Until the honorable Judge Geoffrey Hawthorn arrived with his troop of Inquisitors. Legally speaking, they ought to have announced themselves and made their arrests, separated the sinners from the sheep, held lengthy trials, and permitted each witch to confess her sins as she was bound to the stake. Hawthorn felt it would be more efficient to skip to the end. He and his men came in the night, silent except for the snap of lit torches.
The city burned for days, along with every woman and child and unlucky cat inside it. The papers reported ash falling as far away as Philadelphia, where children played in the drifts, like snow.
Now Old Salem is nothing but a black blight a hundred miles north, occupied by crows and foxes and black trees. Sightseers still trickle through, Beatrice has heard, paying a nickel each for haunted carriage rides through the ruins.
Beatrice looks again at the stacked crates, which comprise the College’s entire collection of documents relating to Old Salem, and which Mr. Blackwell provided with only the slightest raising of his eyebrows and a mild “For the Hawthorn manuscript, I presume?” Beatrice made a gesture that might have been a nod.
None of it is properly transcribed or annotated, most of it is charred or scorched or merely unutterably dull, but somewhere between all the ledgers and receipts and housewives’ cookbooks there might—might—be the words and ways that lead them to that rose-eaten tower.
She slides her spectacles up her nose and braces herself for a very long day. “We should begin with an initial catalog, I think. Are you staying? I’ll take the top two boxes, if you’ll take the third.”
But Miss Quinn isn’t looking at the boxes. She’s watching Beatrice with several conflicting emotions in her face. “Or,” she says, coming to some invisible conclusion, “you could accompany me to the Centennial Fair and buy me as many of those little fried cakes as I can eat. We deserve a day off, don’t you think?”
There is very little Beatrice would like to do more than escort Miss Cleopatra Quinn to the Fair and buy her little fried cakes.
A minute later the two of them are strolling into the honeyed heat of the afternoon, strolling north across the square. Quinn shakes her head as they pass the bronze pig.
“Oh, please. You seem to be perfectly capable of witching when it suits you, I notice—” But Beatrice is unable to continue this line of inquiry because Miss Quinn tucks her hand casually, almost thoughtlessly, around her elbow, and Beatrice becomes incapable of further speech.
They stride up St. Mary-of-Egypt’s, attracting sideways stares and sneers, not quite managing to care. They purchase a pair of yellow paper tickets and stride beneath the high iron arch of the Centennial Fair, where Beatrice buys Quinn a truly upsetting number of fried cakes. Afterward they share a watery beer, fend off two fortune-tellers, and win a gaudy brass ring with a glass diamond at a spin-the-wheel game.
Beatrice presents it to Quinn with a giddy flourish and Quinn laughs. “Oh, I think one is enough for me.” She taps her own wedding ring. “I don’t make the same mistake twice.”
Beatrice slides the ring onto her own finger, instead, and doesn’t feel anything in particular (a leaden weight, say, or a numbing chill) sinking in her stomach.
When she looks back up, Quinn has stationed herself in the line for the Ferris wheel, and is gesturing for Beatrice to catch up. Beatrice isn’t sure she’s interested in being stuffed into a small glass cage and dangled above the city, but the line shuffles forward and Quinn says, “Oh, hush,” and soon they are smashed hip-to-hip, spinning up into the hot blue of summer.
The cabin smells of stale beer and there’s something unfortunate smeared across the windows, but it doesn’t matter. The city lies distant and foreign beneath them, like the surface of the moon, and the wind rushes clean and bright over their skin. Beatrice closes her eyes and wonders if this is how witches felt astride their broomsticks, like hawks who slipped their jesses, who may never return to the leather fist waiting below.
The wheel creaks to a stop. Beatrice and Quinn sway together in the wide-open sky, wind-kissed. Quinn’s hand is still resting lightly on Beatrice’s arm, and Beatrice is paying no attention to it (the pearl shine of her nails, the smudge of ink on her sleeve, the warm smell of cloves rising from her skin).
Beatrice twists at the brass ring around her own finger. “Your husband,” she blurts, and feels Quinn go still beside her. “Is he—does he know how you spend your afternoons?”
Quinn’s smile is far too knowing, smug as a sphinx. “Oh, I doubt it. He’s often away.”
“I see. And do you—” Beatrice suddenly cannot imagine how she intended to conduct the rest of the sentence.
Quinn is still smiling. “We have an arrangement. Mr. Thomas is a very understanding man.” She places a peculiar emphasis on the word, as if passing Beatrice a note written in a code she doesn’t know.
“Good. That’s good. That is, I didn’t think there were any understanding men.”
Her tone is too bitter; Quinn’s sly smile fades a little. “Your father really did a number on the three of you, didn’t he.”
The two of them have talked extensively about Miss Quinn’s past: her childhood in a crowded row house in New Cairo, all smog and sun and hopscotch; her aunts who petted and spoiled her and braided her hair; her mother who still runs a spice shop and comes home smelling of paprika and peppers; her father who used to cut out each of Quinn’s articles from The Defender and paste them into a scrapbook, with which he assailed guests and neighbors at any opportunity.
But Beatrice hasn’t much mentioned her own family, for the same reason a person doesn’t much mention carrion at the dinner table.
Beatrice attempts a casual shrug. “I s-suppose.” She plucks at the brass
