The swear jar on Constance Halliday’s desk is kept full by Natalie and Billie. Helen is too ladylike to let the profanity fly, and Mary Alice uses bad words like someone speaking a foreign language.
Under Miss Halliday’s tutelage, the four learn how to eat fish with two forks and sip from a soupspoon without making a noise. She teaches them how to exit a car without showing their underwear, to waltz like Viennese debutantes, and to hot-wire an automobile in under twenty seconds. They build bombs, decipher codes, learn how to shake a tail and how to kill. They master suffocation and stabbing, the intricacies of poison and garrote. Constance Halliday does not like military-grade weapons, finding them unsubtle and flashy, but she ensures the foursome are thoroughly grounded in firearms although she makes no secret of her preference for bare hands and improvised weapons. Ballpoint pens, jump ropes, sewing needles—they learn lethal uses for all of them.
And each develops her specialty. Natalie loves anything that makes a noise, bombs and grenades and the biggest guns she can get her tiny hands around. Mary Alice discovers an affinity for poisons, slipping harmless substances into the food Miss Halliday serves in order to practice her sleight of hand. Her spare time is spent mixing up enough toxic messes to immobilize an army. Helen, surprisingly, turns out to be a sharpshooter, her eye for detail serving her well as she marks changes in wind and estimated trajectories. She is so skilled, in fact, that Constance allows her to borrow her favorite weapon, a tidy little Colt .38 that has been fitted with a hammer shroud to keep it tucked neatly into a pocket. There are nicks on the handgrip, slash marks that they suspect are kill notches, but no one dares to ask.
But Billie Webster is a struggle for Constance Halliday. She is fair with a grenade and can handle a gun almost as well as Helen, but she doesn’t like it. Her attention wanders, and she takes to shooting wide of the targets just to see what else she can hit. When she takes out the eye of Constance Halliday’s favorite garden sculpture—an evil-looking iron rabbit—Miss Halliday raps her sharply on the shoulder with her stick.
“My office, Miss Webster. If you please.”
Billie mutters under her breath but follows. She has not been in the office since the day of their arrival and she soon realizes this is not a social visit. Miss Halliday doesn’t invite her to sit down, so Billie keeps to her feet, gaze fixed on the painting behind Constance’s desk—a nymph of some sort with stars in her hands and a regretful expression.
Miss Halliday doesn’t say anything for a long minute. She sits instead, tapping a letter opener on the desk and teaching Billie the power of silence.
Finally, Constance Halliday throws the letter opener on her desk. “Miss Webster,” she says with a sigh, “I begin to despair. You are not a bad recruit—”
“Thank you.”
She carries on as if Billie hasn’t spoken. “But you are very rapidly becoming a superfluous one. You shoot well, but not as well as Miss Randolph. You are good with languages, but not as fluent as Miss Tuttle. You are heedless of your personal safety to a degree that one might be tempted to call courageous, but you are not quite as indomitable as Miss Schuyler. In short, Miss Webster, I fail to see the point of you.”
She pauses, but there is nothing Billie can possibly say to that. Constance judges the pause perfectly, then continues on, her tone pleasant. It is the casual, matter-of-fact delivery that hurts more than the words.
“We do have a placement with a perfectly good secretarial college in London. We could send you there. I daresay you might be able to pick up shorthand or typewriting without too much trouble. They could find you a nice office job after you earn your certificate. Perhaps you’d like bookkeeping? That can be rather fulfilling, I’m told.”
Only the tiniest gleam in Constance Halliday’s eye tells Billie she is doing this on purpose, pushing her for a reaction. She doesn’t know what Constance is trying to kindle—anger? Denial? But she is determined not to give it to her.
Billie waits her out in silence and Constance finally gives in, smiling thinly. “It must be difficult for you. I understand.”
“Understand what?”
Constance has gotten her to talk, but she doesn’t gloat. She merely carries on in the same bland tone, tapping a file on her desk. “You’ve never had to work for it, have you? Never been tested, not really.”
Billie thinks about her childhood and tamps down the rising anger. “I don’t know what your little folder says, but I’m not like the rest of them, okay? I didn’t get the picket fence and the golden retriever.”
Constance shrugs. “I am not speaking of the trappings of a happy childhood, Miss Webster. I mean what happens inside—your intellect and what you’ve done with it. Or rather, what you haven’t done with it. Your records show exceptional intelligence and mediocre results. It’s a comfortable place, mediocrity. Never pushing oneself to the limit to see what you can take. Never staring down your fears, never reaching into yourself to find that last bit of courage. You don’t even know what it is that you are made of—and what’s more, you seem distinctly uninterested in finding out. You do just enough to get by, and frankly, I would rather have a dozen recruits with less potential and more heart, Miss Webster. I fear my brother has made a mistake.”
She continues to smile but this time there is pity in it.
“Bullshit!” The word erupts from Billie before she can stop it.
Constance gives a slow nod. “I appear to have struck a nerve there.” She pushes herself to her feet and gestures for Billie to come around the desk. She turns the girl by the shoulders and points to the painting with her stick. “I know you have not had the benefit of a Classical education, Miss Webster. Do you know who that is?”
Billie shrugs.
“Astraea. Have you ever heard the name?”
Billie looks at the slender figure in her gauzy white gown. She is drifting just above a landscape, her toes brushing the grass as she rises into the air. One hand is stretched out towards a group of weeping shepherds, offering them a gesture of farewell, while the other holds a pair of measuring scales to her chest. “I don’t think so. It sounds Greek.”
“Very good. Astraea was a goddess, the daughter of Dusk and Dawn, gifted by the gods with the tools of justice. She was the last immortal to live amongst mankind. But in the end, she despaired of our wickedness and she left, fleeing to the stars with her scales. She sits among the stars today as the constellation Virgo, the scales of Libra next to her. She waits, they say, for the day she will return.”
Billie looks closer at the goddess, at the expression of resigned sadness on her face as she regards the humans who are clearly pleading with her to stay.
Constance Halliday goes on. “All the great English poets wrote of her, Shakespeare, Milton, Browning. Historians compared Elizabeth I to her, and Catherine the Great. And Aphra Behn, Charles II’s playwright spy, used ‘Astraea’ as her code name in honor of her. She has always been there, in the shadows.”
Constance Halliday gestures again, pointing to the goddess’s feet. A narrow line of silver lies in the grass, almost obscured by the greenery, but just visible. Forgotten but not gone.
“Look closely. Astraea took her scales with her, but she left her sword behind—the sword that was given by the gods to administer justice. The question is, Miss Webster, will you pick it up?”