“I—perhaps.” Beatrice swallows hard against the hope rising in her throat. “But they don’t seem to want to be found.” She gestures at her desk, strewn with scraps and open books and dead-ends. “I’ve read the Sisters Grimm a dozen times, every edition I could find. I’ve made a good start on the other folklorists—Charlotte Perrault, Andrea Lang—but if there are any secret instructions or notes tucked inside them they’re faded, stained . . . lost.”
She doesn’t mention the shadow-hand she saw splayed across the page, or the creeping sense that someone doesn’t want the words to be found, on the grounds that she wants Miss Quinn to continue thinking of her as a sane adult. “I’ve been looking. But I’ve been failing.”
Miss Quinn does not look particularly distressed. She gives Beatrice a smart nod and sets her derby hat on the desktop. She unbuttons her sleeves and rolls them up, revealing several inches of pox-scarred wrist. “Well, naturally.”
“Oh?”
Miss Quinn perches on the same stack of encyclopedias Juniper occupied a few weeks before and extends her hand, palm up, toward Beatrice and her black notebook. Her expression is teasing but her eyes are sober, her hand steady. “You didn’t have me.”
Beatrice rubs her thumb along the spine of her notebook, stuffed full of her most private thoughts and theories, her wildest suppositions and most dangerous inquiries. Her own heart, sewn and bound.
It should be difficult to hand it over to a near-stranger, even impossible.
It isn’t.
Juniper didn’t have any friends, growing up. The girls at school weren’t allowed to visit the Eastwood farm, either because of the whispers of witching that surrounded Mama Mags or the alcohol fumes that surrounded their daddy, or the ugly rumors about just how their mother died (awful suspicious, people muttered, I heard she was fixing to leave him).
One way or another it was only ever Juniper and her sisters and the green, green mountainside, and after the fire it was just Juniper and the mountain. Juniper figured she wasn’t missing much anyhow; her daddy said women were like hens, flocking together and pecking at one another, and Juniper didn’t want to be a hen.
But a whole month after signing up with the suffragists to end the tyranny of man, she’s started to suspect her daddy was dead wrong.
She doesn’t like all of the Association ladies—lots of them are fancy, fur-lined-cloak types who look at Juniper like a yellow dog that wandered into the wrong neighborhood—but even the snotty ones are there for the same reason, have come to lend their white-gloved hands to the same work. It makes Juniper think of the quilting circles Mama Mags used to talk about, where a whole valley’s worth of women would huddle in somebody’s kitchen and all their tiny stitches would add up to something bigger than themselves.
And not all of them are snotty. There’s Miss Stone, who’s always busy and never smiles but inspires a fervent, infectious loyalty among her troops; the secretary, Jennie Lind, who keeps to herself but proves to have a surprising weakness for Juniper’s witch-tales; a fat, fashionable widow named Inez Gillmore who has more money than the pope and keeps offering Juniper various hats and bonnets to cover her sawn-off hair; an older woman, Electa Gage, who keeps muttering about chaining themselves to public buildings like the English ladies did. Juniper doesn’t understand what this is supposed to achieve, but she admires the spirit of it and likes Electa very much.
Sometimes when they’re all together, laughing and arguing, it feels like having sisters again. Juniper can almost forget that Agnes is a seething silence on the other side of the city, that Bella is so stiff and buttoned up it’s like living with a department store mannequin. Bella’s been leaving early and staying late every day, working on some mysterious research that leaves her sleeves stained with ink and her eyes bloodshot. She comes home with a distracted, distant air, her little black notebook clutched in her hand. When Juniper questions her—What’s she looking for? Does she know what that sign means? What called the tower to them, and what sent it away?—she evades and delays and never quite says.
Maybe Juniper wouldn’t take it so personal-like, except last week she visited Bella’s office unannounced and found a colored girl in a men’s coat sitting on top of her desk. Bella blushed and said she was “an interested party” but didn’t say what she was interested in or why.
After that she figured she’d wait until Bella was sound asleep some night and sneak that little black notebook out from under her pillow and find out for herself what that tower is and who called it. She has certain suspicions.
In the meantime she has Jennie and Inez and Electa and an endless stream of committees and subcommittees to keep her busy. She didn’t think throwing down the tyranny of man would take so many meetings, but apparently it does.
After the third or fourth meeting that leaves Juniper facedown on her agenda, praying for the sweet release of her untimely death, Miss Stone takes pity on her and assigns her instead to the practical work of preparing for the march at the Centennial Fair. It’s unglamorous to hang flyers and iron sashes and paint slogans, but it beats endless rounds of yeas and nays.
She’s crouched in the back rooms of the Association headquarters, painting the final N on a VOTES FOR WOMEN sign and swearing every time the brush bristles break, when the doorbell jangles.
An unctuous voice calls, “Hello? Excuse me?” and Juniper hears Jennie say, “How may I help you, sir?” Timid boot-steps entering the office, then a voice too low for Juniper to catch. She figures she can ignore it—probably just another monk come to complain about their heathen ways or a reporter come to provoke scintillating quotes—until Jennie herself appears in the doorway looking pale. “Miss Stone, come
