Chapter 7
Blackwell might have scruples about putting her to work on a Sunday, but her sister did not. “Would you help me make signs directing people to the hotel?” Lydia asked, hovering in the doorway of their shared bedroom.
Beatrix glanced back at the brewing manual in her lap, wishing she’d had the sense to read in the forest, where she would have been harder to find. “We’ve got more than a month to go—there’s no rush.”
“Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, so we’d better not leave anything to the last minute.”
Lydia sounded so tired that sympathy overcame irritation.
“All right,” Beatrix said, getting up.
Posterboard and pens waited for them on the dining room table. Her sister sat, rubbing her temples. “Do ten straight-ahead arrows, all right? I’ll make the rights, lefts and U-turns for the inevitable misses.”
Beatrix produced the first sign and shook her head. “I have visions of elderly women wandering around the docks. I wish we could have found a downtown hotel willing to take our money.”
“At least everyone coming from the aeroport should be all right. You did give the shuttle company detailed directions, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Beatrix frowned. “You say that as if I have a habit of not doing what you’ve asked of me.”
Lydia looked up, apology in her eyes. “It’s just that I’ve hardly seen you the last few days.”
Beatrix decided not to point out that she had little choice about her work situation if Lydia wanted her college tuition paid. “I took care of it on Wednesday.”
“Thank you,” her sister murmured, lapsing into silence.
She tried to think of something to fill the vacuum. Plenty suggested itself, all related to Blackwell: her new duties, his apparent lack of salary, how he claimed he was funding her paycheck. How much she wanted to brew. How conflicted she felt.
It seemed custom-made for an argument.
She drew arrows on signs without any comment at all and went to take care of the garden, trying to recall the last time they’d talked about something other than the League or household matters, not counting the momentary detour Friday night.
She’d moved from weeding to harvesting carrots before it came to her: two weeks ago, when Lydia surprised her with a cake for her birthday and they spent the evening looking through old photos.
Her favorite—taken by Rosemarie—caught the two of them playing in the front yard, five-year-old Lydia whooping in her arms as she spun around.
She missed those days, when conversations were easy.
She missed the silly, boisterous girl who jumped into her lap and planted raspberries on her neck.
Now that child was laser-focused and unrelenting and didn’t laugh at her jokes.
She blamed Rosemarie.
But she also owed her, more than she owed anyone.
Two weeks after Dad died, as she’d contemplated the possibility of ruin and the certainty that she would have to drop out of high school a year short of graduation, Rosemarie had tapped her on the shoulder after church and announced she was moving in.
My rent should cover food for us all. Take in another tenant willing to watch your sister during the day.
You’re finishing high school or else, Miss Harper.
“Or else” summed up Rosemarie’s approach to everything. Beatrix had to admit it often worked.
“Need a hand?”
She looked over her shoulder, startled, to find Ella on the stone pathway snaking through the back yard, dark hair wrapped around her head in a tightly coiled braid.
“How on earth did you creep up on me like that?” Beatrix asked.
“Like this.” Her friend lifted her navy blue skirt to reveal a new pair of boots—but not the approved sort that came with narrow heels and pinched toes.
These were thick, solid and clearly intended for a boy.
“I bought these in Baltimore yesterday. I’m not sure what scandalized the shop owner more, that I was getting them for myself or that I called ladies’ shoes the devil’s invention. ”
Beatrix grinned. “I’m telling you, tromping about the forest is much more fun barefoot.”
“I thought you might like to go for a tromp today, but if you’re digging vegetables, it must be your turn to cook dinner.”
“Alas.”
“Well,” Ella said, settling in and uprooting the last of the carrots, “how has it been? The job and the awful wizard, I mean.”
Beatrix tossed a pair of potatoes into her basket. “Actually, I’ve upgraded him on a provisional basis to ‘possibly OK.’”
“Oh, it’s worse than I thought.” Ella clicked her tongue. “He’s cast some sort of mind-altering spell on you.”
Beatrix laughed. “No, he wants me to help him brew.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m serious, and he appears to be, too.”
“Don’t tell Rosemarie, because she would declare I was ‘haring off after a direct order to the contrary,’” Ella said, catching Rosemarie’s cadence and tone so perfectly that she sounded almost exactly like her, “but I was planning to put in a complaint to the wizard ethics board anyway. Would you rather I not?”
Beatrix leaned a shoulder into hers in lieu of a dirt-stained hug. “Let’s hold off on that. But thank you from the bottom of my heart for the offer.”
“It would only have been for the principle of the thing. Because Rosemarie’s right, that board is useless.”
“They’d probably advise me to get married like a good girl and leave employment to the men,” she said, getting to her feet.
“Exactly what my father told me,” Ella muttered, brushing dirt off her hands.
“I didn’t know that.” She tried to think of what Ella had said about her parents before and couldn’t come up with anything, except that they lived in Bethesda. “How did you convince him to send you to teachers’ college?”
“I didn’t. I landed a grant to pay for it and said ‘so long.’” Ella’s punctuating smile hit the intersection of playful and bitter. “Two grand semesters of higher education.” She held the back door open and added: “So in all seriousness, it’s a wonderful thing, what you’re doing for Lydia.”
“What happened to ‘selfish’?” Beatrix snorted at the memory as they walked into her kitchen. “You know, ‘Here, sis, have my life savings so I can attend college vicariously through you—no pressure.’”
“You will never let me live that down.”
“It was practically the first thing you said to me after ‘how do you do’!”
Ella elbowed her. “You laughed, if I recall.”
She had indeed. That was when she knew they would hit it off.
She and Ella got along in precisely the way she’d always thought she would with her sister, but so far had not been able to manage.
Perhaps the thirteen years between her and Lydia explained why they were a step off from each other, like square dancers listening to different callers.
But probably not. Ella was twenty-three, closer to Lydia’s age than her own.
Ella leaned against the counter, the mischievous twist of her lips giving way to a sigh. “Would your parents have sent you to college, do you think? If ...”
As frank as she usually was, Ella let the rest go unsaid. If they hadn’t died.
Beatrix tipped the vegetables into the sink, the potatoes hitting with a hard thunk-thunk-thunk. She didn’t have to guess at the answer. Uncertainty might have been better.
“I’d thought they would send me—my mother told me women were capable of anything, and my father would always smile and nod when she said it.” She shrugged. “But his ledgers showed they never would have been able to afford it. Even before he fell apart.”
“And yet you’re managing.”
“Well, the boarders’ rent helps. And I started saving for it before Lydia went to grade school.
You can see what I haven’t been spending money on,” she added, sweeping an arm around a kitchen that at minimum needed a new refrigerator, stove and floor, the story of the house in miniature.
“On an absolutely related note, Evelyn Becker just informed me she’s moving out tomorrow.
She took what I assume is a nicer room on Main Street. ”
“I know.” Ella grinned in what Beatrix thought a rather unfeeling manner until she added, “She’s trading places with me so I can move in here. Sorry, I thought she was going to let me tell you before she gave you her notice.”
“Oh, Ella! You can’t give up your room—it’s closer to school, and it really is nicer …”
“I’d rather be here. With friends.”
Beatrix dried her hands on her apron and gave Ella a hug. “Thank you.”
“Now we can go tromping to work together. And it should be easier for me to help with the conference, so send Lydia my way if she’s putting too much of the load on you. You know she does,” Ella murmured.
Beatrix didn’t disagree. But it felt disloyal to say so out loud. It felt disloyal, even, to say nothing.
“She really needed the conference and election to be next year—then she’d be done with college,” she said, reaching for a justification as she chopped the potatoes. “And with all these problems cropping up …”
Ella shot her a dark look. “You know what I think about that.”
“They could all be coincidences.”
“Maybe. Or we have a spy in our ranks.”
The idea made her as queasy as when Ella had first suggested it. Who could it be?
“I’m just saying we should be careful,” Ella added, putting up a hand. “I know Lydia can pull it off.”
Oh, to have the same level of confidence. True, Lydia could galvanize the troops. The last three years of Hazelhurst graduates rushed home to breathe new life into their local League chapters, thanks to her.
But so far those alumnae accounted for twenty of the ninety-six state presidents and vice presidents.
Adding in Lydia and Rosemarie, twenty-two.
Far outnumbered by the old guard, who thought women’s place in society was perfectly appropriate as it was and who didn’t see the battle against wizards as a way to press for equal rights.
She glanced at Ella. “Lydia needs to change a lot of minds.”
“She’ll get her chance at the conference.” Ella patted her on the shoulder. “Scoot over, and I’ll peel the carrots.”