Phoenix and Ashes (18 page)

So,
outside these four walls, families were dining tonight on chicken-foot soup and
oat-bread, while within, the ladies of The Arrows thought it hard that they
were reduced to a casserole of potted pheasant. If there was a sweet course on
the tables of the village, it would probably be a jam tart—with the jam
spread as thin as might be. Alison and her daughters feasted on sugar-frosted
cake.

Eleanor
wondered just what the reaction would be in the village if anyone knew this. Or
knew that the innocuous parcels that came on a regular basis to The Arrows
contained foodstuffs no one in Broom had seen for days or weeks, or even
months.

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?

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.