The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,80
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.”