Already Bella can hear the excited scritching of the artist’s pen, see the cartoons that will run in The Post for weeks: three women bound and bowed, their limbs bare and indecent, their hair poking at wild angles through their bridles. Most people will unfold their papers and tsk their tongues at the sight of such wicked witches.
A few of them, though, will see the fury in their eyes, blazing even through the callous caricature, and suspect that behind every witch is a woman wronged.
Second: the evidence against them.
Gideon begins with a sanctimonious little speech about sin and sedition and the propensity of evil to flourish where good men do nothing. Then comes a parade of witnesses, ranging from the purely fanciful—a red-nosed barkeep who claims to have seen Agnes cavorting “in a most unseemly manner” with a fork-tailed gentleman; a housewife who was supposedly seduced by Bella’s “foul glamors” into visiting a house of prostitution on the south end—to the uncomfortably plausible.
There’s a series of disgruntled fairgoers who saw Juniper’s hat-trick; a handful of doctors from St. Charity Hospital, one of whom watches Juniper with an anxious expression, rubbing a pink scar on his forehead; a paper-boy who claims to have seen Bella riding a broomstick while kissing a colored woman, which is at least half-true; a handsome, earnest young man named Floyd-something who testifies that Agnes is a seductress and a snake, and that the infant taken into custody might belong to half the gentlemen in New Salem for all he knows. He looks at Agnes as he says it, with a kind of bruised, vicious meanness; Agnes looks mildly back, unmoved, even bored.
Madame Zina Card limps to the stand next, looking thin and hollow. Yes, she says, Agnes Amaranth sought her services as an abortionist. Yes, she repents her own part in such wickedness.
Miss Munley from the Salem College Library testifies that Bella abused her position to gain knowledge of the occult, and notes that all such materials have been submitted to the mayor’s office for destruction. Bella waits to feel the numbness of betrayal, but all she feels is sorry and sad and weary.
Miss Grace Wiggin is the final witness.
“You spoke to one of these women on the night of the solstice, is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what did you speak about?”
“She asked me if I would join them in their dark purposes.” Wiggin looks up at Hill through her lashes, a child eager to please.
He gives her a stern, bracing smile. “And what purposes were those, my dear? Be strong now, and tell us.”
Grace brushes a lace handkerchief across her forehead. “To end the rule of man,” she answers, tremulously. “To bring about a second plague.”
The courtroom dissolves into gasps and whispers. Hill smiles. “The city thanks you for your bravery, Miss Wiggin.”
There is no cross-examination, no defense. This is a witch-trial, after all, and witches have even fewer rights than women. Bella can do nothing but sweat and stand on aching legs, listening to her own damnation with the taste of iron on her tongue.
Third: the confession.
Bella doesn’t know why Hill bothers, really. Whether they repent or plead innocence or keep their silence, they’ll burn just the same. She supposes it’s merely the proper end to the story he’s telling.
An Inquisitor fiddles with the clasps of their bridles. The mask falls away and Bella retches as the metal tongue slides from her mouth.
Then Gideon Hill asks them a series of questions: Will they repent before God? Will they provide the names of their companions in sin? Will they spend their eternity in Hell?
At this Juniper laughs, a sound like a rusted hinge creaking in the wind. She grins up at him through swollen lips. “Ask for me when you get there, Hill. I’ll be waiting.”
Hill watches her for a long, watery second before nodding to one of his Inquisitors.
After that he asks all his questions again, but they’re harder to hear. It’s the screaming, Bella thinks.
She wonders if Hill expects the pain to break them, and some delirious part of her wants to laugh. They know pain too well. It dined with them at their table, slept beside them, grew with them like a fourth sister. What are hot needles and cold mallets to the Sisters Eastwood?
Over the iron smell of her own blood, Bella thinks that Araminta Wells will have to keep waiting to be disappointed.
After that Bella goes away for a while. (St. Hale’s taught her that trick.)
When she returns, Gideon Hill is at the judge’s bench, whispering. The judge stands, flushed and blinking, his white collar wilting.
“This court, convened on September the twenty-first in the year eighteen-hundred and ninety-three, finds the Eastwood sisters guilty on all charges.” He clacks his hammer once. “They will burn at dusk tomorrow.”
Over the sudden noise—the murmurs and hear-hears, the curses of the officers now wrestling Juniper back into her iron mask—Bella hopes no one notices that Agnes is smiling.
The first time Gideon Hill visited Juniper in her prison cell she was reeling and wounded, stunned to meet a witch in the Deeps beneath New Salem.
This time, she’s the witch. This time, she’s waiting for him.
The moon has already risen and ripened by the time she hears the soft tap of boots, the click of claws. The steps pause outside her door.
She thinks of beasts who came for maidens in the night, of knights who plucked princesses from their towers like fruit from the branch.
A hissed exhalation, a twist of shadow, and Gideon Hill and his dog are standing in her cell. He’s not himself, she sees, or maybe more himself: his features are the same, but the muscles beneath them are arranged differently. His shoulders are no longer stooped, his spine no longer furled.
Juniper looks at him through the iron bars of her bridle, waiting.
He flicks his hands and a pair of
