By the time Beatrice is in her attic room, peering down from her round window, Quinn is gone, vanished entirely from the neat grid of streets below.
Beatrice dreams that night of witches and traveling bards and a golden-haired girl smiling from a tower window. Except her hair isn’t golden at all, actually, and her smile is full of secrets.
The following morning, Bella pins her own hair with unusual severity and stares hard at her reflection in the mirror, reminding herself that she is bony and graying and very boring. Then she feels the tug of her sisters through the line—still alive, still together, moving through the city—and wonders if perhaps she is growing less boring the longer James Juniper remains in New Salem.
Beatrice steps into the street just after sunrise, when the shadows lie soft and the air sparks with dew, and hopes very much that Mr. Black-well will forgive her for missing a second day of work.
The headquarters of the New Salem Women’s Association are already jammed full of bustling women and urgent whispers. Miss Stone stands behind the front desk like a small general overseeing her troops, wig pinned slightly askew. She is so surrounded by people—a hand-wringing lady wearing a monocle, a roundish woman in a very fine dress, that young secretary girl sporting a bruised jaw and a sullen expression—that Beatrice doesn’t think she notices the chime of the bell as she enters.
Until she looks up and fixes Beatrice with an iron glare. “Miss East-wood, wasn’t it? I thought you were too busy for suffrage.”
“Oh, I—that is—”
But Miss Stone is already looking back down at the papers spread before her. “If you’re looking for that sister of yours, she’s not here.”
“No, but—”
“And if she has any sense of prudence at all, she will not dare to show her face here again.”
Beatrice deduces from this that Miss Stone was previously unaware of Juniper’s little spectacle, that she has since become aware of it, and that she suffers from the mistaken belief that Juniper possesses a sense of prudence.
She further deduces that the next several minutes are going to be uncomfortable ones. She manages a faint “Oh, dear” before the bell chimes again and Juniper herself strides into the office with all the swagger and charm of a prize-fighter after a winning match, staff clacking merrily across the floorboards. Agnes comes slinking in after her, looking like a woman with deep misgivings about her choices.
The whispers wither and die. A dozen pairs of eyes land on Juniper. She gives them a beatific smile. “Morning, ladies. Bella! What are you doing here?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer. She grabs one of the spindly chairs by the window and perches on the very edge, knees wide and hands crossed atop her staff, still beaming.
The smile dims when she catches sight of the secretary and the swollen bruise along her jaw. “So you made it out alright. The others, too?”
The girl nods, a furtive flash of pride in her eyes. “We think Electa’s got a busted rib, but she’ll be alright.” It occurs to Beatrice to wonder how exactly they all escaped unscathed, and if perhaps the respectable members of the Women’s Association have a few words and ways they shouldn’t.
Guilt crosses Juniper’s face, a foreign expression, but she banishes it with a little shake of her head. “Well. I hope at least we can all agree.”
Miss Stone—who has until now been standing perfectly still—clears her throat to ask, “On what, exactly?”
Juniper apparently doesn’t hear the tension lurking in Miss Stone’s voice like an unsprung trap. She meets her eyes squarely. “That we aren’t going to get a damn thing by asking nice and minding our manners. That we need to make use of every weapon we have, or they’ll beat us bloody in the streets.” Juniper leans forward, that swaggering smile returning. “That it’s time for the women’s movement to become the witches’ movement.”
The silence following this statement is so profound that Beatrice imagines she can hear the veins pulsing in Miss Stone’s temples.
Juniper speaks into the quiet, heedless. “It was witching that saved me in the street yesterday, and it’s witching that will win us the vote. More than just the vote—back in the old days women were queens and scholars and generals! We could have all that back again. My sister—Bella, I mean; this is Agnes, our other sister”—a look of genuine horror crosses Miss Stone’s face as she contemplates the prospect of another Eastwood—“anyway, Bella has been doing some research about that tower we saw on the equinox. I think it’s . . .” Juniper’s eyes cross Bella’s, and Bella knows that Juniper has guessed what the tower is, what the sign of three circles must mean. “I think it’s important. That it might bring witching back to the world.”
Juniper looks around at the stone-still women. “What do you say?”
None of them answer. Miss Stone exhales a very long sigh into the silence and lowers herself into her chair. She leans back, regarding Juniper with an almost bewildered expression, as if she can’t understand how someone so young could be so powerfully irritating. “Miss West. The Women’s Association has no interest in your wild theories or dangerous ideas.”
The smile slides off Juniper’s face like frosting off a too-hot cake. “Well, as a member of the Women’s Association, I think—”
Miss Stone produces a bitter ha of laughter. “Oh, you are certainly no longer that.”
“Excuse me?”
“I, as president of the Association, do officially expel you from our company, and deeply regret ever having granted you membership.”
Juniper is standing now, fingers white around her staff. “How dare you—”
Miss Stone counts on her fingers, voice very cool. “You organized an illegal assembly against the will of the Association. You made a public demonstration of witchcraft. You endangered the lives of the six fools who followed you into your treason. Saints only know what else you did—the rumors are nearly too wild to believe. Perhaps you have a pair of black horns on your head. Perhaps you can fly. Perhaps you set a demon-snake on an innocent child.” Beatrice flinches. No one notices.
“Look, you wanted to get people’s attention, and we got it. If you’re going to get upset that I defended myself, I don’t—”
Miss Stone raises her voice very slightly. “Miss Wiggin, the head of the Women’s Christian Union—and, I might add, the adopted daughter of a member of the City Council—was injured in the riot. She claims it was an act of witchcraft, and I am disgusted to say I am unsure whether she is lying.”
Juniper’s mouth is open again, but Miss Stone ignores her. She leans forward over the desktop, hands knitted. “I have dedicated the better part of my life to the uplift of women. I was there at Seneca, at the very beginning.” Her fury seems to have blown itself out like a summer storm, leaving her winded and tired. “They laughed at us. Derided us, mocked us, printed vicious cartoons in every paper. We kept working. We built organizations all over the country, saw suffrage laws passed in three states, brought attention to the plight of our sex—but now they are no longer laughing, Miss West. Now—thanks to you and your accomplices—they are afraid. And we could lose everything.”
Juniper strides forward and places her palms on the desk, wearing a look of such blazing intensity that Beatrice feels it scorch her cheeks as it passes. “Or we could win it all. If we stop worrying so much about what a woman should and shouldn’t do, what’s respectable and what’s not. If we stand and fight, all of us together. Imagine if there’d been seventy of us marching, instead of seven!” Miss Stone looks faintly ill at the thought. “There’s this book Bella used to read us when we were little, about these three French soldiers—what’s the thing they said?” She throws the question sideways to Beatrice.
Beatrice clears her throat, cheeks pinking. “All for one and one for all.”
“That’s it.” Juniper’s face is lit now by some internal glow, a passion like the sun itself. “It has to be all for one and one for all, Miss Stone.”
Every eye is on the
young woman with the crow’s-wing hair and the long jaw and the summer-green gaze—like and not like the feral girl-child Beatrice remembers—and for a wild moment Beatrice thinks they’re going to listen to her.
Miss Stone laughs. It’s not a cruel laugh, but Beatrice sees it hit Juniper like a slap. “Goodbye, Miss West. I can’t wish you luck, for the sake of the city.”
Juniper straightens from the desk, all the glow gone from her eyes, face pinched tight, and gives the room a mocking bow. She limps out the office door without looking back. She never let their daddy see her cry, either.
Agnes follows. She pauses to hold the door behind her and looks up at Beatrice, almost as if she’s waiting for her. As if they are still little girls tumbling into the farmhouse, one-two-three, holding the door carelessly open behind them for the next one. “Well?” Agnes sounds annoyed, whether with herself or her sister Beatrice can’t tell.
Beatrice feels Miss Stone’s eyes on her face. “I don’t know you, Miss Eastwood, but you seem a respectable woman. That sister—those sisters of yours will lead you astray.”
Beatrice hesitates. She thinks about the fates of girls who go astray in all the stories, the hot iron shoes and glass coffins and witches’ ovens. (She thinks about St. Hale’s, a prison built especially for straying girls.)
But then Beatrice looks at Agnes still waiting for her, half scowling, and thinks about what else awaits those gone-astray girls: the daring escapes and wild dances, the midnight trysts and starlit spells, a whole world’s worth of disreputable delights.
Beatrice bows her head as she leaves. “So I hope, Miss Stone.”
Agnes is just about to give up and close the damn door behind her, to hell with Bella and the suffragists both, when Bella finally makes up her mind. She goes sailing past Agnes, spine uncrooked, cheeks pink with some private pleasure. Their eyes meet, then slide away.
Juniper is already stamping down the street, clacking her staff with such aggression that passersby scuttle aside. “Those thrice-damned boot-licking shit-witches! Too cussed cowardly to take a damn stand—to hell with them!” She spins to face the plate-glass window of the Association headquarters and crosses her fingers in a gesture of such exceptional rudeness that Bella chokes, “June.”
Juniper spins back to face her sisters. Her eyes are bright and green as fox-fire. “So. What do you say?”
“To what?”
Juniper looks at Bella like she wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “To witching! To the Lost Way of Avalon!”
Bella shushes her, casting worried looks at the genteel bustle of the street: mothers with their hats just so and children with their clothes starched stiff, maids with baskets of fresh white laundry and gentlemen checking their pocket-watches. It strikes Agnes suddenly how ludicrous it is that they should be plotting the second age of witching in the middle of a sunny, orderly street on the north end, surrounded by clerks and investors and clean limestone. Surely it calls for a haunted moor or a misted cemetery.
Bella says, low and urgent, “Juniper, I don’t know what you know or think you know about that tower, but I assure you I don’t have the secret recipe for Avalon stuffed in my socks.”
Juniper crosses her arms, runs her tongue over her teeth. “I know you know more than you’ve told me.”
“I—I—” Bella stutters, and Agnes marvels that she grew up in their daddy’s house without learning how to lie properly. “Yes. Alright. I found some . . . words, the day the tower appeared. I don’t know what came over me, but I spoke them aloud. And then . . .” She gestures upward, recalling the splitting seam of the sky and the dark tower.
Juniper stares hard for another second, then grins. “You snake. I knew it was you. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Bella fumbles for an answer, but Agnes perfectly understands why a person might hesitate to give a vicious, vengeful girl the key to a mysterious and boundless power. There were stories in the old days about whole cities put to sleep, kingdoms frozen over in endless winter, armies reduced to rust and ash.
Juniper waves away Bella’s stutters. “Doesn’t matter now. The real question is: why haven’t you done it again?”
“Because it wasn’t a complete spell. It’s missing some of the words, and all of the ways.”
“Then find them! What exactly have you and your lady friend been up to, all those late nights in the library?”
A flush creeps up Bella’s neck. “She’s not my—Miss Quinn and I have been searching. We’ve collected some scraps, some possibilities, but we have nothing but theories, so far.”
“So let’s test them.” Bella looks doubtful and Juniper presses on, heedless. “Listen. Ever since the equinox the three of us have been bound together, haven’t we?”
Bella tsks, sliding her spectacles up her long nose. “An effect of an unfinished spell, I told you.”
“And how come the three of us were pulled into that spell in the first place? After seven years apart, what drew us together just when our oldest sister got stupid and read some words out loud?” Juniper’s voice lowers. “And before that—didn’t you feel something tugging you toward the square?”
Agnes remembers it: a line reeling her in, a finger prodding between her shoulder blades. She feels it still, an invisible hand chivying her toward her sisters despite her better judgment.
“Mags always said anything lost could be found. Remember that song she taught us? What is lost, that can’t be found?”
Bella blinks several times and murmurs, “I do, yes.”
“Well, I think maybe magic wants to be found. And I think maybe we’re the ones who are supposed to find it.”
“What, like fate?” It’s the first thing Agnes has said since they stepped outside, and both her sisters flinch from the venom of it. “Like destiny?” Fate is a story people tell themselves so they can believe everything happens for a reason, that the whole awful world is fitted together like some perfect machine, with blood for oil and bones for brass. That every child locked in her cellar or girl chained to her loom is in her right and proper place.
She doesn’t much care for fate.
Even Juniper looks a little cowed by whatever she sees in Agnes’s face. “Maybe not. Maybe it’s just luck that Bella found that spell. That the three of us wound up in St. George’s Square. On the equinox. A maiden”—she taps her own chest. “A mother”—she nods to Agnes. Bella casts her such a baffled, owlish look that Agnes suspects she didn’t notice the swell of her belly until this very second. Her mouth makes a small, perfect O.
“And a crone.” Juniper points at Bella, who makes a disgruntled sound. “Like the Last Three themselves.”
None of them speak for a moment. Juniper limps a little closer, until they stand in a tight circle of three, heads nearly touching. “Maybe Agnes is right, and that’s all horseshit. But what if it isn’t? What if we could make every woman in this city into a witch, just like that?” Juniper snaps her fingers. “No more reading witch-tales in books, Bell—you could write them yourself! And no more shit-work for shit-money, Ag. No more being nothing.” Her voice thickens on the last word.
Juniper breathes hard through her nose and asks them a second time: “What do you say?”
“Alright.” Bella looks stunned by the sound of her own voice. “Yes.”
Juniper swivels to Agnes. “And you? Will you help us?” Her jaw is set, her eyes shining, and Agnes marvels at the contradiction of her: bright-eyed and black-hearted, vicious and vulnerable, a girl who knows so little of the world and far too much. A part of Agnes wants to say yes just so she can keep an eye on her.
Except she doesn’t get to choose for herself anymore. She smooths her blouse over her belly. “I can’t start any trouble. For her sake.”
Juniper looks down at her hand. “Oh, I think you’ve got to. For her sake.” She meets Agnes’s eyes, challenging. “Don’t you want to give her a better story than this one?”
Agnes does. Oh, how she does—to see her daughter
grow free and fearless, walking tall through the dark woods of the world, armed and armored. To whisper in her ear each night: Don’t forget what you are.
Everything.
Agnes’s throat is too full-up with wanting to speak. Bella offers, tentatively, “You know the Mother herself started all sorts of trouble, in the stories. I wish . . .” Her voice lowers. “I think it might have been better for us if we’d had a more troublesome mother.”
Agnes looks between them, her wild sister and her wise sister.
She nods her head, once.
Juniper is whooping and thumping Agnes too hard on the back, already badgering Bella about the Lost Way, and Bella is shushing her to no discernible effect, when footsteps sound behind them.
Agnes turns to see the secretary girl from the Women’s Association, with her cornsilk hair and blue-bruised jaw. As she approaches, Agnes sees she’s not as mousy as she’d thought: her eyes are hard, shining with newborn conviction.
“Jennie?” Juniper asks. “What—”
“I want to join.” Jennie says it very fast, like a person diving into cold water before they can change their mind.
“That’s nice,” Juniper says. “Join who?”
Jennie frowns as if she thinks Juniper is making fun of her. “You.” Her eyes skitter to Agnes and Bella. “Your new society.”
Bella starts to say something calm and reasonable, like, There’s been some sort of misunderstanding! We’re not forming a society at all. Sorry for your trouble, but Juniper is already reaching out a welcoming hand, smiling with all the glee of a missionary contemplating a convert.
“Why, Jennie. You can be our first member.”
Bella makes a wheezy, punctured-tire noise. “I’m not sure—I don’t know—” But Juniper has an arm slung over Jennie’s shoulder and Jennie is smiling a shy smile.
“Well.” Bella sighs. “There were really four musketeers, anyway.”
Tell your tale and tell it true,
The Once and Future Witches Page 12