Phoenix and Ashes em-4

by Mercedes Lackey

  "Please sir, could you tell me what's going on? Why are all those carts out here this morning?" she asked, looking up at him with feigned timidity.

  "Oh, now, well, it's May Day and all, do ye ken?" the Gaffer said, opening his bag of words and beginning to strew them about with a great smile on his face. "And when it's May Day, it's only right and proper that there be something to celebrate! Only that's being a bit hard these days, seeing that the Nine-Man-Morris is down to two men—two and a half, if you counted that poor lad i' there—" he nodded his head at the Broom pub—"what's on'y got half of what he left here with. And there's none of the lads what does the hobby-horse, nor Robin Hood, nor Maid Marian neither, nor not even a decent fiddler, so what's to do? And none of the travelers, nor the peddler-men that does the May church fair, or at least, not many and they ain't men. And school be closing short, so as the little 'uns can be helping with the farming. So, says good milady Devlin, may God himself bless her kindly heart, let's make the May Day fair and the school treat all in one, and have it all up at Longacre! Well, no sooner she says that, than everyone thinks, Hoi! A grand idea, that! And bein' as she's her ladyship and all, she's got—means, d'ye ken?" He stopped just long enough to give Eleanor a huge wink. "She's a-got hold of stuff to make sweeties for the kiddies, so it'll be a real school treat and all, and may God bless their innocent hearts, they can be eating sweets till they be sick, just as is proper for a school treat. And Master Reggie, who's Lord Fenyx now and all, he'll be a-handing out the prizes, as it's prize day along of being school treat. None of your Bibles and prayer books, neither, not that I hold with your prayer books, being chapel, and beggin' your pardon if I've offended ye, miss, but that's the bare truth, for a true man don't need a book to tell him what to pray, and I reckon God Himself gets tired of hearin' the same words bein' prattled every Sunday with no more understanding than a babe. Still! Prizes a young-ster'd be happy to have, not that they shouldn't be happy to have a Bible, but 'tisn't as if they don't get Bibles every time yon vicar has an excuse to hand 'em around. No, none of your Bibles and prayer books for Lord Fenyx, no—he'll be handin' out picture books and grand stories with plenty of pirates and bandits and happy endings and what all! So 'tis to be a grand day, all around. I'll be hauling me old bones up there myself, see if I don't! Gaffer, he's old, but not too old to know what a good time is."

  Gaffer paused for breath, and Eleanor took that opportunity to thank him and scuttle back across the road and in through the garden gate—because she greatly feared that once Gaffer got his breath back, she'd be given a detailed account of every good time that the Gaffer had ever enjoyed.

  Once inside the safety of the yard, she paused to consider what she had been told. And now that she recalled—there had been the same sort of to-do last May Day, but Alison had not given her the leisure to think about it, much less ask.

  And of course, Reggie hadn't been up at Longacre either—

  Reggie! If he was to be handing out the school prizes, then of course he wouldn't be able to get down to Round Meadow by teatime. He'd be lucky to get away before sunset, if at all. If she knew Reggie at all, she knew he wouldn't just be a figurehead, he'd be doing something to help.

  And she wouldn't be seeing Sarah, either; Sarah herself had said as much. Well, May Day ... there was undoubtedly something witchy to be done on May Day. Sarah had been quite reticent about her plans, and Eleanor knew better than to pry.

  There was no way that she could get the bond to stretch all the way to Longacre Park. She was lucky to get as far as Round Meadow— which was far enough from the manor that Reggie drove his automobile to get there.

  It was hard not to feel disappointed and deserted, as she walked back into the kitchen and stood staring at the fire on the hearth. Everyone, it seemed, was going to be having some sort of celebration but Eleanor.

  As the last of the carts rattled out of the village, a strange quiet settled over the place. It was, quite literally, as still out there as if it was two or three in the morning, except for bird-calls and the occasional distant crow of a rooster. She hadn't until that moment realized how much sound there was, even in such a small village as Broom, until the moment when it was gone.

  She was all alone. There was no one to talk to, no one to be with. One of the few days she would be able to get away to see Reggie, and he wouldn't even be there, because he was up there at that enormous manor, playing His Lordship. Tomorrow Alison and the girls would probably be back, and her imprisonment would begin again. It's not fair— She sat down on the kitchen stool and stared out the window. It's not— And she felt tears of self-pity start to well up.

  And then, she blinked, and firmed her chin, and sat straight up. What had she to feel sorry about? Good heavens, it was May Day, and Alison and the girls were somewhere far, far away, and she could go out to Round Meadow or anywhere else she could reach and go and gather the first May Day flowers she'd have been able to pick since before the war! And there were at least four old ladies on Cottager's Row that no one would be bringing May bouquets to, and who were too old to get up the hill to the fair! Four poor old ladies who had given all their best years to the service of someone else, and who were now sitting in their little cottages with no one for company except each other. Now there were people who had a right to feel sorry for themselves.

  I might as well find out if I can manage two excursions outside The Arrows in a day. With resolution, she got her sprig of rosemary, broke it, and made the proper incantation, then got a basket and went a-Maying.

  She wandered through pastures deserted by all but the sheep and cows, finding flowers she hadn't seen in three years. She visited little copses where she recalled the shyer flowers blooming, and there they were, untouched by anyone else.

  Of course, that only made sense. The children who would have picked this May Day bounty had been too excited by the coming treat to go make May baskets for their mothers and little sweethearts. And the older girls—

  The older girls have no sweethearts to make May garlands for, either. Suddenly, she stopped feeling quite so sorry for herself. In fact, the last wedding in the village had been her old schoolmate Cynthia Kerns— who'd had one day with her husband before he went back to the Front. One day—

  No, it was no wonder that the flowers were still blooming here. There was no one to pick them. All the young men were gone, and the young ladies didn't have much heart for picking flowers.

  She returned long before the sprig had withered with a basket full of cowslips and primroses, lilies-of-the-valley and other early flowers. With a skill she had thought she had forgotten, she wove grasses into little May-baskets, then raided the tea-cakes for a couple of sweet treats, laying them in the baskets with her own bouquets.

  She surveyed her handiwork with pardonable pride. There] Now that's right and proper! She had made up four lovely little May-baskets of the sort she remembered from much happier days. The baskets wouldn't last a day, the flowers would linger only for two or three more, but it was the thought that counted, wasn't it? She cast the spell a second time, and with a larger basket laden with her offerings, went down to Cottager's Row.

  The proper May Day protocol was to lay one's offering on the stoop, knock at the door, and run away. The problem was, Eleanor very much doubted that any of these old ladies would be able to bend down to pick up her offerings, and even if they could, they might not be able to get back up again. So she went to each in turn, knocked on the door, and presented very surprised and touched old women with her gift and a simple, "First of May, ma'am," with the little curtsey you would expect from a lower servant girl. And then, with eyes cast down, before any of them could ask who she was or who had sent her, she hurried away. She went around the corner and waited until her recipient went back into her house before going on to the next one. They would probably get together over tea and compare notes, but there was no harm in that. The point was that each should have a pleasant surprise, from someone unknown.

  Not
that any of these old women would know who she was even if she gave them her real name. The likelihood that any of them would even be aware of a Robinson family living at The Arrows was pretty remote. As servants up at the manor, they knew less than a quarter of the very small population of Broom, only those with whom they had family ties. Servants at a great house had very little time to themselves, no more than a half day or so off every couple of weeks, and even less to spare to go visiting even their own families. From the time they had entered service to the time when they were pensioned off, their social circle had been among their fellow servants, not down here—and any old friends they'd once had might well themselves be dead at this point.

  And once again, she realized that she had very little reason to feel sorry for herself. Even if her stepmother's spell kept people from recognizing her, people still knew who she was—and at least one remembered her and recognized her.

  As for those four old ladies, at least they knew that someone had remembered them today, and Eleanor found a little smile of pleasure playing about her lips as she hurried back to The Arrows.

  She indulged herself with a slightly extravagant luncheon, but as she finished it, a spirit of restlessness overcame her, and she felt far too unsettled to spend the day reading.

  So instead, she went all over the house, flung open all of the windows to the spring breezes and—after a moment of thought—began to clean. Oh, not the spring cleaning that Alison would, without a doubt, set her to the moment she and the girls got home. No, this time she would clean what she wanted to clean. In the years since the war began, she'd not been able to air out her own bedding or clean her own room more than twice, and only after she was exhausted from her daily work. So it was her tiny room that got turned out and swept and dusted until there wasn't a speck of dirt anywhere in it, the mattress put out in the garden to air, the blankets and coverlet left to hang over the line, the threadbare carpet beaten within an inch of its life. It was every stitch of her own clothing that got washed and hung to dry, then put away with rosemary sprigs to scent it. It was the pallet-bed from the kitchen that got the same treatment as her bedding from her bedroom. And with time still on her hands in the late afternoon, she decided to go upstairs into the attic and see what was there.

  She honestly didn't expect much. After all, she and her father weren't the family that had owned The Arrows for the last however-many generations, and she fully expected that the original family would have cleaned out every bit of their ancestral goods.

  Except that once she climbed the stairs and unlocked the door to the long-ignored room—she discovered that they hadn't.

  She had never been here before; not even once Alison had turned her into a servant. Perhaps everyone had assumed that the attic was empty, and since the war, there had been such a shortage of things that no one actually had anything to go up in an attic to stow things away. Not even clothing; once Alison or the girls deemed a frock too worn or too out-of-date to wear, it went to the church for distribution to the deserving poor in an ostentatious display of false piety. So the piled up furnishings and dust-covered trunks came as a startling surprise as she blinked at them in the musty gloom.

  The air was full of dust, and light shone only dimly through the single grimy window. But there must have been enough in the way of furnishings here to fill two or three rooms, and a great deal more in the way of trunks, boxes, and crates.

  To the windowless back of the attic, she could dimly make out the shapes of exceedingly old-fashioned furniture piled up to the ceiling; heavy stuff, ornately carved. At least one very old-fashioned four-post bed with a wooden canopy, straight-back chairs, a table so heavy she wondered how anyone had gotten it up here. In front of the furniture, were the trunks and boxes, piled upon one another. No books, which seemed odd—but then, perhaps most of the former owners hadn't been readers to speak of.

  Surely there isn't anything usable up here, she thought doubtfully. But something of the child who cannot help but see a trunk and think "treasure" must still have been in her, for she went to the nearest, and flung open the lid to look. And then the next—and the next—and the next—

  Soon enough, she had been half right—and half wrong.

  The trunks were full of all manner of things. Children's books, battered and torn, and broken toys. Trunk after trunk full of threadbare linens, moth-eaten blankets, and ancient curtains. More trunks full of antique clothing. All of the clothing dated to the last century at least, from the era of the bustle and the hoop-skirt, and had been thriftily packed away, with springs of lavender so old it crumbled when she touched it. The silks were so old that they practically fell apart when she picked them up; merely lifting them made them tear. The furs had evidently been raising entire hoards of little mothlets, and so had the woolens. And yet, not everything was a complete loss. Most of the trimmings, the laces, the beads, and the embroideries, were still sound. And there were gowns that somehow had escaped the moth and the mildew and dry-rot. Anything linen or cotton was perfectly good, for instance, and there were a couple of Victorian ball-gowns that were, if terribly creased, also wonderfully evocative of the by-gone belles who must have worn them. Of course the ball-gowns were absolutely useless to her, but she gathered up the linen skirts, well aware that each of the voluminous things, made to wear over the huge hoops formerly fashionable, would make two or three modern walking skirts for her. She would have to be very careful, and do all her sewing at night, but she wouldn't have to look quite as shabby as she had been doing. Shirtwaists and blouses, plain ones at least, hadn't changed much in all that time, either. Perhaps a little altering of collars would be needed, but not much more than that.

  Then she came upon the trunk that had been tucked away under the dust-covered window, well away from the rest. It was a very small trunk, hardly more than a box, and as she brushed the dust from the top of it, she froze.

  For there, carefully written on a paper label stuck to the top of it was her own name. Eleanor Robinson.

  17

  May 1, 1917

  Broom, Warwickshire

  ELEANOR STARED AT THE FADED words on the old paper label, transfixed. This wasn't a hand that she recognized; certainly not her own writing, and not her father's. Whose, then?

  Could it possibly be?

  She hardly dared think of it.

  She finally took a deep breath, and opened the box. Her hands were trembling as she did so.

  It contained two things: an envelope and what looked like a copybook. She lifted both out, carefully, as if they might disintegrate like the shattered silks of the ancient gowns in the other trunks.

  She peered at them, and tried to make out what was written on them, only to realize that the light was too dim in here to read the fading words.

  I need proper light.

  She bundled up her linen skirts and shirtwaists under one arm, put the envelope with great care inside the front cover of the copybook, and took everything downstairs, trembling inside, knees feeling weak, both excited and afraid to discover what it was she had found.

  She left the clothing in the wash-house where it was unlikely to be discovered, then, realizing that the sun was setting, she took her two finds into the parlor and lit the oil lamps—

  And then, of course, she realized just how grimy she was, so she delayed the moment of discovery still further by going to wash her hands and face. Somehow she didn't want to touch her discoveries with filthy hands. It didn't feel right.

  And somehow, she wanted to delay that moment of discovery; she was not sure why, but she both longed for and feared the moment when she would open that envelope and learn what lay inside.

  Only then, with clean hands and face, did she sit down at the table, remove the envelope from inside the copybook with hands that shook with excitement, and opened the flap.

  There was a note inside, a very short note, in the same hand that had written her name on the box. The paper had yellowed, the ink had browned, but the writing was clea
r enough. The words hit her like blows, burned into her mind as if they had been branded there.

  My dear daughter, it began, and she bit back a cry to realize that the writer, as she had not dared to hope, was her own long-dead mother. My friend Sarah would laugh at me if she knew I was doing this. She would say that I am anticipating the worst. I would only say that since neither of us have the gift of scrying into the future, one cannot anticipate anything, and I am taking precautions. If you have found this, you have found my most important legacy to you, my daughter, whom I knew would one day wield the power of a Master of Fire. Sarah is neither a Master nor of your Element, and cannot teach you most of what you need to know. It was hard for me to find a teacher; it may be that by the time you find this, you already have determined you, too, will not be able to find a Fire Master willing to teach a mere girl. In this book you will find all that I know. If you have not already done so, go to Sarah, the midwife some call our village witch, and ask her to help you, since I am not there to do so myself. Be fearless and strong, and seize your birthright with all the strength that is in you.