“Is this close enough?” Cleo whispers.
“Yes,” Bella answers.
“Send word once you’re settled.”
“I will.”
Cleo runs out of things to say. She simply stares at Bella, tracing her face—and Bella has never liked her own features so much as she does in that moment, in the soft gold of Cleo’s gaze—before touching the brim of her derby hat. “Three bless and keep you.”
Bella and her sisters are left alone on the darkening street.
The east side is apparently untroubled by the riots and arrests plaguing the rest of New Salem. The houses have dignified gables and clipped lawns and the slightly burnished shine of old money. Their windows send soft lamp-light and the clink of crystal over the empty streets. A man’s laugh floats from one of them, unworried, perfectly content.
Bella’s sisters crowd close behind her in their borrowed clothes and black cloaks, like refugees from some darker, wilder world. An owl and a hawk wheel high above them.
She leads them to a red-brick house on St. Jerome Street, slightly shabbier and older than its neighbors. She knocks twice, and the silence that follows is sufficient for her to doubt every decision that brought her here.
Then the door swings inward and an elderly, sweatered gentleman is blinking up at her. “Miss Eastwood! Pardon me—Misses Eastwood.” Mr. Henry Blackwell beams at the three of them as if they are unexpected guests to a dinner party rather than the most wanted criminals in the city. “And are those . . . my word.”
Their familiars have swept to their shoulders in a rush of black feathers and hot eyes, talons curving like carved jet. Mr. Blackwell’s genial smile shifts toward awe as he looks at them. He gathers himself. “I don’t believe we have been introduced.”
“This is Strix varia—Strix, I call him—and Pan.” Bella gestures to the fisher-hawk on Agnes’s shoulder. “For Pandion haliaetus, the western osprey, you know.”
Behind her she hears Juniper mutter about the injustice of her sisters finding their familiars first if they were just going to give them such stupid long names.
Mr. Blackwell appears not to hear her. He gives each of them a small bow. “Do come in, all of you.”
The hall is dark oak and dense carpet. As soon as the door clicks behind them Bella begins. “I’m so sorry to surprise you like this. It’s an imposition, I know, and terribly dangerous, but my sisters and I need a place to—”
But Mr. Blackwell is waving a hand over his shoulder at her. “Oh, it’s no trouble at all. I’ve been worried sick about you, to tell the truth.”
Bella isn’t at all convinced that amiable, bespectacled Mr. Blackwell understands the gravity of the risk. “If they find us here, you might well be arrested. Your property could be seized, your position terminated.”
Mr. Blackwell reaches the end of the hall and bends to peruse a bookshelf, thumbing through clothbound spines until he reaches a little bronze statue of a dog, its head shined smooth with use. Blackwell gives a small hah! and tips the dog forward. Some unseen mechanism clicks and whirrs, and the entire bookcase glides smoothly away. Behind it lies a dim, windowless room with a slanting ceiling and several fat down mattresses.
Mr. Blackwell makes a polite throat-clearing noise. “I tidied up a bit last week, got the worst of the cobwebs out at least. I had a suspicion it might be needed.” At Bella’s wordless, openmouthed expression, he adds, “My grandfather built this house. He told me there would always be someone who needed to hide, and that there ought always be a Blackwell there to hide them.”
Bella is searching for words that might adequately express her gratitude and relief when Juniper says, “Well hot damn, sir,” in her burnt rasp of a voice, and Mr. Blackwell leads them into the kitchen, chuckling.
Much later that evening, after Bella and her sisters have consumed a frankly astonishing number of tiny crustless sandwiches and Agnes has retired to the secret room with Eve, her eyes bruised and sleepless, Bella and Mr. Blackwell sit in a matched pair of armchairs with a neglected checkerboard and an un-neglected bottle of chardonnay between them.
“Thank you. For letting us stay.” It seems to require unusual effort to enunciate. “It’s a lovely house.”
Mr. Blackwell plucks an ebony checker from the board and studies it a little morosely. “I thought for a while it might be yours, if you would have me.”
It takes several seconds for Bella to process this statement, and another several to respond. “You what?”
“Oh, merely as a matter of convenience! You had no family and I had no wife, and I thought we might be pleasant enough companions, despite the difference in our ages. Of course as soon as I saw you and Miss Quinn together several things became clear to me.” Blackwell blinks at her, brow furrowed. “I hope I haven’t caused you any distress.”
“No, it’s just . . . I never thought . . .”
Mr. Blackwell gives her another of his affable smiles, but the edges are turned downward. “Someone along the line misled you as to your worth, Miss Eastwood.” Distantly, through the froth of chardonnay, Bella hears the word nothing in her daddy’s voice. “I should quite like to give him a piece of my mind.”
“I—thank you.” She thinks of Juniper, the hiss of scales over straw, the sin she bore for all of them. “But it’s no longer possible.”
Mr. Blackwell nods, unsurprised. “Good.”
She thinks of Cleo’s eyes on her face before they parted, studying her as if she were precious, even vital. “Or necessary.”
“Even better.” Mr. Blackwell raises his glass. “Give Miss Quinn my warmest thanks.”
They sip their wine. Bella imagines a version of her life where she never met Cleopatra Quinn, where she married Mr. Blackwell and lived in this pleasant red-brick house until she was a crone in truth, reading witch-tales by the fireside in
