The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,67
mean.” She sweeps from the room.
Then Agnes is alone, feeling like a snake or a shard of glass, something that hurts if you hold it close.
At the next meeting of the Sisters, Beatrice chooses a seat beside Miss Frankie Black. They work side by side, stripping lace and buttons from a pile of old skirts and donated blouses. There are more Sisters now, in need of more witch-robes.
Beatrice engages Frankie in an airy discussion of family and background, basking in the southern sprawl of her accent, before asking casually if Frankie happens to know Miss Cleopatra Quinn.
Frankie looks at her slantwise. “Yes.”
“Oh, I thought you might. And are you . . . close?”
“Quite close, at one time.” Frankie’s voice is very even, but Beatrice’s heart gives a double thump at that quite. She thinks of all the things Quinn doesn’t tell her, the work she doesn’t share.
“Well,” she says lightly, “I’ve just lately become acquainted with her. She’s quite . . .” She trails away, unsure what word she meant to say (enigmatic, compelling, consuming).
Frankie turns to face her directly. There’s an unmistakable shine of pity in her eyes. “Look, you should know before you get your heart broke: Miss Cleopatra has . . . other interests, and they will always come first.”
“Other—?” Beatrice would give any sum of money to prevent herself from blushing. “The Colored League, you mean?” She abhors the note of desperate optimism in her voice.
The pity deepens. “No, not the Colored League.”
“She’s a member, is she not?”
“I don’t believe she’s been to a meeting in months. Maybe ever.”
“Then I—I don’t know what you mean.” But Beatrice does.
She feels her elaborate theory—that Quinn was a clandestine operative for a women’s rights organization—collapsing like underbaked bread. There was a much more obvious reason that a beautiful woman with an understanding husband might make private calls at unlikely places, might disappear for periods of time without saying where. Beatrice remembers her first meeting with Quinn, the blinding smile, the daring derby hat, the effortless charm.
A woman like that could do much better than a bony librarian. Beatrice wonders wanly if she was the only woman to escort Miss Quinn to the Fair.
Frankie sniffs and reaches out to pat her hand. “Don’t fret. You’re hardly the first.”
Following her conversation with Frankie, Beatrice is more careful. She no longer permits Miss Quinn to loop her arm through hers or accompanies her in public. When their eyes meet—gray to gold, cloud to sunlight—Beatrice looks away after a single second (she counts in her head, one-one-thousand, drawing the syllables long and slow).
The last time Quinn visited the library, Beatrice suggested stiffly that there was no need for Miss Quinn to make the trip up from New Cairo quite so often, as they had finished reviewing the Old Salem materials and found nothing more exciting than a few desiccated rose petals and a pale tatter they thought was lace, but which turned out to be the shed skin of some long-dead snake. Everything else—the court transcripts and diary entries, the ledgers and letters—was either painfully mundane or mysteriously fragmented. A promising journal with the final pages ripped out; a little girl’s letter to her aunt with entire passages faded away to nothing; an account from one of the Inquisitors who burned the city, which ended: After the fire died and the screams faded—and I tell you I shall hear them till Judgment Day—Judge Hawthorn had us comb the ashes for days. Whatever he sought he did not find.
“If the secret to calling back the Lost Way exists, we may be reasonably certain it’s not in the Salem College Library.” Beatrice met Miss Quinn’s eyes (one-one-thousand). “Surely your time would be better spent pursuing—other possibilities.”
Quinn opened her mouth as if she might object, but the expression on Beatrice’s face made her close it. “As you wish, Miss Eastwood.” It’s only after she’s gone that Beatrice notices she left her derby hat behind.
Beatrice spends the rest of the week working alone. She transcribes the chapters she is assigned; she adds more witch-tales and rhymes to her little black notebook and fills page after page with notes and theories and failed experiments (Solstice and equinox offer amplification? Maiden’s blood & Crone’s tears—Mother’s ???); she squints at innocent shadows as they glide across the floor and keeps her threshold lined with salt. Mr. Blackwell blinks as he steps across it and asks Beatrice mildly if she’s been feeling well.