Phoenix and Ashes (32 page)

He
expected much the same out of the Grimsley boy’s essay—But got a
shock. It read like the poetry of Wilfrid Owens, or at least, a very, very
young Wilfred Owens, one who hadn’t yet seen the slaughtering grounds
with his own eyes, but knew very well they were there, and knew that their
leaders were idiots, and while questioning the sanity of it all, did not question
that doing one’s duty was the right and proper thing to do.

Oh,
it wasn’t laid out so skillfully as all that, and there was still more
than a veneer of the youthful idealism that sent those first boys to their
deaths in 1914, thinking it was a glorious thing to fall in battle. But still,
the bones of intelligent questioning were there—and it astonished him.

So
much so that the headmaster caught sight of his startled expression and leaned
over to whisper, “Jimmy is the only boy left in his family. Father, both
brothers, three uncles and all his male cousins. He’d like to go to
university in two years, but—” Stone shrugged. “Whether he
can get a place, I don’t know.”

“You
just get him ready for the entrance examinations,” Reggie said, fiercely.
“I’ll see that he gets there.” He hadn’t even known
that he was going to say such a thing until after the words were out of his
mouth, but he was glad that he had done so a moment later as he caught the look
of astonishment, followed by gratitude, on Michael Stone’s face.

He
nodded to confirm the pledge, then returned his attention to the boy feeling a
kind of proprietary determination. Too many of the bright intellectual lights
of his generation had been put out already. He would, by heaven, save this one,
at least.

After
the prizes came the highlight of the day—what one little fellow joyfully
called “A
proper
tea at last!” with jam buns, currant
scones, and iced biscuits, ice creams, honey and more jam for the proper
sandwiches, all the sweet things that children craved. And if they could not,
as they had in days gone by, eat sweet things until they were sick, well
perhaps that wasn’t so bad a thing. There was just enough of the rationed
sugar to make sure every child got enough to feel properly rewarded—to
fill them up, they had to make do with slightly more wholesome fare. The adults
did have to make do with what they could purchase at the church fair stalls;
this was, after all, the school treat. Every child also got one of the finest
crackers obtainable, with little prizes inside like pennywhistles, so that they
all went home with at least a bag of nuts from the button hunt and a cracker
prize in their pockets, along with the memory of a day stuffed full of fun
without the shadow of war on it. After tea, the wagons arrived to carry them
back down to the village again; the adults lingered until the church fair
officially closed.

Reggie
kept himself mostly out of the way. By this time, his leg was a torment, but
the last thing he wanted was for anyone to notice.

Between
the Longacre staff and the men from the village who came up to help with the
dismantling, the tents came down and were stowed in the hay-wains. The stalls
and booths did not come down quite as quickly as they had gone up, but by
sunset, the only vestiges of the May Day festivities were the trampled grass, a
few bare places where little girls had been unable to resist picking flowers in
the gardens, and the swings still hanging in the trees.

Reggie
got up onto the terrace without drawing any attention to himself, and paused
there ostensibly to admire the setting sun, but in reality to give his knee a
rest. Lady Devlin came up from the gardens when he had been standing there for
a few moments to stand beside him. She surveyed the empty lawn and sighed happily.
“Well, we’ll be scraping our jam a bit thin for the next several
weeks, and the gardens will look a little motheaten for a week or two, but it
was worth it,” she said with content. “Did you see their little
faces?”

“And
their not-so-little faces,” Reggie told her, putting his arm around her
shoulders to give her a squeeze. “Well done, Mater; you put on a ripping
treat for them. Oh, that Grimsley boy—”

“If
you’re going to say we’re finding him a place at Oxford,
good,” she interrupted. “That was an amazingly mature essay. Your
father always meant to have a fund for the village, and never got around to
taking care of it.” She stopped for a moment, closed her eyes, then went
on, bravely, “Since he never got the chance, we should do it for him.
We’ll make that boy the first to have it, shall we?”

He
blinked at her, then grinned. “Mater, you are trumps!” he exclaimed
warmly. “I’ll get it set up with Mrs.MacGregor and Andrew Dennis
tomorrow. I’ll have Andrew set up a trust, and Lee can tell me what we
should use to fund it with.”

“That
would be the wisest, I think.” She nodded decisively. “You know,
I’m glad you invited the Brigadier. You were right; we need more people
about. I
will
invite your aunt—perhaps Lady Virginia too.
We’ll have some small summer weekends—”

So
long as you don’t plan to have ‘em with the sole intention of
trotting potential brides in front of me
, he thought, though in truth, he
knew that any such hope was probably in vain. What he said aloud was,
“It’ll be good to have people around. But at the moment—if
you’ll forgive me, dearest, I am going to go to my room, put my leg up,
and have someone bring me a tray with the sad remains of the feasting. My leg
is not at all pleased with me.”

Truth
to be told, his leg was telling him that if he didn’t get weight off it
soon, he might not like what it was going to do. He’d been able to ignore
the pain for most of the day, but it was coming on with a vengeance now.

“You
do look pale, dear,” she said, casting a worried glance at him.
“And do you know, that sounds like a capital idea to me, too. A hot bath,
a book, and whatever the cook can throw together on a tray. The staff have
worked their hearts out for this, too.” She smiled. “However, I am
very
glad it is only once a year! Now I’ll go and let the housekeeper know
we’ll be making an early evening of it. I’m sure the staff will be
pleased.”

She
kissed his cheek and wandered back into the house; he waited, though his leg
was really beginning to throb, until she was unlikely to see the difficulty he
was in. Only then did he limp towards the door, and seize, with wordless
gratitude, the cane that was in a stand beside it. His valet had silently, and
without being asked, installed stands with canes in them in practically every
room he was likely to be in, and at every outside door. Now he rested his
weight on the handle and reminded himself to make sure Turner was properly
thanked.

As
the dusk began to descend, shrouding the rooms he passed through in shadow, he
wondered how difficult it would be to get electricity and the telephone up to
the place. Mad Ross’s wife, Sarah Ashley, a Yorkshire woman, was the
local telephone operator, although there could not be more than three or four
telephones in Broom itself—so it would certainly be possible to at least
get the telephone installed up here. Yes, he would see to that, no matter what.
It would be another way to get his mother connected back to the wider world.
With the telephone would come invitations to go and do things from her old
friends, and he knew from personal experience that it was a great deal easier
to refuse invitations that came by mail than it was to refuse the ones that
came in person.

Yes.
I’ll get the telephone in at the very least, and electricity if I can
manage it. That should help the staff out a bit, too. Electric lights took less
tending, or so he was told
.

He
paused at the foot of the stairs, looking up to the next floor with a feeling
as if he was about to try to scale the Matterhorn. He gritted his teeth, braced
himself, and with the cane in one hand and a death-grip on the balustrade, he
began the long climb. His knee now felt as if someone was putting a bullet into
it with every step he had to climb.

Halfway
up he had to stop.
I really did overdo. I should have had one of the lads
take the kids out after the first hour
. He’d thought the leg was in
better shape than that. Clearly, it wasn’t.

He
made it to the top of the stairs on will alone, and stood there for a moment
with sweat trickling down his back. He wanted to sit down, and knew he
didn’t dare; he’d never be able to get to his feet again. At least
now he wasn’t going to have to climb any more stairs.

But
it’s a long way to my room
.

When
he had just finished that thought, his valet appeared as if summoned by magic.

And
as he looked into Turner’s concerned face, he decided that pride was a
great deal less important than pain.

“Milord,
may I—” Turner began, diffidently.

“Oh
yes, you certainly may,” Reggie sighed, and allowed Turner to help him
back to his rooms. The valet was a lot more help than a mere cane.

“Milord,
if you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve overdone.” Turner
regarded him sternly. “Now, it’s not my place, and I’m no
doctor, but—”

“Please,
old man, if you don’t mind playing nurse, I’ve no objection to
behaving like a patient,” he replied.

“Then,
I believe that hot water is in order.” Turner nodded briskly, and took
him straight into the bathroom, almost carrying him—which Reggie was not at
all averse to. “Have you actually eaten anything today, milord? Since
breaking your fast, I mean.”

“Ah—”
he blinked, and thought. “A sausage and toast at luncheon. A jam-bun and
lots and lots of tea.”

“I
thought so. The pain takes the appetite, doesn’t it?” Turner helped
him out of his clothing and into the hot bath; he sank into it with a hiss for
the heat, and a sigh of relief as the heat took the edge off the pain of his
leg. “You stay there for a bit, and let me deal with this, milord.”

Reggie
was only too happy to do just that. Once he was in the hot water, he realized
that it wasn’t just his knee that hurt—the rest of his wounds and
broken bones were aching; the knee was just so bad it had overwhelmed the rest.

He
remained in the steaming water until it had started to cool, when Turner
appeared and helped him out again, and then into bed with a hot compress
wrapped around the knee. There was already a tray with hot soup and some
assorted sandwich quarters waiting.

And
when he saw the familiar bottle on the tray along with his food he did not
object. Instead, he looked at Turner with a raised eyebrow. “Was it your
idea or Mater’s to get this refilled?”

“Mine,
milord. I thought you were likely to need it, and I also thought you would not
wish to worry your mother.” Turner’s face was a study in the
unreadable.

“I
don’t pay you enough. We’ll have to attend to that in the
morning,” he replied.

Turner
smiled faintly. “I believe, milord, you won’t need me any more
tonight. Goodnight, milord.”

“Good
night, Turner.”

He
took his dose first, then dutifully ate everything on the tray. It meant that
his reading was cut drastically short once the narcotic set in.

But
considering how he had felt before he took the stuff, that was a very small
price to pay.

I hope someone
warned Eleanor
, was his last thought as he drifted off to sleep.
I
don’t want her to think she was abandoned…

May 1, 1917
Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

ALISON WOKE LATE,
WITH THE sun streaming in the window of her room in the Crown and Cushion, feeling
entirely contented with her life. As it had happened, she had
not
had
to do anything about Locke at all. The Old Gods didn’t like machinery; by
the time he had arrived at the Hoar Stones with the motor, the last vestige of
Loki had long since departed his erstwhile host, and Warrick Locke was back to
being his old obsequious self.

Nevertheless,
she felt as if he ought to be rewarded in some small way. So on the drive back
last night, she had said, quite casually, “Warrick, don’t you think
it would be useful for us to have something at our disposal that is a bit
faster
than this? More powerful? It probably isn’t going to be the last time
we’ll have to traipse out into the countryside. It might be a good thing
to have something fast enough to take us to our destination and back to Broom
in the same night.”

“It
would be useful,” he had replied, doubtfully, “But really powerful
autos take a great deal of practice to handle, Mrs.Robinson, and to be honest,
I understand they need a certain amount of strength too. Are you certain you
want to take something like that on?”

She
had laughed. “Oh,
I
don’t mean to handle it; a fine Guy I
would look, got up like some demon racer! No, why don’t you draw what you
need out of the accounts and purchase something appropriate in your own name.
Then if we need to make a fast run into the country, I can ring you.”

She
didn’t have to be able to see him—not that she’d have been
able to in the dark, even if he wasn’t wearing driving-goggles—to
sense his rush of elation. She had settled back into her seat feeling amused
and content; men were such simple creatures! Give them a new mechanical toy,
and suddenly they felt like gods!

As
to whether a fast automobile would be useful or not, she had no idea, and
didn’t really care. It provided an excuse to permit him to draw out a
great deal of money and reward himself without actually
giving
him the
money, which would set a bad precedent. And he would be ever so grateful;
although he was not doing badly by himself as her solicitor, he would never be
able on his own to afford the sort of fast, powerful auto that
she
could purchase.