the whiskies poured and served to the husbands. It’s the hour where a woman might sit in stillness, scheming and dreaming.
But on the seventeenth of May, some of them are doing more than dreaming.
Beatrice sees them from the scummed glass of the window in No. 7 South Sybil. They come in ones and twos and sometimes threes, their shadows like soft velvet beneath the gas-lamps, their cloaks pulled tight around their shoulders. It isn’t chilly, but there’s a fretful wind chasing them down the streets, plucking hairs loose from their pins and tugging at skirts.
It’s hard to tell in the gloom, but Beatrice thinks some of the women are very young, their hair plaited and their steps eager, and some of them very old. Some of them stride quickly and others skitter like mice across a kitchen floor. Some of them have apron-strings and patched elbows showing beneath their cloaks; some of them gleam with pearls and rings.
She hears the creak of the boarding-house door, the patter of feet on stairs, the rush of eager whispers in the hall. A helpless panic tremors through Beatrice and she glances to her younger sister, mute and beseeching. Juniper advises her to get her panties untwisted and sit tight, but she rests an awkward hand on Beatrice’s shoulder as she says it. The damp heat of her palm tells Beatrice that she feels it too: the sense that they’re teetering on an unseen edge, perched at the beginning of an untold story.
There’s an uncertain knock at the door. “C’mon in,” Juniper calls, and they do: Misses Electa Gage and Inez Gillmore followed by a gaggle of other girls stolen from the Women’s Association; a knot of grim-looking mill-girls with colorless kerchiefs and skeptical expressions; an unsmiling girl with long black hair and cedar-colored skin; a pair of rather disreputable-looking sisters who introduce themselves as “Victoria and Tennessee, spiritualists, magnetic healers, and mediums.”
Miss Quinn appears at the head of a stately delegation of black women who regard the room with expressions of deepest skepticism. Quinn shoots Beatrice her cat’s grin, causing Beatrice to stand up, forget whatever it was she intended to do, then sit back down and study the backs of her own hands for a while.
She hadn’t been at all certain that Quinn would come. She’d helped them with their advertisement, working with Juniper and Beatrice long after the offices of The Defender should have closed to set the spell into ink and lead. It was only after the last page had rolled through the press that Quinn glanced sideways at Juniper. “And am I invited to this meeting, Miss Eastwood?”
“Sure.”
Quinn’s face remained very neutral. “How very . . . broad-minded of you.”
“Well, all for one and one for all,” Juniper declared nobly. She ruined this immediately thereafter by adding, with some relish, “Daddy’d roll over in his grave if he could see us. He fought for the Yanks but only because they gave him fifty dollars and a bottle of rye.”
Miss Quinn tilted her head. “Tell me, Miss Eastwood: how much of all this”—she gestured to the stacks of still-warm newspapers, the witch-ways scattered across desktops—“is designed purely to spite your dead father?”
Juniper ran her tongue over her teeth with a simmering expression that made Beatrice wince in anticipation, but in the end said only, “Come to the meeting, Miss Quinn. Bring your friends.”
Quinn had.
Beatrice watches them covertly as they settle into their seats. There’s a camaraderie among them, an unusual deference to Quinn’s posture, which confirms certain of Beatrice’s theories.
Following the riot on St. Mary-of-Egypt’s, Beatrice watched Quinn more closely. She considered the keenness of her interest in their researches and the words and ways she already possessed; the times she left abruptly or disappeared for days in a row, never quite saying where she’d gone; the mildly scandalized whispers about “that colored journalist” who was often seen entering and leaving all manner of unlikely places across the city; the several occasions she accidentally referred to herself as we instead of I.
Beatrice is no detective, but even a librarian might consult a bound volume of minutes from the annual convention of the Colored Women’s League. She might run her finger down the member list at the back and pause at C. P. Quinn, wondering if perhaps the League was interested in less respectable activities than their literature suggested.
Beatrice is distracted by a flurry of new arrivals: a mother and daughter whispering in Yiddish; Madame Zina the midwife; a trio of