Phoenix and Ashes (33 page)

It
was a bit of an extravagance, but then, once one of the girls was safely wedded
to the Fenyx boy, such things would
be
mere bagatelles. She had gone to
bed feeling supremely satisfied with the night’s work. She woke feeling,
if anything, even more contented. Too contented to go back to Broom.

It
was, after all, May Day. She particularly did not want to return today, since
May Day meant she would have to attend that tedious church fair and school
treat nonsense.

She
had decided months ago that she was
not
going to help out with this
function, even though it was to be held at Longacre Park. The only way she
would be able to attract the attention of Lady Devlin would be to volunteer for
literally everything, and she would be only one person among the horde of
common housewives from the Women’s Institute and Ladies’ Friendly
Society doing the same thing. And she really didn’t want to attend,
either. Merely attending, no matter how much she and the girls spent at the
church stalls on things they didn’t want and had no use for, would still
call up the question of why she wasn’t participating. On the other hand
if business had called her unexpectedly out of town, she would have the perfect
excuse not to even go to the wretched thing. The mere idea of being surrounded
by a pack of sticky children, forced to listen to recitations and to buy
handmade garbage she would not even dare to throw away, made her nauseated. The
only bright spot in the whole day would be in watching the virginal little
maidens of Broom trotting around the phallic Maypole in the recreation of a
fertility rite, without anyone else having the
least
notion of what
they were doing. And that was not amusing enough to have to tolerate the rest
of it.

London
,
she thought with longing.
Yes, and why not
?
She deserved it. The
girls had been very good; they could do with a treat. She could renew her
assault on Lady Devlin once her ladyship had recovered from hosting all those
wretched children
.

A
night or two in London would be just the thing. Some theater, there were things
she had forgotten in the spring shopping trip. And above all, it would give her
a chance to recover her powers before she returned home.

When
she went down to the dining room, the girls were already there, pensively
eating toast and tea with Warrick Locke; they brightened up considerably when
she suggested the trip.

“Mother!”
Lauralee said, her face alight with pleasure. “Oh, grand! There are ever
so many things I forgot last March—that wretched laundress manages to
ruin my stockings with appalling regularity—”

“We
were a bit rushed,” Alison admitted indulgently. “And Warrick, you
can get that automobile I was talking about; with me there, I can simply write
a cheque for it and there will be no tedious nonsense with drawing money on
account or answering to the trust about it.”

The
usually dour expression on the solicitor’s face brightened to that of a
boy on Christmas morning. “That would be more convenient,
Mrs.Robinson,” was all he said, but she held back her own smile. Men were
so transparent!

“Then
let’s gather up our traps and make for the railway station,” was
all she said. “I suspect we can purchase a few more new things to eke out
the clothing we have with us sufficiently. You know,” she added
thoughtfully. “The one thing we did not plan on is that we have no
common
clothing, and if we are going to be making excursions to—special
sites—this summer, we really should not be wearing things that will draw
attention to ourselves.”

“You
can get some quite nice frocks ready-to-wear, Mother,” Carolyn observed.
“Nothing that I would wear to Longacre Park, but good enough
for—excursions.”

“Then
it’s settled. Away you go, girls; be so good as to pack up my things as
well, while I settle with the innkeeper.”

The
girls scrambled to obey, leaving her to enjoy her own breakfast in peace, and
in the certainty that what had begun so well last night was only going to get
better.

May 1, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

Eleanor had had a
restless and uncomfortable night, and was mortally glad that Alison and the
girls were away. She had been reduced eventually to sleeping on the kitchen
floor, near the fire, inside a circle of protection before she could actually
get to sleep. Only when her circle was around her and a couple of her
Salamanders were frisking about with her would the unsettled feeling that there
was something horrible outside the walls of The Arrows leave her.

Then,
of course, she overslept—although, for her, oversleeping meant rising
around seven. It didn’t matter though, since the compulsions that Alison
had put on her had weakened to the point that if she was merely
in
the
kitchen at dawn, she would be left alone. So once she slept, she slept long and
deeply, and only awoke at the insistent tugging of a Salamander on her finger.
The moment she awoke, she knew by the chill even here next to the hearth what
it wanted; the fire had burned down to the barest of coals, and before she did
anything else, she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and got it rekindled. Then
she returned to the pallet—which, now that she was able to take pretty
much what she wanted or needed within the walls of the house, was now as
comfortable, if not more comfortable, than her bed in the attic room. It
looked
as it always had, but she had carefully hand-stitched a tattered rag of a
coverlet over the top of a very nice woolen blanket, had more blankets in
hiding if she needed them, and had made up a decent mattress out of one of the
featherbeds left in the upstairs maid’s room. Anyone looking in on her as
she slept would only see her wrapped in something that looked as if she had
rescued it from the bin, and once she was awake, the sham was carefully hidden
away in a cupboard that had once held enormous pudding-basins. Eleanor could
not have boiled a pudding to save her soul, so the basins, now stowed in the
cellar, were not required. In all the time she had been here, Alison had never
once opened the cupboards, and Eleanor was fairly certain she wasn’t
going to begin now.

So
when she lay back down to wake up properly, it was with no sense of hardship.
She did, however, want to think very hard about the dreams she’d had.

Unlike
the ones that had driven her downstairs, these had been quite interesting. Not
pleasant precisely—she was left with the impression this morning that
whatever else had been going on, she had been
working
very
hard—but certainly not disturbing.

“Am
I supposed to remember them, or not?” she asked aloud. And that seemed to
trigger something—a memory of—voices.

She
closed her eyes, and relaxed as Sarah had taught her, because she knew if she
strained after those dream-memories, they would vanish.

Voices.
The first thing that came into her mind was the hollow, ringing quality of
them. Then words. “
She’s not ready
!
I care not if she
can
wield the power, she is not yet ready to do so
!”

That
was a female voice, more annoyed than angry. But there was something
not—quite—human about it. As if it belonged to one of those fiery
creatures that she had called “fire fairies” that had appeared to
play with her in her dreams as a child. There was a resonance to it that she
had never heard in a human voice.

“
When
are they ever
?
But the knowledge must
be
there when she needs
it
.” That was a male, gruff, with the impression of immense age.
Now, if a volcano could have a personality, this would have been it. Immense
power was in this one, held barely in check; a slow power, slower than that of
the first voice, but somehow the impression was that the speaker’s
strength at need was exponentially greater than anything the first speaker
could command.

And
a third voice—also male, and by contrast, quite human-sounding.
“Very well. But see to it that she forgets when waking.”

After
that—nothing. No matter how much she blanked her mind, she could remember
nothing else, except that she had been working as if she were studying for the
examinations to enter Oxford.

Ah,
now that was another clue. Whatever she had been “doing,” it
hadn’t been physical labor, it had been entirely mental.

Assuming
it was anything other than a dream. Which was a rather major assumption. Yes,
she knew very well that magic was real, and very much a factor in her life, but
it didn’t follow that things she dreamed about were also real. Whatever,
that was all she had of it. With a sigh of frustration, she stretched, opened
her eyes, and started the day.

Which,
once she was clean and dressed, was interrupted again almost immediately, by
the sound of a great many people and wagons coming up the street.

This
was hardly usual for Broom, and even less so this early in the morning. What on
earth could be happening out there?

She
left by the kitchen door and went to the garden gate to peer out, and saw, to
her puzzlement, a veritable procession of wagons and carts carrying canvas and
parcels and no few of the village women, all of it heading up towards the road
leading out of the village. Where on earth could they be going?

Across
the road, watching with the greatest of interest as he leaned on his stick, was
one of the oldest men in Broom, Gaffer Clark. Under the thick thatch of white
hair and the equally white beard, it was hard to tell exactly
how
old
he was, and he himself wasn’t entirely sure, because there weren’t
too many other people in Broom old enough to say that they knew they were older
than Gaffer.

Well,
if anyone would know what this was all about, it would be Gaffer.
But—asking Gaffer was like breaking down a dam holding back a lake of
words. The moment you asked him the simplest of questions, a veritable torrent
of words came out—as Gaffer would say, “Words bein’ so cheap
an’ all, why not make a great tidy heap of ‘em?” He was never
one to keep his thoughts to himself, and one of those was always that there was
no reason to use one word when a dozen would do.

Oh
well, she crossed the street and approached him.

He
gave her that puzzled look that always came over the villagers, because of her
stepmother’s spells—the look that said, “I think I ought to
know you, and I can’t imagine why I don’t.” She just nodded
to him in a friendly but subservient fashion; Alison wanted her to appear to be
a very, very low-ranking servant who was not a native of Broom, and so she
would try and fit in with that. Besides, that very guise would give her the
excuse to ask questions.

“Please
sir, could you tell me what’s going on? Why are all those carts out here
this morning?” she asked, looking up at him with feigned timidity.

“Oh,
now, well, it’s May Day and all, do ye ken?” the Gaffer said, opening
his bag of words and beginning to strew them about with a great smile on his
face. “And when it’s May Day, it’s only right and proper that
there be something to celebrate! Only that’s being a bit hard these days,
seeing that the Nine-Man-Morris is down to two men—two and a half, if you
counted that poor lad i’ there—” he nodded his head at the
Broom pub—“what’s on’y got half of what he left here
with. And there’s none of the lads what does the hobby-horse, nor Robin
Hood, nor Maid Marian neither, nor not even a decent fiddler, so what’s
to do?
And
none of the travelers, nor the peddler-men that does the
May church fair, or at least, not many and they ain’t men.
And
school be closing short, so as the little ‘uns can be helping with the
farming. So, says good milady Devlin, may God himself bless her kindly heart,
let’s make the May Day fair and the school treat all in one, and have it
all up at Longacre! Well, no sooner she says that, than everyone thinks, Hoi! A
grand idea, that! And bein’ as she’s her ladyship and all,
she’s got—
means
, d’ye ken?” He stopped just
long enough to give Eleanor a huge wink. “She’s a-got hold of stuff
to make sweeties for the kiddies, so it’ll be a real school treat and
all, and may God bless their innocent hearts, they can be eating sweets till
they be sick, just as is proper for a school treat. And Master Reggie,
who’s Lord Fenyx now and all, he’ll be a-handing out the prizes, as
it’s prize day along of being school treat. None of your Bibles and
prayer books, neither, not that
I
hold with your prayer books, being
chapel, and beggin’ your pardon if I’ve offended ye, miss, but
that’s the bare truth, for a true man don’t need a book to tell him
what to pray, and I reckon God Himself gets tired of hearin’ the same
words bein’ prattled every Sunday with no more understanding than a babe.
Still! Prizes a young-ster’d be happy to have, not that they
shouldn’t be happy to have a Bible, but ‘tisn’t as if they
don’t get Bibles every time yon vicar has an excuse to hand ‘em
around. No, none of your Bibles and prayer books for Lord Fenyx,
no—he’ll be handin’ out picture books and grand stories with
plenty of pirates and bandits and happy endings and what all! So ‘tis to
be a grand day, all around. I’ll be hauling me old bones up there myself,
see if I don’t! Gaffer, he’s old, but not too old to know what a
good time is.”

Gaffer
paused for breath, and Eleanor took that opportunity to thank him and scuttle
back across the road and in through the garden gate—because she greatly
feared that once Gaffer got his breath back, she’d be given a detailed
account of every good time that the Gaffer had ever enjoyed.

Once
inside the safety of the yard, she paused to consider what she had been told.
And now that she recalled—there had been the same sort of to-do last May
Day, but Alison had not given her the leisure to think about it, much less ask.