She hears the creak of the boarding-house door, the patter of feet on stairs, the rush of eager whispers in the hall. A helpless panic tremors through Beatrice and she glances to her younger sister, mute and beseeching. Juniper advises her to get her panties untwisted and sit tight, but she rests an awkward hand on Beatrice’s shoulder as she says it. The damp heat of her palm tells Beatrice that she feels it too: the sense that they’re teetering on an unseen edge, perched at the beginning of an untold story.
There’s an uncertain knock at the door. “C’mon in,” Juniper calls, and they do: Misses Electa Gage and Inez Gillmore followed by a gaggle of other girls stolen from the Women’s Association; a knot of grim-looking mill-girls with colorless kerchiefs and skeptical expressions; an unsmiling girl with long black hair and cedar-colored skin; a pair of rather disreputable-looking sisters who introduce themselves as “Victoria and Tennessee, spiritualists, magnetic healers, and mediums.”
Miss Quinn appears at the head of a stately delegation of black women who regard the room with expressions of deepest skepticism. Quinn shoots Beatrice her cat’s grin, causing Beatrice to stand up, forget whatever it was she intended to do, then sit back down and study the backs of her own hands for a while.
She hadn’t been at all certain that Quinn would come. She’d helped them with their advertisement, working with Juniper and Beatrice long after the offices of The Defender should have closed to set the spell into ink and lead. It was only after the last page had rolled through the press that Quinn glanced sideways at Juniper. “And am I invited to this meeting, Miss Eastwood?”
“Sure.”
Quinn’s face remained very neutral. “How very . . . broad-minded of you.”
“Well, all for one and one for all,” Juniper declared nobly. She ruined this immediately thereafter by adding, with some relish, “Daddy’d roll over in his grave if he could see us. He fought for the Yanks but only because they gave him fifty dollars and a bottle of rye.”
Miss Quinn tilted her head. “Tell me, Miss Eastwood: how much of all this”—she gestured to the stacks of still-warm newspapers, the witch-ways scattered across desktops—“is designed purely to spite your dead father?”
Juniper ran her tongue over her teeth with a simmering expression that made Beatrice wince in anticipation, but in the end said only, “Come to the meeting, Miss Quinn. Bring your friends.”
Quinn had.
Beatrice watches them covertly as they settle into their seats. There’s a camaraderie among them, an unusual deference to Quinn’s posture, which confirms certain of Beatrice’s theories.
Following the riot on St. Mary-of-Egypt’s, Beatrice watched Quinn more closely. She considered the keenness of her interest in their researches and the words and ways she already possessed; the times she left abruptly or disappeared for days in a row, never quite saying where she’d gone; the mildly scandalized whispers about “that colored journalist” who was often seen entering and leaving all manner of unlikely places across the city; the several occasions she accidentally referred to herself as we instead of I.
Beatrice is no detective, but even a librarian might consult a bound volume of minutes from the annual convention of the Colored Women’s League. She might run her finger down the member list at the back and pause at C. P. Quinn, wondering if perhaps the League was interested in less respectable activities than their literature suggested.
Beatrice is distracted by a flurry of new arrivals: a mother and daughter whispering in Yiddish; Madame Zina the midwife; a trio of women in alarming dresses who greet Juniper and Agnes as if they are old friends.
Juniper beams. “Glad you and the girls could make it, Miss Pearl.”
“Who are they?” Beatrice asks Agnes in an undertone.
“Whores,” Agnes whispers back. Beatrice had not previously been aware that one’s entire body could blush.
Miss Pearl and her girls take seats at the very front. One of them—a freckled, honey-colored girl—glances back at Miss Quinn. They exchange a charged look so fleeting that Beatrice is half-convinced she imagined it.
By ten after nine there are so many women crammed into Agnes’s room at No. 7 that it shouldn’t logically contain them all. Beatrice knows that, in fact, it doesn’t.
Over the previous week Agnes approached the other occupants of the South Sybil boarding house. No. 12, it transpired, was the home of a truly astonishing number of sisters and cousins and second cousins from Kansas who had charmed their room to be rather larger on the inside than it was on the outside. They gave Agnes the necessary ways and words, and now No. 7 is large enough for six rows of borrowed chairs and two dozen women. It no longer seems quite so gray and miserable, and the wet-earth smell of witching has chased away the smell of overcooked cabbage. Yesterday Beatrice even saw a robin nesting in the eaves outside the window.
Nearly all the chairs are full. There are no more taps at the door. The whispers and shuffles of the women fall away in eerie concert, replaced by an expectant stillness. Eyes swivel to the front of the room, where Beatrice and her sisters sit.
Beatrice sees Juniper’s throat bob as she stands, fist tight around her staff. She glances back at her older sisters, suddenly looking young and raggedy and not at all like the president of a suffrage society. Heat passes down the line from Agnes to Juniper, a rush of secondhand strength.
Juniper squares her shoulders and turns back to the room full of waiting women. “Welcome,” she begins, her voice clear and bright, “to the first meeting of the Sisters of Avalon.”
Juniper introduces Beatrice and Agnes and Jennie. She thanks the gathered women for answering the advertisement and reads their mission statement from a creased page held in her hand, stumbling a little, sounding like a schoolgirl reading from the Bible.
She folds the paper and fixes them with a green-lit gaze. “That’s why we’re here.” Her voice is steady now. “How about you all tell me why you’re here?”
A nervous silence follows. It lingers, escalating toward the unbearable, until a flat voice calls from the back, “My brother gets fifty cents a day at the mill. I get a quarter for the same damn work.”
“The courts took my son,” hisses someone else. “Said he belonged to his father, by law.”
Miss Pearl offers, “They arrested two of my girls on immorality, and not a one of their customers.” The end of her sentence is lost in the sudden flood of complaints: bank loans they can’t receive and schools they can’t attend; husbands they can’t divorce and votes they can’t take and positions they can’t hold.
Juniper holds up a hand. “You’re here because you want more for yourselves, better for your daughters. Because it’s easy to ignore a woman.” Juniper’s lips twist in a feral smile. “But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.”
The word witch cracks like lightning over the room. Another silence follows, tense and electric.
A voice cuts through the hush, hard and foreign-sounding. “There’s no such thing as witches. Not anymore.” It’s the big Russian woman from Agnes’s mill, arms crossed like a pair of pistols across her breast.
“No,” Juniper parries. “But there will be.”
“How?”