Chapter 10
The first interruption of the day was Mrs. Greene, pleading for cold relief and getting it on the spot; Beatrix had shrewdly made extra.
The second was Mrs. Beatty, issuing an invitation to Sunday dinner in thanks for earlier help; she had no daughters, so he accepted.
The third was old Mr. Yager, who needed his tractor fixed and could not afford to pay anyone to do it; he went on Peter’s list. The fourth was Mr. Ambrose, who needed his roof patched and could afford to pay for it; he was shown the length of the to-do list and decided to find a non-magical solution.
Now the fifth interruption stood on his porch. She was no supplicant.
“Miss Knight,” Peter said, holding in a frown. He did not point out that it was more than an hour before Beatrix’s shift would end. He simply raised his eyebrows and waited.
Miss Knight cocked her head and raised her eyebrows right back at him. What did he expect? If he was Hades to Beatrix’s Persephone, her friend was a Fury, intent on making him pay.
He sighed. “Won’t you come in.”
After he’d checked the house for wizards, he circled back to the hallway to find out why she’d come.
“I’d like to do my grading here,” she said. “Beatrix’s house is—” She shook her head. “There’s nothing more exhausting than being monitored nonstop.”
Sympathy overpowered his irritation. “I can only imagine.” He gestured to the receiving room. “You can use my desk, if you’d like.”
“Thank you, but I’d just as soon go to one of the upstairs rooms. I don’t want to be tempted to watch Beatrix make brews.”
Sensible. He set up the room where she and Beatrix had practiced protection spells, dragging over a chair from across the hall, bringing in a shelf from an empty bookcase and levitating it to a reasonable height for a desk.
“Thank you,” she said, and if her smile was tight, it still had to be the first time she’d ever favored him with one.
Was she changing her mind about him? Could this be a sign that Beatrix was beginning to see the situation differently?
He grimaced as he trudged back to the attic. What other way could she see it? It wasn’t as if he wanted her to succumb to the insidious pressure the Vow applied to her every second of each day.
But if Beatrix’s angel of vengeance now saw some redeeming value in him, he would count that as a not insignificant victory.
Beatrix rushed up the steps the moment she decanted the last brew of the day, knocked on the door and called out, “It’s me.
” She received no answer—the room was soundproofed, after all—and opened the door without any expectation of what met her eyes.
Ella grinned at her from the middle of the room, hovering at least a yard off the floor.
“Ella, that’s—that’s—”
“Amazing?”
“Yes! But also hazardous. What if something went wrong? You shouldn’t practice by yourself—I wouldn’t even be able to hear you scream.”
Ella shrugged. “I’m careful, I promise. Worst case, I’ll drop the soundproofing and then scream.
” She grinned again, wider this time. “Now that our dear omnimancer thinks I want to mark homework here, I can practice every day and he’ll never suspect.
You, too—just tell him you want to put off going home. Totally believable.”
This seemed like the worst deception yet.
They would be using Peter’s own house to practice the magic he saw as a dangerous amount of power, and had urged her not to tell anyone about, for the express purpose of telling and showing thousands of women—all the while pretending that they simply wanted to avoid the oppression of their bugged house.
Ella’s boots clicked against the floor as she lowered herself back down. “What’s wrong? You can stay and practice, can’t you?”
This could be the day.
“Yes,” Beatrix said.
By Friday of that week, Ella’s appearances after school had become such a routine that Beatrix heard her following Peter up the stairs while he was still confirming that no wizards had slipped in.
A few minutes later, the attic door thunked shut behind him.
Soon after that, a soft shush-shush-shush on the stairs gave way to Ella, standing in the brewing-room doorway in stocking feet.
“Beatrix,” she whispered, vibrating with some strong emotion. “The magic-detection spell—the spell—”
“What? What’s wrong?”
Ella ran around the table and grasped Beatrix’s arm.
“He cast the spell in our room, and what showed up wasn’t bright enough, it was clearly just picking up the actual spells we cast last week, so then I cast another detector when he left and knitted to make a hairpin float and it wasn’t white, Beatrix, it wasn’t white, do you realize what this means? ”
Yes. Yes, she did. They could work magic without leaving telltale signs to give them away to the magiocracy. If their knitting was subtle enough, they could practice right in front of a wizard and he would never know. Peter included.
“Now we just need to make this magic work properly,” Ella said, as if that were a minor issue, and darted back up the stairs.
As Beatrix brewed, she couldn’t help but wonder if Ella would manage it. At the end of the afternoon, she ran up to the little room with an anticipation she couldn’t quell.
“Behold,” Ella said, spreading her arms.
Beatrix looked around. Nothing seemed different. “What?”
“This time I turned a red dress purple.”
The groan escaped before Beatrix could catch it. There was no scenario in which different-colored clothes would be a necessity. “Ella …”
“No, bear with me, it’s actually more impressive than it sounds. Note the shocking ankle-revealing hemline?” Ella twirled, her stockings just visible above her prim schoolteacher lace-up heels. “Come over here and feel it.”
“Your hemline or your ankles?”
“Both.”
Beatrix humored her. Kneeling, she reached for the top of Ella’s shoe—and touched fabric. Invisible fabric in front of her legs. “What—”
“My dress! See, I’m making my shoes and a bit of my legs appear to show through.”
“All right, that is impressive,” Beatrix said, staring at the illusion, the inch or two of Ella that wasn’t actually her.
It was indistinguishable from the rest of her.
Wizards could turn themselves invisible, but there was no spell, as far as she knew, with results like this. “How are you doing that?”
“Practice, like I said. C’mon, I’ll show you.”
Beatrix considered it a moment longer before scrambling to her feet. “As amazing as that is, we really have to focus on sensing magic.”
“You can only try to find an invisible crabapple for so long before you start to go crazy. By the way,” Ella said with exaggerated nonchalance, “I accidentally squashed it.”
Beatrix grinned at her. There was no way to accidently squash a crabapple, invisible or not. “Oh?”
“Yes. While stomping around the room. Who could have predicted such a thing?”
Beatrix held back a laugh. Her own level of enmity for the crabapple was equally high, but they needed to make this work.
“Just try it for twenty minutes,” Ella said. “Then, new crabapple. I promise.”
“All right.” Beatrix shucked off her wizard’s coat. “Can you do your trick in reverse—make the skirt look longer? I’ve been wanting to hem all my dresses so they don’t drag in the snow and mud, but Rosemarie won’t have it.”
Ella frowned and shook a finger at her. “Beatrix!” she intoned, a pitch-perfect Rosemarie imitation. “Ankles! Think what people will say.”
“We must adhere to all the reasonable expectations of society in the interest of abolishing the unreasonable ones,” Beatrix added, her own impersonation not nearly as good, but Ella laughed all the same.
“OK,” Ella said, “first imagine your dress is alive and can be talked into a different shape …”
Joan gave them a wide smile as she let them into her apartment. That seemed a good sign. They talked of nothing for a few minutes, and then Beatrix asked for hairpins and they trooped off to her bathroom.
The air in the middle of the room turned white when Ella cast the spell-detector. There was a tense second before Joan said, “Mine. I’ve been careful about where to cast, just as you said.”
Beatrix let out a breath. “Everything OK?”
Joan nodded. “Recruited two people, neither in the League. And they’ve each recruited their two already.”
“All under Vows?”
“Yes.”
The tightness in Beatrix’s chest eased. But then Joan said, “You did bring more leaves? I’m just about out, and I promised I’d pass replacements down the line as soon as I got them.”
Beatrix tensed up all over again. “How are you out already?”
“You weren’t supposed to teach the recruits all the spells we showed you, remember—not until spring, anyway,” Ella said, shaking her head.
“I know, I know,” Joan said in an appeasing tone.
“And I didn’t. Just detection, soundproofing, levitation and the Vow, that’s all.
But my recruits needed more tries to get the hang of it.
Eleven leaves weren’t enough, they just weren’t.
So I let them use more and gave them extra to hand down for the next two sets of recruits. ”
Beatrix sighed. She should have accounted for that, especially because she’d let the first four recruits cast so many more spells.
But eleven leaves per person was already a stretch.
Even if she had the money to buy them from Baltimore’s wizarding supply shop, she couldn’t—she wasn’t a wizard.
And knitting remained a solution beyond their grasp, hard even for Ella to make work in place of normal spells, her bursts of innovation notwithstanding.
“How many leaves did you hand out per person?” Beatrix asked.
“Twenty.”
Twenty. Ella gave Beatrix a now what look. They’d calculated that they might—might—be able to pilfer two thousand leaves over several months without Peter noticing, and they’d thought that could carry them to spring. Now they would need nearly twice as many.
It was hard to believe he wouldn’t notice that.
Lydia Harper stood on his doorstep. Alone.