trades his milk cow to a witch for a handful of magic seeds, known only by women and children and daydreamers: fee and fie, fum and foe.
The Sisters feel the sweet rush of witching in their veins. They leave before the first green finger pokes through the black earth.
By dawn the burnt carcass of the factory is nearly hidden by leaves and roots and reaching tendrils, as if several wet springtimes have passed in a single night. By noon there is nothing left of the building except the occasional right angle poking through the vines, a scattering of burnt nails among the tall grasses. Birds roost among thick twists of green, and the leaves hum with wingbeats and small, scuttling things. A sign is scratched into a bare patch of earth: three circles, twined together like snakes.
The workers gather nervously at the perimeter, muttering and scowling and crossing themselves. Several of them tilt their caps back to squint up at the thing that was once a construction site—the three-leafed ivies where the scaffold once stood, the tendons of wisteria where the brand-new punch-clock once sat with its stingy second-hand and cold heart—and stroll home, whistling off-key. One of them—a big, brash man with a bronze pin on his chest—begins to hack and slash at the green-grown mountain, shoving his way inside it; he does not emerge, and no one goes looking for him.
The next morning there’s a black-suited officer waiting beside Mr. Malton at the mill. The girls are asked to turn out their pockets and shake out their aprons before entering, “in light of recent events.” Agnes complies, unhesitating, and a scattering of seeds spills into the alley, some tufted white and some dark and shining as beetle’s eyes.
“Flower seeds,” she says innocently. “For my window box, sir.” She sweeps her lashes low over her eyes in a way that has always made men very stupid. The officer waves her inside.
Three days later Agnes is sweating on the corner of Thirteenth and St. Joseph, squinting at the folded square of paper in her hand: August S. Lee. The Workingman’s Friend.
She thought at first “the workingman’s friend” was some sort of title or tiresome motto, but Annie informed her it was a place: a barroom on the upper west side frequented by socialists, unionists, populists, Marxists, libertine college students with wispy mustaches, unemployed men with beards, and every other species of malcontent.
“August’ll be there, stirring up trouble.” Annie shakes her head. “He was throwing bricks through bank windows before he could talk, his mother used to say.”
“And yet he refuses to meet with us.”
“He wishes us all the best, but says he has ‘serious matters’ to attend to—like drinking the town dry, I suppose. Well, you know how they are.” Agnes did.
But she also knew that Mr. August S. Lee was in possession of words and ways that she wanted very much, and that young men in dim barrooms were not known for their reticence, especially if there was an admiring young lady looking up at them through her lashes and saying, “Oh! How shocking!” at regular intervals. Agnes coiled her hair like a sleek black adder atop her head, allowing a few strands to wisp artfully around her face, and chose a half-cloak the precise color of her eyes, before going to find The Workingman’s Friend.
It proves to be less of a barroom and more of an unswept basement. She descends a narrow set of steps and finds the air blue with cigar smoke and fumes, the summer evening sun replaced by the yellow hum of electric lights.
There’s an easy rumble of talk in the room—the comfortable conversation of men with cheap beer and nowhere in particular to be—but it falls quiet as Agnes steps forward: a woman, alone and young, her cloak parted around a pregnant belly.
She approaches the bar and asks for a Mr. August Lee. The barman points to a high-backed booth with a slightly helpless expression, like a cornered spy betraying his comrade’s location.
Four men are seated at the table, blinking up at her with expressions ranging from mild terror to smeary delight. Agnes smiles sweetly at them. “Hello, boys. I’m here to speak with Mr. Lee.” They blink at her with varying degrees of inebriation and she adds, gently, “If your name is not Mr. Lee, shoo.”
Three of the men shoo. They leave behind a long, rangy man with summer-straw hair and a suspicious squint. His face is young but hard-edged, with a skipped-meal