Phoenix and Ashes (20 page)

He’d
always been in places where the commanding officer took as firm a hand as one
could over such a collection of misfits as pilots tended to be, so there had
always been some semblance of order, at least on the surface. The monkeys were
kept on leads, the goats in pens, the trash policed, the meals on time. But
even in the English aerodromes, no two pilots were alike. Take an inventory,
and you could come up with anything. He’d served with fellows who’d
left the seminary to fly, and fellows who he suspected had been (and might
still be) whoremongers. With country lads and cockneys. With fellow Oxford and
Cambridge men, and men who could barely read. With Canadians and Americans,
raised on Wild West shows and inclined to die rather quickly from an
overabundance of enthusiasm combined with a lack of skill and an absolute
certainty that instinct was better than training…

He
propped his cane on the bureau and laid himself down on the bed, staring up at
the ceiling. Another mural of sky and clouds.

And
I’m up above the ground floor. Too far up for them to find me. They
won’t come up here—

Relief
washed over him. He had thought that coming home to convalesce was the worst
thing he could have done. Now he was prepared to admit he might have been
wrong.

And
for the first time in far too long, he felt his eyelids grow heavy, and he let
them close, and drifted into sleep.

Not
a true sleep; it was too light for that. A kind of half-conscious doze, for he
heard the servants moving about in this wing, going about their duties.
Mrs.Dick was very strict with her girls; unless some task was so heavy it
needed two, they were to keep to the schedule and stay strictly apart to avoid
wasting time on gossip. But evidently, she wasn’t so hard on them that
they were unhappy; as a counterpart to his dozing he could hear the one working
across the hall humming to herself.

Heavier
footsteps in the hall; the girl said, “Right there, please,” and
there was a thud of logs, the rattle of a scuttle. One of the boys must have
brought up coal and wood for the fire.

More
humming; it was so unlike the sounds in the hospitals or the camps that it felt
as if he was in another world entirely.

Well,
he was, really. Though it wasn’t the world he had left behind. Mind, he
hadn’t been
home
on leave for more than a year; instead, he had
come over to London, roughly ever other time meeting his mother there instead
of coming down to Longacre. It was easier that way; making a round of theater
prevented any need to talk. She didn’t want to hear about the war, and he
didn’t want to hear about the nice young ladies she wanted him to meet.

When
he’d come over on his own, there had been other entertainment than
theater. And his mother, no doubt, would have been shocked to learn that some
of those same “nice young ladies” were dispensing their favors with
freedom and enthusiasm at the parties given by William Waldorf, Viscount Astor,
Lady Anson. Always it was the war, the war, the war, giving a feverish cast to
these parties, with everyone grimly determined to have—if not enjoyment,
then pure physical pleasure.

Here
it seemed as if his mother had dedicated her life and all of her strength to
trying to preserve life here at Longacre as it had been before the war. He had
noted the last time he was on leave that she assiduously avoided any mention of
the war and anything connected to it, and there had been a kind of brittleness
about her.

He
wondered what would have happened to her if he had died. Would she have
dedicated the rest of her life to keeping things absolutely the same, frozen in
time, like an Edwardian iteration of Miss Havisham?

He
could easily see that. Poor mother.

It
was a lost cause, of course. The juggernaut that this war had become had its
own momentum. It was devouring everything in its path, and everything it could
possibly touch. She didn’t have a chance against it.

In
the end, nothing and no one did.

He
came down to dinner, to discover, to his horror, that he and his mother were
not alone in the house. His grandfather on his mother’s side was in
residence. Unfortunately, the old man considered himself a military expert,
having served in a tame regiment in India, that saw no more exciting action
than polo games.

He
kept a civil tongue in his head all through the rather strained dinner, while
the old man held forth on the wisdom of the war Office, the grand strategies of
Kitchener, and the superiority of “real army tactics” to the new
weaponry of tanks and machine guns and, especially, aeroplanes.

“Damned
useless, said it before, and I’ll say it again,” the old man
fulminated, as Reggie shoved bits of rabbit cassoulet around on his plate.
“Damned cowards are what’s holdin’ the victory up! Too damned
cowardly to
make
the charges. One good push, over the top,
that’d be all it’d take!”

Reggie
closed his eyes, counted to ten, feeling a vein throbbing in his temple. He
thought of all the times he’d looked down on the PBI in their “big
pushes,” how often he had watched them slaughtered by the machine guns.
Thought of the men who had become his friends back on the ward, men who had
been thrown into a meat-chopper by old fools who could not and
would
not understand that war had changed, changed in unrecognizable ways, and that
the old tactics that had worked once did not work anymore.

He
held his temper and his words all through dinner, and after, when what should
have been a nice, quiet moment for a smoke in the sunset turned into another
occasion for a rant from the old man, who seemed determined to confront him,
for some reason. Finally, it was only when his mother retired, that her father
came to the real point.

“Now
that we’re alone, boy,” Grandfather said, with a particularly
vicious look out of the corner of his eye at Reggie, “I want you to know
I don’t hold with this ‘shellshock’ nonsense. A bust-up leg,
that’s fair. But the other, that’s just malingering.” The old
man gave him a particularly malicious glance. “I’ve got my eye on
you.”

Suddenly,
a fury that Reggie had not realized he possessed welled up in him, and he
actually began to shake. He clenched his fist around the handle of his cane to
stop it from trembling, a bitter bile rose up in his throat.

To
keep from giving the old man the answer he deserved, he bit down hard and
clenched his teeth together. Life was difficult enough for his mother; he was
not going to make it harder by having a row with her evil-minded old father.

“You
can believe what you like, sir,” he got out between his clenched teeth,
staring at the old bastard who stood a silhouette, black against the fire in
the study. “I cannot hope to change your mind.”

“Huh,”
Grandfather snorted, and turned away. Reggie, still full of fury, limped off
out of the study, not really knowing where to go, but only knowing that if he
didn’t get away from that house and that horrible old man he was going to
say or do something that would make his mother unhappy.

He
forced himself into a walk around the garden; it might be night, but the layout
of the rose garden hadn’t changed in two hundred years, and he
didn’t need light to know his way around.

But
after limping around the turfed paths for a half an hour, his temper still
hadn’t cooled, and he knew he wanted something he could not get in that
house.

He
limped down to the stables, where horses were sharing their accommodations with
his motor cars. There were three of them now, an enclosed model for his mother,
his own fast Allard, and a Bentley that he could either drive himself or be
chauffeured in. Or rather, he could when the knee healed up. The condition of
the knee made shifting problematic for a while.

But
down there in the stable were two men with whom he had something in common. A
million times more than he shared with that vicious old man who had driven him
out of his own house, though they were neither officers nor gentlemen.

The
stables had been neatly divided into horse and auto sides, with the autos being
housed in the part that had once held the carriages. There was one farm cart
there now, one pony trap (perhaps his mother liked to drive herself around) and
one small, open carriage. The rest of the space was made into a proper garage,
and the glow of a cigarette in the shadows told him that someone was out for a
smoke.

“Care
for a gasper, milord?” asked Peter Budd.

“Thanks,”
Reggie replied, taking the metaphorical strides that crossed all the boundaries
of rank, class, wealth, and education, to arrive at the side of someone who
deserved a hundred times more respect than that horrible old man. “I
would.”

April 24, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

THE BROOM HALL INN
WAS where the autumn hunts began, the hounds and horses assembling in the courtyard
for the traditional stirrup cup, marking it as a distinctly upper-class
establishment. It was certainly of the proper standard for Lady Devlin to meet
Alison Robinson and her daughters for tea.

It
was a safe way for Lady Devlin to examine these curious women for herself,
without incurring any obligations beyond a single meeting. Tea in an inn
didn’t require a response other than a “thank you, I enjoyed your
company,” and it didn’t imply that invitations to one’s house
should or could be forthcoming.

Alison
knew all of this, and also knew that she had passed the first test by agreeing
to this meeting. It was a public place, and while that was an initial
advantage, socially, it could prove to be a disaster if the single meeting was
all that there was, and the rest of Broom could read the snub for themselves.

This
was all part of the social game that the gentry played among themselves, to
ferret out the unworthy, the unmannered, the ill-bred.

Alison
knew all of the moves of the game by heart, and there was only one question in
her mind as she listened to her girls snap waspishly at each other while Howse
attended to their hair.

To
drive, or not to drive?

The
big Crosley auto could fit four, which the Hispano-Suiza would not and the inn
was just far enough away that driving would not be terribly gauche. On the
other hand, it was within easy walking distance, and these were times in which
some self-sacrifice was expected. Decisions, decisions…

It
was the shoes that finally decided her; the frocks she had picked out for all
three of them required town shoes, not country shoes, and in their high-heeled
town shoes the girls were at risk of spraining an ankle. So off they went,
rattling and chugging up the street, and when she arrived at the Inn, Alison
was glad she had made that decision. Lady Devlin’s auto, a magnificent
Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, and her chauffeur were already there.

And
Lady Devlin waited in a private parlor.

It
was not, by any means, the first time that Alison had dined here, and this
place and the Broom Pub with the White Swan alternated in supplying some of
their meals. But this was not the usual private parlor she took; it was clear
from the outset, that this room was not available for just anyone.

Lady
Devlin had already ordered tea; it was waiting when they arrived, and she
served as the hostess, pouring for all four of them. She was of the kind that
Alison thought of as “wispy”—soft, blond hair going to gray,
styled in a fashionable chignon, soft, gray-blue linen walking suit, slight figure,
doll-pretty face with soft blue eyes.

“Mrs.Robinson,”
she said, as she poured the tea as a good hostess did, “I understand that
you have lived in Broom since just before the war began.”

“That
is quite true, Lady Devlin,” Alison replied, taking the cup and saucer
from her hostess, and making sure that their fingers touched as she did
so—

Because,
while Alderscroft would never have dreamed she would use magic to ensure that
she became Lady Devlin’s bosom friend, Alison had no scruples whatsoever
on the subject. But it would have to be subtle, and work with more mundane
methods of influencing Reggie’s mother. So what passed between them in
that moment, was a spell as wispy, as fragile, as Lady Devlin herself. And,
unless you were very, very good, it was exceedingly difficult to detect.

Affinity—
we
are the same, you and I—

“Then
I wonder why I heard nothing of you until now?” Lady Devlin continued,
pouring tea now for Carolyn, who accepted her cup with a diffident murmur of
thanks.

“Oh,
Lady Devlin, I would never have dreamed of pushing myself into your
notice!” Alison replied, putting down her teacup and looking at Lady
Devlin in consternation. “Truth to tell, I do not know why my cousin
Alderscroft elected to do so for me. But Alderscroft is a kind man, and
perhaps…” She looked away and let the words trail off. The letter
to Lady Devlin had stressed how lonely, how hungry for refined company Alison
was. But that was not what one would say for one’s own self. “One
wishes for compatible company, now and again. One does one’s best,”
she murmured, dropping her eyes. “But sometimes, I worry about my
daughters. I should think that Broom would feel very confining for a young
person.”

“Oh,
no, Mama, not at all!” Carolyn, looking very pretty in soft lilac,
exclaimed. “Why, our days are very full here! We have the parish work,
the Red Cross, the Ladies’ Friendly Society—now that spring is
come, there will be tennis at the country club—we scarcely have time to
ourselves, some days!”

Now
Alison exchanged a significant look with Lady Devlin. These are all productive
things, no doubt, but hardly entertaining for a pretty young girl! And they do
not put her into company appropriate to her breeding.