Sisters' Fate

Page 17

Chapter 6
A FEW MEN IN THE CROWD YELL OUT EPITHETS against the witches—but there are no cheers. Has it come to this, that I’m relieved my neighbors don’t clap at the prospect of hanging sixty innocent girls? O’Shea swaggers offstage and the puppetry begins, but no one seems in the mood for it. A grave silence has settled over the bazaar.
This—well, this is awful. Brenna was right.
Of course she was.
Tess pushes through the dispersing crowd, Lucy and Bekah trailing after her, their mouths set like straight pins. “Sachi and Rory—” Tess begins.
“I know.” They would have been the first to fight back, too, so Lord only knows what condition they’re in. I don’t imagine the guards would be stinting in their use of force.
We have to stop this, but how? How? The question pounds like a drumbeat in time with my footsteps crunching against the wide graveled walk. I don’t even know where I’m walking. The night is growing late, and the hour or the chill in the air or O’Shea’s declaration or all three have people leaving the bazaar in droves, rushing home to the comfort of their own hearths.
The gates are packed with people leaving, so we wander up and down the aisles a bit. Rilla makes a good show of cooing over the merchandise, drawing Bekah and Lucy’s attention to jeweled hair clips and cuddly stuffed animals. I buy a cider and press it into Tess’s hands.
“I don’t want it,” she insists, shoving it away. A few drops spill onto my cloak.
“You’re pale. Drink,” I command, and she sighs and obliges. Even the vendors are beginning to pack up their booths. A few laughs ring out from the puppet show, but most of the children have been taken home. No one seems to be having fun anymore.
We wait while Lucy purchases a hot cake studded with currants and dusted with sugar. Mei is clutching Yang’s toy dragon in a death grip. “Did you find something for your sisters?” I ask, and she nods, pulling a packet of colorful hair ribbons from her pocket. They’re covered in vivid prints—strawberries, red and white polka dots, and yellow songbirds—that will stand out in her sisters’ dark braids.
“Those are pretty,” I say. “I bet they’ll love them.”
Mei’s face twists beneath her dark fringe. “Cate, what are we—?”
“Not here.” I can’t help feeling as though the Brothers’ eyes and spies are everywhere. Who told them about the farmhouse in Connecticut? Did a neighbor notice something suspicious? Only the fifteen girls who went on the Harwood mission knew about the safe houses, and most of them wouldn’t have had access to the maps—certainly not in enough detail to tell the Brothers. Tess. Me. Sister Mélisande, who was to drive that wagon before Rory and Sachi took her place. Who else?
It couldn’t have been one of us. The girls at the other safe houses will be all right. They’ve got to be.
We’ve made our way back to the Sisters’ booth. I spot Maura’s bright curls in the back. Elena is selling mittens at the front.
“There you are,” Elena says, whirling on me the second her customer’s gone, the smile slipping from her face. “Inez and some of the others have already left.”
“We’ll meet you at home?” I ask, and she nods.
When did I start thinking of the convent as my home, as a safe place to retreat?
And with Inez in charge, how long can that possibly last?
• • •
Dozens of girls have gathered in the dining room. They sit slumped in their chairs, chins propped on hands. A few of them sip from cups of tea, but most haven’t bothered to take off their cloaks or boots. They’re just—waiting. Quietly. With an air of funereal desperation. The only sound is the click of Grace’s knitting needles.
When the six of us walk in, faces brighten.
“Cate!” Addie pushes up her spectacles with one finger. “What are we going to do?”
I’d have thought Inez would be down here scheming and denouncing the Brothers, but none of the teachers are present. Perhaps she and the others are locked away in her new office; she moved into Cora’s suite of rooms right after the funeral.
“We didn’t save them for them to be executed!” Vi’s big plummy eyes are furious. “We’ve got to stop it!”
“How can we?” Alice toys with a strand of golden hair that’s escaped from her pompadour. “The Brothers will keep them in the prison in the National Council building, with dozens of guards watching over them all night.”
I’ve been going over our options on the silent walk home, and Alice is right. “We’ll have to wait and free them tomorrow, then.”
“In front of everyone?” Vi shrinks against the high back of her wooden chair. “But there’ll be hundreds of people there!”
She’s right, too. Hundreds will show up: a large contingent of Brothers and their guards, plus the curious, the terribly devout, and those who wish to be seen and thought terribly devout. Not to mention anyone with a loved one in Harwood who might be hoping to see her—or not see her—among the victims.
“Thousands, maybe,” I agree, pulling off my cloak. “But a crowd that size—that’s all the better to hide in, isn’t it?”
Alice smooths her black velvet skirts. “What are you planning?”
Heeled boots tap, tap, tap their way across the wooden floor behind me. The familiar sound of Inez’s approach makes me feel ill. “Whatever it is, Miss Cahill, put it out of your head this minute. The war council has voted not to intervene.”
How is that possible? They can’t mean to stand by and do nothing.
But I see the satisfied gleam in Inez’s brown eyes and know that’s precisely what she means. Before Cora died, the war council was evenly split—Cora and Gretchen and Sophia versus Inez and her lackeys Evelyn and Johanna. Now, with Sophia away, Gretchen would be the sole dissenting vote. I glance at her as she shuffles into the room, noticing the red that spiderwebs through the whites of her tired eyes. She has aged ten years in the last two weeks.
“You can’t mean—you’d just stand by and watch them hanged?” Rilla’s stocky body is practically vibrating with indignation.
Inez nods. “Sit down, girls.”
I take the nearest chair, with Mei and Rilla at my elbows. Inez strides to the head table. The other teachers sit, but she stands behind her chair like a general before his troops. Her brown hair, graying slightly at the temples, is pulled back severely into a bun at the nape of her neck. In her unrelieved black, with her pinched face, hollow cheeks, and heavy brows, she is not a pretty woman—not even what Father would call handsome—but she commands the room nevertheless.
“This is a terrible thing the Brothers have voted to do,” she says. “Anyone suspected of witchery will be killed, without trial. Without being permitted a word in her own defense. Soon, anyone who speaks up on a witch’s behalf will be murdered as a sympathizer. What we are witnessing now is the beginning of a second Terror.”
The room falls silent, save the crackling of logs in the fireplace. I shiver at the sound, remembering Brother Ishida’s words on the night before I left Chatham: ’Twere up to me, I’d resurrect the burnings.
Well, he’s about to get his wish. His daughters will be among the first victims. They’ll be hanged, not burnt, but why quibble over methods? Surely he’ll be glad to see them dead, a devout man like that.