Agnes is standing by the window, looking out at the gray alley. “You’re forgetting a whole street full of people just saw a woman set a viper on a boy because he gave her a little trouble.”
“A little trouble—”
Agnes continues. “By now the city will be rotten with rumors. People will be scared, scandalized . . . but some of them will want to know more. They need to know more, if what June says is true.”
Juniper had told them about the shadows at the riot and the sick shine of Miss Wiggin’s smile. She doesn’t know how convinced they are, but she had seen them sidestepping shadows and looking twice at dark doorways in alleys.
“And who knows?” Agnes continues. “They might have some witching of their own. Every woman has a handful of spells from her aunt or cousin or mama.”
Jennie objects. “Not every woman.”
“Well, most women, then.”
There’s a stiffness in Jennie’s face, a wordless denial.
Bella is watching her. “And how did you and the other girls escape the riot, exactly, if it wasn’t witching?”
The stiffness cracks. Jennie chews her lip, cheeks pinking. “It was nothing. Just a little spell.” Her cheeks slide past pink and head straight for scarlet. “To . . . tie shoelaces together.”
Juniper cackles, because the image of dozens of rioters tripping over their own feet is delightful, but Bella asks, boringly, “That sounds like men’s magic. Or boys’ magic, at least.”
Jennie isn’t looking at any of them, face draining to blotched white. “I . . . had . . . a brother.” Even Juniper hears the past tense and shuts the hell up.
Agnes wades into the hush. “Well, wherever you learned it, I think your friends are grateful.” Jennie gives her a twist of a smile. “And even a boys’ prank had some use. Maybe our words and ways don’t seem like much all scattered around the way they are, but if we put them together . . .”
Agnes trails off, but Bella continues in a hushed voice. “I could collect them. Record them. The first grimoire of the modern age . . .” For reasons that are obscure to Juniper, the prospect of so much writing and reading makes Bella’s eyes shine and her frets vanish.
The rest of the evening is a series of debates and schemes. Jennie recalls that the Women’s Association ran regular ads in The New Salem Post encouraging interested parties to visit their headquarters, and suggests the Sisters do the same. Agnes notes dryly that they don’t have headquarters, that they wouldn’t want anyone to know where it was if they did, and that The New Salem Post would never run an advertisement for witchcraft anyway.
Bella makes a hmming noise and mutters that there may be “other reputable papers” in the city, if they had some means of ensuring their invitation reached only sympathetic eyes. A thought seems to strike her. “Do you think ‘cross my heart and hope to die’ could be altered for mass-production?” She snatches her notebook back from Jennie and sinks for some time into her own notes, murmuring to herself.
By nightfall the members of the Sisters of Avalon have gone their separate ways: Bella to present their proposal to Miss Quinn and the staff of The Defender; Agnes to rustle up witch-ways from someone called Madame Zina; Jennie to check on Inez and Electa and the other members of Juniper’s small rebellion, and invite them to join a much bigger one.
Juniper lingers in Agnes’s room. She steals a handful of salt from a pot on the table and tosses a line of it across the threshold and window ledge, thinking of Mags. Honey to keep things close, salt to keep things out. She thinks, too, of those wrong-shaped shadows rolling and oozing through the streets, prying at shutters and sliding under loose-hung doors.
Juniper limps to the bed, where Bella’s little black notebook lies open. She flips through the pages and squints at Jennie’s tidy writing.
Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood, Press Liaison.
Agnes Amaranth Eastwood, Recruitment.
Jennie Gemini Lind, Secretary/Treasurer, with the mother’s-name written in a shaky, uncertain hand, as if she wasn’t sure of the spelling.
And, at the very bottom of the page, neat and firm:
James Juniper Eastwood, President.
As a rule, Agnes walks out of the Baldwin Brothers Bonded Mill and keeps walking. She doesn’t linger to chat or laugh, she doesn’t head to the dance halls or evening sermons or markets with the other girls; she keeps her eyes on the pavement and walks the hell home.
But on the eleventh of May, just as the afternoon is softening like butter into a warm evening, she waits.
She leaves the dim tomb of the mill and leans against the heat of the brick, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, trying to lift the baby off her bladder. Mr. Malton isn’t the sort of boss to grant extra privy-breaks to a girl just because, as he says, “she can’t keep her knees shut.” He’s been eyeballing Agnes’s belly as it grows, pressing hard against the bar of the loom. Just this afternoon he tapped it with his red-sausage finger. “You get three days for bearing. When she’s four she can work in the rag-pickers’ room.”
Agnes closed her eyes so he wouldn’t see the white lick of rage in them.
Her daughter will not grow up in the sunless dark of the mill, breathing dust and fumes, huddling next to the steam pipes in winter to keep warm. Her daughter will not be nothing.
Agnes unclenches her jaw in the alley. There are knots and strings of women gathering nearby, but she doesn’t look at them. Instead she looks at the thin stripe of sky above, the hungry green of the weeds reaching thin fingers between the cobbles, crabgrass and chickweed and dusky deadnettle. Agnes can’t recall if there were this many weeds last spring.
There’s a cluster of women forming down the alley, a copy of The Defender spread between them. None of them, Agnes imagines, are regular subscribers to New Cairo’s radical colored paper, but the Sisters of Avalon purchased several dozen extra copies of this particular issue and distributed them through the boarding houses and mail-rooms of the west side.
Agnes catches a raised voice. “It’s nonsense, is what it is. Pure fancy. Somebody’s idea of a joke.”
“Or,” suggests another, conspiratorially, “it’s a trap. The police never did find that snake or the witch who made it, did they? Maybe they think they’re being clever.”
There are low, doubtful mutters at this, and Agnes figures this is more or less the opening she’s been waiting for. She wishes she had wit or zeal to convince them, but she’s not her sisters, so she merely stalks toward the gathered women and waits for them to notice her squared shoulders. “It’s not a trap,” she says quietly. “Or a trick.”
All of them stare at her the way you’d stare at an alley cat that suddenly sang opera. Agnes understands why; she hasn’t spoken a single spare word to them other than “bobbin’s busted” or “watch your shuttle” in five years of working shoulder-to-shoulder.
One of them huffs loudly, but another one shushes her. Agnes chances a glance of the shusher’s face and recognizes her vaguely as the new girl who got her hair caught in the loom last spring. The machine sucked her into itself, slick and fast, as if her body was just another thread. She screamed, and under the screaming was the wet rip of hair from scalp—until Agnes sliced through it with a pair of shears. The girl fell to the ground, weeping and moaning, stuttering her thanks. Agnes told her to pin her hair up if she wanted to keep what was left of it. She’d never learned her name.