Phoenix and Ashes (13 page)

“And
she needn’t even actually leave the house,” Alison said
thoughtfully. “Carolyn bundled in a cloak could stand in for her when you
‘return’ her. No one would think twice about her not wanting to
show her face after such a disgrace.”

“The
only thing I can think of that would cause a problem is—she still is
showing signs of coming into her power as a Fire Mage, isn’t she?”
Locke asked. “And the nearer she gets to twenty-one, the harder it will
be to keep her suppressed.”

“Distressingly
true; mind you, I’ve seen no signs, no signs at all, that she’s
coming into any significant power, only that she isn’t ever burned, no
matter what she does around fire,” Alison replied, and pursed her lips.
“Still, all the more reason
not
to use magic to drive her mad.
Much
better to use something purely physical.”

Locke
shrugged. “It’s all one to me; one will be expensive in magical
coin, the other in real money. I’ll have to find the proper man—and
it will have to be someone who wouldn’t be missed, because when the job
is over, if we want to
keep
things quiet, Robbie will have to take
care of him.”

“Well,
Robbie would enjoy that, wouldn’t he?” She smiled silkily.

“And
we always like to give Robbie his little pleasures.” Locke returned her
smile. “He is such a loyal employee, and he asks so little in return for
so much.”

Deciding
to proceed with caution, Alison elected to have Robbie drop her at Victoria
Station, and took a taxi back to the Savoy. She was glad that she had; there
was a messenger waiting for her in the lobby, and the packet he handed to her
in return for her signature was sealed with Lord Alderscroft’s signet.

Although
she was impatient to see what was inside, she gave no outward sign; she tucked
it under her arm and took it upstairs.

This
was not just simple caution; the moment she touched the seal, she had known it
was not just a physical protection against prying. So whatever lay within would
be rendered unreadable if the seal was broken without the magical component
being properly released. Not the wisest thing to do in a public place.

The
girls were at the window of the sitting-room, putting charms on passers-by in
the street below. They had moved on from simple lust-charms; she noted with
approval that they were also distributing anger, depression, and
quarrelsomeness with an even hand. Not all the charms “took,” of
course, but every failure was a lesson in what not to do—or who not to do
it to. There were those who had mere touches of magic about them who were never
touched by such things. It was best to learn to recognize such people so that
if one
had
to curse them, one would know to use a stronger spell.

Seeing
that they were gainfully occupied, Alison moved to the little writing-desk and
opened the envelope, first tracing the counter-sigil on the seal so that the
contents would remain intact. She never failed to feel amused at how those
foolish men, with their silly White Lodge, refused to let her past the public
rooms of their little club because she was female. They were like schoolboys,
with their “No Girls Allowed” signs—or cavemen,
superstitiously afraid of the “unclean” woman!

As
she had hoped, the letter contained the dossier of the woman she was to
impersonate. Alison Stanley, of the Northumberland branch of the Stanleys, had
died when the hospital ship
Britannia
, on which she was a nurse, had
been torpedoed, but because no one had printed a new edition of Burke’s
since the war began, she would still be listed as living. Early in the war, the
casualty lists had been suppressed, so only Alison Stanley’s immediate
circle would be aware she was dead. Alison nodded with satisfaction. The
northern Stanleys were as poor as church mice for all their pedigree, what
little income they got went straight into trying to keep the roof on their
ancient barn of a manor house patched, and no one from Longacre would ever have
met any of them.

Lord
Alderscroft gave her the particulars of her “family;” it was numerous,
and she was going to have to memorize it all later.

And
he enclosed a letter of introduction to Reggie’s mother that made her
smile widen.
I have written her ladyship myself
, he said in his
cover-note. Telling her about my “cousin” who was supposed to have
married a fellow called Robinson down there in or around Broom, and asking if
she’d heard of you, and if she had, would she look you up to see that you
were all right. The rest is up to you. Reginald isn’t likely to be
discharged until May at the earliest, so you should have time to establish
yourself before he’s brought to Longacre.

She
laughed silently. If Alderscroft only knew how he was setting a fox to guard
the hens!

However—

She
rested her chin on her hand for a moment, as a complication occurred to her.
Whatever
she did to Eleanor, it would have to wait. She could not afford a scandal
before she got one of the girls safely married to Reggie.
Afterwards—well, these things happened to the best of families these
days, and at any rate, Eleanor was not, strictly speaking,
related
in
any way to her or her girls. The Fenyx family would move heaven and earth to
keep things hushed up. It was the way these things worked, after all.

So—plans
for wretched Ellie must go to simmer. It wouldn’t matter; Alison would
get what she wanted in the end.

She
always had, no matter who was in her way.

At
night, once all the visitors were gone, but before most of the men fell asleep,
was the easiest time of Reggie’s day. That was when, freed, perhaps, by
the dim light, and the first fuzziness of opiates, freed by being just one more
whisper in the dark, the men talked openly among themselves of what they would
not tell anyone else.

There
was a new patient in the bed to Reggie’s right; a cavalry officer, with
an empty sleeve pinned against the breast of his pajamas. He had stared at the
ceiling all day, saying nothing, not even whimpering when his dressings were
changed. Now, suddenly, he spoke.

“Don’t
you think it’s a relief?” he said, with surprising clarity, still
staring at the ceiling.

Reggie
thought,
Do I think
what
is a relief
? but the man continued
before he could ask the question.

“Finally—no
more ruddy show for the folks back home. No pretending it’s all beer and
skittles and no one ever gets hurt. Not that they don’t
know
, of
course, because they do, but you have to pretend anyway. No reckoning how much
life you’re going to pack into a ninety-six hour leave ‘cause it
might be the last one you get, while pretending it’s nothing much. No
more careful letters that don’t let on. No more wondering if you’re
going to do a funk. It’s over, the worst has happened.” He
did
sound relieved. Reggie swallowed, his mouth gone dry. Maybe for his neighbor, the
worst
had
happened.

“That
part’s a relief,” someone else agreed, out there in the dimness.

“No
more guns,” someone else moaned. “All day and all night-pounding,
pounding, pounding—”

“Ah,”
said Reggie’s neighbor in an undertone. “PBI. I’d’ve
done a funk six weeks ago if I’d been PBI.”

Reggie
turned his head, took in the neat moustache and what he could see of the other
man’s remaining hand, and made a guess.

“Cavalry?”
he suggested.

The
other finally turned
his
head and looked at Reggie. “Most
useless waste of man and horseflesh on God’s own earth,” the other
agreed, and though the voice was cheerful, the bleak expression on the
man’s face gave it the lie. “Should have put my horse on a
gun-carriage and me in a trench. All we existed for was to be shot to pieces.
All they could think to do with us was send us across the wire again and again
and let the machine guns have us.”

Reggie
winced. The cavalry had not fared well in the war. And the face on the pillow
of the bed next to his was, behind its brave moustache, disturbingly young.

“My
brother’s PBI; told me enough about it before he caught it that I knew I
wouldn’t last a day,” the youngster continued. “Thought,
since I was a neck-and-nothing rider, I’d try the cavalry. I,” he
concluded bitterly, “was an idiot. All a man on a horse is out there is a
grand target.”

“But
the worst is over,” Reggie suggested, echoing the young man’s own
words.

“Oh,
yes, the worst is over.” The young man sighed, with a suggestion of a
groan in it. “If I keep telling myself that, I should start believing it
soon.”

He
blinked owlishly at Reggie, then looked back up at the ceiling; another moment,
and his eyelids drooped, and he fell asleep.

Out
in the ward, the whispering went on.

“—watched
that gas coming closer and closer; couldn’t move, didn’t dare, had
a machine gun above us to get anybody that bolted that took out two of my men
that tried—”

“—one
minute, passing me a smoke, the next, head gone—”

“—arm
sticking out of the trench wall. Men used to give it a handshake as they went
past—”

“—sweet
Jesus, the
smell
! If I can just get it out of my nose for a
minute—”

“The
smell—” Reggie repeated, with complete understanding. No one who
had not been
in
the trenches understood what that meant. He
hadn’t not really, until he’d been buried in a bunker. One part,
the stink of aged mustard gas. One part, stagnant water. One part, rat urine,
for the rats were everywhere and only a gas attack got rid of them. One part,
unwashed human body, for what was the point of washing when you were standing
knee-deep in stagnant water? And one part dead and rotting human flesh. When
somebody died, you gathered up as much as you could of him to bury—but
sometimes your trenches were dug across an old burial-field, or sometimes, when
a bomb or a barrage had hit the trench directly, there were so many bits
scattered about that you just cleaned up what you could and dumped what might
remain after the stretcher-bearers left into a hole. It wasn’t the first
time that Reggie had heard a story like the hand and arm sticking out of a
trench-wall. Soon enough, you got numb to seeing things like that. Especially
if you were in the PBI.

But
that stink never left you. It got in your nose, in your hair, lodged in your
memory until you couldn’t draw a free breath anymore.

Yet
his exposure it had been so brief—many of the officers in this ward had
lived with it for weeks, months. Maybe they got used to it.

Maybe
they just got numb to it.

“Know
what the real relief is? Not having to bloody lie to the boys anymore.”

That
was another new voice, a tired, tired voice from the other side of his new
neighbor. Reggie got himself up on his elbow and peered through the gloom.

It
was, indeed, a new man—older than Reggie, old enough to have been
Reggie’s father, in fact.
Oh, God
, he thought in sudden
recollection.
They’ve raised the conscription age to fifty,
haven’t they
? One eye was bandaged; in fact, half his head was
bandaged on that side, and his shoulder as well.

“I
mean,” the man continued, doggedly, “They’re just kids, and
they believe you when you tell them that bunk about ‘one more
push’, ‘over the top and on to Berlin.’
They
tell
you to tell it to these kids, and you do, and you
know
you’re
lying to them, that you’re all going over the top and nothing is going to
change except that half of them aren’t going to be in the trench when you
scramble back.
God
how I hate the lying—”

There
were uncomfortable murmurs, but no one disagreed with him. What was treason to
say on the front was of little matter in the ward. What was the War Department
going to do, anyway? Line up a lot of men with empty sleeves and empty
pant-legs and shoot them? Especially when they were only telling the truth?

Insanity.
Pure insanity—the generals at the rear giving the same orders, over and
over and over again, regardless of the fact that all those orders did was to
kill a few thousand men and maim a few thousand more without winning back an
inch of ground. Reggie lay back down and stared at the ceiling himself, seeing
the future stretching on, bleak and full of death. He had the sudden notion
that this was
never
going to end, not until the generals found there
was no one to put in the trenches but toddlers and senile old men. Or until one
side or another found some weapon so vile, so destructive, that it would sweep
from the Western Front to the Eastern Front in a path of lunatic carnage,
leaving nothing alive on the entire continent… and he no longer had the
illusion that such a weapon, if found, would not be used. Give a man who saw
his fellow men as markers on a board such a weapon, and he
would
use
it, and damn the consequences, and there were plenty such men on both sides of
this conflict.

“I’m
tired,” said the man who had said he hated lying. “I want—”

But
neither Reggie, nor anyone else, was ever to find out what he wanted, for he
suddenly shivered all over so that the bed rattled, and then lay terribly
still.

A
deathly quiet settled over the ward, a quiet in which Reggie heard a steady
thumping as of distant thunder. The sound of the guns across the Channel,
carried on the wind.

Someone
cleared his throat. “Poor bastard,” said someone else, in a voice
of detached pity. “He’s out of it now.”

“Maybe—”
Reggie began, then kept the rest of what he would have said behind his teeth,
and listened to the barrage falling, somewhere—somewhere—out in the
darkness.