetic to the cause of witches and working-women, who was willing to trade certain words and ways and hard-to-come-by herbs in exchange for safe harbor.
August shrugs. “Inquisitors showed up asking questions, looking for trouble.”
“And did they find any?”
August’s eyes spark like flint against hers. “A bit, yes. More than they bargained for, in fact.” He touches his jaw, where a bruise is beginning to bloom beneath his beard. “I took care of them, but I thought it best to leave the Club, so as not to draw more unwelcome attention. Besides”—he grabs Eve’s toe and wiggles it—“her Ladyship wanted her mama.”
Agnes kisses her daughter’s cap and breathes the summery smell of her, all sunshine and sweat despite the icy chill of the wind. She glances up at the sky, dimming quickly into darkness. “Perhaps I ought to stay tonight, if—”
August brushes this away. “No, you two go on. I’ll find us a place to stay and draw a circle for your return.” He chucks Eve under the chin and she burbles pleasantly at him. “Give them my regards.”
Agnes kisses him once—and if she lingers longer than is strictly decent, if his hand is lower and warmer on her waist than it ought to be, she finds she doesn’t care.
She turns away and draws a stick of white chalk from her pocket. She sketches a neat design on the wall: three white circles, interwoven. Her daughter’s small fingers splay beside hers on the soot-stained brick for a half-second before the two of them are pulled into elsewhere, or perhaps nowhere.
There is a house down in Orleans they call the Rising Sun.
It’s been the ruin of many a woman,
By God I won’t be one.
A spell against conception, requiring a red dawn & a drawn star
By the spring equinox of 1894, the city of New Orleans has slid past spring and is flirting shamelessly with summer. The air is soft and heavy, magnolia-sweet, and the sun drapes itself like a warm cat around bare shoulders.
Beatrice Belladonna has been in the city for three weeks now, staying in a rented room in the Upper Ninth Ward, and hopes to stay longer.
She is sitting now at a broad desk with the breeze plucking at her endless stacks and piles of notes. More than half of them are written in Miss Quinn’s careless, slanting handwriting, dashed off during her many meetings and interviews—which always seem to occur in midnight graveyards or abandoned bell-towers and involve a great deal of danger—and then jammed haphazardly in a pocket or purse when the authorities arrived.
Cleo dismisses Bella’s concerns with airy waves of her long fingers. “Writing a book is dangerous business, if done correctly.”
Over the winter Cleo received a not-insubstantial contract from John Wiley & Sons to write a book chronicling the sudden upsetting rise of witchcraft among the sharecroppers and freed-women of the South. Her editor desired a lurid account of cannibal-witches and voodoo queens, a book so scandalous it would provoke fainting spells and lengthy speeches about the moral decay of the nation, and which would sell like ice cream on the fourth of July.
Cleo intends to oblige him, to a certain degree; her working title is Southern Horrors, and it so far contains many hair-raising tales of hexed landlords and haunted sheriffs, of boo-hags and haints and courtesans with poison smiles, although it is conspicuously free of specific names or locations.
It also contains a number of engraved illustrations. Above the depictions of mayhem and murder there are inky black skies pricked with white stars in very particular patterns. If a person happens to know their constellations, and if they bear no ill intent toward witches or women, they might reveal certain words and ways that John Wiley & Sons never intended to publish.
Bella serves mostly as her typist and assistant, assembling notes and organizing chapters, but she also devotes considerable hours to their other, much more ambitious and secret undertaking: to restore what has been burned, to find again what has been lost. To rebuild the Library of Avalon.
Bella and Cleo collect spells wherever they go, hidden in rumors and stories, preserved in rhymes and hymns and sewing samplers, and record them as accurately as they can. Already Bella has begun a dozen new spell-books: grimoires and guides, books of weather and medicine and beauty and death. She’s written the words and ways from the smallest household spells—charms to sort bad eggs from good or remove stubborn stains from white sheets—to curses that will stop hearts or poison wells or heal bones.
Many of the spells sound strange to Bella’s ear, nothing like Mama Mags’s rhymes. They come in odd forms and unlikely languages—Spanish prayers and Creole songs and Choctaw stories, star-patterns and dances and drum-beats—and not all of them are easily translated to ink and paper. Bella begins to believe that the Library of Avalon was only ever a sliver of witchcraft in the first place. She begins to believe that the words and ways are whichever ones a woman has, and that a witch is merely a woman who needs more than she has.
Mr. Blackwell agrees. Bella sends him pages of notes and ideas every other week and he returns long missives stained with tea and wine, dotted with helpful questions and possibilities. He also includes regular updates on the state of New Salem and the Sisters of Avalon. Bella is amused by the frequency with which Miss Electa Gage’s name recurs; she will not be surprised to hear news of their engagement soon.
Most days Bella is hopeful, proud of the work they’ve accomplished in a mere six months—but sometimes a certain melancholy takes her. Some days when she steps back into the tower she is overwhelmed by the scent of ash and grief, haunted by its hollow heart. On those days what they have gained seems to pall before the immensity of what they have lost.
But the tower is no longer lost, nor is it a ruin. The trees surrounding it are flecked with green-furred buds and the rose-vines have crept up to the first window. There aren’t any blooms yet, but Bella has seen tight curls of red hidden among the thorns, waiting.
Bella and Agnes swept out the ashes and hauled burned scraps from the tower. They scrubbed the scorch marks with lye and hung twists of lavender and cat-mint in the windows. Mr. August Lee turned up with a number of useful tools—many of which were stamped with company names and certainly did not belong to him—and helped the sisters fell and cure the timber they needed. It sits now in neat stacks, drying. By summer perhaps they will have a staircase again, and the beginnings of bookshelves. All they have now is a rope ladder leading up to the little round room at the top of the tower, where three beds still stand in a neat circle.