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An Introduction 7 страница



“This place is awful nice, isn’t it, Ag? ” Juniper offers. She’s thinking of her sister’s mildewed room in the boarding house. “Bet it costs a pretty penny, though. ”

The red-silk lady—who introduced herself with a casual flick of her fingers as Miss Florence Pearl, proprietress of Salem’s Sin, No. 116 St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue—cracks a cackle. Cigarette smoke coils from her nose. “Sure does. ”

Juniper sees her shoot a knowing wink at Agnes, who snorts, then flinches.

Miss Pearl’s eyes narrow. “I’ll send Frankie up. Her auntie taught her rootspeak back in Mississippi, she’s ten times better than those butchers over at St. Charity’s. And dinner—you picky about food? I was almost the whole nine months. ” She ticks her chin at Agnes’s belly, and Juniper notices for the first time the way it’s pushed tight against her dress, the way her sister cradles it in her arms.

Oh.

Juniper sees her sister standing above her again, strong and steady, risking herself to save some stupid, vicious boy—and risking a second someone, too.

Agnes shakes her head, lowering herself onto the bed with white lips. Miss Pearl sweeps out.

Then they’re alone together with the cupcake bed and the smell of blooming chestnuts and the careful sound of Agnes’s breathing. A gluey silence falls between them.

“So, ” Juniper says, “who’s the daddy? ” It comes out meaner than she meant it to. She can almost feel Mama Mags’s knuckles on the back of her skull. Mind that tongue, child.

Agnes shakes her head at the floor, still breathing thin through her nose. “Doesn’t matter. ” She looks up, meets Juniper’s eyes. “She’s mine. ”

“Oh. ” Juniper feels a hot flare in the line between them, fierce and defiant. Is that what mother’s love is like? A thing with teeth?

Juniper’s mother was never anything to her but a secondhand story from her sisters, a curl of hair in a locket. Juniper never missed her much; she always figured if her mother was worth a damn she would’ve left their daddy or slipped hemlock into his whiskey, and she didn’t do either. Juniper had her sisters, and it was enough. Until it wasn’t.

A second silence falls, thicker than the first. Agnes starts to speak just as Juniper asks, “Why did you leave? ”

Agnes frowns at the floor. “You’re the one who left, as I recall. ”

“I mean before. ”

Juniper already knows why she left. Their daddy was a mean drunk with hard knuckles who never loved anything or anyone as much as he loved corn liquor, and there was nothing for miles but coal seams and sycamores and men just like him. Any girl with a single, solitary lick of sense would want to get as far from Crow County as her feet could carry her, unless they loved the wild green mountains more than they loved themselves.

She’s just too chickenshit to ask her real question: Why didn’t you take me with you?

Agnes looks up at her, then away. “Had to, didn’t I? ”

“I guess. ” Maybe it’s even true; maybe everybody has to survive the best they can. Maybe her sisters couldn’t afford to haul a wild ten-year-old girl along with them when they ran. “But later. You could’ve come back later. ” Or written a letter, at least. Even a single smudged address would’ve been a map or a key to Juniper, a way out.

Agnes shrugs one shoulder. “Only if I wanted to spend the rest of my life locked in the cellar. Daddy told me he’d skin me himself if he ever saw me again, and I guess I believed him. ”

“He—what? ”

Agnes looks up again, but now there’s a faint crease between her brows. “When he sent me away. He told me he was through with me, that he did his best but God cursed him with wayward daughters, and he washed his hands of us. ”

Juniper doesn’t hear anything but the beginning: He sent me away. Her daddy sent Agnes away.

What if her sisters hadn’t cut and run? What if they loved her after all? It’s too huge a thing to think, too dangerous to want. Juniper feels her own pulse rabbiting in her ears, her fingers trembling on the red-cedar staff.

“Why—” She stops, swallows hard. “Why did he send you away? ”

The frown between Agnes’s brows goes a little deeper. “You don’t remember? ”

Juniper limps to the bed and settles beside her sister. “I remember I was running the mountain that day. ” The slant of sun through leaves, the bite of briars, the whip of sassafras and beech leaves against her cheeks. Some days it would take her like that, an animal need to run and keep running, and she would dive through the woods at a pace that would have killed a person who didn’t know every stone and gully of that mountain.

“I was running and then I felt…” A tugging in her chest, an invisible need that made her turn around and run even faster. “Well. I remember walking into the old tobacco barn, all dark and hot. You and Bella were there, and so was Daddy…” Juniper feels something vast slide beneath the surface of her memory like a whale beneath a ship. She looks away from it. “I was sick for a while after the barn-fire. Mags did what she could, but my foot must’ve got infected. I was hot and dizzy for days, and my head ached. ” It’s aching now, a dull warning.

Agnes is watching her face. “Weren’t there ever any rumors about me? After? ”

Of course there were rumors: people hissed that Agnes was a whore and a hedge-witch, that she cursed the ewes to lamb out of season and lay down with devils before running off to the city to fornicate.

“No. ”

Agnes grunts, very nearly amused, then sighs long and slow. “Well. It’s no secret now: I got myself in a family way. You remember Clay, the Adkins boy? ”

There was a whole pack of boys that used to trail after Agnes; Juniper and Bella used to come up with names for them. She thinks the Adkins boy was Cow Pie, or maybe Butter Brains.

“Sure I remember him. ”

“Well, he and I… I was lonely and he was nice enough, and one thing led to another. ” Her voice goes young and soft. “Mags figured it out before I did. ”

Juniper thinks of all the girls she used to see slinking across the back acres to Mags’s house, looking for the words and ways to unmake the babies in the bellies. Not all of them young or unwed—some were too old for childbearing or too sick, or had too many hungry mouths already. Mags had helped them all, every one, and buried their secrets deep in the woods. The preacher called it the Devil’s darkest work, but Mags said it was just women’s work, like everything else.

Agnes is rubbing her thumb over the ball of her belly now. “She… helped me. It hurt, but it was a good kind of hurting. Like shedding a skin, coming out brighter and bigger. Afterward I buried it beneath a hornbeam on the east side of the mountain, and I thought that was the end of it. I told the Adkins boy to get gone and stay that way. I thought nobody would ever know. ”

Juniper remembers all her daddy’s lectures on Eve’s curse and original sin, descending into slurred rambles about weak-fleshed women and their whoring ways. She remembers his eyes gleaming red in the gloom in the barn, his bones showing white through stretched-taut skin, and begins to understand. “How did he find out? ”

“I didn’t tell anybody. Not a soul except Mama Mags. ” Agnes’s mouth twists, venom in her voice. “And Bella, of course. I told her everything back then. ”

“She never—”

“She did. I was watering the horses because Mags said it was fixing to freeze overnight. ” Crow County slinks back into her voice, sly and drawling. “Then Daddy turns up and I could see in his face that he knew, about me and Clay, about the pennyroyal and the thing beneath the hornbeam. And then I saw Bella creeping along behind him, all pasty white, and I knew what she’d done. ”

Juniper wants to argue. She remembers the feel of her sisters’ hands in hers on summer evenings, the circle they made between them; the promise that was never said aloud but was woven in their hair, written in their blood: that one would never turn against the other. Surely Bella would have died before she broke that trust.

But then Juniper recalls the cold gray of her sister’s eyes, the secrets she keeps safe in her notebook, and stays quiet.

“I told him it wasn’t true, that Bella was a liar and a—” Agnes swallows hard, skips over something. “But he just kept walking toward me. He wasn’t even in his cups—sober as a judge, I’d swear. But he was looking at me like—like…”

Juniper knows exactly how he was looking at her: like she was a colt that needed breaking or a nail that needed hammering, some misbehaving thing that could be knocked back into place. Juniper had seen that look. She came running into the barn, tangle-haired, sap-sticky, arms scored by the reaching fingers of the woods, and saw her sisters huddled against the far wall. Her father prowling toward them like a wolf, like a man, like the end of days—

And then—

That unseen thing swims too close to the surface and Juniper looks away. She goes someplace else instead, cool and green.

Agnes calls her back. “Juniper. June, baby. ” Juniper returns to the pretty wallpapered room, to the sister who watches her with wide eyes.

Juniper bridles at the pity in that look. “What? ”

Agnes takes up her story like a woman knitting past a dropped stitch, leaving a gaping hole behind her. “You remember the fire, don’t you? ”

For a sick second Juniper thinks Agnes means the second fire, the one she set the night she ran north, before she recalls the shatter of her daddy’s lantern as he fell, the spit of oil across dry straw and old timbers, the weeks and weeks of changing bandages and coughing up globs of char and blood.

“Of course I do. ” She falters a little. “But I don’t remember…” How she survived. How could she remember the inside of the barn as it burned—the rafters bright gold above her, the hideous screaming of the horses, the wet snap of flesh—without remembering how it ended?

“When I was younger I was always burning my fingers when I took the pot off the stove. ” Agnes sounds like she’s treading carefully. “Mags gave me some words and ways to keep me safe. I didn’t know if they’d do any good, but Daddy was blocking the door and I still had the water for the horses… I threw it in a circle around the three of us and said the words, and it worked. Nearly. ” Her eyes flick to Juniper’s left foot, then away, gray with guilt. “Daddy reached in after you, but we didn’t let him take you. ”

Juniper always thought her scars look like split branches or spreading roots. Now she can see they look more like the fingers of a burning hand.

“Somebody must have heard the horses or seen the smoke. They dragged us all out, piled wet earth over Daddy to put out the flames. Mags took you away—you were all hot and shaking, I thought you might be dying—” Agnes pauses to swallow again, still not looking at Juniper. “We were sent upstairs while people came in and out. The preacher, the sheriff, half the county it felt like. Then Daddy called us down to his bedside and said it was all arranged. In the morning Bella would go to some school up north, and I would go live with our aunt Mildred. ” Their aunt Mildred was a sour crabapple of a woman who lived two counties north and spent her time collecting tiny paintings of Saints and complaining about the many sins of her next-door neighbors. “I ran as soon as I could. Wound up here. ”

Juniper wants to ask: How come you never came back for me? She wants to ask: How come you never even wrote? But she’s frightened of the skipped stitches in the story, the things she doesn’t want to see.

“Juniper, I—” Agnes is reaching toward Juniper almost as if she means to wrap her arms around her, and Juniper doesn’t know if she’s going to let her, when someone knocks softly on the door.

The two of them sit straighter, tucking their unruly feelings back inside their chests.

Frankie Black turns out to be a freckled colored girl with velveteen eyes and an accent that makes Juniper homesick. She has Agnes sit up straight and runs her fingertips over the small of her back, pressing and whispering. She lights a honey-colored candle and drips the wax in a pattern of lines and specks. She sings a spell that has a drumbeat rhythm running underneath it, shuffles her feet, tap-tap-tap, and straightens up.

It’s nothing like Mags’s spells, and Juniper watches with narrowed eyes. But Agnes’s face loosens as the pain lifts away, so Juniper figures it must be working. It occurs to her for the first time that there might be more than one kind of witching in the world. The thought is an uncomfortable one, far too large; it reminds her of riding the train across the Crow County line and feeling the country unfold like a map beneath her, flat and endless.

“Miss Pearl says you two should stay till morning. There’s police out looking for two black-haired women. One of them with child”—her eyes cut to the cedar staff on the bed—“one of them with a demon-snake for a familiar. ”

Juniper says, “It’s not a familiar, ” at the same time Agnes says, “We can pay. For the room, and the lost business. ”

Frankie makes a sound somewhere between offense and amusement. “You couldn’t afford us, sweetheart. Miss Pearl says we’re closed up for the night, anyhow. The men are all riled up, looking to prove something. They can look elsewhere. There’s corned beef and rolls if you’re hungry. ” She sets a basket on the dresser top and leaves them alone again.


The honey-candle is sitting in a waxy puddle and the food is nothing but crumbs caught in the valleys of the down comforter before either of them says a word to the other.

Agnes is slouched against the headboard, her body slack in the absence of pain, the baby swimming soft inside her.

Juniper has her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes slide over Agnes’s belly. “How come you came today? ”

Agnes shrugs, because shrugging is easier than talking about guilt and love and the things that still stretch between them after seven years of silence. “How come you invited me? ”

Juniper shrugs back, sullen, and counters, “How come you saved that idiot boy? ”

Agnes almost laughs at her. For a quick girl, Juniper can be awfully slow sometimes. “I wasn’t saving that idiot boy, Juniper. ”

Juniper narrows her eyes. Her mouth is half-open to retort when she realizes who Agnes was saving. Her face softens.

Juniper glances again at the fragile swell of Agnes’s belly. “But—even with—”

“I guess. ” Agnes attempts a smile. “Mama told me to take care of you. ” Maybe Agnes owed her, for all the times she’d failed. Or maybe it wasn’t about debts or duties at all; maybe it was just that she didn’t want to see her youngest sister strung up in the city square.

Apparently she’s said something wrong, because Juniper is bristling and sharpening again. “I don’t need you to take care of me. I was about to teach that boy a lesson. Teach them all a lesson. ”

Her eyes are seething, shadowed. They make Agnes think of maiden-stories—the kind about young witches who sing ships to their deaths, who hunt the woods at night with their seven silver hounds, who turn sailors into pigs and feast every night.

Agnes wants to be angry at her—for being so careless and cruel and so terribly young—but she can’t quite manage it. She’s been all of those things herself; she knows the black alchemy that transmutes hurt into hate. She remembers climbing barefoot from the attic window, meeting some poor boy in the woods and tearing at his clothes with more than lust, digging her nails too hard into his skin. It felt so good to be the one hurting, instead of being hurt.

So she doesn’t tell her sister to shut her damn mouth and think for a second. Instead she asks, “And then what? After you teach them all a lesson. After you burn them or bite them or curse them. What happens after that? ”

Juniper’s mouth bows, petulant as a child.

“I know why you’d want to—Saints, so does every woman alive—but think what it costs. ”

“I don’t care, ” Juniper spits.

She never has. When she found them in the barn that day she hadn’t cared what might happen to three nothing-girls found beside their father’s corpse; when she led those suffrage ladies into a riot she hadn’t cared what kind of hell it started.

Agnes rubs the ball of her belly with a thumb, thinking of the little spark inside it. “I know you don’t. But I do. ” The baby kicks in answer, a butterfly touch, and Agnes tilts her head at her sister. “You want to feel her move? The baby? ”

Juniper stares at her like she’s never heard the word baby in her entire life. She reaches out a cautious hand. Agnes holds it to her belly and they wait together, hushed and still, feeling their hearts beat in their palms. The baby is motionless for so long Agnes is about to give up, until—

Juniper’s face splits in half with the size of her smile, eyes gone summer green. “I’ll be damned. That was her? ”

Agnes nods, thinking how young and bright her sister looks right now, wishing she could stay that way. Wishing there was room for her inside Agnes’s circle. “The midwife says she’ll come by the Barley Moon, in August. Maybe sooner. ”

Juniper seems taken aback by this information, as if she thought babies ought to abide by timetables and punch-clocks. She presses her palm to Agnes’s belly a second time, and her expression is so hopeful and wide open that Agnes says, “She could use an aunt. ”

Juniper looks up at her, a quick darting glance, like she doesn’t want Agnes to see the hope shining in her face.

“But you’ve got to be more careful. The march today—it was your idea? ”

Juniper takes her hand away. “Yes. ”

“You saw what happened. The crowd went mad. ”

Agnes expects Juniper to turn sullen again, but instead her face creases with thought. “I don’t think they were in their right minds. ”

“Oh, don’t be so naive—”

“No, I mean I saw something… not right. Shadows moving in ways they shouldn’t, twisting together. It was witching, but darker and stranger than anything Mags ever did. ”

Agnes thinks of the shadowless men in the alley and feels the hairs rising on her arms. “But what kind of witch would incite a riot against witches? ”

Juniper purses her lips. “That Wiggin woman would. If ever there was a person who would work hard against themselves, it’d be her. ”

“I heard those Christian Union types all swear oaths against every kind of witching, even the kind to keep dust off the mantel or mealbugs out of the flour. ”

“Well somebody was messing with shadows. ”

“All the more reason to be careful. ”

“All the more reason to be prepared. To arm ourselves properly. ” A fey light comes into Juniper’s eyes and Agnes knows she’s thinking of that black tower and those strange stars, of long-ago magics and long-gone powers. “Listen, the tower we saw that day. I was thinking—you remember the story Mags used to tell us? Saint George and the Last Three? What if it’s the tower? Their tower? I think that’s what Bella thinks, anyway. ”

But Agnes doesn’t want to hear about witch-tales and wishes, and she especially doesn’t want to hear about Bella. “Oh, please. It’s a children’s story. And anyway, you seem well enough armed to me. That snake…” Agnes swallows. “Was it a familiar? ”

Juniper snorts at her. “Did you forget everything Mags taught you? A familiar isn’t a spell or a pet. It’s witchcraft itself wearing an animal-skin. If a woman talks long and deep enough to magic, sometimes the magic talks back. But only the most powerful witches ever had familiars, and I don’t figure there are any of those bloodlines left. ” Juniper looks away, and Agnes politely does not mention all the hours Juniper spent in the woods as a little girl, waiting for her familiar to find her.

Juniper gives herself a little shake and shoots Agnes a sickle-moon smile. “But maybe that wouldn’t matter, if we had the Lost Way. Just imagine what we could do. ”

Before she can remind herself that the Lost Way of Avalon is a children’s story, Agnes does: she thinks of double-shifts and boarding-house fleas and all the nothing-girls whose highest hope is for a husband like Floyd Matthews, soft-palmed and stupid, and how it would feel to want more. She thinks of her daddy’s knuckles and Mr. Malton’s leers and how it would feel to be the dangerous one, for a change.

But then she thinks of angry mobs and scaffolds and all the things that would happen next, and the baby girl in her belly.

Agnes meets her sister’s gaze as steady as she can. “And what comes after? ”

Juniper doesn’t look away. “Come with me in the morning, ” she answers. “Come join the suffragists. And find out for yourself. ”

Agnes looks into her face, blazing with hope and hunger, young and wild and jagged-edged—and finds she can’t answer. Instead she clears her throat and says, “It’s late. Time for bed, I think. ”

Agnes manages not to look at her sister while they ready themselves for bed, unbuttoning and unclasping, taking turns at the chamber pot. It’s only in the last second of light, right before Agnes pinches the candlewick between her fingers, that she sees the silent shine of tears in Juniper’s eyes.


Juniper curls her spine away from her sister but she can still feel the heat of her, hear the steady rush of her breath.

Long past midnight, when even the ceaseless bustle and clank of the city has finally gone still and Juniper thinks she might be able to hear the distant seesaw song of spring peepers, Agnes rolls over beside her.

“I should have come back for you, no matter what. I was scared. ”

Of me. Juniper doesn’t know where the thought comes from, why it sounds so certain and so sad.

“I’m sorry, Juniper. ” Agnes whispers it to the ceiling, a prayer or a plea.

If Juniper says anything, Agnes will hear the tightness of her throat, the salt-bite of tears in her voice. So she says nothing.

There’s a pause, then: “I’ll come with you in the morning, if you’ll have me. ”

Another pause, while Juniper breathes carefully through her mouth. “I’ll have you. ” It comes out too rough, a little strangled, but she hears Agnes sigh in relief.

After that Agnes’s breath goes deep and slow and Juniper lies wide awake, thinking about venom and vengeance, praying to every Saint that her sisters never find out how their daddy died.

Bella isn’t here—Bella the betrayer? Bella the Judas? —but Juniper wishes she were. She would ask her for a story and fall asleep on a bed of once-upon-a-times and happily-ever-afters and righted wrongs.

She whispers one to herself, instead.

 

 

THE TALE OF RAPUNZEL AND THE CRONE

Once upon a time there was a woodcutter whose wife was with child. But she grew very ill, her golden hair turned brittle gray, and in his desperation the woodcutter went to the local hedge-witch and begged for a cure. The hedge-witch told him of a black tower in the hills covered in green-growing vines even at midwinter. Just three leaves from this vine would cure his wife.

The woodcutter found the black tower and the green-growing vines. He stole his three leaves and brewed them as the witch instructed. Soon his wife was rosy-cheeked and smiling again, her hair the brightest gold. When their daughter was born they named her after the herb that saved her: Rapunzel.

But as they named the baby there came a terrible wind from the east, smelling of earth and ash. Knuckle-bones knocked at their door and they found a bent-backed Crone hunched on their stoop. She wore a tattered black cloak around her shoulders and an asp around her wrist, like a bracelet made of obsidian scales.

She came, she said, to take back what was stolen from her. When the woodcutter pleaded that his wife had already eaten the leaves, the Crone shuffled into the house and peered down at the baby girl. The baby girl peered back at her with eyes the color of green-growing vines.

When the Crone left the house that night, trudging through the silent snow, she carried a baby bundled beneath her cloak.

The Crone raised the girl in her high, lonely tower. Rapunzel grew to love the old woman, and, inasmuch as a witch loves anything, the Crone loved the girl. By the time Rapunzel was half-grown the only sign that she had ever belonged to anyone else was her hair: bright gold, long and shining.

One day when the Crone was away, a traveling bard saw the shine of Rapunzel’s hair through the tower window. He sang to her:

My maiden, my maiden,

Let down your long hair,

Braided tight and shining bright,

A way where once was none.

There followed the usual course of events when a handsome stranger sings to a beautiful maiden, and soon Rapunzel was climbing down a golden rope woven of her own hair, reaching her hand out for his.

The Crone returned just as the pair took their first step away from the tower, hands clasped.

“If you would leave me, ” she told Rapunzel, “you must return what belongs to me. ”

Rapunzel raised her chin and agreed to pay any price. The Crone bade her close her eyes and touched two cold fingers to their lids. When Rapunzel opened her eyes once more the green-growing color had been taken from them, along with her sight.

The Crone returned to her tower and watched the maiden and the bard stumble together across the hills. Rapunzel did not turn back or call out.

The Crone wept, and as her tears touched the stone floor, the tower trembled and fell. Or perhaps it vanished outside of time and memory and took the Crone with it. Perhaps she waits still for her stolen daughter to call out to her.

The only certainty is the tears themselves.

 

 

My maiden, my maiden,

Let down your long hair,

Braided tight and shining bright,

A way where once was none.

A spell to escape, requiring three hairs & nimble fingers

When Beatrice Belladonna runs from the riot on St. Mary-of-Egypt’s, she knows two things for certain: that her youngest sister is alive, and that her middle sister is with her.

It shouldn’t comfort her to know that Agnes is there—she learned long ago that she couldn’t trust her when it counted—but it does. If anyone could haul their little sister out of the mess she made and keep her alive through the night, it’s surely Agnes.

“If you’re finished staring at nothing, I would quite like to keep running for our lives now. ” Beatrice makes a private note that Miss Quinn grows drier and more cutting under pressure, before bunching her skirts in her fists and following after her.

For a woman born and raised in New Cairo, Quinn possesses an uncanny knowledge of the north side. She leads Beatrice down narrow alleys and nameless back streets, following a winding path that leads them somewhat mystifyingly to the respectable row house where Beatrice rents a room.

“How did you know my address? ”

Miss Quinn gives a very unsorry shrug. “Stay inside tonight. The police are awfully scarce this evening, which makes me wonder just who’s behind this mess. ”

Beatrice wants to say, Thank you for saving me, or Be careful, or Who exactly are you and what uncanny secrets are you hiding? but Quinn is already turning away, taking long-legged strides down Second Street.

By the time Beatrice is in her attic room, peering down from her round window, Quinn is gone, vanished entirely from the neat grid of streets below.

Beatrice dreams that night of witches and traveling bards and a golden-haired girl smiling from a tower window. Except her hair isn’t golden at all, actually, and her smile is full of secrets.

The following morning, Bella pins her own hair with unusual severity and stares hard at her reflection in the mirror, reminding herself that she is bony and graying and very boring. Then she feels the tug of her sisters through the line—still alive, still together, moving through the city—and wonders if perhaps she is growing less boring the longer James Juniper remains in New Salem.

Beatrice steps into the street just after sunrise, when the shadows lie soft and the air sparks with dew, and hopes very much that Mr. Blackwell will forgive her for missing a second day of work.

The headquarters of the New Salem Women’s Association are already jammed full of bustling women and urgent whispers. Miss Stone stands behind the front desk like a small general overseeing her troops, wig pinned slightly askew. She is so surrounded by people—a hand-wringing lady wearing a monocle, a roundish woman in a very fine dress, that young secretary girl sporting a bruised jaw and a sullen expression—that Beatrice doesn’t think she notices the chime of the bell as she enters.

Until she looks up and fixes Beatrice with an iron glare. “Miss Eastwood, wasn’t it? I thought you were too busy for suffrage. ”

“Oh, I—that is—”

But Miss Stone is already looking back down at the papers spread before her. “If you’re looking for that sister of yours, she’s not here. ”

“No, but—”

“And if she has any sense of prudence at all, she will not dare to show her face here again. ”



  

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