Phoenix and Ashes (24 page)

She
looked down at her hands, clasped together in front of her. “Thank
you,” she said quietly. Then she looked back up again. She kept her frown
to herself, but—

But
wasn’t he supposed to be an Air Master? Yet there were none of the
energies, none of the Elementals of Air anywhere about him! Why, he showed no
more of magic than—than the schoolmaster, Michael Stone! Less!

Surely
that wasn’t right.

“So,
do you come and invade my private property often?” he was asking, trying
to sound normal, trying to make an ordinary conversation of the sort he could
so easily back before the war began.

And
now she found herself fighting against the prohibitions of Alison’s other
spells. She would have
liked
to say, “When I can escape my
stepmother’s spell—” or “When no one is going to catch
me and make my life a purgatory—”

But
all she could say was, “When I can.” Then she sighed.
“It’s so peaceful here, and sometimes I can’t bear how things
are now. Here, nothing’s changed. It’s all the way it
was—before. The meadow probably hasn’t changed in a hundred
years.”

“That’s
a good answer, Eleanor Robinson,” he replied. “That’s a very
good answer, and I give you leave to come here whenever you want. It’s
the reason I came down here—well, I tell a lie, it’s
one
of the reasons.” He smiled wanly. “My teatime has been
unconscionably invaded, and I came to escape the enemy.”

She
furrowed her brow in puzzlement, and stepped forward a pace or two.
“Enemy?” she asked uncertainly.

“Women,”
he elaborated. “A gaggle of women. Invited by my mother, with malice and
intent. Those that weren’t there on their own to simper and flirt at me,
were mothers eyeing the goods before they set their own daughters on the scent.”
He shuddered. “I felt like the only fox in the county with three hunts in
the field at once.”

She
couldn’t help it; she had to laugh at that. Especially considering that
Alison and the girls must have been in that group he so openly despised.

And
they thought they were the only ones with an invitation to tea
! That was
more than enough to make her smile.
Oh, they would be so angry when they
came home
!
They hadn’t reckoned on there being competition. They
should have, though. Reggie would have been quite a prize before the war, and
now, with so many young men dead in France and Flanders, he was an even greater
prize
.

And
the best part was that they would be blaming one another. Alison would be
blaming the girls for not being sufficiently charming to keep Reggie there, and
the girls would be blaming their mother for not knowing this was going to be a
competition staged by Reggie’s mother, inadvertently or on purpose. There
was not a single thing that any of them could blame on
her
, so they
would make poisonous jibes at each other, or stare sullenly, all through
dinner.

And
meanwhile, here he was, the object of their hunt, hiding from them.

“I’ll
go if you want to be alone,” she offered. It only seemed fair. He’d
come here to
be
alone, hadn’t he? “I just—I just
wanted to go somewhere today where I could pretend that—all
that—hadn’t happened. At least for a while.”

“I
wanted the same thing,” he said, and somehow, the wistful, yet completely
hopeless way in which he said it, made her heart ache for him.
“And—no, Miss Robison—”

“Eleanor,”
she said, instantly.

He
smiled a little. “Then if I am to call you Eleanor, you must promise to
call me Reggie. No, please don’t go. I’m not much company, but I
don’t want to think I’ve driven you away from the only peaceful
place you can find.”

He
patted the tree-trunk beside him in a kind of half-hearted invitation to sit;
instead, she sat down in the grass at his feet.

He
looked a great deal different from the last time she had seen him, and it
wasn’t just the little moustache or the close-cropped military haircut.
He was very pale, and every movement had a nervous quality to it, like one of
those high-bred miniature greyhounds that never seems entirely sure something
isn’t going to step on it or snatch it up and bite it in two. He was also
very thin, much thinner than she remembered him being.

And
his eyes, his gray-blue eyes, were the saddest things about him.
“Haunted” was the very expression she would have used, had anyone
asked her. These were eyes that had seen too much, too much loss, too much
horror.

She
felt tongue-tied, at a loss for anything to say to him, and it was clear that
he felt the same. Finally, she said, in desperation, knowing that the topic of
an automobile was at least safe, “I heard your motorcar go past the other
night. Is it a very fast one?”

With
relief, he seized the neutral subject as a drowning man seizes a plank, and
went into exacting, excruciating detail about the auto. She had to admit,
although she didn’t care a jot about the insides of the thing, the other
things he could tell her about the auto itself were fascinating. Evidently its
type had won many races, and there was no doubt that he was as proud of it as
he had been of his aeroplane.

And
something instinctively warned her about not talking about flying, though she
couldn’t have told what. Perhaps it was the vague recollection of hearing
his wounds had come when he had crashed. Perhaps it was because he himself
didn’t bring the subject up, and before he had gone off to the war, that
had been the one thing in his life he had been the most passionate about.

When
he ran out of things to tell her about his motorcar, she asked about what he
had read for at Oxford, and what his friends had been like. He relaxed, more
and more, as he spoke of these things, and she thought she just might be doing
him some good. Finally, when he looked as if he was searching a little too hard
for another good story, she smiled, and asked, “I have some bread and
jam. Would you like to share
my
tea?”

And
at that, he laughed weakly, and quoted, “ ‘Better a dinner of herbs
where love is?’ Yes, thank you, I should very much like to share your
tea. And—” He reached down behind the trunk of the tree and brought
up an old rucksack, rummaging around in it for a moment. “Well, yes,
good, my old instincts have not failed me; as I fled the harpies, I carried off
provender. I can provide drink. I have two bottles of ginger-beer.”

With
great solemnity he opened the bottles and handed her one; she passed over half
of her slightly squashed jam sandwiches.

“I
think it was very rude of your mother not to have warned you that guests were
coming,” she said bluntly, after they clinked bottles. “Especially
so many. That was not at all fair.”

“Yes,
well, if she’d
told
me I’d have done the bunk beforehand,
now, wouldn’t I?” he replied logically. “I suppose now
I’ll have to find some excuse to avoid teatime every day from now
on—”

“Oh,
don’t do that—she’ll just invite them to supper or something
equally inconvenient!” Eleanor exclaimed. “No, the thing to
do—” she screwed up her face as she thought hard. “The thing
to do is to sit through it once in a while. Every other day, or every third
day, or the like. Only have something, some appointment or task later in the
afternoon that you
have
to do so you can excuse yourself after an hour
or two. That way your mother won’t ever know when, exactly, you’re
going to take tea with her, and
you
will have a good escape
ready.”

“By
Jove, Eleanor, I think that will work! And I know my estate manager will be
only too ruddy pleased to have me in the office as often as possible, so I can
make that my excuse.” He actually looked—happy. Wanly happy, but
definitely for one moment, happy. “You should be a tactician, old
girl!”

And
just at that most pleasant moment, she felt the first faint tugging of
Alison’s hearth-spell, and looked down to see the sprig of rosemary
pinned to the breast of her shirtwaist starting to wilt. She could have cursed.
“I have to go!” she exclaimed, jumping to her feet.
“I’m really sorry, but I must—”

“What’s
the hurry?” he asked in bewilderment, as she shoved the empty ginger-beer
bottle into his hands. “I say, I haven’t said anything to offend
you, have I?”

“No,
no, no, I just have to get back, I don’t have a choice,” she shook
her head and felt the sting of disappointed tears in her eyes.
“It’s nothing to do with you; I enjoyed talking with you. I have to
or—or—or I’ll be in trouble—” she shook her head,
and turned away.

“Well,
at least say you’ll be here tomorrow!” he called after her, as she
began to run across the grass.

“I
can’t—” she called back over her shoulder, then at the sight
of his stricken face, she made a reckless promise. “I’ll
come—I’ll come whenever I can! At teatime! Whenever I can!”

And with that, she
had to turn to race back to the house, back to captivity, an imprisonment that
was now more onerous than it ever had seemed before.

April 28, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

DINNER WAS NOT
PLEASANT TONIGHT. Animosity and suspicion hung over the table like the cloud of
cigarette smoke rising above the heads of all three of the Robinsons at the
table. “I don’t understand it,” Alison said, glaring at her
daughters. “He hasn’t shown the least bit of interest in either of
you. That is just—unnatural.”

“It
wasn’t my spells, Mama,” Carolyn said petulantly, tossing her head.
“You checked them yourself. You
watched
me work them.” She
looked sideways at her sister. “Unless
you
interfered—”

But
Alison wasn’t accepting that excuse. “She didn’t interfere;
don’t you think I would be able to tell?” Alison snarled. “No,
it’s not that. I’ve never seen anyone who was so unaffected by
spells, and that’s not natural. Even men with no magic at all respond to
sex-charms.”

Eleanor
was unashamedly eavesdropping, and by a means that her stepmother would never
guess. If Alison came to look, she would find Eleanor stoically peeling
potatoes at the hearth, staring into the fire. Little did she guess that what
Eleanor was staring at was not the flames. She had learned a new spell, or to
be more precise, she had improvised it out of a scrying spell in Sarah’s
grimoire, that was supposed to use mirrors, linking the mirrors together, like
a transmitter and a wireless radio, so that whatever was reflected in the
target mirror was reflected in the one that the scryer held.

Only
instead of mirrors, Eleanor was using the flames on the hearth in the kitchen
and the one in the dining-room. It had been very odd, actually—Sarah had
been struck dumb when she first tried it. And she could not imagine where she
had gotten the idea that such a thing would work, either; it just—came to
her, as she was reading the grimoire, as if someone had told it to her.

Now
it was as if she was looking out from the fireplace there, and what was more,
she was able to
hear
everything that went on as clearly as if she was
sitting right there.

“It
isn’t only sex-charms he doesn’t respond to,” Lauralee said,
stabbing her cigarette down into the center of her plate. “I tried to
make him loathe that Leva Cygnet girl, and instead, he sat next to her at
tea!”

“And
I thought you said he was an Air Master, Mama,” interrupted Carolyn.
“But I haven’t seen a single Sylph anywhere about him, nor any hint
of magic. Are you
sure
he’s an Air Master?”

And
when Carolyn said
that
, Eleanor watched Alison go through the most
curious pantomime she had ever seen in her life. Alison opened her mouth to say
something—then a puzzled look came over her—then she closed her
mouth, opened it again, closed it, and frowned.

The
girls stared at her, as if they had never seen their mother so nonplussed
either.

Eleanor
wondered what it meant.

“No
Sylphs about,” Alison said, consideringly. “As if the Sylphs do not
recognize him as having Air Mastery either. No Zephyrs. They can’t see
him—I’m sure that’s what that means. And yet, no shields, either.
As if… as if he is a magical cipher, a null…”

“Actually,
Mama,” Lauralee said reflectively. “It’s more as if the
spells we cast on him are just swallowed up.”

“Drained
away,” Carolyn echoed. “Or reflected, but not back at us.”

“How…
odd. Then I believe we are going to have to rethink our strategy,” Alison
brooded. “I wanted him to be attracted to you before I went to work more
directly. I am going to need to make new plans.”

“What
new plans, Mama?” Lauralee asked leaning forward over the table eagerly.
“Are you going to teach us new magic?”

Eleanor
watched as Alison rubbed her hands along her arms uneasily. “Well, the
magic that you two can cast is clearly not going to work. In fact, I would say
he is probably resistant to all but the most powerful magic.”

Both
of them gazed at their mother with hunger now. Eleanor had wondered, ever since
Sarah had come to the door, if Alison had been purposefully holding back
teaching her daughters, or if her daughters were just not capable of greater
magic. It was hard to tell—though it was true that none of the Earth
Elementals were attracted to the girls.

Now
she heard the answer, or at least, the answer that Alison was going to give
them. “I’m afraid, my dears, you have no more inborn ability with
magic than Warrick Locke. And I don’t think at this point it would be
wise to use my greater magics for more than I already have planned. So instead
of using magic, use your wiles; show no jealousy of the other girls, but be the
most pleasant and charming creatures in the room. Pay attention to everything
he does and says. Work out what pleases him and what he would prefer not to
deal with. Be sympathetic, and find things to get his mind off the war. That
will do for now. Meanwhile, I will need to do some research of my own.”