Phoenix and Ashes (22 page)

“You
are the damndest fellow I ever did see,” he said, coming up out of the
glass at last.

Reggie
looked around, at the scarred faces, the missing limbs, the haunted looks.
“I think we’re all damned, Ross,” he said quietly. “I
think this is hell’s own waiting-room. And I think we might as well make
good company for each other while we’re still here.”

With
Alison and the girls out of the house for a little, Eleanor hastily painted the
glyph on the hearthstone with her sprig of rosemary (which worked better than
the wand, actually), cracked it in half, and slipped out the back door and the
back gate.

What
she wanted, was a newspaper and gossip, in that order.

It
never failed to amaze her, every time that she slipped out, how no one ever
recognized her, not even the people she knew well. Their eyes just slipped past
her, almost as if they actually could not see her. If something happened, such
as physically bumping into someone, the person in question would look down at
her in puzzlement or irritation, as if they could not imagine where she had
sprung from, and depending on their natures, pass on with a vague smile or an
annoyed frown without saying a word.

Then
again, as a scullery maid, she didn’t warrant a second glance, much less
an apology.

I
swear, if this is ever over, I will hunt down Ross Ashley and become a
socialist…

The
newspaper could be found on the top of Morgan Kirby’s dustbin, neatly
folded. An old one, of course, but
old
was better than
none
.
The gossip could be heard by creeping under the window of Nancy Barber’s
hairdressing establishment and listening there. Her husband had been the
eponymous barber of the village, but he was gone, and Nancy had children to
feed, so the barber-shop became a ladies’ hairdressing salon where
esoteric creations like marcel waves were produced, the very daring (or very
young) had their hair bobbed, and the gossip flowed…

Eleanor
crept into place beneath the window just in time to catch the tail end of a
sentence.

“—oh
definitely back! Colonel Davies, the stationmaster, saw him when he got off the
train, and his people sent a car down for him from Longacre.”

Longacre!
Well either they were talking about a guest or Reggie Fenyx was back from the
war.

“Well,
how did he look?” someone asked.

“The
Colonel said none too healthy,” replied the first speaker, sounding
uncertain. “Though what he meant by that, I can’t say.”

“It
could be anything,” a third woman said, with resignation. “Men have
no notion.”

“Well,
he
was
wounded. I should think he has every right to look
unhealthy,” said the first. “What’s more interesting to me is
that his mother, Lady Devlin, is having tea right this minute with Alison
Robinson and her two girls.”

“No!”

“What?”

“Really?”
The replies came quickly, too quickly for the speaker to answer.

And
now I understand why she was in such a pother over going to tea. It’s not
just that it’s Lady Devlin and nobby society. It’s Reggie.
Unmarried Reggie
.

“And
her with two pretty daughters too. Hmm,” said the owner of the third
voice thoughtfully. “Well, we know where the wind blows there.”

“Social
climber,” said the second with contempt. “So Broom society
isn’t good enough for milady Robinson—”

“Be
fair! She never said anything about being gentry!” said the first.
“Some nob relative of hers sent Lady Devlin a letter about her.”

“At
least
now
she’ll stop her girls angling for every lad with a bit
in his pocket here,” said the second. “Not that they’re so
many on the ground anymore, but still.”

“With
your Tamara about?” giggled the third. “Those chits didn’t
have a chance. Oh, I wish you’d seen them at the Christmas party,
swanning about in their fashionable London frocks, and in comes Tamara in her
two-year-old velvet from Glennis White, and there go all the officers! Oh,
their faces were a sight!”

“Fine
feathers aren’t everything,” the mother of the village beauty,
Tamara Budd, said complacently. “Nor, when it comes to it, is a pretty
face, if there’s a mean, nasty heart behind it.”

Eleanor
didn’t have to hide a smirk, since there was no one to see her. If there
was a single soul in all of the village that her stepsisters hated, truly
hated, it was Tamara Budd. She had been pretty when Eleanor had been locked
within the walls of the house. Now, evidently, she had blossomed into true
beauty, for any time some entertainment was on offer, be it a tea-dance for
soldiers or a gathering at some house or at the Broom Hall Inn, according to
the girls, it was Tamara who was the center of male attention.

There
was no doubt that the stepsisters would have killed or disfigured her if they
could. Eleanor could tell that from the vicious things they said, the way they
stabbed their cigarettes in the air, the mere tone that their voices took when
they spoke about her.

For
her part, she might have been alarmed that they would succeed in doing Tamara
harm, except that she also heard them complaining that something protected
their rival from any charms or cantrips they attempted to cast. She had a good
idea that it might be Sarah who was responsible, but you never knew.

She
listened a while longer, but it was clear enough that there was nothing more to
hear, and it would not be long before Alison and girls returned from their tea
with Lady Devlin.

She
crept out of hiding, and hurried back to the kitchen with her purloined
newspaper hidden in the folds of her skirt. From there it went underneath the
pile of logs for the stove and the kitchen fire; there wasn’t a chance
that either of the girls nor Alison would move a single one of those logs. Now
that she had gotten outside—and discovered what shocking changes had
happened to the world that she had known—she was afire to find out how
much more had been happening.

Not
that any of it had been good. She had read with horror of ships being torpedoed
by German submarines and sent to the bottom with most of their human
cargo—even hospital ships! Bombs had actually been dropped on parts of
London and the eastern coast by both zeppelins and huge aeroplanes and several
hundred perfectly innocent people had been blown to bits. As for the war
itself, her head reeled to think about it, and she knew she was getting no more
than the barest, most sanitized idea of what was going on from the papers. How
could something be a “glorious victory” when all it got you was
possession of a long trench a hundred yards east of where you had been when an
assault started—a trench you had occupied several times already, only to
have been driven out of it by the Germans—who doubtless also crowed about
their “glorious victory.”

She
couldn’t help but wonder, was
this
how her father had died? No
one had ever told her the details. All that she had ever known was that he was
dead. She had nightmares about it sometimes; that he was blown to pieces by a
shell, that he was killed in a charge, that he was shot by a sniper. That he
died instantly, or that he had lain in agony for hours, while his fellow
soldiers watched, unable to help him. It was horrible; she woke from those
dreams sobbing, and only seeking solace from the little Salamanders in her fire
helped.

She
sighed, and went to work on dinner preparations. The girls were going to get
chicken stew and dumplings, and like it, for it was the only way to stretch the
poor, thin chicken that had come by way of the butcher shop today.

So,
Reggie Fenyx was home again—and looking ill, and had been wounded. She
could not imagine the energetic young man, boiling over with enthusiasm that
she had known, as being ill or hurt. Such a thing never seemed possible.

But
she couldn’t imagine him in a uniform, either.

She
couldn’t think of him as shooting people, and killing them; he had always
seemed so gentle in his way.

As
she chopped vegetables, she reflected that now she knew why Alison was so afire
over the invitation to tea with Lady Devlin—so much so, that the girls
had left frocks spread all over their rooms for her to pick up, trying on this
one and that one until Alison was satisfied with their appearance. It all made
perfect sense. Alison wanted to get invitations up to Longacre Park so that the
girls would have an unrestricted chance to snare Reggie.

She
chopped savagely at the old, withered carrots. Miserable creatures! They would
do nothing other than make poor Reggie unhappy! Here he was coming home in a
weakened state, and they were going to descend on him like vultures to nibble
on the carcass—

But
wait a moment; hadn’t Sarah said that the Fenyx family were Elemental
Masters?

She
had!

Eleanor
felt her shoulders unknot. Of course. Reggie was an Air Master; Alison’s
girls would have no more chance of bewitching him than of taking one of his
aeroplanes up by themselves.

But
that opened up another thought. If Reggie was an Air Master, wouldn’t he
be able to
see
the magic spells on her? And even if he couldn’t
do anything about them himself, couldn’t he tell someone who could?

Her
heart fluttered in her throat at the very idea—

Don’t
get your hopes up, she scolded herself severely. First you have to get out of
here. Then you have to be somewhere that he is. And last, he has to be willing
to help you
.

Still,
the mere
chance
of a hope was more than she’d had in a long
time.

I can at least
make plans
.

April 23, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

SO THE BLOODY YANKS
FINALLY decided to give us a hand, then.” That was Matt Brennan, the
barman’s brother. Poor Matt had lost a leg and his arm had been terribly
mangled, and half the time seemed to have lost his speech as well. Brother
Thomas kept him on as potman, collecting the glasses, doing a bit of sweeping
up, and let him sleep somewhere on the premises once the place was closed. It
wasn’t much, but it was work.

The
news had finally percolated to Broom that the United States had actually joined
the war that the rest of the world had been fighting for the past three years,
and it was likely to be the sole topic of conversation here in this pub for the
rest of the week. Everyone who came in started it over again.

“What
d’ye think of them Yanks, captain?” Ross Ashley asked. “Never
caught sight of one myself.”

“Well,”
Reggie said, measuring his words carefully. “We got quite a few Yanks in
the RFC, boys that wouldn’t sit still and watch while someone else was
having a fight. I heard the French picked up a few, especially in the Foreign
Legion.”

“So
they got the gumption to stick it, ye think?” asked Will Stevens, who had
been a good yeoman farmer before the war began, and was again, just without
three fingers on his right hand.

Reggie
shrugged. “Hard to tell, really. The ones I saw all seemed to think of
themselves as being in some sort of Wild West show. Talked about ‘flying
by the seat of the pants’, didn’t pay a lot of attention to
instruction, and tended to be ‘thirty-minute men’ if that. Though
when they were good enough to survive, they were
quite
good. I
don’t know what their infantry will be like.”

Young
Albert Norman (chest wound, lost a lung) coughed and cleared his throat. Mind,
he coughed a great deal, but this was the sort of cough he used when about to
say something.

“There
are a great many of them,” he said carefully. “It’s a bigger
country than Canada. And I shouldn’t think it would be too terribly
difficult for them to turn all those factories to making armaments.”

Reggie
nodded. Albeit was well read; Reggie didn’t doubt in the least that he
had the right of it.

“So,”
Doug Baird (shrapnel to the legs) said bitterly. “We’ll have fought
the Kaiser to a standstill for three bloody years, and the Yanks will just come
in with convoys of fresh troops and all the damned supplies you could ask for,
roll over the trenches, and take credit for the whole thing, then?”

Reggie
sighed. To be brutally honest, he didn’t see it turning out any other
way. But he decided not to say anything. These men were bitter enough without
his adding to their discontent—or despair.

“At
least it will be over,” Richard Bowen said, with resignation.
“That’s all I care about. Just let it be over.”

Thomas
Brennan cleared his throat. “Last call, gentlemen.”

“My
round again,” Reggie said decisively.

He
did a lot of round-buying—not so much as to make it seem as if he was
patronizing them, but because he knew very well that there was not a lot of
money to spare in their households, and it seemed a hard thing to him to have a
man leave bits of himself in France in the service of his country only to find
he couldn’t afford his pint when he came home again. A hard thing, and a
wicked, cruel thing; there wasn’t a lot of pleasure left in the world for
these men.

Those
that had gone back to their work—farmers, mostly—were finding it
difficult. Those who hadn’t lost limbs outright still had injuries bad
enough to muster them out. Legs didn’t work right anymore, arms
didn’t have the same strength. They found themselves depending on their
wives or children to help them with difficult physical jobs, and that was
humiliating. Often the young horses they’d depended on to help with
plowing had been taken for the war, leaving only the old fellows who should
have been taking up pasture-space. They found themselves with a house full of
Land Girls, who might or might not be of any use. Nothing was the same,
everything was more difficult, and what had they gotten out of it all? Nothing
to speak of. The best, the very best that they could say was that because they
were at the production end of the food supply it was easier for them to hide a
bit from the government and circumvent some of the shortages. If you were a
farmer, you could still have your sweets, if you made do with honey instead of
sugar, and though sugar was rationed for tea, it was, oddly enough,
not
rationed for jam-making—you could hide a pig in your wood-lot, or raise
rabbits openly, since rabbit-meat wasn’t in short supply. When you
brought your wheat to David Miller, he’d generally “forget”
about a few of the bags of white flour he loaded back on your cart. And if you
had a cow of your own, your kiddies weren’t forced to drink that thin,
blue skimmed milk that made the city children so thin and pale-looking.