Beatrice manages a strangled “What are you doing here?”
Miss Quinn adopts an arch, censorious expression, although a certain irreverence glitters in her eyes. “I was under the impression that libraries were public institutions.”
“Oh, yes. That is—I thought—” You came to see me. Beatrice closes her eyes very briefly in mortification. She tries again. “Welcome to the Salem College collections. How may I help you?”
“Much better.” The irreverence has escaped her eyes and now curls at the corners of her mouth. “I’m looking for information on the tower last seen at St. George’s Square, and the Last Three Witches of the West.” Her voice is far too loud.
Beatrice makes an abortive movement as if she might launch herself across the desk and press her palm over Miss Quinn’s lips. “Saints, woman! Anyone could overhear you!”
“So take me someplace more private.” She gives Beatrice another of those highly inappropriate looks and Beatrice swallows, feeling like a harried pawn on a chessboard.
Mr. Blackwell agrees to cover the circulation desk and watches the pair of them retreat to Beatrice’s office with a doubtful expression. He comes from broad-minded Quaker stock, but there are rules about people like Miss Quinn lingering too long in the Salem College Library. The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but the important rules rarely are.
Beatrice clicks her door closed and turns around to find Miss Quinn reading the spines of stacked books and peering at the black leather notebook that lies open on the table. Beatrice snaps it shut.
“As I told you on a previous occasion, I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the events at the square, or the Last Three. You are of course welcome to search our collections.”
“Oh, but I was hoping for a guided tour. From someone with more . . . intimate information.” Her tone is over-warm, over-familiar, over-everything. She’s doing what Mama Mags called laying it on thick.
Why? What does she know about three circles woven together, three lost witches and their not-so-Lost Way? Beatrice puts frost in her voice. “What do you want?”
“Only what every woman wants.”
“And what’s that?”
Miss Quinn’s smile hardens, and Beatrice thinks this must be her true smile, beneath the dazzle and shine of whatever act she’s putting on. “What belongs to her,” she hisses. “What was stolen.” There’s a different kind of wanting in her tone now, one that Beatrice believes because hasn’t she felt it, too?
She hesitates.
Miss Quinn plants her palms on Beatrice’s desk and leans across it. “You and I are both women of words, I surmise. We share an interest in truth-seeking, storytelling. Surely we might share those stories with one another? I am capable of great discretion, I assure you.” Her voice is all honey again, oozing sincerity. “Whatever you tell me I will keep just between the two of us. I promise.”
Beatrice manages a breathless laugh, dizzy with the clove-and-ink scent of her skin. “Are you a journalist or a detective, Miss Quinn?”
“Oh, every good journalist is a detective.” She leans away, straightening her sleeves. “What are you?”
“Nothing,” Beatrice says, because it’s true. She was born nobody and taught to stay that way—remember what you are—and now she’s just a skinny librarian with gray already streaking her hair, a premonition of spinsterhood.
Miss Quinn raises her eyebrows and nods at the ratty notebook still clutched to Beatrice’s chest. “And what of your work? Is that nothing?”
Beatrice should say yes. She should toss her notes aside and flick her fingers. Oh, that? Just moonbeams and daydreams.
Her fingers tighten on her notebook instead. “It’s not . . . much. Just conjecture so far. But I think . . .” She wets her lips. “But I think I found the words and ways to call back the Lost Way of Avalon. Or some of them.”
She flinches as she says it, half waiting for the crack of a nun’s knuckles or the cold draft of the cellar.
Miss Quinn doesn’t scorn or scold her. “Really,” she says, and waits. Listens.
Beatrice isn’t listened to very often. She finds it makes her heart flutter in a most distracting fashion. “It’s this rhyme our grandmother taught us. I thought she made it up, but then I found it in the back of a first-edition copy of the Grimms’ Witch-Tales—you’re familiar with the Grimms?”
She tells Miss Quinn about wayward sisters and maiden’s blood and her theory that secrets might have survived somehow in old wives’ tales and children’s rhymes. “It must sound ridiculous.”
Miss Quinn lifts one shoulder. “Not to me. Sometimes a thing is too dangerous to be written down or said straight out. Sometimes you have to slip it in slantwise, half-hidden.”
“Even if I pieced together the spell, I doubt any of us has enough witch-blood to work it. All the true witches were burned centuries ago.”
“All of them, Miss Eastwood?” There’s a hint of pity in Quinn’s voice. “How, then, did Cairo manage to repel the Ottomans and the redcoats both for decades, despite all their rifles and ships? Why did Andrew Jackson leave those Choctaw in Mississippi? Out of the goodness of his black little heart?” The pity sharpens, turns scathing. “Do you really think the slavers found every witch aboard their ships and tossed her overboard?”
Beatrice has encountered wild theories that there was witchcraft at work in Stono and Haiti, that Turner and Brown were aided by supernatural means. She’s heard the scintillated whispers about colored covens still prowling the streets. But at St. Hale’s she was taught that such stories were base rumors, the product of ignorance and superstition.
Quinn gentles her tone. “Maybe even good Saint George missed a witch or two during the purge. How do you think your grandmother came to know those words in the first place?”
Beatrice has not permitted herself to ask that question out loud. To wonder who Mags’s mother was, and her mother’s mother. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, after all.
“Surely it’s
