“Of course, Miss Calliope. But no one will overhear us here.”
They settle at a table in the dimmest corner of the dance hall, nearly invisible beneath the haze of tobacco and ether. Mr. Lee seems content simply to watch her in silence, his hands pressed to the frost of his beer glass, until she asks, “Why are you here, Mr. Lee? I thought you’d be back in Chicago, by now.”
He looks out at the press and swirl of bodies and doesn’t answer directly. “I grew up in West Babel, did you know that? My folks split a room with Annie and her family—twelve of us packed like fish into two rooms. My father worked for Boyle’s, over in the Sallows.” Boyle’s is a meat-packing factory crouched on the west side of the Thorn, all grease and offal and missing fingers. “People said he was a fighter, but he wasn’t really. He was a dreamer, always on about the eight-hour day and workers’ rights and utopia. It’s just that dreamers generally wind up fighting. He started having men over to our place, drawing up charters . . . He was a half-step away from a real union when they got him.”
“Who got him?” Agnes doesn’t know why he’s telling her all this, but she likes the warmth of his voice when he mentions his father. She wonders what it would feel like to mourn your daddy rather than merely outlive him.
Lee takes a drink, sets his glass precisely back in the damp ring it left behind. “Boyle’s men, we think. They said it was an accident, that he was fooling around on the line. But we saw him, after. I don’t know how a man could contrive to hang himself on a meat hook without a little help.” Another drink, much longer. Agnes wants to cover his hand with hers. She presses her fingers flat to the table. “Lawyers from the plant came to see us a few days after. They asked my mother to sign some papers swearing that her husband’s death had been his own doing. They sat at our kitchen table and handed her a pen. She looked at me—I was fourteen, old enough to know the truth—and then she looked away. She signed their paper and that was that.
“I wasn’t at home if I could help it, after. I fell in with Dad’s old friends, went looking for trouble. Found some, in Chicago.” He rubs the scar along his jaw. “And it was—well, it was awful, to tell the truth. Uglier and meaner than I thought it would be. But it was grand, too, to be part of something. To find a fight worth having.”
There’s an earnestness in his voice that makes him sound young and desperately naive; Agnes wonders if he’s a dreamer, too. She asks again, lower, “So why are you still here?”
That sweet smile, hitched sideways by his scar. “Because I found an even bigger fight, I guess.” His eyes flash up to hers. “And a woman who won’t look away.”
Her stomach sours with shame. Wouldn’t I, August? Agnes doesn’t say anything for a long time, digging her thumbnail into the soft wood of the table and thinking about when to fold and when to fight. She realizes her thumb is sketching three woven circles and stops.
“When is she due?” Lee is looking at the dent where her belly presses against the table.
“Barley Moon. The midwife says she’s big, though, so it could be sooner.” Agnes doesn’t mention the flutter of fear in her belly, the memory of her mother’s skin whiter than wax. Maybe Mama Mags could have saved her, but maybe not. Mags told her once their family lost more women to the birthing bed than they did men to the battlefield.
Lee’s voice goes a little lower, almost fearful. “Who was he?”
It takes Agnes a long minute to understand who he’s referring to; she hasn’t thought twice about Floyd Matthews all summer. “Nobody. A nice boy from uptown.”
“Did you love him?” She can tell by the braced shape of his shoulders that the question matters a great deal to him; she wishes it didn’t.
“No, August. I didn’t love him.” His whole body seems to exhale. “But the more interesting question is: did he love me?”
“Did he love you?” he asks obediently. There’s a puzzled crease between his brows.
“Only some of me. And I’m tired of making do with some, with half-measures.”
Agnes watches his mouth open and close and then open again, and she’s suddenly sure he’s on the verge of making some declaration or vow because he thinks, poor fool, that he loves all of her. Because he doesn’t know how cold and cruel she is beneath the softness of her skin, doesn’t know the anything-at-all she would do to survive.
She stands up from the table, pushing her chair back. “I’d have done the same thing your mother did.” She aims it like a slap, and he rocks back with the force of it. “Did you never think what would have happened if she’d fought? How easy it is for lawyers to take a child away from a woman alone? Did you never think what it must have cost to choose her living son over her dead husband?”
She sees from the sudden white of his face that he never has.
“Sometimes you can’t fight. Sometimes you can only survive.”
He swallows once. “And yet you’re still fighting.”
Agnes draws her half-cloak back over her shoulders. “If you and your boys want to help the Sisters, talk to Annie or Yulia. Not me.”
“Wait—why? What are you doing?”
She looks back once before she leaves, a last greedy glance at the tangle of his hair and the angle of his scar. “Surviving.”
Juniper is a ghost, these days.
She is a silhouette on the windowsill, an apparition in the alley, a woman there and gone again. She is a pocketful of witch-ways and a voice whispering the right words to the right woman, the clack of a cane against cobbles.
She is rarely out in daylight, and she finds she likes the city better by night. It’s stranger and wilder, full of soft voices and scurrying feet. It reminds her of running the mountainside after dark, surefooted and free, certain that if she ran fast enough she would become a doe or a vixen, anything but a girl.
Now she runs along alleys rather than deer trails and ducks beneath laundry-lines rather than pine boughs. Now she runs toward rather than away, and she no longer runs alone.
There are fewer Sisters of Avalon than there once were—some of them were caught, some of them left town a half-skip ahead of the law, some of them were just scared—and they no longer have anything like headquarters. Instead they meet wherever they may: an attic above a hat shop that smells of glue and felt; Inez’s gilded parlor, where they drink wine from golden goblets and laugh themselves sick; a church basement that makes Juniper’s heart race in her throat.
Juniper and Bella bring the Sisters spells written out in plain English and the words disappear up sleeves and down boots. Later they are whispered by those who can read to those who can’t; stitched into handkerchiefs and hems; tucked into the pages of romance novels so frivolous that no man is likely to touch them. In return the Sisters give them bread and soft-baked potatoes, hot pies wrapped in dish towels, baskets of apples. They don’t ask where the Eastwoods live or how they disappear so thoroughly that neither the police nor the angry mobs—nor those eerie, unnatural shadows—can find them. They look at Juniper and Bella with shining eyes, waiting for the next trick, the next miracle, the next proof that witching has returned.