Bella is searching for words that might adequately express her gratitude and relief when Juniper says, “Well hot damn, sir,” in her burnt rasp of a voice, and Mr. Blackwell leads them into the kitchen, chuckling.
Much later that evening, after Bella and her sisters have consumed a frankly astonishing number of tiny crustless sandwiches and Agnes has retired to the secret room with Eve, her eyes bruised and sleepless, Bella and Mr. Blackwell sit in a matched pair of armchairs with a neglected checkerboard and an un-neglected bottle of chardonnay between them.
“Thank you. For letting us stay.” It seems to require unusual effort to enunciate. “It’s a lovely house.”
Mr. Blackwell plucks an ebony checker from the board and studies it a little morosely. “I thought for a while it might be yours, if you would have me.”
It takes several seconds for Bella to process this statement, and another several to respond. “You what?”
“Oh, merely as a matter of convenience! You had no family and I had no wife, and I thought we might be pleasant enough companions, despite the difference in our ages. Of course as soon as I saw you and Miss Quinn together several things became clear to me.” Blackwell blinks at her, brow furrowed. “I hope I haven’t caused you any distress.”
“No, it’s just . . . I never thought . . .”
Mr. Blackwell gives her another of his affable smiles, but the edges are turned downward. “Someone along the line misled you as to your worth, Miss Eastwood.” Distantly, through the froth of chardonnay, Bella hears the word nothing in her daddy’s voice. “I should quite like to give him a piece of my mind.”
“I—thank you.” She thinks of Juniper, the hiss of scales over straw, the sin she bore for all of them. “But it’s no longer possible.”
Mr. Blackwell nods, unsurprised. “Good.”
She thinks of Cleo’s eyes on her face before they parted, studying her as if she were precious, even vital. “Or necessary.”
“Even better.” Mr. Blackwell raises his glass. “Give Miss Quinn my warmest thanks.”
They sip their wine. Bella imagines a version of her life where she never met Cleopatra Quinn, where she married Mr. Blackwell and lived in this pleasant red-brick house until she was a crone in truth, reading witch-tales by the fireside in winter and dreaming of better worlds. She thinks of the old story of the witch who buried her heart in a silver box beneath the snow so that she might never be hurt. A chill shivers up her spine.
Blackwell sets his glass among the checkers. “Did you truly find it?”
Bella knows from the soft reverence of his voice what he means. “We did.” She can’t help the note of pride in her voice.
“And is it truly gone?”
Her voice this time is a graveside whisper. “It is. Although—” She withdraws her little black notebook from her skirt pocket and runs her thumb across the cover. “It has been recently brought to my attention that not all witching was lost, that night.”
“Oh?” It’s the same oh? he used to give her over lunch in the College library, which granted her permission to lecture to her heart’s content about the lives of Saints or the execrable handwriting of monks. Bella smiles a small, wistful smile for those quiet, safe days, and tells him more or less everything there is to tell.
She tells him about Old Salem and the sewing sampler and the owl winging toward her through the trees; living in the lost library of Avalon, outside of time and mind, and standing in its ashes; Araminta’s spells, which rely on stars and songs rather than rhymes and herbs, and her growing suspicion that witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.
She tells him far more than she needs to, and he listens with considering nods and small smiles and a few my words.
“I was hoping to ask Araminta about the scarification process and their mother’s-names, but then Hill’s shadows turned up in New Cairo. Oh! The wards!”
Bella stands so abruptly that her blood thuds in her skull. She reels to the front door and pours a line of salt and thistle across the threshold. Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Guard the bed that I lay on.
She’s on her sixth window before she notices the yellowing grains of salt already lying on the sills. “Did you ward your house already?”
Mr. Blackwell looks a little sheepish. “Not nearly so well as you are, I’m sure. It’s just that fever—the Second Plague, some are calling it now—has been creeping north. It strikes me as uncanny, so I thought perhaps a little uncanniness might keep it at bay.” He nudges his spectacles back up his nose. “My great-aunt taught me a few little charms here and there.”
Bella would like to ask more about all this—a man working witchcraft, an uncanny sickness—but at that moment Juniper emerges from behind the bookshelf. She is wrapped in a dark cloak, limping badly without her red-cedar staff, her eyes the green-lit gray of the sea before a storm. She pauses to sweep the two of them a bow before slipping out the front door and vanishing into the deepening night.
“What is she doing, at this hour?”
“Whatever she can. Whatever might help.” Bella sighs. “I imagine we’ll read about it in tomorrow’s papers.”
Juniper has never cared much for reading (or any of the others of Miss Hurston’s three R’s), but over the next few weeks she acquires the habit of reading the paper over breakfast. Or at least the headlines: SISTERS EASTWOOD STILL AT LARGE; NEW SALEM CHIEF OF POLICE RESIGNS AMID RUMORS OF NERVOUS BREAKDOWN; HILL’S RALLY INTERRUPTED BY BAYING DOGS AND STRONG WINDS.
The other Sisters tell Juniper that Mayor Worthington is leaning on The Post not to print the most hysterical stories: that the Eastwoods can transform themselves into black birds or possibly bats; that the Crone herself is currently living on the south end, keeping company with colored women; that the Mother gave birth to a little devil-child with hair the color of Hell itself.
“Bet the bastards wish they’d just given us the vote when we asked nicely,” says Electa Gage, with no small degree of satisfaction. “Too late now.”
The previous week the City Council issued a statement that the suffrage question could not possibly be entertained in the current climate. “And frankly,” Mr. Hill had told the papers, “if this is what happens when women gain some measure of power, we have grave doubts about the advisability of granting them more.”
Following this announcement, several members of the New Salem Women’s Association had found their way to the Sisters, their jaws gritted, looking for witch-ways and words.
The Sisters rarely congregate, these days. They speak instead by mockingbird and smoke-signal, by letters that can only be seen by friendly eyes and notes that ignite after reading. They meet only for furtive exchanges of spells and safe houses and disperse before they can be found by the things that hunt them: the mobs of men with brass badges and torches, the steel-jawed officers on white horses, the eyeless shadows that twist up from sewer grates and reach after them.
But they are prey with teeth and claws of their own, now. They have the spells they stole from Avalon before it burned, still stitched into hems or written in recipe-books; they have the words and ways taught to them by their grandmothers and aunts and neighbor-ladies, now shared between them; they have August’s little boys’ Latin and Araminta’s songs, chanted prayers from a pair of dark-eyed Russian girls, and even a few shuffling dances from the Dakota woman. And Bella is still gathering more. Everywhere they stay she asks for their stories or spells or songs, whatever ways they’ve found to talk to the great red heartbeat on the other side, and adds them carefully to her collection. Her little black notebook has become a sort of patchworked grimoire, part spell-book and part diary. Juniper has seen Bella writing in it long into the evenings and suspects her of adding wholly unnecessary narrative; she figures it comes of reading too many novels as a girl.