The Once and Future Witches

by Harrow, Alix E.

  She finds it in an obscure translation of Homer, tucked between a verse about cruel arts and noxious herbs. Beatrice is no Classicist, but she’s certain she’s never seen these lines in any other version of the Odyssey. She assumes they are the addition of the translator, a Miss Alexandra Pope.

  Juniper claps her hands and cackles when Beatrice shows her. “Hot damn, Bell. Who will it be? The mayor? That Gideon Hill bastard?”

  Agnes says, “Jesus, June, you’re a menace,” and Beatrice says, a little shyly, “I was thinking perhaps Saint George?” Her sisters agree.

  And so, on the last night of May, when the moon is a blacker blackness in the sky above them and the air smells hot and rich with summer, Beatrice leads the Sisters of Avalon to St. George’s Square.

  They flit through the alleys and side-streets of New Salem in ones and twos, there and gone again. Instead of their usual skirts and aprons they wear gowns sewn from scraps and bits, pieced together by the girls who are cleverest with needle and thread.

  Juniper had waved an illustrated copy of the Sisters Grimm at them as they worked. “We want them long and loose, witchy as all hell. And for Saints’ sake, make sure they have pockets.”

  Beatrice thinks they did well; in their dark cloaks and long gowns the Sisters look like shadows or secrets, like fables come to life.

  They gather in the white-paved square. Saint George stands over them, tall and bronze and cold, the hero who saved them from the plague and the wicked rule of witches.

  Beatrice meets his metal eyes and has no difficulty at all summoning the will.

  The words come next. Then the red splash of spilled wine. The bright scorch of magic as it burns its way into the world, shared between them and stronger for it. Beatrice staggers a little with the force of it.

  When they smell the hot reek of molten bronze, they run.

  It’s the lamp-lighters who find it first. They arrive with their ladders and dousers just before dawn, leaning for a moment against the linden trees that have never quite been the same since the equinox, ragged and twisting.

  “Thought I’d gone mad,” one of them tells The New Salem Post, several hours later. “Thought my eyes was playing tricks.”

  But his eyes are not playing tricks. On the plinth where Saint George once stood, proud and princely, there is now something lumpen and squat, vaguely shameful: a bronze pig, bearing a brand of three circles woven together.

  The following afternoon Miss Cleopatra Quinn marches into Beatrice’s office at Salem College and lays three newspapers across the desk. BELOVED STATUE SUFFERS UNCANNY ATTACK, reads one headline. THE WITCHES ARE COMING! declares another. The Defender offers the more measured SAINT OR SWINE? AVALONIANS STRIKE A BLOW FOR WITCH-KIND.

  “My, my, Miss Eastwood. I wasn’t aware I was fraternizing with such a troublemaker.” Beatrice assures herself that Miss Quinn means nothing in particular by the word fraternizing.

  “It was nothing,” Beatrice murmurs, barely blushing.

  “Hardly nothing. You have the whole city’s attention, now.”

  They do: the Women’s Christian Union, the Ladies’ Temperance Society, and the New Salem Women’s Association issued a joint letter of condemnation the previous week, and Mr. Gideon Hill is holding rallies each Sunday afternoon. A “modern-day coven,” he calls them, seeking to bewitch young maidens and seduce God-fearing husbands. ( Just the reverse, Beatrice thinks, and then spends several minutes shocked at her own wickedness.)

  And their numbers are growing. Agnes says they knock at all hours of the day and night: too-young girls run away from home, lost-looking mothers with babies in tow, grandmothers with sly smiles and witch-ways tucked in their pockets.

  “Juniper wants another demonstration before the half-moon,” Beatrice says. “I haven’t found anything suitable—just the usual trifling spells to darn socks or shine silver—but Agnes thinks she might have what we need. It comes from that old witch-tale story about a boy who buys an enchanted bean from the Crone. Do you know it? One of the mill-girls told Agnes a rhyme that went with the story . . .”

  But Beatrice trails away because Quinn isn’t listening. She’s looking out the window with her brow knit. “I hope you and your sisters know what you’re doing. I hope you understand that this kind of trouble”—she nods out to the square, where city workers are even now gathered around Saint George’s plinth, scratching their heads over the problem of relocating several possibly accursed tons of bronze pig—“demands a response.”

  “From who?”

  “The law. The Church. Every man whose wife looks at him sideways, not quite laughing, picturing him as a pig instead of a man. Every man who has ever wronged a woman, which is just about every man.” Her voice is tense, her arms folded. Beatrice doesn’t think she’s ever seen Quinn look worried.

  “Well,” Beatrice says with forced cheer. “That’s why we’re looking for the Lost Way, isn’t it? Here are the materials we requested last week.” She gestures to the teetering stack of crates behind her desk.

  Quinn turns away from the window, the worry banished by a childish eagerness. “The Old Salem papers?”

  It was Quinn who connected Old Salem with the Lost Way. She was skimming through an antique book of nursery rhymes when a scrap of paper slid from the pages. It seemed to be the end of a much longer letter, just a few precious lines:

  is true. What was lost has been found. Even the stars are not the stars I knew as a girl. Come soonest, my love. If we burn, let us burn together,

  S. Good

  October 10, 1783

  Salem

  Beneath the signature were three circles looped together, dotted with ink-drops that might have been eyes.

  Quinn showed it to Beatrice and she felt a great wave move through her as she looked at it, an electric thrill that ran from her spine to her scalp. This was not a myth or a children’s story; this was ink-and-cotton proof that the Eastwoods were not the first wayward sisters to call the tower and its strange constellations.

  She met Quinn’s eyes and found them molten gold. “October tenth. Mere weeks before Old Salem fell.”

  Beatrice wished she shared Juniper’s talent for profanity. She settled for a hoarse, insufficient “Oh my.”

  Old Salem, where witching rose again in the New World, despite centuries of shackles and stakes. Where Tituba and Osborne and Good and the rest of them had worked their wonders and terrors, walking the streets with black beasts at their heels. Where men feared to tread and women feared nothing at all.

  Until the honorable Judge Geoffrey Hawthorn arrived with his troop of Inquisitors. Legally speaking, they ought to have announced themselves and made their arrests, separated the sinners from the sheep, held lengthy trials, and permitted each witch to confess her sins as she was bound to the stake. Hawthorn felt it would be more efficient to skip to the end. He and his men came in the night, silent except for the snap of lit torches.

  The city burned for days, along with every woman and child and unlucky cat inside it. The papers reported ash falling as far away as Philadelphia, where children played in the drifts, like snow.

  Now Old Salem is nothing but a black blight a hundred miles north, occupied by crows and foxes and black trees. Sightseers still trickle through, Beatrice has heard, paying a nickel each for haunted carriage rides through the ruins.

  Beatrice looks again at the stacked crates, which comprise the College’s entire collection of documents relating to Old Salem, and which Mr. Blackwell provided with only the slightest raising of his eyebrows and a mild “For the Hawthorn manuscript, I presume?” Beatrice made a gesture that might have been a nod.

  None of it is properly transcribed or annotated, most of it is charred or scorched or merely unutterably dull, but somewhere between all the ledgers and receipts and housewives’ cookbooks there might—might—be the words and ways that lead them to that rose-eaten tower.

  She slides her spectacles up her nose and braces herself for a very long day. “We sho
uld begin with an initial catalog, I think. Are you staying? I’ll take the top two boxes, if you’ll take the third.”

  But Miss Quinn isn’t looking at the boxes. She’s watching Beatrice with several conflicting emotions in her face. “Or,” she says, coming to some invisible conclusion, “you could accompany me to the Centennial Fair and buy me as many of those little fried cakes as I can eat. We deserve a day off, don’t you think?”

  There is very little Beatrice would like to do more than escort Miss Cleopatra Quinn to the Fair and buy her little fried cakes.

  A minute later the two of them are strolling into the honeyed heat of the afternoon, strolling north across the square. Quinn shakes her head as they pass the bronze pig.

  “Oh, please. You seem to be perfectly capable of witching when it suits you, I notice—” But Beatrice is unable to continue this line of inquiry because Miss Quinn tucks her hand casually, almost thoughtlessly, around her elbow, and Beatrice becomes incapable of further speech.

  They stride up St. Mary-of-Egypt’s, attracting sideways stares and sneers, not quite managing to care. They purchase a pair of yellow paper tickets and stride beneath the high iron arch of the Centennial Fair, where Beatrice buys Quinn a truly upsetting number of fried cakes. Afterward they share a watery beer, fend off two fortune-tellers, and win a gaudy brass ring with a glass diamond at a spin-the-wheel game.

  Beatrice presents it to Quinn with a giddy flourish and Quinn laughs. “Oh, I think one is enough for me.” She taps her own wedding ring. “I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

  Beatrice slides the ring onto her own finger, instead, and doesn’t feel anything in particular (a leaden weight, say, or a numbing chill) sinking in her stomach.

  When she looks back up, Quinn has stationed herself in the line for the Ferris wheel, and is gesturing for Beatrice to catch up. Beatrice isn’t sure she’s interested in being stuffed into a small glass cage and dangled above the city, but the line shuffles forward and Quinn says, “Oh, hush,” and soon they are smashed hip-to-hip, spinning up into the hot blue of summer.

  The cabin smells of stale beer and there’s something unfortunate smeared across the windows, but it doesn’t matter. The city lies distant and foreign beneath them, like the surface of the moon, and the wind rushes clean and bright over their skin. Beatrice closes her eyes and wonders if this is how witches felt astride their broomsticks, like hawks who slipped their jesses, who may never return to the leather fist waiting below.

  The wheel creaks to a stop. Beatrice and Quinn sway together in the wide-open sky, wind-kissed. Quinn’s hand is still resting lightly on Beatrice’s arm, and Beatrice is paying no attention to it (the pearl shine of her nails, the smudge of ink on her sleeve, the warm smell of cloves rising from her skin).

  Beatrice twists at the brass ring around her own finger. “Your husband,” she blurts, and feels Quinn go still beside her. “Is he—does he know how you spend your afternoons?”

  Quinn’s smile is far too knowing, smug as a sphinx. “Oh, I doubt it. He’s often away.”

  “I see. And do you—” Beatrice suddenly cannot imagine how she intended to conduct the rest of the sentence.

  Quinn is still smiling. “We have an arrangement. Mr. Thomas is a very understanding man.” She places a peculiar emphasis on the word, as if passing Beatrice a note written in a code she doesn’t know.

  “Good. That’s good. That is, I didn’t think there were any understanding men.”

  Her tone is too bitter; Quinn’s sly smile fades a little. “Your father really did a number on the three of you, didn’t he.”

  The two of them have talked extensively about Miss Quinn’s past: her childhood in a crowded row house in New Cairo, all smog and sun and hopscotch; her aunts who petted and spoiled her and braided her hair; her mother who still runs a spice shop and comes home smelling of paprika and peppers; her father who used to cut out each of Quinn’s articles from The Defender and paste them into a scrapbook, with which he assailed guests and neighbors at any opportunity.

  But Beatrice hasn’t much mentioned her own family, for the same reason a person doesn’t much mention carrion at the dinner table.

  Beatrice attempts a casual shrug. “I s-suppose.” She plucks at the brass ring on her finger. “He was—he could be very charming. I once saw him talk a pair of men out of a blood-feud with nothing but a smile and a round. But he could also be . . .” A devil, a monster, a wolf on two legs. “Different.”

  Quinn makes a carefully neutral noise and Beatrice knows she could stop there, if she liked. She could skip over the rotten places in her past as she usually does and remain unblemished a little longer.

  But the two of them are alone far above the city and Quinn’s hand is still on her arm, and surely a woman who turned a Saint into a pig might manage to tell the truth, however small and sordid.

  Beatrice wets her lips. “It wasn’t only my father. It was—St. Hale’s.” Just saying the name sends a sick swooping through her stomach, as if the cabin has broken loose from its moorings and gone plummeting earthward.

  Quinn sucks a sharp breath between her teeth. “That place has . . . an unfortunate reputation. Beatrice, I’m sorry.”

  Beatrice can barely hear her over the memory of hot wax hissing on the back of her bent neck, the ache of her knees on the chapel floor. Her hands bound together in forced prayer, cords cutting deep. A dozen clever cruelties that drove every desire from her body save one: to make them stop.

  Beatrice finds that she’s twisting violently at the brass ring. It slips from her finger. “Oh dear, pardon me—”

  Quinn scrabbles after it but the ring falls between the steel seams of the cabin and twinkles downward. It vanishes in a final flash of cut-glass diamond.

  A small silence follows while Beatrice reassembles herself, parentheses braced once more like a pair of cupped hands around her heart. “I apologize. I do not mean to be so hysterical.”

  “I don’t know what they told you at St. Hale’s, but a few tears hardly make a woman a hysteric.”

  Beatrice had not been aware that she was crying. She scrubs too hard at her cheeks, feels the wind whip them dry. “In any case, you are mistaken. My father did not send me to St. Hale’s.” Beatrice says it calmly, but there’s acid 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.