The whispers wither and die. A dozen pairs of eyes land on Juniper. She gives them a beatific smile. “Morning, ladies. Bella! What are you doing here?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer. She grabs one of the spindly chairs by the window and perches on the very edge, knees wide and hands crossed atop her staff, still beaming.
The smile dims when she catches sight of the secretary and the swollen bruise along her jaw. “So you made it out alright. The others, too?”
The girl nods, a furtive flash of pride in her eyes. “We think Electa’s got a busted rib, but she’ll be alright.” It occurs to Beatrice to wonder how exactly they all escaped unscathed, and if perhaps the respectable members of the Women’s Association have a few words and ways they shouldn’t.
Guilt crosses Juniper’s face, a foreign expression, but she banishes it with a little shake of her head. “Well. I hope at least we can all agree.”
Miss Stone—who has until now been standing perfectly still—clears her throat to ask, “On what, exactly?”
Juniper apparently doesn’t hear the tension lurking in Miss Stone’s voice like an unsprung trap. She meets her eyes squarely. “That we aren’t going to get a damn thing by asking nice and minding our manners. That we need to make use of every weapon we have, or they’ll beat us bloody in the streets.” Juniper leans forward, that swaggering smile returning. “That it’s time for the women’s movement to become the witches’ movement.”
The silence following this statement is so profound that Beatrice imagines she can hear the veins pulsing in Miss Stone’s temples.
Juniper speaks into the quiet, heedless. “It was witching that saved me in the street yesterday, and it’s witching that will win us the vote. More than just the vote—back in the old days women were queens and scholars and generals! We could have all that back again. My sister—Bella, I mean; this is Agnes, our other sister”—a look of genuine horror crosses Miss Stone’s face as she contemplates the prospect of another Eastwood—“anyway, Bella has been doing some research about that tower we saw on the equinox. I think it’s . . .” Juniper’s eyes cross Bella’s, and Bella knows that Juniper has guessed what the tower is, what the sign of three circles must mean. “I think it’s important. That it might bring witching back to the world.”
Juniper looks around at the stone-still women. “What do you say?”
None of them answer. Miss Stone exhales a very long sigh into the silence and lowers herself into her chair. She leans back, regarding Juniper with an almost bewildered expression, as if she can’t understand how someone so young could be so powerfully irritating. “Miss West. The Women’s Association has no interest in your wild theories or dangerous ideas.”
The smile slides off Juniper’s face like frosting off a too-hot cake. “Well, as a member of the Women’s Association, I think—”
Miss Stone produces a bitter ha of laughter. “Oh, you are certainly no longer that.”
“Excuse me?”
“I, as president of the Association, do officially expel you from our company, and deeply regret ever having granted you membership.”
Juniper is standing now, fingers white around her staff. “How dare you—”
Miss Stone counts on her fingers, voice very cool. “You organized an illegal assembly against the will of the Association. You made a public demonstration of witchcraft. You endangered the lives of the six fools who followed you into your treason. Saints only know what else you did—the rumors are nearly too wild to believe. Perhaps you have a pair of black horns on your head. Perhaps you can fly. Perhaps you set a demon-snake on an innocent child.” Beatrice flinches. No one notices.
“Look, you wanted to get people’s attention, and we got it. If you’re going to get upset that I defended myself, I don’t—”
Miss Stone raises her voice very slightly. “Miss Wiggin, the head of the Women’s Christian Union—and, I might add, the adopted daughter of a member of the City Council—was injured in the riot. She claims it was an act of witchcraft, and I am disgusted to say I am unsure whether she is lying.”
Juniper’s mouth is open again, but Miss Stone ignores her. She leans forward over the desktop, hands knitted. “I have dedicated the better part of my life to the uplift of women. I was there at Seneca, at the very beginning.” Her fury seems to have blown itself out like a summer storm, leaving her winded and tired. “They laughed at us. Derided us, mocked us, printed vicious cartoons in every paper. We kept working. We built organizations all over the country, saw suffrage laws passed in three states, brought attention to the plight of our sex—but now they are no longer laughing, Miss West. Now—thanks to you and your accomplices—they are afraid. And we could lose everything.”
Juniper strides forward and places her palms on the desk, wearing a look of such blazing intensity that Beatrice feels it scorch her cheeks as it passes. “Or we could win it all. If we stop worrying so much about what a woman should and shouldn’t do, what’s respectable and what’s not. If we stand and fight, all of us together. Imagine if there’d been seventy of us marching, instead of seven!” Miss Stone looks faintly ill at the thought. “There’s this book Bella used to read us when we were little, about these three French soldiers—what’s the thing they said?” She throws the question sideways to Beatrice.
Beatrice clears her throat, cheeks pinking. “All for one and one for all.”
“That’s it.” Juniper’s face is lit now by some internal glow, a passion like the sun itself. “It has to be all for one and one for all, Miss Stone.”
Every eye is on the young woman with the crow’s-wing hair and the long jaw and the summer-green gaze—like and not like the feral girl-child Beatrice remembers—and for a wild moment Beatrice thinks they’re going to listen to her.
Miss Stone laughs. It’s not a cruel laugh, but Beatrice sees it hit Juniper like a slap. “Goodbye, Miss West. I can’t wish you luck, for the sake of the city.”
Juniper straightens from the desk, all the glow gone from her eyes, face pinched tight, and gives the room a mocking bow. She limps out the office door without looking back. She never let their daddy see her cry, either.
Agnes follows. She pauses to hold the door behind her and looks up at Beatrice, almost as if she’s waiting for her. As if they are still little girls tumbling into the farmhouse, one-two-three, holding the door carelessly open behind them for the next one. “Well?” Agnes sounds annoyed, whether with herself or her sister Beatrice can’t tell.
Beatrice feels Miss Stone’s eyes on her face. “I don’t know you, Miss Eastwood, but you seem a respectable woman. That sister—those sisters of yours will lead you astray.”
Beatrice hesitates. She thinks about the fates of girls who go astray in all the stories, the hot iron shoes and glass coffins and witches’ ovens. (She thinks about St. Hale’s, a prison built especially for straying girls.)
But then Beatrice looks at Agnes still waiting for her, half scowling, and thinks about what else awaits those gone-astray girls: the daring escapes and wild dances, the midnight trysts and starlit spells, a whole world’s worth of disreputable delights.