in her throat. “My sister did.”
Quinn startles beside her. “Juniper?” she whispers.
“Certainly not. June is the loudest of us, but hardly the most dangerous. And she was only a girl when it happened.”
Quinn doesn’t move or speak or ask questions. She simply listens, as if her whole being is bent toward the listening, as if Beatrice is someone worth listening to.
Beatrice swallows very hard. “Our father was angry with Agnes for . . .” There would be a kind of justice to it if Beatrice spilled her sister’s secrets, one bloody eye traded for another, but she finds she can’t do it. “Our father was always angry. Or maybe not always—Mother said he used to laugh, and take her dancing, until the war . . . Well. I never saw him dance. One day he came for Agnes, and Agnes threw me before him like a bone to a wolf.”
Agnes had looked at her with her eyes ringed white and her teeth bared. In her face Beatrice had seen the sudden certainty of her own death: the red of her blood, the black of the cellar, the gray of her gravestone. She was an animal with its leg caught in a wire trap, deciding whether to turn its teeth against its own flesh or just lie down and die.
And Beatrice watched her sister choose. I saw Beatrice with the preacher’s girl last Sunday.
Until that day, until the very second Agnes opened her mouth to exchange her life for Beatrice’s, they had been one another’s keepers. But no longer.
Beatrice looks out over the city without seeing it. “I was in St. Hale’s by the following Sunday. I believe our local preacher assisted with the tuition costs.”
Quinn stays quiet a little longer, maybe waiting for more of the story, maybe just waiting for the wind to dry the wetness on Beatrice’s cheeks. Then she asks, “And yet—you trust Agnes now?”
“. . . Yes.” Or at least she trusts that her sister wants the same thing they want: more.
“Although she broke that trust before.”
“Surely trust is never truly broken, but merely lost.” Beatrice’s lips twist. “And what is lost, that can’t be found?”
She feels the amber heat of Quinn’s gaze on her face, scrutinizing her. “Perhaps you should trust less easily, Miss Eastwood.” There’s a harshness in her voice, but she loops her arm not-very-casually through Beatrice’s as she says it, and Beatrice does not pull away.
The wheel spins them back to earth, the bright-smelling wind replaced with the greasy fug of the Fair. As they stroll back beneath the high arch of the entranceway, still arm in arm, Quinn asks, lightly, “So. Tell me about this second spectacle.”
And Beatrice—who perhaps should trust less easily—does.
Fee and fie, fum and foe,
Green and gold, see them grow!
A spell for growth, requiring buried seeds & fool’s gold
It’s Agnes Amaranth who finds their second spell. She’s talking with Annie before the shift bell rings, whispering about ways and words and spells half-hidden in witch-tales, and Annie scoffs. “You think there’s witchcraft hidden in pat-a-cake songs? Secret spells in the tale of Jack and the Giant?” Agnes watches her with narrow gray eyes and says, “Maybe so. Tell it to me.”
Later that evening Agnes walks past the black remains of the Square Shirtwaist Factory on St. Lamentation. She read in the papers that forty-six women died in the fire, and another thirteen leapt from the high windows. “It’s company policy to lock the doors,” the owner argued in court. “So the girls don’t get shiftless.” He and his partner had paid a fine of seventy-five dollars.
Standing there, looking up at the burned carcass of the factory with heat gathering in her fingertips, Agnes notices that there are survey stakes spaced neatly around the lot. Scraped earth. The beginnings of a scaffold. She understands that the factory will be rebuilt, locked doors and all—that the sisters and cousins and mothers of the dead girls will work atop their ashes—and she knows, then, what their second spectacle will be.
On the tenth of June, Agnes and the Sisters of Avalon walk two-by-two down St. Lamentation. They wear their billowing black gowns, their skin gleaming white and olive and clay-dark beneath the gas-lamps, and carry seeds in their pockets: rye and rose, wisteria and ivy.
They plant their seeds in the ashen dirt of the Square Shirtwaist Factory, and toss glittering handfuls of fool’s gold into the lot. They speak the words. They’re silly words, stolen from a tale about a boy who