Phoenix and Ashes em-4

by Mercedes Lackey

  Certainly Alison's reputation in the village would suffer the loss of some of its shine.

  Eleanor had planned to go to visit Sarah tonight, but as she had gotten ready to add Sarah's herbs to the tea, something had hissed out of the fire.

  She had turned to see a Salamander writhing on the hearth, watching her with agitation. When it knew it had caught her eye, it beckoned her nearer.

  "Not tonight," it had hissed. "She walks and wakes tonight. Tomorrow."

  For a moment she had hesitated, but then had put the herbs away. The Salamanders didn't often speak to her, or even appear in the fire during the hours in which they might be seen by someone else. If this one felt it needful to deliver a warning, why take chances?

  So she resigned herself to a night of hard work alone. If Alison was going to be awake, there was no point in fighting the compulsions and arousing her suspicion.

  She stared at her own reflection in the window as she washed up the dinner dishes. In some ways, none of this made any sense at all. At this point, there were days when if Alison had simply come to her and said, "If you sign over your inheritance, I will let you go" that she would have agreed in a flash. It wasn't as if, given all she had learned perforce, she couldn't earn a living as a servant.

  Of course, that would have meant giving up a great deal of what made life tolerable. Servants didn't have a lot of time nor leisure to read. And once she did that, the life of an Oxford scholar would have been quite out of reach.

  But why should she give up what was hers? Especially when Alison had essentially stolen it in the first place?

  Because freedom was worth more than things. If she had learned one lesson in all of this, it was that. Freedom was worth far more than things.

  She finished the dishes, and sighed. Alison would never let her go, not even for that. She knew too much. Ordinary people might not believe in magic, but there were more like Alison out there, and if she was ever able to leave these four walls, she would be in a position to tell them herself what Alison was up to, how she had bewitched Eleanor's father, and all the rest. Those people might not pay attention, but then again, they might. Alison would never let her go as long as there was a chance that her scheme would be exposed.

  Because even if those people did nothing about what had happened to Eleanor and her father, they would be warned for the future, and any new scheme Alison had in mind could be thwarted.

  She reached for a towel to dry off her hands, and made a face as she looked at the left. Well, there was another reason for Alison not to let her go. She wouldn't even have to say anything about magic, just that her stepmother had kept her prisoner and abused her all these years, and here was her little finger buried beneath the hearthstone to prove it. She certainly wouldn't have chopped her own finger off and buried it, now would she?

  With the dishes finished, she took some mending and sat beside the hearth to do it. The Salamander was still there, coiling restlessly around the flames, sometimes flickering out and around her ankles before diving back in again. She had expected the house to settle, and indeed, she heard the two girls going to their rooms, but Alison kept walking back and forth restlessly.

  Or was she walking back and forth?

  Eleanor cocked her head and listened intently. No, this wasn't a simple to-and-fro. Alison was walking in a circle. The house was too well-built for her to hear if her stepmother was saying anything, but—

  The Salamander looked up. "It is near midnight," it observed. "She walks."

  "You mean, she's doing magic?" Eleanor whispered.

  The Salamander nodded.

  So that was what the creature had meant!

  Eleanor looked up and shivered. Whatever was going on, it couldn't mean anything good. Who, or what else, did Alison have in her power now?

  And what was she doing to them?

  9

  April 20, 1917

  Longacre Park, Warwickshire

  REGGIE GOT OUT OF THE car stiffly, gazing up at the imposing front of Longacre feeling not that he was coming home, but that he was a stranger in a foreign land. He wasn't comfortable standing on the steps of a place like this anymore; he kept wondering when the next barrage would come in and knock it all to pieces. This was not reality, this quiet, peaceful country, this grand house with its velvety lawns. This was not where he lived. His home was a tent or a hastily-thrown-up wood hut, the earth churned by bombs, with the echoing thud of cannon that never stopped. This was no longer his world. Beautiful, yes, it was. With its stone columns rising to support a Grecian-inspired portico, it looked more like a government monument than a place where people lived. The Georgians built to impress, rather than to house.

  He took the first few steps, knee crying agony at him, and looked up at the portico again. What am I doing here? he thought. The uniformed staff was lined up beside the door to greet him. Uniformed staff? Neat suits, proper little gowns and aprons?

  His world contained slovenly orderlies that stole your whiskey and tobacco, piles of dirty uniforms pitched in the corner of the tent, clutter that was never cleaned, only rearranged.

  He took another three steps upwards, feeling as if he was a supplicant climbing to the throne of God. The scene had that same feeling of unreality. Pristine white steps going up to a colonnaded portico, cloudless blue sky, larks overhead, a line of solemn, priest-like people waiting to greet him—

  He realized as he was halfway up the stairs that once he had thought he loved Longacre, but he was not the same person who had given that love to this place.

  In fact, he was only just coming to the realization that what he loved was not this great stone pile, this display in marble, it was the land around it.

  What had he remembered, after all, in those days when he waited to be sent up, in those nights when he listened to the guns? As he climbed all those stairs, what occurred to him was that it had not been the memories set in those rooms with their twenty-foot ceilings, but the ones spent in woods and fields, in the stables and the sheds, that had kept him alive and sane.

  There were 6,500 acres of field and farm, meadow and woods belonging to this place; he felt more at home in any of them than in the building itself. If it had not been too much effort to go back down all those steps, he might just have gone down to the car and ordered it away, far away, anywhere but here, this strange place that should have been home and wasn't.

  His mother had the entire staff lined up out front to greet him, as if he was some sort of medieval monarch returning. Bloody hell, he thought, with weary resignation. Don't they have things to do? Of course they did. But this was traditional. This was where the staff of Longacre got their largesse—

  So why don't I just pay them decently instead, and we can do without this mummery?

  But no, no, he must follow the tradition. Noblesse oblige. Can't disappoint the staff.

  So he hobbled forward, as one of the men detached himself from the line and moved to his elbow, and pressed several coins into his hand.

  Surely they would prefer this in their proper pay-packet?

  First and foremost in line were Mrs. Dick, the housekeeper, and James Boatwright, the butler. They had held those positions on the estate for as long as Reggie could recall, and in all that time they had not apparently changed; no one knew if Mrs. Dick had ever actually had a "Mister" Dick; one just referred to the housekeeper by the title of "Mrs." because that was how things were done. He vividly recalled the day he had learned her given name of Catriona—all his life until then he had thought "Mrs." was her first name.

  They, at least, seemed genuinely moved to see him. "Boatwright," he said, shaking the upright old man's hand. "Mrs. Dick." They didn't even acknowledge the largesse, simply slipped it into a pocket and went on shaking his hand, and somewhat to his shock, there were tears in their eyes.

  Why? What should they care? Even if they remembered him as a child, they could not have done so all that vividly. The people he had spent the most amount of time with had been
his nurse, his governess, and then his tutors and his father. All of them were gone, and of all of them, only the nurse remained anywhere nearby—in the pensioners' cottages, if she hadn't died of old age yet.

  And he felt so unmoved ... as if it wasn't he who was standing here, greeting old family retainers who, with so many going off and being slaughtered, hadn't expected to see him alive. As if he actually was dead, a ghost come back to observe, but not feel.

  Next in the hierarchy, he greeted with somber gravity the cook. Mrs. Murphy was not quite as intimidating as Mrs. Dick, being all Irish and beaming. "Mrs. Murphy," he said, shaking her hand—every time he did this, of course, he left that money in their hands gold sovereigns for the upper servants, smaller coins for the lesser, the tips that servants in great houses were accustomed to get from visitors and on occasions like this, from the family. Or at least, the head of the family, which he now was. His father had simply dropped where he stood, on the first of June, 1915, after Reggie was already in the RFC.

  It should have been his father standing here. For God's sake, why couldn't this have been done with less fanfare? It was humiliating, surely, for them, and no great joy for him. And his knee hurt abominably.

  He could remember his father doing this, on occasions like the King's birthday, or Boxing Day, or the day he, Reggie, had taken his Oxford degree, just before the war began. Devlin Fenyx had never seemed to find this the ordeal that his son was now experiencing.

  Beside him was Michael Turner, his valet, unobtrusively handing him the gold sovereigns. Turner had been his father's valet, and knew the secret that father and son kept from his mother, that both of them were Elemental Masters. Only with Turner did he feel something like normal, and he wished that, if this had to be done, it could have been Turner who attended to it.

  I don't belong here. I don't belong to this world anymore, these piles of showy stone, these devoted family retainers. My world is not this place. My world is a world of blood and ruin, of bombs and cannon and the stink of gas.

  Still he moved on, smiling, pleasant, while pain lanced through his knee and more and more he wanted only to go lie down somewhere. Next to Mrs. Murphy was Thelma Hawkins; Thelma cooked for the servants. Quiet word, shake hand, slip in the coin, move on. What were these folk to him, or him to them? Just "milord," or something more? And was that something nothing more than a chimera, a fata morgana, an illusion? He was a ghost, a ghost of the past, and no more real than the dreams of a poet.

  Then there were the cook's helpers, four of them: Cheryl Case, Maria Bracken, Amanda Hart, and Mary Holman the tweenie. He wasn't supposed to know them, but he did, all but Mary Holman; Turner murmured their names as they curtsied, and this time it was Turner who gave them their largesse, not Reggie, because these were under-servants, the bottom of the hierarchy. And little Matthew Case, who ran errands, was hardly even in the hierarchy at all.

  And just why should that be? Reggie knew the helpers better than he knew many blood relations. Reggie had spent many hours in the kitchens as a boy, running away from lessons. The little Holman girl looked up at him in awe, as if he had been the king. It was embarrassing. In the end, he was no better than she. She might one day come to produce something good and useful—all he had produced was death.

  Next, the housekeeping staff, women first. Upstairs maids in their crisp black dresses with white collars and cuffs and starched white aprons with lace caps—all of which must have been wretched to keep clean when your job was to clean. Downstairs maids, in gray-striped gowns of the same cut. One of them, Mary, had been the one who had taught him how to slide down the banister. Turner gave them their little gift. They didn't say a word, other than a murmur of thanks directed to him and not to Turner.

  They curtseyed, too, like stiff little puppets, their faces without expression. Even Mary. Didn't she remember? Or was this one of the things she wasn't supposed to remember, lest she embarrass the master?

  Men next, the footmen, George Woodward, James Jennings (Reggie remembered this old fellow was a talented hobbyist cabinetmaker), and Steven Druce. All three of them were from his father's staff, and definitely too old to be conscripted. Poor old men! They should have gone to a pensioners' cottage long ago. He couldn't help but think of the prewar descriptions in the newspaper for those seeking footmen—tall, of particular hair-color, and with a handsome leg— well, George and James probably looked like that when his father was a youngster, but they were very much past their prime now.

  In contrast to their years was the hall boy, Jason Long, who couldn't have been more than fifteen. The hall boy had that name because his position required that he sleep in the hall to answer the door after hours, but Lord Devlin had found that distasteful. "That might do for some medieval blockhead," he had said with a grimace, "but I am neither, and we do have some modern conveniences these days." So instead of sleeping in the hall on a cot behind a screen, the hall boy had a room just off the kitchen, with a bell connected up to the door. And if anyone was foolish enough to come calling after everyone had gone to bed, Lord Devlin had felt that they deserved to have to wait in the cold and dark until the hall boy made his way to the door. Reggie was glad the change had been made. The head stableman was in the same age-bracket as the two footmen. And the stable boys were both boys, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, and looking stricken and anxious as he greeted them.

  There was a pattern building here. No men between the ages of seventeen and fifty. He had known that in the abstract, but seeing it on the staff—babies and grandfathers. How many hundreds of thousands of men were dead in the killing fields of Flanders and France? No way of telling, not when a barrage came in and blew everyone to bits, and you just estimated who had been there. But it was bad—bad—if you could look at people here at home and see a gap where there just were no men of a certain age Of course, it cut across all nations, and surely the French had suffered the worst of all, but—but this was home— He moved on, looked down at a face, and got a shock that almost made him stagger. The head gardener—who was responsible for Longacre's famous rose garden—was not the man he recalled, but a woman. "Mrs. Green" was murmured into his ear, and he recalled with a start that her husband had been killed in the first year of the war. "A sad loss," he said, with as much sincerity as he could. The next face was another shock, for another mere boy was the second gardener.

  Now the staff that did not get largesse, the business staff. Gray old Paul McMahon, the estate accountant, and the estate manager, which should have been Owen McGregor, but Reggie found another female face looking at him where a man's should have been. "Lee McGregor, sir," she said to him, without waiting for Michael. "Owen was conscripted in June of ' 16 and we heard we'd lost him in January."

  "Good Lord," he said, feeling knocked a-kilter. He took her hand and shook it. "I'm so sorry—"

  She managed a wan smile. "I'm hoping you'll keep me on in his place, sir."

  He glanced over at McMahon, who lifted his brow and gave a slight nod of approval. "If Paul thinks you're handling the job, then certainly," he replied, still feeling off-balance.

  So now women were taking men's jobs, because there were no men to fill them. What else? When he went down into Broom, what would he find there? Female shopkeepers, surely—female postmen? Female constables?

  Female farmers—how many of the tenant farmers are gone? Are their wives managing? Do we need Land Girls to help them? He hadn't been home a half an hour, he was supposed to be here to recover, but already he felt burdens settling onto his shoulders—

  Until he looked down at Lee McGregor again, and realized that his concerns were misplaced. Old Paul approved. She probably already had everything in hand. He would just be meddling.

  But then he moved to old friends; he was so happy to see Peter Budd, despite his new chauffeur's hook-hand, that he nearly shook the hook off. Budd had been the one responsible for helping to dig him out of that wretched bunker—Budd had heard him screaming his lungs hoarse, insisted there was someone
still alive in there, and had begun the digging with only a bit of board to help him. And that, ironically, had led to the loss of his hand; he'd gotten a splinter of all damned things, the wound had gone septic immediately as happened all too often in the trenches, and before anyone could do anything about it, it had gotten so black it had to come off. When Reggie had gotten wind of that, he had sent to his fellow-sufferer to offer him a job. Peter had been a chauffeur before the war; Reggie assumed that anyone with the gumption to dig a man out with a board had the gumption to learn to drive again with a hook.

  "How are you doing, old man?" he asked.

  Budd grinned. "Ready to race, milord," he said saluting with his hook. "Took the liberty, milord, of lookin' up me mate, Bruce Kenny, and turned out he was already working here." He jerked his head to the side at another new face. "Good mechanic, milord, and made bold to conscript 'im. Wasted on horses."