Just before midnight a creaking voice asked the miller’s daughter, “Why do you weep so?”
“Oh,” she answered, “because my father is a fool and I will surely burn tomorrow, for I am no witch.”
An old, old woman lurched out of the shadows, dressed in tattered rags and carrying a black-wood staff. A pair of rubies were set into the staff’s head, like the red eyes of a snake.
“Ah,” she said to the miller’s daughter, “but I am. What will you give me if I turn this straw to silver?”
With the girl’s golden necklace clasped around her neck, the Crone sat down at the spinning wheel.
At dawn the king was very pleased to find a room full of spun silver, enough to build a statue or a ship. He was so pleased, and so foolish, that he locked the girl in an even larger cell the following night and demanded that she perform the trick again.
The miller’s daughter wept, and soon she heard the shush of a tattered cloak along the floor. She and the Crone haggled briefly, and this time when the Crone sat down at the wheel she wore the girl’s diamond ring on her finger.
By morning the cell was full of silver and the king, who was by now beginning to dream of entire armadas, locked her in a third cell, larger still.
The miller’s daughter wept, a little perfunctorily, and the Crone appeared. But there were no necklaces or rings left to barter. The Crone asked for the girl’s firstborn child, instead, and the miller’s daughter—who did not want to burn at the stake, who counted her own life more heavily than that of a child not yet thought of or wanted—agreed.
The straw was spun. The king was pleased. So pleased, in fact, that he made her a king’s wife instead of a miller’s daughter.
In time the king’s wife became a prince’s mother. On the child’s name-day the Crone appeared to claim her debt. The king, seeing the Crone with her black-wood staff, realized the secret behind his wife’s miraculous spinning and spurned her, so that the king’s wife lost her crown and her child in the same hour.
The woman wept, and the Crone took pity on her. “If you can find my tower within three days’ time, I will forgive your debt,” she said, and vanished.
For two days the woman walked the high hills of her kingdom, barefoot, ragged, her gown stained with milk. On the evening of the third day the last of her milk ran from her breasts and fell like pearls to the earth. The pearls ran together, forming a line, which became a pale, milky snake with red rubies for eyes. The mother—or, in some tellings, the Mother—followed the snake deeper into the woods.
Perhaps, among the darkest and oldest trees, she found a tower. Perhaps a fire was burning in the hearth and bread was waiting on the table, and her son lay wrapped in black rags, sleeping gently. Perhaps she and her child lived in the tower happily ever after.
Neither the Mother nor the Crone was ever seen in the kingdom again.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Tell the truth, reveal all.
A spell to see, requiring a mirror & a borrowed belonging
Beatrice Belladonna expects despair to hurt, but it doesn’t feel like much of anything. She thinks of Jonah in the belly of the whale and the little red witch inside the wolf and wonders if either of them felt a little relieved to be eaten, to be taken away from the world and permitted to curl in the suffocating black, alone.
Beatrice sleeps. She dreams—of locked cells and spun silver, of white snakes and black towers—and wakes sweating in the stale heat of midday. She wills herself back to sleep, staring at the pulsing dark of her own eyelids until she slips into a dazed, dreamless place.
The next time she wakes the attic is all slanting shadows and twilit windows, and Miss Cleopatra Quinn is sitting at the end of her bed.
(Beatrice is abruptly aware that her left cheek is sticky with spittle and that she is wearing her oldest and most mortifying nightdress, the one with little bonneted ducks embroidered at the collar.)
“I believe in the story it’s a kiss that wakes Snow White from her sleep, but I’ve always found that a little presumptuous.” Quinn’s voice is light, but her eyes on Beatrice are heavy with worry. “I tried to visit your office at the library today.”
Beatrice licks sleep-gummed lips. “It’s not my office anymore.”
“So I was made to understand.” She adds, after a pause, “I’m sorry.”
The next pause is much longer and emptier. The interior of Beatrice’s skull feels dim and cobwebbed, like a closet she prefers not to open.
Quinn strokes the brim of the derby hat in her lap. “The Post reports five arrests—Frankie, Gertrude, Jennie, the oldest Domontovich girl—all of whom are charged with general mayhem, the promotion of sin, and public witchcraft. Juniper has . . . additional charges, of course. As far as I can tell, most of the girls were shipped four miles south to the women’s workhouse. Except Jennie, who I can’t seem to find, and Juniper, who is in the Deeps.”
Beatrice wonders vaguely what Quinn expects her to do with this report. Cry, perhaps. But even crying seems messy and troublesome compared to the clean relief of sleep.
Quinn continues in a clipped, professional voice. “Your sister’s trial is set for the middle of next week, but the Deeps are not a healthful place to linger, and the solstice is the day after tomorrow. I don’t think we
