Phoenix and Ashes (4 page)

And
after Warrick Locke investigated further, that was why she was forced to keep
Eleanor alive and enslaved. Because if Eleanor died, the property went to some
impoverished cousin in the North Country, and not Alison at all. Periodically,
Eleanor was called into the parlor and given paper and pen, and wrote a letter
under Alison’s sorcerous dictation to the solicitor, directing him to
give Alison money for this or that luxury beyond the household allowance.
Alison fumed the entire time she was dictating these letters, but Eleanor was
far, far angrier.

There
were times when Eleanor wished she could die, just out of spite…

She
had eavesdropped on as many conversations as she could, which wasn’t as
difficult as it sounded, because Alison and Locke discussed such matters as if
she wasn’t present even when she was in the same room. She knew that her
stepmother was something called an “Elemental Master” and that her
power was over earth. What that meant, she had no real notion, but that was
probably why Alison had buried Eleanor’s severed finger. She knew that
Warrick Locke was an “Elemental Mage,” and that his power was also
over earth, and that he was nothing near as powerful as Alison was. Lauralee
and Carolyn were one rank below Warrick, evidently.

That
Alison had far more power even than she had demonstrated against Eleanor was
not in doubt. Eleanor had overheard plenty in the last three years, more than
enough to be sure that the two of them were up to a great deal of no good. But
of course, they wouldn’t care what she heard; even if she could get out
of the house, who would believe her wild tales about magicians?

For
that matter, she hardly knew anything of what was going on in the world outside
this house—just what she could glean from the occasional newspaper she
saw. In the early part of the war, she had been able to get more information by
listening to the servants, but—well, that was one way in which the war
had affected
her
. There had been nine servants in the Robinson
household—three more than the six that Eleanor and her father had thought
sufficient—at the time when her father was killed. A man-of-all-work, a
gardener, a parlormaid, three house maids, the cook Mrs.Bennett, and two
ladies’ maids, one (Howse) for Alison herself, one shared by Carolyn and
Lauralee. Now there were two, Eric Whitcomb from the village who had returned
from the war with a scar across the front of his head from some unspecified
wound, and rather less than half his wits, and who did the gardening, the rough
work and heavy hauling, and Alison’s maid Howse. All the rest of the work
was done by Eleanor. No one outside the house knew this, of course.
Alison’s status would have dropped considerably.

The
man-of-all work had gone first, not so much out of patriotism (for after March
of 1915 as the true nature of the slaughter in the trenches became known, it
became more and more difficult to find volunteers) than because he had caught
wind of conscription in the offing, and at the same time, was given the
opportunity to join up with a regiment that was going somewhere
other
than France. “I’m off to the Suez, lovey,” he’d told
the downstairs house maid, Miranda Reed. “I’ll bring you back a
camel. I’ll still be PBI, but at least my feet’ll be dry.”

Miranda
had wept steadily for two months, then turned in
her
notice to go and
train as a VAD nurse (“It can’t be more work than this, and
I’ll surely get more thanks,” she’d said tartly on
departing). The next to go had been the parlormaid, Patricia Sheller, after her
brothers were conscripted, leaving no one to help at her aged parents’
London shop, and it wasn’t long before Katy Feely, the stepsisters’
maid, followed, when the work of the upstairs maid was added to her own
load—she claimed she too was going to be a VAD nurse, but it wasn’t
true. “I’ve had enough of those cats, Mrs.Bennett,” Katy had
whispered to the cook in Eleanor’s hearing. “And enough of this
grubby little village. I’m off! There’s heaps of better positions
in London going begging now!”

By
then, even married men were being conscripted, and Mrs.Bennett’s son had
been killed, leaving a wife and two tiny children with a third baby on the way;
Mrs.Bennett turned in
her
notice to go and help care for them.

The
result had been a sea change in how meals were dealt with in this household.
Alison could compel Eleanor to cook—but she couldn’t compel Eleanor
to cook
well
. And it appeared that no matter how great Alison’s
powers were, they weren’t enough to put the knowledge of an expert cook
into Eleanor’s mind, nor the skill of that cook into her hands. Eleanor
hadn’t done more than boil an egg and make toast in her life, and cooking
was an undisclosed mystery to her. So for one week, Eleanor labored her way
through the instructions in the cookery books, but the resulting meals were
anything but edible. After that week, Alison gave up; the White Swan had
supplied most of the components of luncheon and dinner to the household from
that time on, while Brown’s Bakery provided bread, crumpets, scones,
muffins, cake and pie for afternoon tea.

The
rest of the help had followed when Alison proved disinclined to pay for their
meals from the pub as well as hers. Kent Adkins the gardener and Mary Chance
the other maid vanished without bothering to give notice.

Eleanor
still wasn’t more than an adequate plain cook, and she took a certain
amount of grim satisfaction in the fact that no more dishes with fancy French
names graced Alison’s table unless they came ready-made out of a tin. She
could not bake much of anything—her bread never seemed to rise, and her
pie crust was always sodden. She
could
make ordinary soup, most eggy
things, toast, tea, and boil veg. She could make pancakes and fry most things
that required frying. Anything that took a lot of practice and preparation came
from the Swan or out of hampers from Harrods and Fortnum and Mason, things that
only required heating up before they were presented at table.

There
was rationing now—sugar, according to complaints Eleanor overheard or saw
in the newspaper, was impossible to get, and the authorities were urging
meatless days. There were rumors in the newspapers that other things would soon
be rationed—but none of that touched this household
as
privation. However it happened, and Eleanor strongly suspected
black-marketeering, there were plenty of good things stocked away in the pantry
and the cellar, including enough sugar to see them through another two or three
years, and plenty of tinned and potted meats, jams and jellies, honey, tinned
cream, white flour, and other scarce commodities, enough to feed a much larger
household than this one. Not that Eleanor ever saw any of that on
her
plate. Rye and barley-bread was her lot, a great many potatoes roasted in the
ashes or boiled and served with nothing but salt and perhaps a bit of dripping,
and whatever was left over from the night before put into the ever-cooking
soup-pot, sugarless tea made with yesterday’s leaves, and a great deal of
sugarless porridge. In fact, the only time she tasted sweets now was when an
empty jam jar came her way, and she made a little syrup from the near-invisible
leavings to pour over her porridge or into her tea.

She
glanced at the light coming in through the door; almost teatime. This, of
course, was Howse’s purview, not hers. There was a spirit-kettle in the
parlor; Howse would make the tea, lay out the fancy tinned biscuits, bread,
scones, crumpets, tea-cakes, butter and jam. If toast was wanted, Howse would
make it over the fire in the parlor. And then Howse would share in the bounty,
sitting down with her employers as if she were their equal. Thus had the war
affected even Alison, who, Eleanor suspected, had learned at least one lesson
and would have done more than merely sharing meals in order to avoid losing
this last servant. A lady’s maid was a necessity to someone like Alison,
who would have no more idea of how to put up her own hair or tend to her
wardrobe than how to fly an aeroplane. The laundry could be sent out, prepared
foodstuffs brought in, and Eleanor’s strength was adequate to the rest of
the needs of the household, but if Alison and her daughters were to keep up
their appearances, and to have a chance at ascending to the social rank they
aspired to, Howse must be kept satisfied. And
silent
, where the true
state of the household was concerned.

Eleanor
sighed, and stared into the flames on the kitchen hearth. There was a patent
range here too on which most of the actual cooking was done, with a boiler and
geyser in back of it that supplied hot water for baths and washing, both
upstairs and down, but Eleanor liked having an open fire, and wood was the one
thing that Alison didn’t keep her from using. Since the spell that bound
her was somehow tied to the kitchen hearth, it would have seemed more natural
for Eleanor to hate that fireplace, but when she was all alone in the kitchen
at night, that little fire was her only friend. In the winter, she often slept
down here now, when her room was too cold for slumber, drifting off beside the
warmth of that fire, watching the glowing coals. Now and again, it seemed to
her she saw things in the flames—little dancing creatures, or solemn eyes
that stared back at her, unblinking. The truth also was that no matter what she
did around the fires, she never got burned. Leaping embers leapt
away
from her, smoke always went up the chimney properly, even when the north wind
drove smoke down into the parlor or Alison’s room. No fire ever burned
out for her, and even that ever-cooking soup-pot never scorched. Her fare might
be scant and poor, but it was never
burned
. Which could not always be
said of Alison’s food, particularly not when she or Howse undertook to
prepare or warm it themselves, at the parlor hearth… and though Eleanor
kept her thoughts to herself, she could not help but be glad when hard, dry,
inedible food and burned crusts came back on the plates to the kitchen.

Sometimes
Eleanor wondered why her stepmother hadn’t simply done to Howse what she
had done to Eleanor and turn
her
into a slave, but even after three
years, she didn’t know a great deal more about magic than she’d
learned on that December night. Alison clearly
used
it, but she had
never again performed a spell or rite where Eleanor could see her. Perhaps the
reason was no more complicated than that while crude, unskilled work could be
compelled, skilled work required cooperation…

And
even as she thought that, Eleanor realized with a start that she had been
sitting on her heels, idle, staring into the flames on the hearth, for at least
fifteen minutes.

The
thought hit her with the force of a hammer blow. Could Alison’s magic be
losing its strength?

With
a mingling of hope and fear, and quietly, so as not to draw any attention to
herself, Eleanor climbed carefully to her feet and tiptoed to the kitchen door.
The high stone wall around the garden prevented her from seeing anything but
the roofs of the other buildings around her and the tops of the trees. There
was a wood-pigeon in the big oak on the other side of the east wall, and the
cooing mingled with the sharp metallic cries of the jackdaws. She stood quietly
in the late afternoon sunshine, closing her eyes and letting it bathe her face.

Then
she stepped right outside onto the path between the raised herb beds, and had
to bite her lower lip and clasp her hands tightly together to avoid shouting in
glee. She was outside. She was
not
scrubbing the floor—

But
as she made a trial of approaching the garden gate, she found, with a surge of
disappointment, that she could not get nearer than five feet to true freedom.
The closer she got to the big blue wooden gate, the harder it was to walk, as
if the air itself had turned solid and she could not push her way through it.
This phenomena was not new—unless Alison was there and
“permitted” her to approach the gate, the same thing had always
happened before.

Still,
to be able to break free from the spell
at all
was a triumph, and
Eleanor was not going to allow disappointment to ruin her small victory. And
after a quick, breathless, skipping run around the dormant garden, she was not
going to allow discovery to take that victory from her, either. She went back
to her scrubbing. Except that she wasn’t scrubbing at all. She was
sitting on her heels where she could quickly resume the task when she heard
footsteps and simply enjoying the breathing space.

The
sound of high-pitched voices in the parlor told her that the ladies were having
their tea. Just outside the door, starlings had returned to the garden and were
singing with all their might. The kitchen was very quiet now, only the fire on
the hearth crackling while the stove heated for dinner. Alison’s mania
for forcing her to clean meant that the kitchen was spotless, from the shining
copper pots hanging on the spotless white plaster walls to the flagstone floor,
to the heavy black beams of the ceiling overhead. It looked very pretty, like a
model kitchen on show. But of course, no one looking at a model kitchen ever
thought about the amount of work it took to make a kitchen look like that.

She
stared into the fire, and thought, carefully. If this glimpse of limited
freedom wasn’t some fluke, if incomprehensible fate had at last elected
to smile on her—well, her life was about to undergo a profound change for
the better.

Her
stomach growled, and she smiled grimly. Yes, there would be changes, starting
with her diet. Because one of the things that the spell on her did was that it
prevented her from going into the pantry late at night to steal food.

In
many households, the food was kept under lock and key, but Eleanor’s
father had never seen the need for that. He felt that if the servants needed to
eat, they should feel free to help themselves.