Phoenix and Ashes (2 page)

Besides
that, they had maids and a cook—well, there were others in Broom who had
“help,” but not many had maids that lived in, or a cook at all. And
they lived in one of the nicest houses in Broom. “The Arrows,” a
Tudor building, was supposed to have been there at the time Shakespeare passed
through the village after a poaching expedition, got drunk and fell asleep
under the oak tree in front of the tavern.

But
her papa hadn’t made much of their prosperity, so neither had she. He
socialized with the village, not the gentry, and other than visits to Longacre
to see Reggie fly, so had she. They weren’t members of the hunt, they
weren’t invited to dinners or balls or even to tea as the vicar was. The
governess, the special tutoring later—this was, to her, not much
different from the piano lessons the butcher’s and baker’s
daughters got.

In
fact, she hadn’t really known how prosperous they were. Papa’s business
was hardly glamorous—he made sacks, or rather, his factories made sacks.
All sorts of sacks, from grain-bags to the rough sailcloth duffels that sailors
hauled their personal gear in. Well, someone had to make them, she supposed.
And from time to time, Papa would visit one or another of his factories, making
sure that everything was operating properly, and look over the books. His trips
always happened the same way; he’d tell her and Cook when he was going
and when he would be back and they’d plan on simple meals till he
returned. He would drive their automobile, chugging and rattling, to catch the
train, and at the appointed time, drive home again.

But
last June something different had happened.

He’d
gone off—then sent a telegram that something had happened, not to worry,
and he would be back a week later than he had planned and he’d be
bringing a grand surprise.

She,
more fool, hadn’t thought any more of it—except, perhaps, that he
was buying a new automobile. That was what he had done when he’d gotten
the first one, after all, come back a week later, driving it, all bundled up in
goggles and hat and driving-coat, and full of the adventure of bringing it all
the way from London
.

And
he came back, as she had half expected, not in the old rattle-bang auto, but in
a sleek, long-bonneted thing that purred up the street.

The
problem was, he hadn’t been alone.

She
had been with him. And right behind them, in their own car
, They had come.

She
had come arrayed in an enormous scarlet hat with yards and yards of scarlet
scarves and veils, and a startling scarlet coat of dramatic cut. Father had
handed her out as if she was a queen, and as she raised a scarlet-gloved hand
to remove her goggles, he had said, beaming with pride
, “
And
here’s my surprise
!
This is your new mother
—”
he
hadn’t said
“
stepmother
,”
but Eleanor would
never, ever call that horrible woman
“
Mother
”

“—Alison,
this is my daughter. And look, Eleanor, here are two new sisters to keep you
company! Lauralee, Carolyn, this is your sister Eleanor! I’m sure
you’re going to be the best of friends in no time!”

Two
elegant, languid creatures descended from the rear of the second automobile,
wearing pastel blue and lavender versions of
her
getup, and removed
their goggles to regard her with stares as blank and unreadable as the goggles
had been.

Broom
had never seen anything quite like them. They looked as if they had come
directly from the pages of some London quarterly. Only
she
smiled, a
knowing little smile, a condescending smile that immediately made Eleanor aware
of her untidy hair that was loosely tied with a ribbon like a child’s,
her very plain linen day-dress,
not
in vogue and
not
new, of
her uncorseted figure, and her thick, clumsy walking shoes. The two girls
raised their heads just a trifle, and gave her little patronizing smirks of
their own. Then all three had sailed into the house without so much as a word
spoken.

And
with a shock, Eleanor had found herself sharing the house and her papa with a
stepmother and two stepsisters.

Except—from
the moment they entered the door, there wasn’t a great deal of
“sharing” going on.

The
first sign of trouble came immediately, when the girls inspected the house and
the elder, Lauralee, claimed the second-best bedroom—Eleanor’s
room—as her own. And before Eleanor could protest, she found herself and
her things bundled up the stairs to an untenanted attic room that had been used
until that moment as a lumber room, with the excuse, “Well, you’ll
be at Oxford in the autumn, and you won’t need such a big room, now, will
you?” Followed by a whispered “Don’t be ungracious,
Eleanor—jealousy is a very ugly thing!” and a frown on her
papa’s face that shocked her into silence.

The
thing that still baffled her was the speed with which it had all happened.
There’d been not a hint of any such thing as a romance, much less a
marriage,
ever
! Papa had always said that after Mama, no woman could
ever claim his heart—he’d gone a dozen times to Stoke-on-Trent
before, and he’d never said a
word
about anything but the
factory, and she thought that surely she would have noticed something about a
woman before this.

Especially
a woman like this one.

Oh,
she was beautiful, no question about that: lean and elegant as a greyhound,
sleek dark hair, a red-lipped face to rival anything Eleanor had seen in the
newspapers and magazines, and the grace of a cat. The daughters, Lauralee and
Carolyn, were like her in every regard, lacking only the depth of experience in
Alison’s eyes and her ability to keep their façade of graciousness
intact in private.

Eleanor
only noticed that later. At first, they were all bright smiles and simpers.

Alison
and her daughters turned the house upside down within a week. They wore
gowns—no simple “dresses” for them—like nothing anyone
in Broom had seen, except in glimpses of the country weekends held up at
Longacre. They changed two and three times a day, for no other occasion than a
meal or a walk. They made incessant demands on the maids that those poor
country-bred girls didn’t understand, and had them in tears at least once
a day. They made equally incredible demands on Cook, who threw up her hands and
gave notice after being ordered to produce a dinner full of things she
couldn’t even pronounce, much less make. A new cook, one Mrs.Bennet, and
maids, including a lady’s maid just for Alison called Howse, came from
London, at length, brought in a charabanc with all their boxes and trunks.
Money poured out of the house and returned in the form of tea-gowns from London
and enormous hats with elegantly scrolled names on the boxes, delicate shoes
from Italy, and gloves from France.

And
amid all of this upheaval and confusion, Papa beamed and beamed on “his
elegant fillies” and seemed to have forgotten Eleanor even existed. There
were no tea-gowns from London for Eleanor…

Not
that she made any great show against
them
. She looked like a maid
herself, in her plain dresses and sensible walking shoes. They didn’t
have to bully her, not then, when they could simply overawe her and bewilder
her and drown her out with their incessant chattering and tinkling laughter.
And when she tried to get Papa alone to voice a timid protest, he would just
pat her cheek, ask if she wasn’t being a jealous little wench, and advise
her that she would get on better if she was more like them!

She
might have been able to rally herself after the first shock—might have
been able to fight back. Except that all those far-off things in the newspapers
about assassinations and Balkan uprisings that could never possibly have
anything to do with the British Empire and England and Broom—suddenly
did.

In
August, the world suddenly went mad. In some incomprehensible way, Austria
declared war on Serbia, and Prussia joined in, and so did Germany, which
apparently declared war on everybody. There were Austrian and Prussian and
German troops overrunning France and England was at war too, rushing to send
men to stop the flood. And though among the country-folk in Broom there was a
certain level of skepticism about all this “foreign nonsense,”
according to the papers, there was a sudden patriotic rush of volunteers
signing up to go to France to fight.

And
Papa, who was certainly old enough to know better, and never mind that he
already had been in the army as a young man, volunteered to go with his
regiment. And the next thing
she
knew, he was a sergeant again, and
was gone.

Somehow
Oxford never materialized. “Your dear father didn’t make any
arrangements, child,” Stepmother said, sounding surprised, her eyes
glittering. “But never mind! This will all be over by Christmas, and
surely
you would rather be here to greet him when he comes home, wouldn’t you?
You can go to Oxford in the Hilary term.”

But
it wasn’t over by Christmas, and somehow Papa didn’t manage to make
arrangements for the Hilary term, either. And now here she was, feeling and
being treated as a stranger, an interloper in her own house, subtly bullied by
glamour and not understanding how it had happened, sent around on errands like
a servant, scarcely an hour she could call her own, and at the end of the day,
retreating to this cold, cheerless closet that scarcely had room for her bed
and her wardrobe and desk. And Papa never wrote, and every day the papers were
full of horrible things covered over with patriotic bombast, and everything was
wrong with the world and she couldn’t see an end to it.

Two
more tears burned their way down her cheeks. Her head pounded, she felt ill and
feverish, she was exhausted, but somehow too tired to sleep.

Today
had been the day of the Red Cross bazaar and tea dance. Organized by
Stepmother, of course—“
You have such a genius for such things,
Alison
!”—at the behest of the Colonel’s wife. Though
what that meant was that Eleanor and the maids got the dubious privilege of
doing all of the actual work while Stepmother and “her girls” stood
about in their pretty tea-gowns and accepted congratulations. Eleanor had been
on her feet from dawn until well past teatime, serving cup after cup of tea,
tending any booth whose owner decided she required a rest, watching with raw
envy as her stepsisters and other girls her age flirted with the handsome young
officers as they danced to the band Stepmother had hired for the occasion.
Dances she didn’t know—dances to jaunty melodies that caused
raised, but indulgent eyebrows among the village ladies.
“Ragtime”—that’s what they called it, and perhaps it
was more than a little “fast,” but this was wartime, and beneath
the frenetic music was an unspoken undercurrent that some of these handsome
young men wouldn’t be coming back, so let them have their fun…

Eleanor
had cherished some small hope that
at last
someone who knew her would
see what Alison was doing and the tide of public opinion would rise up to save
her. Alison, after all, was the interloper here, and with her ostentatious ways
and extravagance, she had surely been providing more than a little fodder for
the village cats. But
just
when she was handing the vicar’s
wife, Theresa Hinshaw, a cup of tea, the woman abruptly shook her head a
little, and finally
looked
at her, and frowned, and started to say
something in a concerned tone of voice, out of the corner of her eye she saw
Alison raise her head like a ferret sniffing a mouse on the wind, and suddenly
there she was at the woman’s elbow.

“Mrs.Hinshaw,
how
are
you?” she purred, and steered Eleanor’s hope away
into a little knot of other women.

“I
was wondering why we haven’t seen Eleanor about,” the vicar’s
wife began.

“Yes,
she used to run wild all about the village, didn’t she, poor
thing,” replied Alison, in a sweetly reasonable tone of voice. “A
firm hand was certainly wanted
there
, to be sure. You’d never
guess to look at them both that she’s the same age as my Carolyn, would
you?”

Eleanor
saw Mrs.Hinshaw make a startled glance from the elegant Carolyn, revolving in
the arms of a young subaltern, to Eleanor in her plain frock and apron and
ribbon-tied hair, and with a sinking heart, saw herself come off second best.

“No,
indeed,” murmured Mrs.Sutherland, the doctor’s wife.

Alison
sighed heavily. “One does one’s poor best at establishing
discipline, but no child is going to care for a tight rein when she’s
been accustomed to no curb at all. Keep her busy, seems to be the best answer.
And of course, with dear Charles gone—”

The
vicar’s wife cast a look with more sympathy in it at Eleanor, but her
attention was swiftly recaptured by Lauralee, who simpered, “And poor
Mama, not even a proper honeymoon!” which remark utterly turned the tide in
Alison’s favor.

From
there it was all downhill, with little hints about Eleanor’s supposed
“jealousy” and “sullenness” and refusal to “act
her age”—all uttered in a tone of weary bravery with soft sighs.

By
the time Alison was finished, there wasn’t a woman there who would have
read her exhaustion and despair as anything other than sulks and pouting.

The
music jangled in her ears and made her head ache, and by the time the car came
for Alison and her daughters (“
Dear little Eleanor, so practical to
wear things that won’t be hurt by a little wet
!”) and Eleanor
was finished with the cleaning up and could trudge home again, she felt utterly
beaten down. Her aching legs and feet were an agony by the time she reached an
unwelcoming home and unfriendly servants. Alison and the girls held high
celebration in the parlor, their shrill laughter ringing through the house as
they made fun of the very people they had just been socializing with.