Chapter 3
Half the leadership of the Women’s League for the Prohibition of Magic, Maryland chapter, stared at Beatrix as she walked into her dining room. The other half would undoubtedly have followed suit, had they not lived too far away to attend a meeting in Ellicott Mills on a Friday evening.
Her sister jumped from her seat at the head of their table. “What on earth happened? Are you all right?”
“We have a new town omnimancer,” Beatrix said.
She was forced to raise her voice over the resulting furor to add, “And he’s pressed me into service as his assistant.”
This second revelation had the opposite effect on the group. She took advantage of the shocked silence to explain, leaving in the details that could make a person of a certain mindset draw the conclusion that it was her own fault.
That person was predictably the first to react.
“There are times for grand speeches about women’s rights, and that was not one of them,” said Rosemarie, the state chapter’s vice president, strategist and (it sometimes seemed) chief critic of Beatrix. She’d had plenty of opportunity, as Beatrix’s longest-standing tenant.
Lydia’s skirt swished as she paced. “When did he ask your name? Before or after he press-ganged you?”
“Before,” Beatrix said.
“He’s trying to get to me through you.”
“Well—”
“Did he mention me?”
“Yes, but—”
“The conference is in four weeks. That can’t be a coincidence.” Her sister grimaced and sank back into her seat. “They’ve decided long-distance interference is insufficient.”
Lydia, head of the state chapter, was lead organizer of the League’s national conference. They’d quickly discovered that powerful people did not want the event to go well.
None of the nicer hotels in Baltimore would rent their ballrooms to the League.
The established firms all declined to cater, many of them after initially expressing interest. And—though it could have been an accident—ten of the ninety-six invitations sent to the women heading other state chapters had not arrived.
(Thank God their own chapter treasurer stumbled upon the problem and mailed a second set.)
“What do you think?” Lydia asked. “I’m not being paranoid, am I?”
This was directed at Rosemarie. Beatrix, sitting gingerly to avoid staining the seat, wondered how long it had been since her sister had asked for her advice.
Rosemarie Dane, hair a soft gray, could pass for grandmotherly if you didn’t look her in the eye.
Her eyes were hard. She baked cookies for no one.
Now, tapping her pencil on her notepad, she said, “We’d better assume the Washington magiocracy knows you’re planning to run for League president. And they don’t want you to win.”
Lydia’s laugh was grim. “I’m certainly not going to, if they make it look as if I can’t even manage a conference. And then we’ll have at least four more years of Patricia Gossard, who will lead in exactly the same way we’ve always been led, with exactly the same lack of results.”
Beatrix decided to inject her opinion, asked for or not. “I don’t think Blackwell is part of a plot against the League.”
Rosemarie’s raised eyebrow conveyed her view of this just as clearly as her skeptical “oh?”
“When he walked in the door, I assumed the same thing you did,” Beatrix said, “but then I recognized him. Blackwell’s a scientist, isn’t he? He’s not the type you’d ask to disrupt an activist organization. And he seems disgruntled to be here. This has ‘demotion’ written all over it.”
Lydia shook her head. “But isn’t that exactly why they would have sent him? To lull us into a false sense of security?”
“Well—”
“We must proceed as if our new omnimancer is here to undermine us,” Rosemarie said. “It’s the only way.”
“I’m sorry, Bee, but I think she’s right,” Lydia said. Naturally.
“What he’s done to Beatrix is outrageous,” said Ella, the county chapter’s vice president and Beatrix’s best friend, if “best” and “only” were not mutually exclusive. “We ought to file a complaint with the wizard ethics board.”
Beatrix glanced at the ceiling to stave off the tears that threatened. She appreciated the gesture. But it hurt, and more than she expected, that it hadn’t come from her sister.
“No point—the board’s a joke.” Rosemarie stopped tapping her pencil.
“Now, if Washington planned to cut off Lydia’s tuition funds, they needed only to keep the store owners in town from employing Beatrix.
Perhaps they think Blackwell can glean some useful information about us through her.
But these things cut both ways. Here’s what I propose: Beatrix will use every opportunity to find damaging information about him.
Even better, about the administration—or wizards in general. ”
Oh, was that all. She looked at Lydia, who always decided these things.
“Yes, I agree.” Then her sister glanced at her, eyebrows raised in a question asked out of order. “If you’d be willing?”
Beatrix sighed.
After the meeting, once she’d wolfed down supper, set her clothes to soak, scrubbed the grime off herself and pulled on a nightdress, she found Lydia working at the desk in their room.
She appeared to be copying out an essay from a much-revised original, using only the small desk light to save on electricity—and a pen instead of their typewriter.
Beatrix’s chest tightened in that reflexive way it did when an unexpected bill materialized. “Has the infernal contraption broken again?”
Lydia sighed. “Twice in one week has to be a record.”
“I’ll drop it off with Mr. Hawkins tomorrow.”
“I brought it by this afternoon.” Her sister brushed a stray hair behind her ear, the gesture looking weary. “He thinks there’s nothing more he can do.”
A stroke of bad luck—another one. The typewriter had been ailing for months, but Beatrix had hoped it would last until the end of the year, when she might have enough scraped up for a replacement. Or better yet, until May, when Lydia would graduate.
The dress soaking in the bathroom was almost certainly ruined, too. But at least that dress was the very oldest she owned—one of her mother’s—and its absence could be dealt with by wearing Monday’s outfit again on Friday.
She sat on her bed, a groan escaping.
“It’s all right, Bee.” Lydia glanced over at her. “Really. The professors accept handwritten essays—I checked. And Meg said I could use her typewriter when I’m on campus.”
Meg Wallace, Lydia’s classmate and League treasurer, came from a family of means. She would never have to worry about broken typewriters. Neither would the rest of Lydia’s classmates at Hazelhurst College, for that matter.
“What are you working on?” Beatrix asked, unable to keep the question from sounding wistful. “The biology assignment?”
“Finished it. On to twentieth-century history.”
“Ah.”
“I’m arguing that the period is a prime example of the fallacy that progress is inevitable.”
“No doubt the wizards would disagree,” Beatrix said, her sense of humor reasserting itself after hours of suppression.
Lydia shot her a look. Wizards, in her opinion, were no joking matter. She didn’t subscribe to the idea that laughter counted as protest.
“Tell me about Peter Blackwell.” Lydia turned more fully in her chair. “How dangerous do you think he could be?”
“Rosemarie taught him for eight years. Wouldn’t you rather ask her?”
“I already did.”
That was what she got for being petty. She laughed under her breath at herself.
“But I want your opinion,” Lydia said—so sincerely that Beatrix’s resentment faded back to its usual under-the-surface condition, like a headache just before the pain.
Of course her sister was worried. Lydia had been born just after Blackwell left for the Wizardry Academy in Arlington. She’d grown up hearing gossip about his skill and intelligence, and suddenly he’d reappeared.
“I’ll grant you he could be dangerous if he was so inclined,” Beatrix said, running fingers through her damp hair so she could braid it. “He’s a much better wizard than Omnimancer Graham. You know Graham had half the town convinced that spells never took on the first try?”
Her sister’s lips quirked. There was hope for the girl yet.
It was hard to grin back, though, because at that moment Lydia looked so very much like their mother.
Naturally she did, with her auburn hair, hazel eyes and pale skin (none of which Beatrix had inherited—brown, brown, browned), but for all that, her face hardly ever suggested their mother, whose default expression had been a smile. Usually mischievous.
“What else?” Lydia asked, dragging her back to the present.
“Well ... he’s bright. Very. We were in the same grade, so I can attest to that.
” She tried to think of other relevant facts as she finished her braid.
“He doesn’t have any family left in town.
Oh, and he’s clearly used to everyone doing exactly as he says, but I suspect that’s standard issue for wizards. ”
“What did he do today? While he made you clean house, I mean.”
“Harvested leaves. He claims Washington won’t be supplying him, which makes no sense.”
Lydia raised one eyebrow, a habit she’d picked up from Rosemarie. “It does if he’s trying to create the impression there’s a rift.”
Beatrix almost shot back “not everything is about you”—almost—but kept the uncharitable words to herself.
Lydia hadn’t asked for most of what she’d got.
She hadn’t even asked to be sent to college.
It was simply that she took as a given that uncomplaining Bee would plow every spare moment into her cause, and it was getting harder and harder to see that as anything but unfair.
It wasn’t that Lydia was selfish. Just single-minded to a fault.
Well—she supposed she could be, too.
“I really don’t think he’s trying to lull us into a false sense of security,” she said. “Honestly.”
Lydia shook her head. “If he’s particularly good at lulling ...”
“Then that’s exactly what I would think, true.” Beatrix gave a rueful laugh. What if she believed her sister was not the reason Blackwell hired her because she wanted something—even this awful thing—to be about her? “I can’t stand him, if it makes you feel any better.”
This would have been an opportune time to say something in a commiserating vein. Lydia, tapping two fingers to her lips, asked, “Did he spellcast?”
Single-minded.
Beatrix let out a breath that was more of a sigh, swung her sore feet onto the bed and leaned back on her elbows. “Yes. Unlocked the door, lit up the house and turned a leaf into paper.”
She had a great deal of fellow feeling for that leaf, both of them helpless to resist the transformation he demanded.
“What was it like?” Lydia’s question was so soft, she almost missed it. “The magic.”
“Didn’t you ever see Omnimancer Graham cast spells?”
“Never. At least, not since I was old enough to remember.”
He had spent more time squeezing dinner invitations out of the townspeople than doing magic the last decade or so of his life.
If Graham hadn’t refused to retire, they might have received a replacement more quickly.
But his death came after Washington stopped assigning omnimancers to areas with populations under fifty thousand, thus their respite.
She tried to force nebulous impressions about spellcasting into concrete words. “Do you remember when you were eight and we borrowed the Bennett boys’ sleds?”
“Stole, you mean?”
Beatrix waved this away. “Borrowed without technically getting permission and returned before anyone noticed. How did it feel to go down McCabe Hill?”
“As if I’d left my stomach at the top.” Lydia let another small smile free.
“Amazing, wasn’t it? With an undercurrent of danger that made it all the more exciting.”
Her sister’s smile flickered and died. “Yes, but do you remember that when we went back up, it occurred to me that girls aren’t supposed to sled? Completely unfeminine, etc. etc. And it made me so angry I almost wished I hadn’t gone down at all.”
“Right. And that’s exactly how it feels to watch magic.” Beatrix swallowed. “How I feel, anyway.”
She closed her eyes. A moment later, Lydia murmured, “I’m very sorry, Bee, about what happened to you today.”
“I know,” she said, because she did. She just wished it hadn’t taken all night for Lydia to think of saying it.