Beatrice finds that she’s twisting violently at the brass ring. It slips from her finger. “Oh dear, pardon me—”
Quinn scrabbles after it but the ring falls between the steel seams of the cabin and twinkles downward. It vanishes in a final flash of cut-glass diamond.
A small silence follows while Beatrice reassembles herself, parentheses braced once more like a pair of cupped hands around her heart. “I apologize. I do not mean to be so hysterical.”
“I don’t know what they told you at St. Hale’s, but a few tears hardly make a woman a hysteric.”
Beatrice had not been aware that she was crying. She scrubs too hard at her cheeks, feels the wind whip them dry. “In any case, you are mistaken. My father did not send me to St. Hale’s.” Beatrice says it calmly, but there’s acid in her throat. “My sister did.”
Quinn startles beside her. “Juniper?” she whispers.
“Certainly not. June is the loudest of us, but hardly the most dangerous. And she was only a girl when it happened.”
Quinn doesn’t move or speak or ask questions. She simply listens, as if her whole being is bent toward the listening, as if Beatrice is someone worth listening to.
Beatrice swallows very hard. “Our father was angry with Agnes for . . .” There would be a kind of justice to it if Beatrice spilled her sister’s secrets, one bloody eye traded for another, but she finds she can’t do it. “Our father was always angry. Or maybe not always—Mother said he used to laugh, and take her dancing, until the war . . . Well. I never saw him dance. One day he came for Agnes, and Agnes threw me before him like a bone to a wolf.”
Agnes had looked at her with her eyes ringed white and her teeth bared. In her face Beatrice had seen the sudden certainty of her own death: the red of her blood, the black of the cellar, the gray of her gravestone. She was an animal with its leg caught in a wire trap, deciding whether to turn its teeth against its own flesh or just lie down and die.
And Beatrice watched her sister choose. I saw Beatrice with the preacher’s girl last Sunday.
Until that day, until the very second Agnes opened her mouth to exchange her life for Beatrice’s, they had been one another’s keepers. But no longer.
Beatrice looks out over the city without seeing it. “I was in St. Hale’s by the following Sunday. I believe our local preacher assisted with the tuition costs.”
Quinn stays quiet a little longer, maybe waiting for more of the story, maybe just waiting for the wind to dry the wetness on Beatrice’s cheeks. Then she asks, “And yet—you trust Agnes now?”
“. . . Yes.” Or at least she trusts that her sister wants the same thing they want: more.
“Although she broke that trust before.”
“Surely trust is never truly broken, but merely lost.” Beatrice’s lips twist. “And what is lost, that can’t be found?”
She feels the amber heat of Quinn’s gaze on her face, scrutinizing her. “Perhaps you should trust less easily, Miss Eastwood.” There’s a harshness in her voice, but she loops her arm not-very-casually through Beatrice’s as she says it, and Beatrice does not pull away.
The wheel spins them back to earth, the bright-smelling wind replaced with the greasy fug of the Fair. As they stroll back beneath the high arch of the entranceway, still arm in arm, Quinn asks, lightly, “So. Tell me about this second spectacle.”
And Beatrice—who perhaps should trust less easily—does.
Fee and fie, fum and foe,
Green and gold, see them grow!
A spell for growth, requiring buried seeds & fool’s gold
It’s Agnes Amaranth who finds their second spell. She’s talking with Annie before the shift bell rings, whispering about ways and words and spells half-hidden in witch-tales, and Annie scoffs. “You think there’s witchcraft hidden in pat-a-cake songs? Secret spells in the tale of Jack and the Giant?” Agnes watches her with narrow gray eyes and says, “Maybe so. Tell it to me.”
Later that evening Agnes walks past the black remains of the Square Shirtwaist Factory on St. Lamentation. She read in the papers that forty-six women died in the fire, and another thirteen leapt from the high windows. “It’s company policy to lock the doors,” the owner argued in court. “So the girls don’t get shiftless.” He and his partner had paid a fine of seventy-five dollars.
Standing there, looking up at the burned carcass of the factory with heat gathering in her fingertips, Agnes notices that there are survey stakes spaced neatly around the lot. Scraped earth. The beginnings of a scaffold. She understands that the factory will be rebuilt, locked doors and all—that the sisters and cousins and mothers of the dead girls will work atop their ashes—and she knows, then, what their second spectacle will be.
On the tenth of June, Agnes and the Sisters of Avalon walk two-by-two down St. Lamentation. They wear their billowing black gowns, their skin gleaming white and olive and clay-dark beneath the gas-lamps, and carry seeds in their pockets: rye and rose, wisteria and ivy.
They plant their seeds in the ashen dirt of the Square Shirtwaist Factory, and toss glittering handfuls of fool’s gold into the lot. They speak the words. They’re silly words, stolen from a tale about a boy who trades his milk cow to a witch for a handful of magic seeds, known only by women and children and daydreamers: fee and fie, fum and foe.
The Sisters feel the sweet rush of witching in their veins. They leave before the first green finger pokes through the black earth.
By dawn the burnt carcass of the factory is nearly hidden by leaves and roots and reaching tendrils, as if several wet springtimes have passed in a single night. By noon there is nothing left of the building except the occasional right angle poking through the vines, a scattering of burnt nails among the tall grasses. Birds roost among thick twists of green, and the leaves hum with wingbeats and small, scuttling things. A sign is scratched into a bare patch of earth: three circles, twined together like snakes.
The workers gather nervously at the perimeter, muttering and scowling and crossing themselves. Several of them tilt their caps back to squint up at the thing that was once a construction site—the three-leafed ivies where the scaffold once stood, the tendons of wisteria where the brand-new punch-clock once sat with its stingy second-hand and cold heart—and stroll home, whistling off-key. One of them—a big, brash man with a bronze pin on his chest—begins to hack and slash at the green-grown mountain, shoving his way inside it; he does not emerge, and no one goes looking for him.
The next morning there’s a black-suited officer waiting beside Mr. Malton at the mill. The girls are asked to turn out their pockets and shake out their aprons before entering, “in light of recent events.” Agnes complies, unhesitating, and a scattering of seeds spills into the alley, some tufted white and some dark and shining as beetle’s eyes.
“Flower seeds,” she says innocently. “For my window box, sir.” She sweeps her lashes low over her eyes in a way that has always made men very stupid. The officer waves her inside.
Three days later Agnes is sweating on the corner of Thirteenth and St. Joseph, squinting at the folded square of paper in her hand: August S. Lee. The Workingman’s Friend.