Following her conversation with Frankie, Beatrice is more careful. She no longer permits Miss Quinn to loop her arm through hers or accompanies her in public. When their eyes meet—gray to gold, cloud to sunlight—Beatrice looks away after a single second (she counts in her head, one-one-thousand, drawing the syllables long and slow).
The last time Quinn visited the library, Beatrice suggested stiffly that there was no need for Miss Quinn to make the trip up from New Cairo quite so often, as they had finished reviewing the Old Salem materials and found nothing more exciting than a few desiccated rose petals and a pale tatter they thought was lace, but which turned out to be the shed skin of some long-dead snake. Everything else—the court transcripts and diary entries, the ledgers and letters—was either painfully mundane or mysteriously fragmented. A promising journal with the final pages ripped out; a little girl’s letter to her aunt with entire passages faded away to nothing; an account from one of the Inquisitors who burned the city, which ended: After the fire died and the screams faded—and I tell you I shall hear them till Judgment Day—Judge Hawthorn had us comb the ashes for days. Whatever he sought he did not find.
“If the secret to calling back the Lost Way exists, we may be reasonably certain it’s not in the Salem College Library.” Beatrice met Miss Quinn’s eyes (one-one-thousand). “Surely your time would be better spent pursuing—other possibilities.”
Quinn opened her mouth as if she might object, but the expression on Beatrice’s face made her close it. “As you wish, Miss Eastwood.” It’s only after she’s gone that Beatrice notices she left her derby hat behind.
Beatrice spends the rest of the week working alone. She transcribes the chapters she is assigned; she adds more witch-tales and rhymes to her little black notebook and fills page after page with notes and theories and failed experiments (Solstice and equinox offer amplification? Maiden’s blood & Crone’s tears—Mother’s ???); she squints at innocent shadows as they glide across the floor and keeps her threshold lined with salt. Mr. Blackwell blinks as he steps across it and asks Beatrice mildly if she’s been feeling well.
If a certain scent lingers in the air, Beatrice doesn’t notice (cloves; newsprint; machine oil).
She sees Miss Quinn a handful of times—at meetings of the Sisters of Avalon, flitting in and out of South Sybil as they plan their third spectacle—but somehow never quite remembers to return her derby hat; Quinn does not retrieve it.
By the eighteenth of June the summer heat has finally sunk through the limestone and wood-paneling of the library, so that sitting in her office feels like sitting in the damp interior of an animal’s mouth. Even the books look rumpled and disheveled, pages swollen.
Beatrice works until midafternoon, sweaty and glazed and lonely. Her eyes slide to the derby hat on her desk.
She stands and tucks it under her arm. It may be unwise to form any particular attachment to Miss Quinn, but surely Beatrice might enjoy her company. Occasionally. She informs Mr. Blackwell that she’s going home early and strides out into the bright haze of the square.
The trolley deposits her at the southernmost tip of Second Street, where the neat cobbles give way to hard-packed dirt and the stately homes are replaced by hasty tenements, and scuttles north again. Beatrice proceeds on foot, stepping across the invisible line that divides one neighborhood from the next—although New Cairo isn’t so much a neighborhood within New Salem as it is an assault upon it.
Instead of a neat grid of streets there’s a haphazard tangle; instead of pulled curtains and closed windows there are balconies crowded with flowerpots and laundry and bright awnings; even the churches are suspiciously cheery, ringing with raised voices rather than tolling bells and dour chants. The city has retaliated—passing fussy little ordinances and fines for broken windows, stuffing the entire neighborhood into a single odd-shaped voting district—but New Cairo persists in growing. The Jungle, Beatrice has heard it called, with a sour smile, or Little Africa; Beatrice thinks they’re frightened to say the word Cairo aloud, as if it might summon golden tombs and witch-queens from the air.
The offices of The Defender are six blocks south, in a sooty red building that hums with the constant churn of the press. The secretary looks up as Beatrice enters. “Cleo isn’t in, Miss Eastwood. Check Araminta’s, on Nut Street.” He says Nut strangely, almost like night.
After several wrong turns and two consultations with bemused passersby, Beatrice still walks past it twice: Nut Street is a long, crooked alley, deep-shadowed and cool even in the afternoon heat. Red-painted doors and dark windows line the walls, bearing discreet signs: LESLIE BELL, TAILOR; M. LAWSON’S CURATIVES; ARAMINTA’S SPICES & SUNDRIES. Beatrice taps at the door. After a long silence, she turns the handle.
She smells the spices first: a hundred shades of cinnamon and sage, clove and cardamom. The air itself glows reddish-gold, flecked with motes of pepper and paprika. The shop is filled with rows of tiny wooden drawers and brown paper packages, sacks of garlic and jars of ruby peppers. The floorboards sigh little puffs of saffron and salt as she crosses them. There’s another smell lying beneath the spices, colder and stranger and wilder, that Beatrice can’t name.
Beatrice edges toward the counter in the back, empty except for a small copper bell. Beatrice is reaching for it when she hears her own name, followed by: “—certain she isn’t holding anything from me. She doesn’t suspect anything. She’s just . . . cautious.”
Beatrice goes very still, her hand outstretched, her lungs half-full. She knows that voice.
Someone else says something, low, indistinct. It must be a question, because the first voice responds: “Tomorrow night. The Rose Moon. I told them a full moon was a foolish time for going unseen, but they’re getting cheeky, less careful. Foolish.”
Tomorrow the Sisters of
