The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  A small, regal woman shuffles up to the counter wearing a wide-brimmed hat hung with lace. Her face behind the veil is all cheekbone and chin, bones and angles, but the cheeks lift in a smile when she sees Quinn.

  “Evening,” Quinn greets her. She nudges Beatrice, who lowers the dark drape of her hood.

  The woman stares at Beatrice for a long, still second before sighing, “Oh, Cleo,” very much like a mother whose daughter has brought home a particularly unlovely pet and begged to keep it.

  Quinn answers with crisp formality. “The third spectacle was an ambush. I saw at least four of the Sisters taken into custody, including their leader. Her blood-sister.” She tilts her head at Beatrice. “When I understood what was happening I . . . intervened.”

  The woman behind the counter—Araminta?—murmurs something like obviously.

  “With your permission, we’ll stay here till dawn.” The woman’s eyes slide between them again, a little too knowing; Beatrice squirms. “And then in the morning I’ll take her . . . wherever she likes.”

  “The Hall of Justice, I suppose,” Beatrice sighs, and finds herself the object of two identical yellow stares. “T-to sort all this out.”

  Araminta begins to laugh then, a rolling cackle, and does not stop for a long time. “Oh, sweet Saints preserve us. You’re going to march straight into the lion’s den and do what? Ask them real nice to give your sister back? This”—she waves a knobbed knuckle at Beatrice but addresses Quinn—“is exactly the kind of foolishness I was talking about. This is why we’re better off keeping to ourselves.”

  “Excuse me,” Beatrice says stiffly. “My sister has been arrested on false charges”—well, probably false—“and they can’t hold a woman indefinitely without hard evidence.”

  This only provokes an even longer, more extravagant laugh from Araminta. She’s thumbing actual tears from her eyes by the time it subsides.

  Araminta turns away to face a gilded cage that sits behind the counter. She extends two fingers through the bars to stroke the creature inside it: a rabbit, whose fur is such a deep and starless black that it seems to swallow the candlelight like an open mouth.

  Araminta addresses Beatrice over one shoulder. “They can do exactly whatever they want, child. I’d bet my eye-teeth your sister is already in the Deeps.” She catches sight of Beatrice’s face and the carved lines around her mouth soften very slightly. “I’m sorry for it. Truly, I am. But it’s too late for her now.”

  It’s not the harshness of the words that undoes Beatrice; it’s the pity lurking beneath them. Terror closes like cold water above her.

  If Quinn or Araminta says anything further, Beatrice doesn’t hear it. She is distantly aware of an arm around her shoulders, shepherding her behind the counter and up a narrow flight of stairs; a warm room that smells of spice and skin; a bed spread with saffron quilts.

  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 knuckle
s 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.

  Beatrice skims The Herald: untimely death; signs of the uncanny; daughter seen fleeing the property.

  She slides it back across the desk and the officer shakes his head. “What kind of woman would kill her own father, eh?” He taps the paper twice. “This’ll be in The Post first thing in the morning. I wouldn’t go around telling folks you rented a room to a murderess, if I was you.”

  Beatrice notices a brass badge shining dully on his chest, showing a torch raised high, and understands that Miss Quinn was right. That there will be no bail or due process, that the rule of law has given way to the rule of men and mobs. That it’s too late.

  She retreats, and watches the men forget her as soon as she leaves their sight. Outside the air is thick and gray with the promise of rain. Beatrice tries hard not to think of Juniper down in the Deeps, all alone with the rising water. At least the cellar was dry, most days.

  Beatrice doesn’t know where she’s walking until she is standing in the wood-paneled hall of the Salem College Library, blinking dimly at her office door. Her sanctuary, her one safe place.

  But there’s something subtly wrong. It takes her a frazzled moment to realize that her nameplate—the cream-colored card with her name in neat script—is missing from its brass holder.

  Her door is locked.

  She stares at it for several seconds before retreating to the washroom and scrubbing the disguise from her face. Her own eyes are clouds looming back at her in the mirror.

  Miss Munley is working at the circulation desk today, shuffling stacks of paper in a way that is meant to communicate that she’s very busy and harried and doesn’t have time for nuisances like Beatrice.

  “E-excuse me, ma’am?” (After St. Hale’s, Beatrice’s words developed a tendency to clot and stick in her throat, like sour milk. It took years to make them flow cleanly again.) “My office seems to be locked.”

  Miss Munley doesn’t look up at her. “It is no longer your office, I’m afraid.” Her voice is as crisp and neat as the turn of a staple.

  “Why?”

  She taps her papers on the desk to neaten the edges and meets Beatrice’s eyes. “Because—in light of recent information provided to us by a concerned citizen—you are no longer employed by the library.”

  The numbness creeps over her again, the chill of betrayal. Someone betrayed more than the time and place of their doomed spectacle; someone whispered names and positions. But then why isn’t Beatrice down in the Deeps beside her sister?

  “I see.” Beatrice’s voice sounds like it’s coming through an especially battered phonograph, warbly and tinny. “May I retrieve my personal effects?” What would the police make of her stacks of children’s tales and folklore, her scribbled words and ways—her black leather notebook, ringed with salt?

  “No. In fact we have been instructed to inform the authorities if we see you on the premises.” Miss Munley slants an unreadable look at Beatrice and adds, “So I would advise you to leave the premises at once. Before I see you.”

  Beatrice leaves the premises. She stands in St. George’s Square, unmoving, unmoored.

  She wants very badly to go home, but the little attic room has never been her home. Her home was always witch-tales and words, stories into which she could escape when her own became too terrible to bear. It was the soft quiet of the stacks and her too-small office and the scratch of her pen across the page. All of it, lost.

  It begins, gently, to rain.

  Beatrice is very familiar with despair. It’s followed her since St. Hale’s, trailing like a loyal black dog behind her, nipping sometimes at her heels. Now she greets it calmly, almost gladly, like a childhood friend.

  Agnes knows despair. She first met it on the night her mother died—a black hound that curled on her chest, bending her ribs inward—and has often heard the pad of its steps following her up the boarding-house stairs.

  Now she feels its eyes watching her from the shadows of the mill-house floor.

  She stands clustered with the other girls, murmuring and whispering. Annie is there, pale and puffy-eyed, and Yulia, with her lips white and thin. Her eldest daughter is there beside her, but the next-eldest is missing. Caught, as she fled the witch-yard? Struck by the summer’s fever, like so many other girls?

  Mr. Malton glares out at them from eyes like peppercorns, small and dry. Agnes can tell he’s skipped his morning drink, can almost feel the blood thudding resentfully in his ears.

  “You’ve all read the papers, by now.” They haven’t, because a quarter of them can’t read and another quarter can’t read English and none of them can afford the over-sized special issues the paper-boys are running up and down the streets, but the mill already hums and hisses with rumors. Only Agnes and the other Sisters kept their mouths shut and their eyes down this morning.

  “There are witches walking among us once more. They caught the ringleader early this morning—some madwoman from down south, I heard—but some of them still roam free.” Malton waves a creased page of newsprint in the air. Agnes does not permit her eyes to follow it. She can feel the soft heat of Bella somewhere to the north, but nothing but a cold absence where Juniper should be.

  Malton wheels, fixing them with his red-veined stare. “And I have it on good authority that some of them might even be standing right in front of me, posing as good honest working-women in order to seduce others to their cause.”

  Agnes does not flinch, does not breathe. What authority?

  “So I’m here to offer you girls a warning: if I get so much as a whiff of witching—or unionizing, suffrage, any of that trash—I’ll take it straight to the police, make no mistake.” His eyes rake them, and Agnes
catches the wet gleam of fear beneath all his bluster. She wants very badly to make him more afraid.

  “As it is,” he finishes, “you’ve all earned yourselves a week without work.”

  Gasps and curses ripple through them. A week without pay means hungry children and cold stoves and maybe angry husbands.

  Someone shouts, “You can’t do that!” and Malton spits back, “The hell I can’t.” His nose throbs an unhealthy purple. “The Baldwins have agreed: we can run on scabs and day-workers for a week while you girls take some time to consider your situations. Decide where your loyalties lie.”

  The mill seethes around Agnes. Women exchange bitter glares of blame and suspicion, eyeing one another as if they would gladly tie the witch to the stake themselves if they found her. Annie and Yulia are standing very still, not looking at one another or at Agnes.

  Eventually the women form a resentful line out the door, apronstrings hanging loose. Agnes trails at the back, trying to look as if she’s merely worried about late rent.

  Just before she steps into the alley Mr. Malton’s hand reaches out to stop her, pressing against the bowl of her belly. “Hold on a minute, girl.”

  He’s far too close to her. She smells the sour sweat of him, feels his breath against her cheek. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten your little trick.” It was one of the first spells Mags taught them: a nettle-leaf and a sharp needle and a man would be too busy yelping and swearing to want you any longer.

  His palm is sweating through her dress. “Should I go to the authorities, do you think? Should I tell the police what you are, Miss Eastwood?”

  His fingers dig like nails into the swollen meat of her stomach, biting deep, just because he can. Because she can’t stop him. Because she is nothing and he is something.

  Rage licks hot and red up her spine, followed by a sick wave of shame. What a fool she was to think witching could change anything. Their mother had known plenty of words and ways, and what good had it done her?

  Agnes swallows rage and shame both—and oh, she’s grown tired of the taste of them—and answers, “No, Mr. Malton.”