Beatrice doesn’t need to read the article, because she already knows what it says. She found out seven years ago what Juniper was, what lay coiled beneath her skin, waiting to strike. Her daddy should have remembered it, too, but maybe he got soft or stupid over the years. Maybe one day he took too much from her, some last precious thing, and left her with nothing to lose.
Beatrice skims The Herald: untimely death; signs of the uncanny; daughter seen fleeing the property.
She slides it back across the desk and the officer shakes his head. “What kind of woman would kill her own father, eh?” He taps the paper twice. “This’ll be in The Post first thing in the morning. I wouldn’t go around telling folks you rented a room to a murderess, if I was you.”
Beatrice notices a brass badge shining dully on his chest, showing a torch raised high, and understands that Miss Quinn was right. That there will be no bail or due process, that the rule of law has given way to the rule of men and mobs. That it’s too late.
She retreats, and watches the men forget her as soon as she leaves their sight. Outside the air is thick and gray with the promise of rain. Beatrice tries hard not to think of Juniper down in the Deeps, all alone with the rising water. At least the cellar was dry, most days.
Beatrice doesn’t know where she’s walking until she is standing in the wood-paneled hall of the Salem College Library, blinking dimly at her office door. Her sanctuary, her one safe place.
But there’s something subtly wrong. It takes her a frazzled moment to realize that her nameplate—the cream-colored card with her name in neat script—is missing from its brass holder.
Her door is locked.
She stares at it for several seconds before retreating to the washroom and scrubbing the disguise from her face. Her own eyes are clouds looming back at her in the mirror.
Miss Munley is working at the circulation desk today, shuffling stacks of paper in a way that is meant to communicate that she’s very busy and harried and doesn’t have time for nuisances like Beatrice.
“E-excuse me, ma’am?” (After St. Hale’s, Beatrice’s words developed a tendency to clot and stick in her throat, like sour milk. It took years to make them flow cleanly again.) “My office seems to be locked.”
Miss Munley doesn’t look up at her. “It is no longer your office, I’m afraid.” Her voice is as crisp and neat as the turn of a staple.
“Why?”
She taps her papers on the desk to neaten the edges and meets Beatrice’s eyes. “Because—in light of recent information provided to us by a concerned citizen—you are no longer employed by the library.”
The numbness creeps over her again, the chill of betrayal. Someone betrayed more than the time and place of their doomed spectacle; someone whispered names and positions. But then why isn’t Beatrice down in the Deeps beside her sister?
“I see.” Beatrice’s voice sounds like it’s coming through an especially battered phonograph, warbly and tinny. “May I retrieve my personal effects?” What would the police make of her stacks of children’s tales and folklore, her scribbled words and ways—her black leather notebook, ringed with salt?
“No. In fact we have been instructed to inform the authorities if we see you on the premises.” Miss Munley slants an unreadable look at Beatrice and adds, “So I would advise you to leave the premises at once. Before I see you.”
Beatrice leaves the premises. She stands in St. George’s Square, unmoving, unmoored.
She wants very badly to go home, but the little attic room has never been her home. Her home was always witch-tales and words, stories into which she could escape when her own became too terrible to bear. It was the soft quiet of the stacks and her too-small office and the scratch of her pen across the page. All of it, lost.
It begins, gently, to rain.
Beatrice is very familiar with despair. It’s followed her since St. Hale’s, trailing like a loyal black dog behind her, nipping sometimes at her heels. Now she greets it calmly, almost gladly, like a childhood friend.
Agnes knows despair. She first met it on the night her mother died—a black hound that curled on her chest, bending her ribs inward—and has often heard the pad of its steps following her up the boarding-house stairs.
Now she feels its eyes watching her from the shadows of the mill-house floor.
She stands clustered with the other girls, murmuring and whispering. Annie is there, pale and puffy-eyed, and Yulia, with her lips white and thin. Her eldest daughter is there beside her, but the next-eldest is missing. Caught, as she fled the witch-yard? Struck by the summer’s fever, like so many other girls?
Mr. Malton glares out at them from eyes like peppercorns, small and dry. Agnes can tell he’s skipped his morning drink, can almost feel the blood thudding resentfully in his ears.
“You’ve all read the papers, by now.” They haven’t, because a quarter of them can’t read and another quarter can’t read English and none of them can afford the over-sized special issues the paper-boys are running up and down the streets, but the mill already hums and hisses with rumors. Only Agnes and the other Sisters kept their mouths shut and their eyes down this morning.
“There are witches walking among us once more. They caught the ringleader early this morning—some madwoman from down south, I heard—but some of them still roam free.” Malton waves a creased page of newsprint in the air. Agnes does not permit her eyes to follow it. She can feel the soft heat of Bella somewhere to the north, but nothing but a cold absence where Juniper should be.
Malton wheels, fixing them with his red-veined stare. “And I have it on good authority that some of them might even
