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And Saints save her, Agnes wishes it was real. That she could just wave a sign or shout a slogan and step into a better world, one where she could be more than a daughter or a mother or a wife. Where she could be something instead of nothing.
Books and tales are as close as she can come to a place where magic is still real, where women and their words have power.
“Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both…” She gestures in midair again. “They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.”
Is that what mother’s love is like? A thing with teeth?
Beatrice and her sisters chose nine o’clock in the evening because nine o’clock is a woman’s hour. The dinners have been served and the dishes dried and stacked, the children tucked into bed, the whiskies poured and served to the husbands. It’s the hour where a woman might sit in stillness, scheming and dreaming.
Then Agnes is alone, feeling like a snake or a shard of glass, something that hurts if you hold it close.
“I thought you wanted to recruit more women to the cause.” “It’d recruit the hell out of me,” Juniper said, truthfully. “Yes, well, you’re a plague and a calamity and you should be locked up for the safety of the city.”
I wonder sometimes where the first witch came from. If perhaps Adam deserved Eve’s curse.” His smile twists. “If behind every witch is a woman wronged.”
she supposes a person doesn’t have to love their home in order to miss it.
The problem with saving someone, Bella thinks, is that they so often refuse to remain saved. They careen back out into the perilous world, inviting every danger and calamity, quite careless of the labor it took to rescue them in the first place.
She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?
Agnes’s man. What a novel, rather appealing arrangement, to own a man rather than being owned by him.
Of the terrible risk of loving someone more than yourself and the secret strength it grants you.
An angry woman is a smart woman, Mags used to say.
“The Constitution? What, exactly, do you think the Constitution is? A magic spell? A dragon, perhaps, that will swoop down to defend you in your most desperate hour?” Cleo straightens in her seat. Juniper doesn’t think she’s ever seen a face so full of scorn. “I assure you it has only ever been a piece of paper, and it has only ever applied to a very few persons.”
She thinks how very tiresome it is to love and be loved. She can’t even risk her life properly, because it no longer belongs solely to her.
“Took you long enough.” That’s the antlered woman, with a voice like snake teeth and briars. “Well.” Juniper shrugs. “We were busy. And you were dead.”
“Start at the beginning,” she orders, and Juniper wonders which beginning she means. The day they called the tower into St. George’s Square and found one another again? Or seven years before, when she ran down the rutted road after her sisters, begging them not to leave her? Or maybe the beginning of their story is the same as the middle and the end: Once there were three sisters.
That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”
Agnes isn’t surprised, not really. She knows powerful men only keep their promises when they have to, and they never have to.
She knows what’s coming better than her sisters. She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.
Distantly it occurs to her that men like Gideon ought to stop breaking people, because sometimes they mend twice as strong.
It seems to her it has happened this way before and will happen again, until there are no witches left to burn or no men left to burn them.
“Writing a book is dangerous business, if done correctly.”
She begins to believe that the words and ways are whichever ones a woman has, and that a witch is merely a woman who needs more than she has.
“History is a circle, and you people are always looking for the beginnings and ends of it.”
I guess something rose from my ashes, after all. Makes me wonder if maybe those phoenix stories were never really about birds in the first place.
