Phoenix and Ashes em-4

by Mercedes Lackey

  He smiled slightly, or rather, stretched his lips in something like a smile. "I suppose for form's sake we ought to invite her to the ball, too. It isn't done to leave out one sister of three. People might talk."

  Again, that brittle laugh. "Oh, you can if you like, but I shouldn't trouble myself. She'd never come. She's a dreadful bluestocking, and she never even comes home on the vacs. I don't think she knows such things as balls exist. She certainly doesn't know how to dress. She'd never leave her—studies—for anything that frivolous."

  He leaned back in his chair. He hadn't missed that moment of hesitation when she had sought for a word to describe what Eleanor was doing. He yawned. "Oh, well, in that case, if you think she won't feel slighted. The vicar suggested to Mater that she ought to be included on the guest list is all."

  "Oh." The girl's voice grew hard, and just a touch cold. "The vicar, was it? No, I really shouldn't bother if I were you. I'll make sure Mother reminds the vicar of how much Eleanor dislikes leaving Oxford. I suppose she'll be a don, once they allow such things."

  He made a sound like a laugh. "It's not as if there won't be a surfeit of young ladies to dance with; too many of them are likely to be wallflowers as it is, unless I can bring some more cadets from the RFC up to scratch. I think we can do without her."

  "So do I." She swiftly turned the subject to costumes, and whether he thought it would be too warm for eighteenth-century court dress. "Wouldn't an Empire gown be cooler?" she asked.

  "I should think so," he replied. "And besides, it'd be deuced difficult to dance in those side-things that stick out—what-you-call-'ems—"

  "Panniers," she said with immense satisfaction. "Lauralee wouldn't hear of anything but being Madame Pompadour, but I thought Empress Josephine would be far more elegant and cooler."

  "Well, there I agree with you, but don't tell her that," he said, in a confidential tone of voice. "I'd rather dance with a girl who can move about in her costume than have to steer some wire contraption around the floor." She giggled and agreed. He thought he had effectively distracted her from the subject of her sister.

  As he continued talking with her to make sure she had forgotten his question in her flutter of excitement about his attentions, he digested what he had learned. Well, now he knew this much, at least. He knew that Eleanor was Alison's stepdaughter, and he knew that they were, for some reason, keeping alive a fiction that she was at Oxford. It was clear that she wasn't—but the question was, what was she doing in Broom? His assumption that she had fallen on hard times was obviously wrong, but why was she dressed like an inferior servant and clearly doing menial labor?

  He worried at the problem for the rest of the day, through tea, while he dressed for dinner and all through dinner. It made for a quiet meal, but his aunt more than made up for his silence, and his mother was so full of her entertainment plans that they didn't really notice that he wasn't talking much. How was it that neither the vicar nor the doctor were aware that "Eleanor is at Oxford" was a complete fiction? Surely, if she had been strolling around Broom, someone would have noticed and said something. And she certainly wasn't transporting herself to their meadow by magic carpet. None of this was making much sense.

  After dinner he went out on the terrace with a drink; the Brigadier joined him as they watched the sun set; the sky ablaze with red, gold, and purple, the last rays of the setting sun making streaks across the horizon. It looked like a Turner painting.

  "You would never know there was a war from here," the old man said at last, and Reggie thought he sounded wistful. "Must admit, I was dubious about this brouhaha your mother set her heart on, but—it won't be bad to forget for a little while, and pretend."

  "Like children playing truant from school," Reggie replied, with bitter longing. "But it won't go away."

  "But we can rest our minds from it for a little, surely, without feeling guilty." The Brigadier sipped his brandy. "We'll all put on our dominoes and pretend that outside the walls of Longacre it is 1912; we can even persuade ourselves for a little that our lost and absent friends are out there in the crowd, too. And as long as the masks are being worn, we can hold to the illusion. Is that so wrong?"

  Yes, he wanted to say. Yes, because the ones that haven't been killed by the idiotic strategies of old men fighting a war with last century's tactics are out there putting their lives at risk because those same old men are so certain that what they want is God's will that they won't admit they are wrong or that what they are doing is a hideous, horrible mistake.

  But he didn't say it. In part, because he knew that although the Brigadier agreed with him in his heart, he could never admit it aloud. And in part because it would only hurt that good old man further.

  "Sometimes—one needs illusions," he said, carefully, and left it at that.

  Illusions. So much of what was going on here was an illusion. Not just this country weekend and the ball, but everything on this side of the Channel. No one wanted to talk about the war anymore, or think about it even, except those who had been in it. The topics that seemed to obsess most people had nothing whatsoever to do with the war except as the war had caused the problems. And that drove him mad, sometimes. He wanted to wake them up, drag them forcibly down to the hospitals and show them the shellshocked and the maimed, to make them care, force them to understand what this war was doing. Was he in the wrong, then, to want to break into the comfortable illusions and shout at them all, that their petty little concerns over their comforts, the shortage of servants, the rationed food, were selfish, self-centered and disgusting to him? That over there in France, that sound like thunder that came over the Channel when the wind was right, was the sound of people dying, and it was time they woke up and acknowledged it?

  But he wanted to forget it too—part of him was so tired of it all that he was sick with longing for it to just stop, to go away, and take all his memories with it.

  He turned his mind back to the problem of Eleanor with a feeling almost of relief. It was something to think about that was not the war, and part of him deeply sympathized with the Brigadier. Like those nights when he would lie in his bed at the hospital and recite poem after poem in his head to keep from thinking about what was out there in the dark, waiting for him to fall asleep. Because you could only think about the war and what it was doing to you and your mates for so long before you started going mad.

  Eleanor Robinson should have been at Oxford, and was not, and it was not for lack of money in her family. And in fact, from all appearances, she was working as a servant. Why, oh why, had she not told him herself what was wrong? Pride?

  For that matter, why had her father married a scheming creature like Alison?

  She vamped him I suppose, like her daughters are trying to vamp me. I suppose if you've never been vamped before, it would be easy to succumb. When would that have been? He tried to reckon up the last time he had seen her. It was before the war, before he joined the RFC. So at some point between then and the start of the war, her father had remarried. He'd done some checking, and her father had died at some time around the first Christmas of the war. So why had his daughter not been at Oxford at that point? Had Alison persuaded the besotted new husband that it was unnecessary to give a girl a university education? Or had she pled the war as an excuse, claiming she needed Eleanor at home? Just how besotted had he been, to deny his only child her one dream? He must have been caught like a salmon in a net.

  And then, just as the last of the sun sank below the horizon, it struck him. What if her father had altered his will in favor of the new wife before he went off to the war?

  It was just the sort of thing that Alison would have insisted on, he was sure of it. Manipulative creature that she was, she would have promised, ever so sweetly, that she would take as good care of Eleanor as of her own daughters. So why shouldn't her dear new husband not change his will to make her sole inheritor? After all, leaving flighty young girls anything directly was generally a bad idea. Who could guess what they woul
d do with their inheritance, and of course, there were always cads who would romance them for their money, then waste it and leave them penniless and deserted.

  He stared into the growing darkness, as beside him, the Brigadier lit up a cigarette. The end of it glowed as he pursued that line of thought to its logical conclusion.

  So, assume that was precisely what had happened. Then her father had died in the first months of the war, leaving her entirely at the mercy of her stepmother, a woman who clearly despised her. Then what? What was she doing here, dressed like a servant?

  Well, what were her choices? To leave—and do what? She wasn't suited to anything but marriage, and if she'd had a sweetheart in the village, he doubted that she would have been so keen to go to university. There was a sad truth to her condition; she had no skills with which to support herself. She hadn't enough education to become a governess. She hadn't the money to train as a nurse, and although she could have gone as a VAD no one could really live on the tiny stipend that was allotted to the volunteers. In the beginning she wouldn't have had the stamina for a factory job, and the Land Girls hadn't been formed until later. That would have left her with only one option. To remain at home at the mercy of her stepmother, who must have seen her as a ready source of free labor and put her to work as a servant.

  Which explained why she was dressed like one.

  Now, her own pride would have kept her hidden from the village. And her stepmother would never have admitted she had treated her own stepdaughter so shabbily. And so the fiction of "Eleanor is at Oxford" was born, with both sides of the situation eager to maintain it.

  His left hand clutched at the stone balustrade, and he downed the last of his drink and set the glass down lest he inadvertently shatter it in his sudden fit of anger. Perhaps it was absurd to be so angry over what was, essentially, a teacup tragedy when there were so many greater tragedies in the wake of this war. She wasn't dead, after all, merely ill-used. She hadn't been struck by a stray bullet and paralyzed, not blown to pieces by a shell.

  But feelings, he reminded himself, were not rational. And this shabby treatment of a girl who'd done nothing to earn it made him very, very angry.

  He could see how it was that no one noticed that she was still here, especially if she herself took pains to conceal the fact. And no one ever really looked at anyone in servants' clothing. Especially not someone dressed as shabbily as Eleanor was. So on the rare occasions when she escaped her work for a little, so long as she kept her head down— which everyone would expect anyway out of a lower servant—no one would recognize her. He didn't recall that she had socialized much with the girls her age, anyway; it had been the boys that had congregated around his aeroplane that knew her best, boys who were all long gone in the first weeks of the War. Perhaps the adults—the adult women, anyway—might have noticed, but in those first weeks and months, they had more than enough cares of their own to preoccupy them. The longer the charade went on, the less likely it would be that anyone would see the face of the clever schoolgirl in the visage of the work-hardened young woman. That had to be it.

  The question now was—what could he do about it? And to that question he had no ready answer. For a start, how could he even get to her to talk to her? Helping her would mean prying her out of her imprisoning shell, the walls of The Arrows, and at the moment, he had no good idea of how to do that.

  Once he did that, he also had no good idea of how to offer help without it seeming like charity and pity, and he had a fairly good idea of what she would think about charity and pity. At least, he thought he did.

  "Penny for your thoughts," the Brigadier said, out of the darkness, startling him from his concentration.

  "I'd have to give you ha'pence change, Brigadier," he replied, mendaciously. "I wasn't thinking about much."

  The old man chuckled. "Let's go in, then," he suggested. "The damp isn't doing either of us any good."

  "Probably not," he agreed. "I was thinking of going down to the village, anyway."

  "And I'm for my book and bed," the Brigadier replied. "It's peaceful out here. I shall take my rest while I can get it."

  They parted company on the terrace, Reggie limping his way down to the stable to get his motorcar. He decided that he would see what he could learn by steering the conversation in The Broom around to the Robinsons. It would be natural enough, what with The Arrows being almost directly across the street, and that would be a good place to start.

  July 22, 1917

  Broom, Warwickshire

  Sarah looked so triumphant when Eleanor arrived just before midnight that Eleanor could not in good conscience deny her the pleasure of revealing whatever it was that had put that smug smile on her face. She hoped it was good news, because today had been particularly brutal. The amount of work that she'd been laden with would have laid her out four years ago. She'd almost been too tired to come here tonight, and really, all that had gotten her out the door was the promise of eventual freedom.

  "It is a very good thing that no one would ever entrust you with a state secret, because you could never conceal the fact that you had a secret in the first place," she told her mentor, as she picked up her mother's notebook to begin her exercises, took a deep breath, and concentrated on getting her second wind. She and Sarah were focusing on one thing now; to extend the length of her "leash," so that she could attend the fancy-dress ball—though how she was going to get inside the doors of the manor at Longacre Park without an invitation, she had no notion. There was no chance that one would come for her now. Lauralee, Carolyn, and Alison had long since gotten theirs, and the girls took every chance they could get to take out the precious piece of cream-laid vellum and flourish it about. Their acquaintances—one could hardly call them "friends," anymore—in the village were eaten up with envy. The only other villagers who had gotten invitations were the vicar and his wife, and the doctor and his. With this alone, Alison had made it wordlessly clear how much higher her social stature was in the tiny circle of Broom. That, in fact, she had escaped the social circle of Broom for another, more rarified atmosphere.

  She had, of course, cleverly feigned confusion to "discover" that no one else had achieved similar invitations, and unlike her daughters (who might be excused such behavior on the grounds of their callow youth) she did not make much of it after that initial flurry of exquisitely acted discomfiture. In this way, even though she had without doubt made some real enemies among the village elite, none of them would dare come out actively and openly against her. The ladies still came to her teas and her war-effort gatherings—though with all of the invitations up to the manor, those were becoming infrequent. But she presided over them with the absent air of a queen who has other concerns than the petty ones of her subjects.

  Eleanor had hoped that somehow, someone would remember her existence and include her in the joint invitation, but no one had; it had read, "Mrs. Alison Robinson, Miss Danbridge, and Miss Carolyn Danbridge." Not even a hint of "Eleanor." She had almost given up at that moment, but it did occur to her that Sarah might know a way of slipping her in, somehow—or perhaps even was planning to forge an invitation. Granted she wouldn't be on the guest list, but perhaps no one would check that, or if they did, she could claim she was part of "Alison Robinson and daughters." Or perhaps Sarah meant for her to slip in through the gardens, though how she was to do that in an enormous ballgown eluded her.

  She settled herself at Sarah's old, age-darkened kitchen table, her brazier in front of her, a Salamander already lying coiled in the coals without needing to be summoned.

  "Here you are, just as I promised," Sarah said, handing over a plain envelope that contained a cream-laid vellum one that—no mistake— was identical to the one in Alison's middle desk-drawer. The outer one was addressed to Sarah, but the inner to Eleanor herself— At an Oxford address. Somerville College, to be exact. She gazed at it in blank astonishment. She already knew what it contained, of course. Her invitation to the ball. But— "How—" was all she coul
d manage.

  Sarah actually winked. "I have my ways," she said. "A little word to—someone—who kindly reminded her ladyship that Miss Robinson was away at Oxford as the invitations were picked up to be given to the postman, so she rewrote the Robinson invitations on the spot. And then, a—fellow follower of the Ancient Ways, not an Elemental Master, who is—" She hesitated. "Well, I'll only say this. She has every reason to be at Somerville, and she chose Somerville because it is the women's college that has no religious requirements that might conflict with her own faith."

  Eleanor gaped at her, feeling her eyes going rounder with every passing moment.

  "Oh, don't look at me like that!" Sarah laughed. "I told you there were more of us than you'd ever guess! At any rate, she intercepted your invitation and reposted it to me. That's all. You are on the guest list and you have a genuine invitation. So if I were you, I would stop staring and get back to my exercises, or on the day, you won't be able to get as far as the front gate." She plucked the invitation from Eleanor's nerveless fingers. "And I'll keep that safe, here. No point in risking having it found, and you'll have to come to me to dress anyway. Now, it's time to work, not daydream."