Agnes threw the pennyroyal down the boarding-house privy weeks ago. She did it without drama or debate, as if it were any other brown paper sack of ingredients she no longer needed. When she returned to her room she sat on the floor and trailed her finger in a circle around herself. There were two of them inside it now.
Sometime past midnight she hears uneven steps in the hall and feels an invisible thread winding tight.
Paper rustles. The steps retreat.
When Agnes rises she finds a white square of paper slid beneath her door: COME TO THE FAIR TOMORROW, 4 O’CLOCK. IF YOU GOT THE GUTS.
Agnes knows from the shaky shape of the capitals and the attitude that the note is from Juniper. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow at the Centennial Fair, but, given the electric hum in the line between them, like charged air before a storm, Agnes feels confident it will be deeply stupid and possibly dangerous.
She crumples the note in her fist and pictures tossing it down the privy, too. She wouldn’t even need to make an extra trip; she always needs to piss, these days.
Instead she smooths the note flat on the table. She looks at it a long time before she climbs back into bed.
The day before the march, Jennie Lind asked Juniper if she’d ever been to a fair. Sure, Juniper told her. Back home they had a cornbread festival every fall. Jennie laughed at her and Juniper thwacked her with a rolled-up poster and Jennie laughed harder.
It’s only as Juniper walks under the arched iron entranceway of the New Salem Centennial Fair that she knows why.
The Centennial Fair makes the cornbread festival look like a church picnic. It’s like a whole second city sprung up on the north end of New Salem, filled with smart white tents and gaudy stalls and salesmen hawking newfangled contraptions. Electric lights buzz and swing between the tents, singeing the top-hats and hair-dos of the crowd below, and a great metal Ferris wheel spins above them. The air smells rich and fatty, like sweat and fry oil and dollar bills.
Inez buys seven tickets at the booth and passes them around. Juniper, Jennie, Electa; Mary, Minerva, Nell; each of them clutching a white hat in their hands, each of them wearing expressions suitable for the storming of castles.
Juniper had hoped there’d be more of them, but Jennie said they couldn’t risk inviting anyone who might turn tail and report their plan back to Miss Stone, so they approached only the most discontented, troublesome members of the Association. Things always come in sevens in witch-tales (swans, dwarves, days to create the world), so Juniper figures they’ll do fine.
They spend the day jostling through the Fair, unremarkable in dull olives and sober grays, just seven more citizens come to celebrate the founding of New Salem. They pass knots of mill-girls and flower-sellers, students from the College and men from the tannery, a handful of policemen riding shining white horses. The girls eye them as they pass, linking arms and exchanging looks, perhaps stroking the white brims of their hats. Juniper thinks of wanted posters and murder charges and what could happen if she’s caught, and resolves not to be.
They dodge souvenir-sellers offering commemorative plates and historical pamphlets. They buy sausages on little wooden sticks and burn their lips on the grease. They walk so far that Juniper’s bad leg aches and she leans hard on her cedar staff.
Her daddy never used a cane, though he should have; he said they were for grannies and cripples, not proud veterans of Lincoln’s war. Sometimes when he was deep in his cups he’d give Juniper’s staff a mean, slanted look, like it was an old enemy of his, but he never laid a hand on it.
They wander into a tent labeled Doctor Marvel’s Magnificent Anthropological Exhibition!, which features a number of natives wearing beads and feathers and bored expressions. Juniper pauses for a while to observe THE LAST WITCH-DOCTOR OF THE CONGO, PRESERVED FOR SCIENTIFIC STUDY, who turns out to be a withered African woman with an iron witch-collar locked around her neck. Her skin beneath the collar is whitish and dead-looking, like frostbitten fingertips; Juniper finds she can’t meet the woman’s eyes. She limps out of Doctor Marvel’s tent and tosses her half-sausage away, uneaten.
By four o’clock she and the others make their way to the center stage, where a crowd is gathering beneath red-and-white pennants. Inez slips Juniper a bundle of cloth that might be a parasol but isn’t, and the seven of them diverge, pointedly not looking at one another as they edge through the audience. They take places along the fringes, forming a not-accidental circle.
A mustachioed man in a gray suit gives a short speech. There’s a polite patter of applause as the mayor replaces him at the podium.
“I must begin of course with a hearty welcome to all of you, the good citizens of New Salem!” The mayor is a saggy gentleman with a red-veined nose and all the charisma of stale bread. Juniper finds Gideon Hill sitting behind him with the rest of the city councilors, sweating in the May sunshine and blinking far too often. Juniper wonders how a man like that—all pinkish and wet, like something recently shelled—could get elected to anything. His dog is curled beneath his chair, her eyes staring straight at Juniper, gleaming red in the first bloom of sunset.
“I must also thank the Council for their unflagging support of this project and valuable oversight.”
Juniper isn’t listening. She’s watching the faces of her co-conspirators—Minerva and Mary looking pale and slightly sick; Inez smoothing the already smooth pleats of her dress; Electa looking bored—wondering if any of them are regretting the decisions that led them here. Wondering if anyone in the crowd has noticed the hats they’re clutching to their chests, each of them some shade of white: pearl or lace or clotted cream, beribboned or dripping with baby’s breath.
Each of them spelled straight to Hell and back.
But what is there to notice? They’re only hats; you can’t smell the witching on them unless you get right up close.
Juniper herself carries three hats. She knows neither of her sisters are coming—knows that Bella is too scared and Agnes is too selfish—but still, she brought three stupid hats. Just in case.
Earlier she thought she caught a glimpse of sleek braid, a flash of spectacles, but she can’t bring herself to feel along the invisible threads stretched between them. It’s better to not quite know, to keep pretending they might have come.
Worthington is leaning over the podium and sweating in a manner that suggests his speech must be drawing to its merciful end. “I say to you now: let us put aside our petty grievances and differences, and celebrate instead what unites us. Let us enjoy the Fair!” The mayor makes a gesture to the brass band perspiring silently behind the stage.
The crowd is applauding dutifully and the first notes of Salem’s Freedom are rising from the band when James Juniper raises her white hat into the air. Six other hands follow suit.
Juniper and the renegade members of the New Salem Women’s Association lower the hats onto their heads and whisper the words.
White cloaks cascade from nowhere and fall over their shoulders, bright and clean. They drape over their day-dresses and in an instant they become a single thing instead of seven separate women.
It’s a spell of Juniper’s own invention—not exactly the good stuff, but not nothing, either. She disappeared the cloaks using Mags’s spell for vanishing her potions and herbs when the law came around, which required only a pair of silver scissors to cut the air and a muttered rhyme. Then she had to figure a way to call the cloaks back from nowhere. She lost several of Inez’s nicest white wool cloaks, vanishing them into who knows where, before she thought to try a binding.