Phoenix and Ashes (34 page)

And
of course, Reggie hadn’t been up at Longacre either—

Reggie
!
If he was to be handing out the school prizes, then of course he
wouldn’t be able to get down to Round Meadow by teatime. He’d be
lucky to get away before sunset, if at all. If she knew Reggie at all, she knew
he wouldn’t just be a figurehead, he’d be doing something to help
.

And
she wouldn’t be seeing Sarah, either; Sarah herself had said as much.
Well, May Day… there was undoubtedly something witchy to be done on May
Day. Sarah had been quite reticent about her plans, and Eleanor knew better
than to pry.

There
was no way that she could get the bond to stretch all the way to Longacre Park.
She was lucky to get as far as Round Meadow—which was far enough from the
manor that Reggie drove his automobile to get there.

It
was hard not to feel disappointed and deserted, as she walked back into the
kitchen and stood staring at the fire on the hearth. Everyone, it seemed, was
going to be having some sort of celebration but Eleanor.

As
the last of the carts rattled out of the village, a strange quiet settled over
the place. It was, quite literally, as still out there as if it was two or
three in the morning, except for bird-calls and the occasional distant crow of
a rooster. She hadn’t until that moment realized how much sound there
was, even in such a small village as Broom, until the moment when it was gone.

She
was all alone. There was no one to talk to, no one to be with. One of the few
days she would be able to get away to see Reggie, and he wouldn’t even be
there, because he was up there at that enormous manor, playing His Lordship.
Tomorrow Alison and the girls would probably be back, and her imprisonment
would begin again.
It’s not fair
—She sat down on the
kitchen stool and stared out the window.
It’s not
—And she
felt tears of self-pity start to well up.

And
then, she blinked, and firmed her chin, and sat straight up. What had she to
feel sorry about? Good heavens, it was
May Day
, and Alison and the
girls were somewhere far, far away, and
she
could go out to Round
Meadow or anywhere else she could reach and go and gather the first May Day
flowers she’d have been able to pick since before the war! And there were
at least four old ladies on Cottager’s Row that
no one
would be
bringing May bouquets to, and who were too old to get up the hill to the fair!
Four poor old ladies who had given all their best years to the service of
someone else, and who were now sitting in their little cottages with no one for
company except each other. Now there were people who had a right to feel sorry
for themselves.

I
might as well find out if I can manage
two
excursions outside The
Arrows in a day
. With resolution, she got her sprig of rosemary, broke it,
and made the proper incantation, then got a basket and went a-Maying.

She
wandered through pastures deserted by all but the sheep and cows, finding
flowers she hadn’t seen in three years. She visited little copses where
she recalled the shyer flowers blooming, and there they were, untouched by
anyone else.

Of
course, that only made sense. The children who
would
have picked this
May Day bounty had been too excited by the coming treat to go make May baskets
for their mothers and little sweethearts. And the older girls—

The
older girls have no sweethearts to make May garlands for, either
.
Suddenly, she stopped feeling quite so sorry for herself.
In fact, the last
wedding in the village had been her old schoolmate Cynthia
Kerns—who’d had one day with her husband before he went back to the
Front. One day—

No,
it was no wonder that the flowers were still blooming here. There was no one to
pick them. All the young men were gone, and the young ladies didn’t have
much heart for picking flowers.

She
returned long before the sprig had withered with a basket full of cowslips and
primroses, lilies-of-the-valley and other early flowers. With a skill she had
thought she had forgotten, she wove grasses into little May-baskets, then
raided the tea-cakes for a couple of sweet treats, laying them in the baskets
with her own bouquets.

She
surveyed her handiwork with pardonable pride.
There
!
Now
that’s right and proper
! She had made up four lovely little
May-baskets of the sort she remembered from much happier days. The baskets
wouldn’t last a day, the flowers would linger only for two or three more,
but it was the thought that counted, wasn’t it? She cast the spell a
second time, and with a larger basket laden with her offerings, went down to
Cottager’s Row.

The
proper May Day protocol was to lay one’s offering on the stoop, knock at
the door, and run away. The problem was, Eleanor very much doubted that any of
these old ladies would be able to bend down to pick up her offerings, and even
if they could, they might not be able to get back up again. So she went to each
in turn, knocked on the door, and presented very surprised and touched old
women with her gift and a simple, “First of May, ma’am,” with
the little curtsey you would expect from a lower servant girl. And then, with
eyes cast down, before any of them could ask who she was or who had sent her,
she hurried away. She went around the corner and waited until her recipient
went back into her house before going on to the next one. They would probably
get together over tea and compare notes, but there was no harm in that. The
point was that each should have a pleasant surprise, from someone unknown.

Not
that any of these old women would know who she was even if she gave them her
real name. The likelihood that any of them would even be aware of a Robinson
family living at The Arrows was pretty remote. As servants up at the manor,
they knew less than a quarter of the very small population of Broom, only those
with whom they had family ties. Servants at a great house had very little time
to themselves, no more than a half day or so off every couple of weeks, and
even less to spare to go visiting even their own families. From the time they
had entered service to the time when they were pensioned off, their social
circle had been among their fellow servants, not down here—and any old
friends they’d once had might well themselves be dead at this point.

And
once again, she realized that she had very little reason to feel sorry for
herself. Even if her stepmother’s spell kept people from recognizing her,
people still knew who she was—and at least one remembered her
and
recognized her.

As
for those four old ladies, at least they knew that
someone
had
remembered them today, and Eleanor found a little smile of pleasure playing
about her lips as she hurried back to The Arrows.

She
indulged herself with a slightly extravagant luncheon, but as she finished it,
a spirit of restlessness overcame her, and she felt far too unsettled to spend
the day reading.

So
instead, she went all over the house, flung open all of the windows to the
spring breezes and—after a moment of thought—began to clean. Oh,
not the spring cleaning that Alison would, without a doubt, set her to the
moment she and the girls got home. No, this time she would clean what
she
wanted to clean. In the years since the war began, she’d not been able to
air out her own bedding or clean her own room more than twice, and only after
she was exhausted from her daily work. So it was
her
tiny room that
got turned out and swept and dusted until there wasn’t a speck of dirt
anywhere in it, the mattress put out in the garden to air, the blankets and
coverlet left to hang over the line, the threadbare carpet beaten within an
inch of its life. It was every stitch of her
own
clothing that got
washed and hung to dry, then put away with rosemary sprigs to scent it. It was
the pallet-bed from the kitchen that got the same treatment as her bedding from
her bedroom. And with time still on her hands in the late afternoon, she
decided to go upstairs into the attic and see what was there.

She
honestly didn’t expect much. After all, she and her father weren’t
the family that had owned The Arrows for the last however-many generations, and
she fully expected that the original family would have cleaned out every bit of
their ancestral goods.

Except
that once she climbed the stairs and unlocked the door to the long-ignored room—she
discovered that they hadn’t.

She
had never been here before; not even once Alison had turned her into a servant.
Perhaps everyone had assumed that the attic was empty, and since the war, there
had been such a shortage of things that no one actually had anything to
go
up in an attic to stow things away. Not even clothing; once Alison or the girls
deemed a frock too worn or too out-of-date to wear, it went to the church for
distribution to the deserving poor in an ostentatious display of false piety.
So the piled up furnishings and dust-covered trunks came as a startling
surprise as she blinked at them in the musty gloom.

The
air was full of dust, and light shone only dimly through the single grimy
window. But there must have been enough in the way of furnishings here to fill
two or three rooms, and a great deal more in the way of trunks, boxes, and
crates.

To
the windowless back of the attic, she could dimly make out the shapes of
exceedingly old-fashioned furniture piled up to the ceiling; heavy stuff,
ornately carved. At least one very old-fashioned four-post bed with a wooden
canopy, straight-back chairs, a table so heavy she wondered how anyone had
gotten it up here. In front of the furniture, were the trunks and boxes, piled
upon one another. No books, which seemed odd—but then, perhaps most of
the former owners hadn’t been readers to speak of.

Surely
there isn’t anything usable up here
, she thought doubtfully. But
something of the child who cannot help but see a trunk and think “
treasure
”
must still have been in her, for she went to the nearest, and flung open the
lid to look. And then the next—and the next—and the next—

Soon
enough, she had been half right—and half wrong.

The
trunks were full of all manner of things. Children’s books, battered and
torn, and broken toys. Trunk after trunk full of threadbare linens, moth-eaten
blankets, and ancient curtains. More trunks full of antique clothing. All of
the clothing dated to the last century at least, from the era of the bustle and
the hoop-skirt, and had been thriftily packed away, with springs of lavender so
old it crumbled when she touched it. The silks were so old that they
practically fell apart when she picked them up; merely lifting them made them
tear. The furs had evidently been raising entire hoards of little mothlets, and
so had the woolens. And yet, not everything was a complete loss. Most of the
trimmings, the laces, the beads, and the embroideries, were still sound. And
there were gowns that somehow had escaped the moth and the mildew and dry-rot.
Anything linen or cotton was perfectly good, for instance, and there were a
couple of Victorian ball-gowns that were, if terribly creased, also wonderfully
evocative of the by-gone belles who must have worn them. Of course the
ball-gowns were absolutely useless to her, but she gathered up the linen
skirts, well aware that each of the voluminous things, made to wear over the
huge hoops formerly fashionable, would make two or three modern walking skirts
for her. She would have to be very careful, and do all her sewing at night, but
she wouldn’t have to look quite as shabby as she had been doing.
Shirtwaists and blouses, plain ones at least, hadn’t changed much in all
that time, either. Perhaps a little altering of collars would be needed, but
not much more than that.

Then
she came upon the trunk that had been tucked away under the dust-covered
window, well away from the rest. It was a very small trunk, hardly more than a
box, and as she brushed the dust from the top of it, she froze.

For there, carefully
written on a paper label stuck to the top of it was her own name. Eleanor
Robinson.

May 1, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

ELEANOR STARED AT THE
FADED words on the old paper label, transfixed. This wasn’t a hand that
she recognized; certainly not her own writing, and not her father’s.
Whose, then?

Could
it possibly be?

She
hardly dared think of it.

She
finally took a deep breath, and opened the box. Her hands were trembling as she
did so.

It
contained two things: an envelope and what looked like a copybook. She lifted
both out, carefully, as if they might disintegrate like the shattered silks of
the ancient gowns in the other trunks.

She
peered at them, and tried to make out what was written on them, only to realize
that the light was too dim in here to read the fading words.

I
need proper light
.

She
bundled up her linen skirts and shirtwaists under one arm, put the envelope
with great care inside the front cover of the copybook, and took everything
downstairs, trembling inside, knees feeling weak, both excited and afraid to
discover what it was she had found.

She
left the clothing in the wash-house where it was unlikely to be discovered,
then, realizing that the sun was setting, she took her two finds into the
parlor and lit the oil lamps—

And
then, of course, she realized just how grimy she was, so she delayed the moment
of discovery still further by going to wash her hands and face. Somehow she
didn’t want to touch her discoveries with filthy hands. It didn’t
feel right.

And
somehow, she wanted to delay that moment of discovery; she was not sure why,
but she both longed for and feared the moment when she would open that envelope
and learn what lay inside.