It seems like precisely the kind of fate that could have met a person in 1712.
“A garrote,” I echo, and find myself tracing a circle on my notebook, over and over: a circle of piano wire perhaps.
“Do you like it?”
Pleased is not an expression I’m accustomed to seeing on Ellis Haley’s face, but it’s infectious; I find myself smiling back at her as I write down the method: garrote.
“All right,” I say when I look up again. “You know, one of the interesting things about the Dalloway case was that there were no suspects—everyone just claimed the girls’ deaths were the inevitable price of witchcraft.”
Margery’s directly so, if you consider being buried alive by vengeful townspeople to be a fitting end for her magical crimes.
“Yes, that’s my point,” Ellis says, perhaps a bit impatiently. “It’s terribly convenient, isn’t it? The witches all die in witchy ways, no murder about it. Do you really believe that?”
I don’t want to dignify that with an answer. Especially when we both know what the answer really is.
“Fine,” I say. “But is that what you want to do in the book as well? I thought you were going to have Margery be the killer?”
“Are you two planning to come down for supper?”
I snap around toward the door at the sound of the voice. I was too quick to avoid looking suspicious; for her part, Ellis is perfectly unfazed by the appearance of Leonie Schuyler in my room. Today, Leonie wears a tartan skirt and a neat blazer furnished with an elaborately knotted silk scarf: the very picture of an old-fashioned schoolgirl. She no longer has the loose coils of before; now her hair is a cascade of braids entwined with delicate gold thread. She didn’t even mention she was going into the city, but she must have: everything about her looks professionally styled. For some reason I’m struck by the reality that the other Godwin girls have lives that don’t involve us—don’t involve Ellis.
“That depends,” Ellis says. “It’s Kajal’s turn tonight, right? What did she make?”
I wonder if Leonie can hear my heart beating from all the way across the room. It certainly feels like it’s about to pound its way right out of my chest.
“Coq au vin,” Leonie says. “With a side of hasselback potatoes and salad. She made some kind of vegetarian version of the chicken for you, Ellis.”
Vegetarian coq au vin sounds repulsive to me, but Kajal’s a fantastic cook, so I put aside my notebook and we follow Leonie downstairs. Ellis glances back at me as we descend, her hand trailing along the railing and her scarlet lips quirking, the only acknowledgment of our shared secret.
Once she’s turned away I let my fingertips graze mahogany. I touch the same place she had touched, and it’s like a cord drawn taut between us—as intimate as skin.
Things change in the days following that first Night Migration.
Whether the magic was real or not, something bound us together in those woods. Leonie puts music on the record player, Kajal dances in a red dress. Even Clara seems to be more at ease, her smiles coming quicker when we laugh over dinner. It feels like Godwin again, the way it did before. Like we’re sisters.
That first week is painted in vivid color. I read tarot for the other girls in the common room: Kajal half-drunk making me draw cards for her again and again until she gets the results she wants, Leonie draping a veil over her head like the High Priestess, Ellis curled up on the sofa studying the Magician. Clara plants herbs in window boxes that wilt two days later; she cries about it, even though they’re just plants, and for some reason I feel sorry enough to comfort her.
It takes that whole week for me to define what’s happening, to say I’m happy, in those words. But I say it, a declaration made while standing on the coffee table with my arms outspread, a declaration that earns whoops and applause from the rest of them, Ellis helping me down with one black-gloved hand.
I’m happy. Ellis was right: I’m getting better.
I bury what’s left of my pills in the backyard under Tamsyn Penhaligon’s oak tree, pressing quartz into the soil above them. I don’t need them anymore. I’m not that person anymore. I’m not the girl who saw ghosts in every corner, who feared her mind was host to a darker and more parasitic presence.
I’m going to be all right now.
* * *
—
“We’ll have to learn how to forge handwriting,” Ellis muses as she writes the second set of Night Migration notes in her characteristic sloping script. “Whatever Margery used to lure her victims out into the woods wouldn’t have been written in her own hand.”