Phoenix and Ashes (26 page)

Well,
he hadn’t lasted six months; a “sixty-minute man”—that
was about how much time he’d had in the seat before a Hun in a Fokker
shot him down.

Chris
Whitmore
?
Maybe. Hard to tell… That mania he’d had for
photography might have been the stirrings of an artist’s nature or just
that of a tinkerer. He was supposed to be taking recon photos now, last
Reggie’d heard, in the Sudan. No bloody mud in the Sudan
.

Not
Geoffrey Cockburn, that was certain. The boy who put his motorcar into the
ornamental pond next to the cricket-grounds because he was roaring drunk the
night before vivas was not the sort to have a sensitive soul. And no Lyman
Evans, either, who’d been pouring the bubbly in the first place.

Maybe
Rene Comeau; he was one of the better-educated French infantrymen attached to
the air wing as local guards, and the French—well, they were French. They
understood that sort of thing. But Rene was still over there too—unless
he was dead.

Melancholy
was certainly on him this afternoon. And he desperately wanted someone to talk
to about it.

Oh,
not Allan McBain either, that hard-headed Scots engineer who cursed them all
whenever one of “his” runways got a shell-crater or a bomb-crater
in it. As if it was their fault!

Though
in a sense it was—if there hadn’t been ‘planes and pilots
there, no one would bother to shell or bomb McBain’s runways.

Vincent
Mills… Another sensitive ghost out of the past, but this time a ghost
that hadn’t even made it to the Front. He’d trained with Reggie at
the Oxford-based branch of the Flying School—and he’d been one of
too-frequent fatalities. They’d found him upside-down in a tree, neck
broken, a strange and puzzled look on his face as if he couldn’t quite
fathom what had gone wrong. His demise had been a shock; he was a
good
flyer.
Perhaps the machine had done him wrong. Reggie still had one of his poems, or
at least, it was folded into one of his books of sonnets back at the Front, an
articulate yearning for higher skies—

No,
there wasn’t anyone
here
and
now
. And the girl was.
Perhaps it was no bad thing that she wasn’t pretty, wasn’t his
class, was, in fact, poor from all appearances. She didn’t look like the
sort to read trashy romantic novels and dream of marrying the duke. She looked
like the sort who could be sensible. She’d certainly been more sensible
than some of those boys who’d flocked around him.

He
nodded to himself, as the golden-green light flooded around him. Maybe that was
why he kept coming here. Someone sensitive, and sensible at the same time.
Someone he could talk to that wouldn’t go carrying tales. Who’d
believe a kitchen-girl who told tales about meeting up with Reggie Fenyx in a
meadow on odd afternoons to talk, anyway? No one. Without witnesses—and
really, no one ever did come here—she’d never be believed.

So,
content with his reasoning, he dozed a little in the sun until his watch told
him the pub would be open. Who would ever have thought that a
working-man’s pub would become his refuge?

The
Brigadier would be arriving in a few days, though. Perhaps then he
wouldn’t need a refuge as much.

Reggie
came in through the garden entrance; it was just as easy to get to from the
stable, and a great deal quieter. He took the entrance beneath the grand marble
staircase, rather than the one on the terrace; this passage was generally used
more by the staff but as a child he had scampered in and out of all possible
entrances. The place was dark, as it should be; his mother and grandfather
retired early when there was no entertaining going on, and she hadn’t
entertained since his father had died. None of the staff was down here now at
this time of night, and it felt almost as if he was alone in the huge old
house. He walked carefully, his path brightened only by a few gaslights, turned
low.

He
remembered how his father had brought in the gas. It hadn’t been that
long ago, it seemed. And now—

Electricity.
We need to bring in electricity. And the telephone
. He shook his head, and
made his way up to the first floor.
It was easier to get to the family
staircase from this part of the house
.

Stone
floors below, polished wood above, and all of it too noisy, for all he was
walking as quietly as he could. Tonight he was feeling more than a bit tipsy;
it had been one of
those
nights. Something had set off Matt Brennan,
and he’d gone down on a chair in the corner and just sat and rocked and
wouldn’t talk to anyone.

Shell
shock. They all knew the signs of it, and Brennan—well, Brennan had more
than a few reasons to suffer from it. It was the first time he’d gone
into a fit of it in public though (and Reggie could only be grateful that he
himself had managed to keep his own fits behind the closed doors of his rooms
).

Well,
they weren’t doctors, but the only doctor that Reggie knew that had any
success with shellshock was Doctor Maya, and she wasn’t there. They had
their own rough-and-ready remedy; maybe not the best, but a damn sight better
than doing nothing, or telling a fellow he was malingering. They physically
hauled him out to the middle table, put a glass in his hand, and poured drink
into him until he came out of it—and of course in order to keep him
drinking they had to match him drink for drink. They’d all gotten bawling
sentimental, even Kevin Eaches, one of Reggie’s tenant farmers,
who’d wandered in by accident and somehow never made it out again.

When
Brennan was well in hand, Reggie took his leave. It wasn’t quite closing
time, but this might be one of those nights when Tom locked the doors on a few
of the oldest friends, and moved the “cure” into the private part
of the building. He wasn’t in that select group yet, and he was not
inclined to intrude. So out he went, into the spring-scented night.

It
had taken some careful navigating to get the ‘bus up to the house without
incident. Fortunately, there’d been a moon. Unfortunately, there had been
cows. He’d had to stop and shoo them off the road.

Not
the easiest thing to do, when you were staggering a bit. Cows didn’t seem
to be impressed with a man who wasn’t able to stand without weaving back
and forth.

He
left the auto in the middle of the round stableyard; the men would park it in
the carriage house. He knew that tonight he was in no condition to try and put
her away himself.

With
the hour so late, and the house so dark and still, he assumed that everyone,
including all of the staff, had gone to bed. He expected to get quietly up to
his rooms without anyone the wiser.

The
last thing he anticipated was to find his mother waiting for him in the settle
at the top of the family staircase.

She
had an oil-lamp burning on the table beside her, and was pretending to work on
some of that infernal knitting every woman seemed to be doing these days,
making stockings for soldiers. He staggered back a pace or two on seeing her.
“Ah. Evening, Mater,” he said carefully. “I’ve been
out.”

“So
I see.” She put the knitting down in her lap. She was still dressed for
dinner, in a navy-blue gown. Her tone could have frozen the flowers in the vase
beside her. “I presume it was the same place you have been going to every
night. The working-man’s pub. The—

Broom.”

She
acted as if she had never heard the name before. As if she had been completely
unaware that there was a working-man’s pub. He drew himself up.
“Yes, I have. I’ve been to The Broom. I went last night, I went
tonight, and I intend to go tomorrow night. In fact, I will continue to go to
The Broom for as long as I am on medical leave.”

Her
face crumpled. “Reggie—how
could
you? Everyone in the
village certainly knows—it won’t be long before the whole county
knows, you’re down there every night, consorting with
socialists
and riff-raff—”

“Who
give me a better and warmer welcome than I have in my own home,” Reggie
retorted, anger burning out some of the whiskey fumes and clearing his head.
“Where I’m not called coward to my face, and told I’m
malingering! Why, I’d rather spend four hours in Mad Ross’s company
than five minutes in your father’s!”

Even
as he said the words, he was glad they were out, that it was all out in the
open, at last. He didn’t need the Brigadier for this. Not to lay the
truth plain to his mother. He should have stood on his own two feet a long time
ago.

His
mother cried out, and her hands flew to her mouth. Tears started up in his
eyes.

He
felt coldly, curiously unmoved.

“If
you want to know why I go there, why don’t you watch how your father
drives me out of my own home every night?” he asked, angrily. “And
you had better get used to my new friends, Mater, because they
are
my
friends, and I have far more in common with them than you could ever
understand! We’re—” he could find no words to tell her.
“We’re
soldiers
.” he said at last. “Real
soldiers. Not tin-toys like your father, who strutted his way around cowing
poor little Hindu heathen until he was old enough to claim a pension, and now
wants to lord it over me the same way.”

He
stared at her, stared her down, stared at her until she shrank back in her seat
and dropped her eyes. He took a deep breath, and walked past her, all the
stagger gone from his step. He walked straight to his rooms, feeling full of a
cold dignity he hadn’t known he possessed.

And
then, once the door was shut, he sat down abruptly on the side of the bed, and
blinked.

“What
did I just do?” he asked aloud.

But of course, there
was no one there to answer him.

April 30, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

THE ARROWS WAS EMPTY;
ALISON was gone. So were Carolyn and Lauralee, and it wasn’t off to tea
at Longacre again. It was a two-day excursion somewhere that they did not talk
about even amongst themselves. But it was going to involve Warrick Locke.

And
it was going to involve the contents of three brass-bound cases that Alison had
taken with her.

Magic.
That was Eleanor’s guess, anyway. They were going somewhere to work
magic, somewhere that was special. There were a lot of special places of power
around, or so Sarah said; Stonehenge was only the most obvious. There had been
enough blood spilled on English soil to make plenty of spots where Alison and
her nasty Earth Elementals would feel right at home. Eleanor only hoped that
they hadn’t gotten hold of anything personal of Reggie’s. With luck,
this wouldn’t have anything at all to do with Reggie, or this new magic
would just break itself on the walls of his unbelief
.

But
that meant that at long last, she was going to be able to run down to the
meadow at teatime—and hope against hope that Reggie Fenyx was the sort of
fellow who kept his word.

The
lot of them were finally packed up and gone by luncheon, a meal that stretched
on interminably so far as she was concerned. She had to keep her mouth shut and
her eyes cast down meekly the whole time, as the foursome pretended she
didn’t even exist while she waited on them.

Finally
they packed up the big motorcar and all four of them drove away, with no more
clue as to where they were going than Alison’s careless, “Keep the
house neat and clean, Ellie, and don’t expect us back before
Saturday.”

When
she was utterly certain they were gone, she could scarcely believe her luck.
And the first place she went—since, of course,
she
had not had
time or opportunity to snatch more than a bite of bread for luncheon—was
the pantry.

This
time she packed a basket with a real tea, recklessly plundering the stores she
wasn’t supposed to be able to get into for the making of a meal that even
Reggie Fenyx would find appealing. Sarah walked in on her in the midst of her
preparations.

“Well,
what’s all this, then?” she asked, hands on hips, surveying the
state of the kitchen. “I thought we might do some work, with Alison
gone—”

“I—”
Eleanor found herself flushing. “I was going to take a picnic to Round
Meadow.”

Sarah
blinked her deceptively mild eyes once or twice, then a slight smile curved her
lips. “So that’s the way the wind blows. No wonder young
Reggie’s been there every afternoon.”

“He
has?” she gasped. “But—how do you know?”

“He
leaves his auto parked below it,” Sarah said dismissively.
“It’s
his
meadow, after all, and it’s part of the
field his aeroplane used to be in, I doubt anyone thinks anything at all about
it.
I
just wondered, why does he always come at teatime?”

“Because
that’s when I met him there the first time.” She looked around
distractedly for something to take with her to drink. “Does wine go with
tea?” she asked, rather desperately.

“No,
wine does
not
, and moreover, you’re not used to it, you’ll
be tipsy in no time,” Sarah scolded. “There’s the stream
running through there; drink water. But go, go now, before he gets tired of
waiting and goes off to his cronies at The Broom.”

She
caught up the basket, and ran.

The
few people on the street did not seem to notice her as she ran; that was
something that seemed to happen a great deal. Unless she was actually in the
way, no one in Broom paid the least bit of attention to her no matter what she
did. Today that was all to the good.

Her
heart lifted as she saw in the distance that there was an
automobile—presumably Reggie’s—tucked off the road down near
Round Meadow.

Her
feet felt lighter at that moment too, but she was struck with a sudden feeling
of shyness, and instead of speeding up, she slowed down to a walk. And then the
doubts began.