Juniper limps to the window to watch them go. Mr. Gideon Hill scurries down the street with his hands clasped behind his back and his dog trotting obediently at his heels. In the late afternoon light their shadows are black and long, larger than their owners. As Juniper watches she sees Mr. Hill’s shadow ripple strangely, as if it isn’t quite under its master’s command.
Fear slicks down her spine. She recalls that, by the evidence of the black tower, there is at least one unknown witch in the city working toward ends of her own. But why would she bewitch a sniveling city councilor? Rather than, say, quietly poisoning him in his sleep?
She hears raised voices behind her, catches stray words. Unfair! Unjust! And then: Nothing we can do.
Someone objects, almost certainly Electa. “Nothing legal we can do, you mean!”
Someone else gives a little gasp. Juniper thinks it must be that Susan Bee woman, a mummified Victorian type who wears an honest-to-Eve monocle and treats Juniper like a cleaning girl. “We aren’t criminals, Miss Gage!”
Electa starts to reply but Miss Stone cuts across her. “Nor can we afford to become so, Electa.” There’s no heat to it; she merely sounds old, and very tired. “Ladies, do we have a quorum present? Let us discuss our response.” She shepherds her flock into the back offices again.
Only Jennie lingers. “June?”
“Mm?” Juniper is watching Hill’s shadow disappear around a corner, trying to decide if it seems darker than other shadows, denser.
“They’re calling a meeting. Don’t you think we ought to join?”
“No.” Juniper turns away from the window. “I don’t. I think we ought to march at the Centennial Fair.”
To her considerable credit, Jennie doesn’t gasp or squeal. She looks straight back at Juniper, level and hard, and Juniper sees a fierce spark in her eyes. She wonders for the first time how Jennie’s nose got broken, and if she was ever anything other than a part-time secretary with cornsilk hair.
“Miss Stone won’t like it,” she observes.
“No.” Juniper likes Miss Stone, but she’s gotten too used to hearing the word no. “It’ll do her good to see a woman take that no and shove it back down somebody’s throat.”
“The police’ll never let us in.”
“So we disguise ourselves until the very last second, and disappear before they show up. I know the words and ways.” Juniper can tell by Jennie’s flinch that she knows what kinds of words and ways Juniper means. And she can tell by the sly shine of her eyes that she doesn’t mind it, that she’s tired of no too.
Juniper smiles, all teeth. “I think you’ve already got the will.”
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
Yours to mine and mine to yours.
A spell to bind, requiring a tight stitch & a steady hand
On the last night of April, Beatrice Belladonna is curled in the round window of her attic room, reading Charlotte Perrault’s Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals by witch-light. She ought to use a candle or an oil lamp like a respectable woman should, but she’s grown used to the honeyed glow of Juniper’s pitch pine wand in the evenings. Last week she came home to find a thin strip of holly and a note in Juniper’s uncertain hand: YOU OTTA KNOW THE WORDS BY NOW.
Beatrice does. When she works the spell the wand-light is silvery and cool, nothing like Juniper’s midsummer blaze. She finds it restful.
It’s late. The moon is a pearl over the neat rows of north-side rooftops, and Bethlehem Heights looks like a cuckoo clock running along hidden rails, each piece in its place. Beatrice is thinking of abandoning Perrault, who seems to have no secret rhymes or riddles to offer, when she hears the thump-thump-clack of her sister’s steps on the stairs.
Beatrice remains curled in the window. “Evening.”
Juniper grunts in response, leaving her staff at the door and tossing her half-cloak over the back of a chair, apparently not noticing the bread and broth Beatrice set out hours ago. It’s gone cold, the surface skinned with fat.
Juniper shuffles over to the window, scowls out at the pearl moon. She holds a ladies’ hat in her hands, fashionable and frothy, purest white. Beatrice can’t imagine an article of clothing less likely to be worn by her youngest sister.
“Fair opens tomorrow,” Juniper says.
“Yes.”
“We’re marching at five. After Worthington’s speech.”
“I thought you said your permit was revoked?”
Juniper gives her a careless shrug, a crow ruffling its feathers.
“I thought that Stone woman was opposed to . . . illegal activities.”
Another shrug. “She is.”
“. . . I see.”
Juniper waits, spinning the white hat in her hands. “So. Will you be joining us?”
“Joining what?” It takes Beatrice a second to understand that Juniper is referring to the highly visible and apparently unsanctioned march for women’s suffrage. “Oh, n-no, I don’t think so. What would the library think?”
She can see Juniper’s lip curl, her teeth sharp in the moonlight. “Right. Of course.”
Beatrice refrains from pointing out that her position at the library is the reason Juniper has a roof over her head and cold broth to ignore, nor does she invite her sister to trot over to the west side and beg for work in the mills. She merely wants to.
Juniper is still standing beside her, still turning that absurd hat in her hands. “You ought to come watch, at least. It’s going to be quite a show.” Beatrice hears the satisfaction in her sister’s voice and feels a certain uneasiness run down her spine.
The floorboards creak as Juniper turns away. “Invite that colored friend of yours, if you like. Cleopatra.”
“Miss Quinn?” (Cleopatra has asked her several times to call her Cleo, but Beatrice can’t imagine being bold enough to reduce the distance between them to four flimsy letters.)
In the silence that follows, Beatrice pictures herself taking a long morning walk down to New Cairo—the trolleys don’t run to the colored end of town—and strolling into the offices of The Defender. Casually inviting Miss Quinn to accompany her to a suffrage march, proving herself to be something more than a timid librarian. Perhaps provoking Miss Quinn into one of those sharp, honest smiles, rather than her charming lies.
Beatrice finds herself suddenly more interested in the Centennial Fair. “I suppose—”
But she’s been quiet too long. She feels the hot snap of Juniper’s temper through the line between them. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
The door slams shut, limping steps fade quickly, and Beatrice is alone.
She sits in the window for another hour, watching the moon, wondering what it would feel like to fly with moonlight on her bare shoulders, then stands abruptly. She writes a note addressed to Mr. Blackwell, explaining that she will not be able to work her usual shift tomorrow as she has developed a sudden fever.
She lies awake in bed for a long time after, buzzing and nervy. She falls asleep thinking of the place where the trolley lines end.
Agnes is not sleeping. She is tossing and turning, discovering all the new and novel ways in which her body can be uncomfortable. The baby inside her is still small—“the size of a spring cabbage,” Madame Zina told her cheerily—but she seems to possess an uncanny ability to find every tender nerve and soft tissue in her body. At night Agnes feels her clawing and kicking, a cat in a too-small cage. She holds her palms flat to her belly and thinks, Stay mad, baby girl.