But on the spring equinox of 1893, she is a fool.
She sits in the dust-specked light of her little office in the East Wing of the Salem College Library, flipping furtively through a newly donated first-edition copy of the Sisters Grimm’s Children and Household Witch-Tales (1812). She already knows the stories, knows them so well she dreams in once-upon-a-times and sets of three, but she’s never held a first edition in her own two hands. It has a weight to it, as if the Sisters Grimm tucked more than paper and ink inside it.
Beatrice flicks to the last page and pauses. Someone has added a verse at the end of the last tale, hand-lettered and faded.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
There are more lines below these, but they’re lost to the blotches and stains of time.
It isn’t especially strange to find words written in the back of an old book; Beatrice has been a librarian for five years and has seen much worse, including a patron who used a raw strip of bacon as a bookmark. But it is a little strange that Beatrice recognizes these words, that she and her sisters sang them when they were little girls back in Crow County.
Beatrice always thought it was one of Mama Mags’s nonsense-songs, a silly rhyme she made up to keep her granddaughters busy while she plucked rooster feathers or bottled jezebel-root. But here it is, scrawled in an old book of witch-tales.
Beatrice flips several onion-skin pages and finds the title of the last tale printed in scrolling script, surrounded by a dark tangle of ivy: The Tale of Saint George and the Witches. It’s never been one of her favorites, but she reads it anyway.
It’s the usual version: once upon a time there were three wicked witches who loosed a terrible plague on the world. But brave Saint George of Hyll rose against them. He purged witching from the world, leaving nothing but ashes behind him.
Finally only the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone remained, the last and wickedest of witches. They fled to Avalon and hid in a tall tower, but in the end Saint George burned the Three and their tower with them.
The last page of the story is an engraved illustration of grateful children dancing while the Last Three Witches of the West burned merrily in the background.
Mama Mags used to tell the story different. Beatrice remembers listening to her grandmother’s stories as if they were doors to someplace else, someplace better. Later, after she was sent away, she would lie in her narrow cot and re-tell them to herself again and again, rubbing them like lucky pennies between her fingers.
(Sometimes she can still see the walls of her room at St. Hale’s: perfect ivory, closing like teeth around her. She keeps such things locked safe inside parentheses, like her mother taught her.)
A raised voice rings from the square through her office window, startling her. She isn’t supposed to be dawdling over witch-tales and rhymes; as a junior associate librarian she’s supposed to be cataloging and filing and recording, perhaps transcribing the work of true scholars.
Right now there are several hundred pages of illegible handwriting piled on her desk from a professor in the School of History. She’s only typed the title page—The Greater Good: An Ethical Evaluation of the Georgian Inquisition During the Purge—but she can tell already it’s one of those bloodthirsty books that relishes every gory detail of the purges: the beatings and brandings, the metal bridles and hot iron shoes, the women they burned with their babes still held in their arms. It will be popular with the Morality Party types, the saber-rattlers and churchgoers who rather admire the French Empire’s bloody campaign against the war-witches of Dahomey, who are eager to see similar measures taken up against the witches of the Navajo and Apache and the stubborn Choctaw still holed up in Mississippi.
Beatrice finds she doesn’t have the stomach for it. She knows witching is sinful and dangerous, that it stands in the way of the forward march of progress and industry, et cetera, but she can’t help but think of Mags in her little herb-hung house and wonder what the harm is.
She looks again at the words on the last page of the Sisters Grimm. They aren’t important. They aren’t anything at all, just a little girl’s rhyme written in a children’s book, a song sung by an old woman in the hills of nowhere in particular. An unfinished verse long forgotten.
But when she looks at them, Beatrice can almost feel her sisters’ hands in hers again, can almost smell the mist rising from the valleys back home.
She pulls a notebook from her desk drawer. It’s cheaply made—the black dye fading to murky mauve, the pages coming unglued—but it’s her most beloved possession.
(It was her very first possession, the first thing she purchased with her own money after she left St. Hale’s.)
The notebook is half-filled with witch-tales and nursery rhymes, stolen scraps and idle dreams and anything that catches Beatrice’s eye. If she were a scholar she might refer to her notes as research, might imagine it typed and bound on a library shelf, discussed in university halls, but she isn’t and it won’t be.
Now she copies the verse about wayward sisters into the little black book, beside all the other stories she’ll never tell and spells she’ll never work.
She hasn’t spoken so much as a single charm or cantrip since she left home. But something about the shape of the words on the page, written in her own hand, tempts her tongue. She has a wild impulse to read them aloud—and Beatrice isn’t a woman much subject to wild impulses. She learned young what happened when a woman indulges herself, when she tastes fruits forbidden.
(Don’t forget what you are, her daddy told her, and Beatrice hasn’t.)
And yet—Beatrice cracks her office door to
