Quinn makes a carefully neutral noise and Beatrice knows she could stop there, if she liked. She could skip over the rotten places in her past as she usually does and remain unblemished a little longer.
But the two of them are alone far above the city and Quinn’s hand is still on her arm, and surely a woman who turned a Saint into a pig might manage to tell the truth, however small and sordid.
Beatrice wets her lips. “It wasn’t only my father. It was—St. Hale’s.” Just saying the name sends a sick swooping through her stomach, as if the cabin has broken loose from its moorings and gone plummeting earthward.
Quinn sucks a sharp breath between her teeth. “That place has . . . an unfortunate reputation. Beatrice, I’m sorry.”
Beatrice can barely hear her over the memory of hot wax hissing on the back of her bent neck, the ache of her knees on the chapel floor. Her hands bound together in forced prayer, cords cutting deep. A dozen clever cruelties that drove every desire from her body save one: to make them stop.
Beatrice finds that she’s twisting violently at the brass ring. It slips from her finger. “Oh dear, pardon me—”
Quinn scrabbles after it but the ring falls between the steel seams of the cabin and twinkles downward. It vanishes in a final flash of cut-glass diamond.
A small silence follows while Beatrice reassembles herself, parentheses braced once more like a pair of cupped hands around her heart. “I apologize. I do not mean to be so hysterical.”
“I don’t know what they told you at St. Hale’s, but a few tears hardly make a woman a hysteric.”
Beatrice had not been aware that she was crying. She scrubs too hard at her cheeks, feels the wind whip them dry. “In any case, you are mistaken. My father did not send me to St. Hale’s.” Beatrice says it calmly, but there’s acid in her throat. “My sister did.”
Quinn startles beside her. “Juniper?” she whispers.
“Certainly not. June is the loudest of us, but hardly the most dangerous. And she was only a girl when it happened.”
Quinn doesn’t move or speak or ask questions. She simply listens, as if her whole being is bent toward the listening, as if Beatrice is someone worth listening to.
Beatrice swallows very hard. “Our father was angry with Agnes for . . .” There would be a kind of justice to it if Beatrice spilled her sister’s secrets, one bloody eye traded for another, but she finds she can’t do it. “Our father was always angry. Or maybe not always—Mother said he used to laugh, and take her dancing, until the war . . . Well. I never saw him dance. One day he came for Agnes, and Agnes threw me before him like a bone to a wolf.”
Agnes had looked at her with her eyes ringed white and her teeth bared. In her face Beatrice had seen the sudden certainty of her own death: the red of her blood, the black of the cellar, the gray of her gravestone. She was an animal with its leg caught in a wire trap, deciding whether to turn its teeth against its own flesh or just lie down and die.
And Beatrice watched her sister choose. I saw Beatrice with the preacher’s girl last Sunday.
Until that day, until the very second Agnes opened her mouth to exchange her life for Beatrice’s, they had been one another’s keepers. But no longer.
Beatrice looks out over the city without seeing it. “I was in St. Hale’s by the following Sunday. I believe our local preacher assisted with the tuition costs.”
Quinn stays quiet a little longer, maybe waiting for more of the story, maybe just waiting for the wind to dry the wetness on Beatrice’s cheeks. Then she asks, “And yet—you trust Agnes now?”
“. . . Yes.” Or at least she trusts that her sister wants the same thing they want: more.
“Although she broke that trust before.”
“Surely trust is never truly broken, but merely lost.” Beatrice’s lips twist. “And what is lost, that can’t be found?”
She feels the amber heat of Quinn’s gaze on her face, scrutinizing her. “Perhaps you should trust less easily, Miss Eastwood.” There’s a harshness in her voice, but she loops her arm not-very-casually through Beatrice’s as she says it, and Beatrice does not pull away.
The wheel spins them back to earth, the bright-smelling wind replaced with the greasy fug of the Fair. As they stroll back beneath the high arch of the entranceway, still arm in arm, Quinn asks, lightly, “So. Tell me about this second spectacle.”
And Beatrice—who perhaps should trust less easily—does.
Fee and fie, fum and foe,
Green and gold, see them grow!
A spell for growth, requiring buried seeds & fool’s gold
It’s Agnes Amaranth who finds their second spell. She’s talking with Annie before the shift bell rings, whispering about ways and words and spells half-hidden in witch-tales, and Annie scoffs. “You think there’s witchcraft hidden in pat-a-cake songs? Secret spells in the tale of Jack and the Giant?” Agnes watches her with narrow gray eyes and says, “Maybe so. Tell it to me.”
Later that evening Agnes walks past the black remains of the Square Shirtwaist Factory on St. Lamentation. She read in the papers that forty-six women died in the fire, and another thirteen leapt from the high windows. “It’s company policy to lock the doors,” the owner argued in court. “So the girls don’t get shiftless.” He and his partner had paid a fine of seventy-five dollars.
Standing there, looking up at the burned carcass of the factory with heat gathering in her fingertips, Agnes notices that there are survey stakes spaced neatly around the lot. Scraped
