Not all of them get away. There are arrests and detentions, beatings and brutalities. A man in Bethlehem Heights finds witch-ways in his wife’s sewing box and ties her to the bedpost until the authorities retrieve her; one of Pearl’s girls is found bloodied and barely breathing with the witch-mark drawn on her back; an entire tenement on the west side is set ablaze by a gang of mean-eyed boys who claimed to have followed a black cat with red eyes.
It proves difficult to keep a witch behind bars. Workhouses suffer from rusted locks and shattered bars, missing shackles and stolen keys. Guards are discovered sleeping or missing or terribly confused, convinced they are lost in deep woods. Cells are found empty except for the wild smell of witching.
The smell is everywhere, now. The whole city reeks of wet earth and green things, char and crushed herbs and wild roses. It rises like steam from the alleys between tenements and the lawns of fashionable homes, as if some great dragon is rousing beneath the city, breathing smoke through the cracks. The streets heave over the bones of tree roots that grow faster than they should; thistle and pye weed sprout between bricks. Sometimes at night the stars shine more brightly than they have any right to, as if there aren’t gas-lamps and bulbs buzzing beneath them, as if they’re shining down on a black wood or an empty prairie. The wind is sharp and too cold for the final days of summer, as if the ghost of Avalon still lingers, haunting the city.
Almost, Juniper begins to believe it will be all right. That the women of the city will stand strong against mobs and shadows, that Gideon Hill will lose his election in November and slink back under whatever rock he came from. But their stores of witch-ways are running thin, and every midwife and herbalist has been driven out of town. The sickness is worsening, too—even The Post now calls it the Second Plague—and panic worsens with it. The shadows coil thicker and darker, like fattened flies, and Gideon Hill’s face smiles down from every window and wall. Our light against the darkness.
Juniper and her sisters make it four nights at Mr. Blackwell’s before Agnes spots a shadowless man standing on St. Jerome Street, staring blankly through the windows, waiting. That night they say farewell to Mr. Blackwell, who sends them with several bottles of wine and a hooked cane for Juniper. A Daughter escorts them north through the tunnels to stay with Inez and Jennie in the glamorous near-mansion Inez’s deceased husband conveniently left behind.
They make it two days before fists thump on the door in the middle of the night. Bella whispers the words to tangle the halls and doors of the house in a winding labyrinth behind them—a spell taught to them by Inez’s chatty Greek maid—while all five of them slip out the kitchen door.
They spend the following night beneath a bridge, huddled together with the heat of their spells warping the air around them, and another handful of days back in New Cairo, in the well-warded house of Cleo’s aunt Vivica. But the shadows always find them eventually, and they always run.
By the end of August, Juniper can feel their list of willing hosts shrinking, doors slamming and locks clicking ahead of them. Partly it’s the fear rising like sewer-stink through the city as Hill’s mobs grow bolder and the plague worsens. Partly it’s Eve, who screams at inconvenient hours of the night, and whose hair remains eye-catchingly red no matter how many spells or dyes they apply. Sometimes the problem is Miss Cleo Quinn; it turns out even the suffragists who seem sympathetic with the cause of colored women balk at the thought of welcoming one into their actual homes.
Another time they were asked to leave after the mistress of the house discovered Cleo and Bella in her washroom somewhat less than fully dressed. They behaved themselves better after that, but there was still an ardent, unsated thing between them. It unsettled people.
It unsettled Juniper, to own the truth. True, Bella’s cheeks were flushed and her stutter was gone, but Juniper recalled the preacher’s admonitions about man and wife and the natural order of things. She asked Agnes about it one evening and was told in no uncertain terms to mind her own damn business.
“What’s wrong with loving somebody, anyhow?” Agnes hissed. “Doesn’t she deserve a little happiness?” Juniper surrendered and resolved thereafter to mind her own damn business.
The morning after, she caught Agnes whispering to a mockingbird on the window ledge, watching it wing into the dawn as if half her heart was flying alongside it. The next time they have to run, Agnes says, quietly, “I know a place.”
She leads them to one of the crookedy, higgledy-piggledy stacks of tenements in West Babel only a few blocks north of South Sybil. A thin, tired-looking woman opens the door, her hair brittle white. She flinches only briefly at the sight of three women, an infant, and a pair of uncanny birds standing in her hallway, before inviting them inside and introducing herself as Miss Florentine Lee.
Her apartment is a single cramped room, the walls stained with years of cooking-grease and close living. A small window provides a stingy square of summer-light, obscured by laundry-lines and balconies.
Mr. August Lee is waiting at the kitchen table. He stands as they enter and his face when he sees Agnes is—well. It’s private, Juniper decides. She busies herself with her cane, wondering a little bitterly how her sisters found the time to pursue romance alongside all the witching and women’s rights. She tries
