Agnes turns to see the secretary girl from the Women’s Association, with her cornsilk hair and blue-bruised jaw. As she approaches, Agnes sees she’s not as mousy as she’d thought: her eyes are hard, shining with newborn conviction.
“Jennie?” Juniper asks. “What—”
“I want to join.” Jennie says it very fast, like a person diving into cold water before they can change their mind.
“That’s nice,” Juniper says. “Join who?”
Jennie frowns as if she thinks Juniper is making fun of her. “You.” Her eyes skitter to Agnes and Bella. “Your new society.”
Bella starts to say something calm and reasonable, like, There’s been some sort of misunderstanding! We’re not forming a society at all. Sorry for your trouble, but Juniper is already reaching out a welcoming hand, smiling with all the glee of a missionary contemplating a convert.
“Why, Jennie. You can be our first member.”
Bella makes a wheezy, punctured-tire noise. “I’m not sure—I don’t know—” But Juniper has an arm slung over Jennie’s shoulder and Jennie is smiling a shy smile.
“Well.” Bella sighs. “There were really four musketeers, anyway.”
Tell your tale and tell it true,
Cross my heart and hope to die.
Strike me down if I lie.
A spell for secrets kept and told, requiring bindweed & blood
The Calamitous Coven.”
“No.”
“Eve’s Army.”
“No! It ought to be about, I don’t know, sisterhood or union—”
“The Ladies Union of Giving the Bastards What’s Coming to Them.”
“James Juniper, if you can’t be serious, at least be quiet.”
Juniper subsides, slouching lower against the wall. As a clandestine society of would-be witches, Juniper had anticipated that their first order of business would be exciting and magical, like burning the Sign of the Three across City Hall or turning the Hawthorn River to blood.
Her sisters and Miss Jennie Lind apparently thought otherwise. The four of them have been stuck in Agnes’s cabbagey room at South Sybil for hours now, discussing safe houses and membership oaths and other disappointingly unwitchy subjects.
Jennie is even taking honest-to-Eve notes, sitting on Agnes’s bed with Bella’s little black book propped on her knees. She’s the one who suggested their society have a name, although she has so far ignored each of Juniper’s excellent suggestions.
“The Sisters of Sin.”
Jennie’s pen doesn’t move.
“What about—” Bella begins, then bites her lip. “What about the Sisters of Avalon?” It takes less than a second’s silence for Bella to begin backtracking and hand-wringing. “Perhaps not. It sounds a bit like the Daughters of Tituba, doesn’t it, and we hardly want to be mistaken for make-believe. And it’s so provocative to associate ourselves so openly with the Last Three—”
But Agnes is smiling and Jennie’s pen is moving across the top of the page, and Juniper can feel the name settling over them, shining in their faces. Juniper has a goosefleshed premonition that it will be printed in papers and on wanted posters, whispered through the alleys and mill-floors, passed like a lantern from hand to hand. The Sisters of Avalon, they call themselves. Did you hear? The looks exchanged, the flash of longing in their eyes.
“Excellent.” Jennie finishes the last flourish of the name. “And what about titles and duties? Should they be elected positions, do you think?”
Juniper finds that this somewhat dampens the shine of their new name. “Positions?”
“Well, I mean—secretary, treasurer, president, vice president, press liaison, head of recruitment . . .” Jennie ticks them off on her fingers.
“Saints, there’s only four of us.”
“Sounds like a problem for the head of recruitment.”
Juniper flicks a ball of lint at Jennie and Jennie dodges without taking her eyes from her paper. Bella offers, tentatively, “I—I could be the press liaison. I have a—contact in the newspaper business.” Bella doesn’t look at any of them as she says it, and Juniper wonders if she means that colored woman in the gentleman’s coat, and why that should cause her to blush such a vivid pink. She recalls a little uneasily that there were rumors back home about her oldest sister, too.
Jennie writes something in the notebook. “Full name?”
“Beatrice Eastwood.”
Jennie hesitates. “Why do your sisters call you Bella?”
Juniper says, “Because that’s the name our mama gave her. Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood.” Bella shifts uncomfortably and Juniper sighs at her. “Honestly, if we can’t use our mother’s-names in a secret society of witches, when can we?”
Jennie finishes writing and turns an expectant eye to Agnes, who looks very close to rolling her eyes. “I can . . . ask around, I suppose.” She makes a circle with her index finger, indicating either the South Sybil boarding house, the neighborhood of West Babel, or the entirety of New Salem. “Does that make me in charge of recruitment?”
“Name?”
“Agnes Eastwood.” Juniper tosses a second ball of lint at her. “Oh, fine. Agnes Amaranth Eastwood.”
Jennie records this, too, then says brightly, “And who’s president?”
There’s a brief exchange of glances between the sisters. Juniper asks, “What does it mean to be president, exactly?”
Jennie makes a seesaw motion with her head, cornsilk hair swinging. “Not much, really, if we agree to a collective decision-making process.” The phrase recalls the endless meetings of the Women’s Association. Juniper gives an involuntary shudder.
“But in the Association . . . Miss Stone was the heart of us.” There’s a gray note in Jennie’s voice, like regret, and Juniper shrugs away a prickle of guilt. It was Jennie’s own damn choice to follow her out the Association door. “She was our direction. We all steered the ship, but she was our compass.” Jennie looks at Juniper as she finishes, frowning a little.
Juniper looks away. “Well, we can vote on it later. Let’s talk about getting some girls signed up, O head of recruitment.”
But Bella says anxiously, “I’m not sure how many people we ought to recruit. What would we be recruiting them to, exactly?”
Juniper says, “Hell-raising,” just as Jennie says, “Yes, we’ll need a constitution, and a declaration of intent.”
Juniper considers for several consecutive seconds and offers, “To raise hell?”
The other Sisters of Avalon ignore her. She tries again. “To bring about a second age of witching. To get back what was stolen from us.”
“That might be a little . . . much, don’t you think?” Bella clears her throat over Juniper’s muttered you’re a little much. “How about: to restore the rights and powers of womankind?”
Jennie writes it down while Bella frets, because Bella always frets. “Without the Lost Way we don’t have any powers to restore. I’m not sure anyone would sign up for the sake of m-moonbeams and witch-tales.” Her hands are twisting in her lap, chapped and ink-stained.