The girl is a year older now, a year harder. Her hair is pulled tight beneath a gray kerchief and her eyes are the color of coins. “That so?” She says it level and flat, like a woman paying off a debt.
Agnes meets her eyes. “Did any of you try it yet?”
Embarrassed shuffling. A clucked tongue. The rustle of a hastily folded newspaper shoved down someone’s apron-front.
On the sixth page of that newspaper, in the section generally reserved for advertisements selling pomades and tobacco and Madame CJ Walker’s Wonderful Scalp Ointment, there was a half-page of solid black ink. In large white capitals are the words:
WITCHES OF THE WORLD
UNITE!
The text below invites women of all ages and backgrounds to join the Sisters of Avalon, a newly formed suffrage society dedicated to the restoration of women’s rights and powers. Interested parties are instructed to prick their fingers and smear the blood across the advertisement while chanting the provided words, which would—if the blood belongs to a woman, and if that woman bears the Sisters no ill intent—reveal a time and location.
A Miss Inez Gillmore purchased the ad on behalf of the sisters, signing the check with a merry flourish that Agnes both envied and resented. Bella and Juniper provided the spell, fussing for days with bindweed and blood and ink, their fingertips gone purplish red from repeated needle-pricks. And Agnes provided the location, against all her better judgment. Who would ever suspect the shabby, respectable South Sybil boarding house as the site of seditious organizing?
Agnes gestures to the poorly hidden newspaper. “Try it. Speak the words. Feel the worth of them.” They were the words the three of them had used as girls to leave messages for one another, the ones they didn’t want their daddy to see: Meet me at the hollow oak or Staying at Mags’s tonight. “It’s true witching, stronger than anything your mother taught you.”
One of the women—Agnes thinks it’s the same broad, ruddy-cheeked woman who laughed with her over Floyd Matthews—gives a quiet, doubtful huh, as if her mother taught her a thing or two.
Agnes holds both palms up in surrender, but continues, “And there’s more where that came from. Lots more.” Well, some more, at least. “Think what you might do, with a little real witching.”
Agnes can see her words working on them, tugging at the loose threads in their hearts. These were women who were never tempted by the suffragists or their rallies or their high-minded editorials in the paper. Oh, they wanted the vote—what woman didn’t want it, aside from Miss Wiggin and her fellow fools?—but these were women who knew the difference between wanting and needing. The vote couldn’t feed their children or shorten their shifts. It couldn’t cure a fever or keep a husband faithful or stop Mr. Malton’s reaching fingers.
Maybe witching could.
The girl with the tight-pinned hair and the coin-colored eyes chucks her chin at Agnes. “You one of them, then?”
Agnes flinches a little at that them, at being one of something rather than simply one, but she ducks her head in a nod.
The broad woman makes another derisive sound. “Well, good for you, eh?” Her accent is cold and jaggedy, like snow-cut mountains. “I would never risk my children in such a way.” Her eyes linger pointedly on Agnes’s rounding belly, flick once to her ringless finger. There are murmurs of agreement from some of the others.
Shame bubbles acidly in Agnes’s throat, followed very quickly by anger. She regards the big woman: mouth thin and hard, red veins cracked under milky cheeks, eyes like iced-over lakes. “How many children do you have, ma’am?”
She puffs out her chest. “Six daughters, all healthy, all hard workers.”
“And your daughters. They’re safe, you think?”
The frozen eyes narrow. Agnes presses. “They’ll grow without knowing hunger or want or a man’s hand raised against them? They won’t go blind in the mill or lose their fingers packing meat?”
Now the woman’s shoulders are straining against the seams of her blouse, her face reddening. “Well, they will not get themselves”—she says a long, chilly word that sounds like it must be Russian for knocked up—“without a husband, that’s for damn—”
Agnes cuts her off. “And their husbands will treat them kindly? They won’t lose their paychecks in barrooms or gambling halls, they won’t die young, they won’t beat their wives for back-talk or a burned dinner?” Agnes knows she’s going too far, saying too much, but she can’t seem to stop. “And if they do, will your daughters keep their own daughters safe?” Her voice cracks and bleeds like a split lip. If their mother had been a true witch instead of merely a woman, would she have saved her daughters from the man she married? Would she at least have lived?
Agnes swallows hard into the silence. She can feel glances winging past her. “It’s a risk just to be a woman, in my experience. No matter how healthy or hardworking she is.” A great weariness washes over her as she says it, a grim bone-tiredness that makes her want to walk away and keep walking, until she finds someplace soft and green and safe to have her child. But no such place exists. A voice very like Juniper’s whispers, Yet, in her ear.
None of the women answer her. Agnes is turning to leave, feeling like she should go find Jennie and tell her she needs a new title because she’s a piss-poor recruiter, when the woman in the gray kerchief says, “What’s your name?”
“Agnes.” She hesitates a half-second before adding, “Amaranth.” There’s a quick hiss of breath around her. Mother’s-names are things shared between friends and sisters, not offered in grimy alleyways to strangers.
The kerchiefed woman raises her chin. “Annie Asphodel.” She nods to the women around her. “And this is Ruthie and Martha. The big one
