She lies awake listening to the murmur of voices in the street and the tocking of a clock somewhere in the house—too-late, too-late—until Quinn’s voice tells her to sleep, and she does.
Beatrice dreams of cellars and locked doors and wakes with her own fingers clawing at her throat.
Dust motes dance above her, suspended in sunlight. Pigeons burble at the window. She is alone, though there’s a hollowed-out warmth in the bed beside her, as if someone has lain next to her in the night. Her spectacles are folded neatly on the bedside table.
Beatrice looks at them, picturing the hands that placed them there and feeling a dangerous tenderness creep over her, before she realizes the thing she doesn’t feel: her youngest sister. The line between them has gone slack and dead as a cut tendon.
She finds Miss Quinn in a galley kitchen on the first floor, patting a round of biscuit dough with flour-dusted fingers. She listens to Beatrice’s tearful babbling patiently, cutting neat rounds of dough with a tin can, sliding them into the oven with an iron skree. Then she folds Beatrice’s fingers around a hot mug and gently refuses to escort her to the Hall of Justice. “After all the trouble I took to save you? No. You’re going to eat your biscuits and change out of those witch-robes, then go home. Tomorrow you’ll go to work as if nothing has happened.”
“But—”
Quinn touches the back of her hand, very gently. “You’re no good to her locked in the cell beside her. Please.”
Beatrice eats her biscuits and changes out of her witch-robes. She follows Miss Quinn two blocks east into a white-tiled salon full of chattering women who dip their heads to Quinn and raise their eyebrows at Beatrice, and through the back to a door that reads SUPPLIES. A cool, deep smell seeps around its edges. Beatrice is not surprised when Quinn presses her scarred wrist to its surface and whispers the words.
The tunnel twists north, rumbling sometimes as trolleys or hooves clatter overhead. Beatrice keeps feeling along the line that led to her youngest sister, like a woman tonguing the gap where a tooth once was.
“W-why is it called the Deeps?” she asks, as Quinn pauses to scrawl some complicated sign on the tunnel wall.
“Because it’s waist-deep down there. At least after a bad rain.”
Beatrice makes a sound somewhere between a whimper and a question mark, and Quinn clarifies. “They built the prison on the riverbank, where the land was soft and boggy—there’s a reason none of our tunnels lead to the east bank—and it sinks an inch or two every year. The lowest cells always have standing water in them. There’s no way to get dry or clean. I knew a man arrested for loitering who came out with his feet dead white, just rotting away in his boots . . .” Quinn’s voice trails into the tunnel-dark.
“Were you . . . close?”
“Cousins,” Quinn answers, with that same iron shape to her spine. Beatrice is quiet after that.
The tunnel ends in a spiral staircase and a narrow, arched door. Beatrice stumbles after Quinn, sun-blinded, and finds herself standing in the genteel bustle of Bethlehem Heights, half a block from her rented room. No one appears to notice them, and Beatrice wonders if Quinn has cast one of her strange glamors over them before she understands that the door they stepped through is tucked discreetly at the corner of a handsome manor house: a servants’ entrance. In their neat ironed dresses she and Quinn are just a pair of maids, all but invisible—nothing. It occurs to Beatrice for the first time that there’s a certain power in being nothing; she thinks of that old tale where the clever Crone tells a man her name is Nobody, and when asked who cursed him the man cries, “Nobody!” while the witch escapes.
“Go home. I’ll meet you at the library tomorrow.” Quinn gives her a last amber look and disappears.
Beatrice counts very slowly to twenty, then turns on her heel and heads due west toward the New Salem Hall of Justice.
Because she isn’t as much a fool as Quinn and that Araminta woman seem to think, she stops first at a certain disreputable establishment on St. Mary-of-Egypt’s. She asks for Miss Pearl and finds herself shuffled into a spare, practical powder room on the first floor. Pearl’s eyes are puffed and bluish, her nails still grimed with grave-dirt. She lights a thin cigarette as she listens to Beatrice’s request and nods once. “The bastards took Frankie, too. Ask after her, won’t you?”
When Beatrice leaves Salem’s Sin she is a crone in truth: her eyes are filmy blue and her hair is the yellowed ivory of a pulled tooth. Her flesh stretches thin and frail over her cheekbones. Some of it is clever powders and dyes and some of it is more, the words and ways a whore might use either to attract attention or divert it. She was rather hoping to be disguised as a busty blond or a sultry Jezebel, but Miss Pearl recommended wrinkles. “Men stop seeing you altogether, after a certain age.”
The clerk at the front desk of the New Salem Hall of Justice doesn’t even look up as she approaches, so perhaps Pearl was right. He remains bent over a stack of paperwork, scratching idly at his pimpled chin, apparently unbothered by the sickly smell that rises from the floorboards: a stagnant reek, like still water and old meat.
She raps her knuckles on his desk and he looks up at Beatrice with bored, pinkish eyes.
“I am looking for information regarding a woman taken into custody early this morning. A Miss James Juniper Eastwood.”
A dim spark of interest. “She one of the witches they brung in?”
Beatrice gives the clerk her most severe librarian’s glare and is gratified to see him straighten reflexively in his seat. “What she is or isn’t remains to be proven in a court of law, sir. What I would like to know is where she’s being held, on what charges, and in what specific condition. I am also interested in the whereabouts of a Miss Frankie Ursa Black and Miss Jennie Lin—”
“S’not public information, ma’am.” He shrugs. “Didn’t look too good when they drug her in, though.”
Cold sloshes in Beatrice’s stomach. She gathers herself. “I would like to speak to your supervisor immediately, young man. A girl has been arrested and apparently injured, without due process or a fair trial—”
Her outrage attracts the attention of the officers lounging in the back office. One of them slouches to the front. “What’s it to you, woman?”
Beatrice transfers her milky glare to him. “I am Miss Eastwood’s landlady, if you must know. And I take considerable offense when one of my tenants is arrested on false charges.”
The officer grunts at her. “There’s nothing false about her charges, ma’am.” He scrounges lazily through the detritus of the front desk and produces a poster with WANTED FOR MURDER & SUSPECTED WITCHCRAFT printed in large capitals beneath a drawing of a woman’s face. Her hair is an untidy sprawl of ink rather than the chopped-short nest Beatrice knows, but it’s unmistakably Juniper. The artist captured the defiant line of her long jaw, the wild gleam of her eyes.
Beatrice swallows. “I’m not sure what this proves, precisely, but—”
The officer slides another paper across the desk: a yellowed page from The Lexington Herald. MURDER BY MAGIC, it reads, CROW COUNTY VETERAN FOUND DEAD.
Beatrice doesn’t need to read the article, because she already knows what it says. She found out seven years ago what Juniper was, what lay coiled beneath her skin, waiting to strike. Her daddy should have remembered it, too, but maybe he got soft or stupid over the years. Maybe one day he took too much from her, some last precious thing, and left her with nothing to lose.