Phoenix and Ashes (19 page)

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.”

It
was obvious why Kenny was working at Longacre, given Reggie’s standing
order to replace staff that were not going to return with unemployed veterans
of the war. Kenny had a wooden leg. A wooden leg was unlikely to impede his
abilities as a mechanic.

“Excellent,”
Reggie replied, feeling much more heartened than he had been a few moments ago.
And feeling relieved that the review of the staff was apparently over. There
might be some groundskeeping staff, and eventually Gaffer Norman, the
gameskeeper, would present himself, probably with his pretty daughter Eva in
tow (Gaffer had read too many romantic novels in which the gameskeeper’s
daughter marries the lord of the manor). He would be expected to make the
rounds and meet all of the tenant farmers. And he should inspect the woodlands.
Not that he intended to hunt, but there was a sawmill on the property, and it
might not be such a bad idea to think about producing lumber for fine
cabinetry… the woodlands were old, and properly managed, could remain
woodlands
and
provide timber.

No,
he wouldn’t hunt. He had had enough of hunting. He never wanted to shoot
anything again. Not ever.

But
he should also look over the accounts of all the rental properties in Stratford
and elsewhere; reliable sources of income needed to be cared for.

The
welcome being over, the staff filing away to their various duties, he could now
enter his house—

How
can anyone call this monster a
“
house
”?

The
first room was the Great Hall, and it was guaranteed to make virtually anyone
feel utterly insignificant. Here, the ceiling was thirty feet above the floor,
and the magnificence of the room matched the size. It might be beautiful but it
had never been built for humans—

But
that was the moment of epiphany when Reggie realized that it
had
been
built for Air Masters.

He
stepped inside, and between the height of the ceiling and the windows up high
as well as low, he realized that he felt—comfortable. He could draw a
breath as easy as if he had been outside. For the first time since he had come
back, he was in a room that didn’t feel as if it was pressing in on him.

Of
course;
this wasn’t just a monument to display, it was the
retreat and stronghold of someone who needed the sky above him to feel truly
happy. The public rooms on the ground floor, all with twenty-foot ceilings with
the exception of the Great Hall, virtually guaranteed that no Air Master would
ever feel claustrophobic. And the private rooms on the next floor were nearly
as spacious. He mentally apologized to his ancestor. What he had thought had
been built to intimidate had actually been constructed to comfort…

He’d
suffered from gnawing claustrophobia, he suddenly realized, ever since his
return from France. The proportions made sense when you thought of it as a
house built for those most comfortable under the open sky. Even the ceiling
murals with their clouds and birds made sense.

His
mother was waiting for him, posed in the exact center of the Great Hall, with
her hands outstretched. He limped toward her, and took both her hands in his.

She
studied his face anxiously, and he produced a surface smile for her. His poor
mother! She was not very clever, being one of those fluttery, helpless
creatures, but she had loved her husband dearly, and he, her. She just
hadn’t known what to do with the two Fenyx males in her life, who had
bonded more closely than mother and child right from the first. “Oh, my
dear boy,” she said, “You look so pale—”

“I’m
tired, mother,” he replied, with partial honesty. “It was a brutal
trip down. Not good on the knee.” That was nothing less than the truth.
Every little bump had sent a lance of pain through it. And he hadn’t had
a decent night of sleep without being drugged for months.

“Well,
go along to your old room then, dear, and have a lie-down. You don’t mind
that you’re still in your old room, do you?” her voice sharpened
with anxiety.

As
if I’d want father’s room. Not a chance
. “It will suit
me just fine,” he told her, and followed one of the footmen up the stairs
and down the corridor, though he hardly needed to be shown the way.

His
room had not been touched since he left, except to clean and tidy it. He paused
just over the threshold, feeling, with another sense of shock, that it had been
preserved as a sort of shrine. Perhaps to his safety—perhaps to his
memory.

And
because of that, it was now a shrine to something that didn’t exist
anymore.

He’d
known this when he had come home on leave, in a vague way. But now—now
the contrast between what he had been and what he had become could not have
been greater.

Here
was his room—it was, thank goodness, not the room of the cricket-playing
boy-in-a-man’s-body that had gone off to Oxford. He had made some changes
since that time. But it was the room of an enthusiast, for everywhere you
looked were items having to do with flight. Books, models, pictures of
‘planes, a stack of the blueprints for his own ‘bus, framed
pictures of himself in her. Bits of a carburetor were still lovingly arranged
on the desk from the last time he’d taken it to bits. Whoever had been
doing the arrangement had lined up the parts by order of size, and had polished
them until they gleamed. How long had
that
taken?

He
could not help but contrast this room with the aerodrome on the Western Front
he’d last been posted to. More of a cubbyhole in a tent, really, his
sleeping-quarters had been cluttered with binoculars, maps, bits of
aeroplanes—some souvenirs, some just picked up out of idle curiosity. He
generally shared his quarters with at least two cats on account of the rats and
mice being everywhere, but in general, an aerodrome was overrun with dogs.

It
was mad, really, there were always dogs everywhere, puppies peeking their heads
out from under cots, adult dogs fighting or fornicating in the runways. Dogs in
the club, dogs in the enlisted men’s tent barracks, dogs of every shape
and size but with no pedigree whatsoever. Why all the dogs? It had finally
occurred to him that the aerodromes were probably where every pet in Belgium
and France that had been bombed out of its home had come—in the cities
that were still intact, they had their own pets, and there was no safety nor
comfort in the trenches for any animal. So the aerodromes were where the
homeless hounds of France had come, following their noses to where there might
be food and friends.

He
hadn’t much cared for the fleas that the dogs brought, and liked the
quiet company of cats, so there were usually a couple lounging about his bunk. He,
like so many others, decorated the canvas of his tent or hut with enemy
insignia cut from downed planes, and illustrations cut from magazines—

Then
there had been the photos. Every flier had them, layered onto the wall.
He’d never indulged in the gruesome hobby of snapping dead enemies and
posting them on the walls of his quarters, though plenty of the others did, but
in a way, his collection was quite as bad, for so many of those in the snaps
were dead. Ghost arms circled the shoulders of the living, dead eyes shone at
the camera with the same enthusiasm as those who had survived.

Usually
there wasn’t room for more in his sleeping quarters than bed, kit-bag, a
little table and a chair—with perhaps an ammunition crate serving as a
bedside stand. The bed would be covered in cats and clothing, the stand would
have something to give light, the chair would be draped with two or three
jackets or waistcoats.

And
on his table, more bits of motors, bills, brandy bottles half-full, whiskey
bottles either full or empty, letters, tobacco for his friends, light novels
borrowed from those who had finished them, boxes of stomach pills, for every
flyer he knew ate them like candy, himself not excepted. How not, when every
time you went up you stood a good chance of coming down in pieces? The RFC
pitied the PBI, but the PBI called the RFC the “suicide corps” or
the “sixty-minute men” because a total of sixty minutes in the air
was allegedly the average lifespan of a pilot.

Dirty
clothes on the floor, a floor of rough wood full of splinters—the sound
of a gramophone bawling somewhere down the row, Harry Tate or sentimental
music-hall songs. In the last bivouac, it had been “The Rose of
Tralee,” over and over; the chap with the gramophone never shut it off.
The smell—as distinct as in the trenches but thank God not
so—unbearable. Oil, hot metal, glue, paraffin, the French cook conjuring
up something—tobacco—brandy.

His
unit had a French cook and kept hold of him grimly. Having a Frenchie to do for
you meant you could actually eat the food—the sad substitutes for cooks
supplied by the British Army took whatever they got, boiled it for three hours,
then served it with a white sauce with the look and taste of flour-paste. The
Frenchies did you right; a good soup, a little salad, and making the most of
whatever they could get from the quartermaster and by scrounging. He suspected
horse, many times, but that was preferable to the slimy
“bully-beef” which he also suspected to be horse.