Phoenix and Ashes (44 page)

“I’m
not going to bother with trying to teach you anything now,” Sarah said,
gravely. “For the life of me, I cannot think what I could offer you that
you aren’t already getting in your dreams.” And before Eleanor
could protest, she held up her hand. “I am not saying not to come here
anymore. But I think you have a new teacher—though I don’t know who
or what it could be, that can work through dreams.” She shook her head.
“I’ve heard of that, but no one I know has actually gotten
that
sort of teaching.”

Eleanor
went very still. “Not even Mother?” she asked softly.

Sarah
shook her head. “Not even your mother.”

Eleanor
slipped back into the house well ahead of the return of her stepmother and the
girls. They had gone to Longacre Park for a tea party—the expected company
had arrived, and with it, an invitation to tea.

And
while it sickened Eleanor to hear the girls try to outdo each other in their
boasting about how Reggie had been attracted to them, she wanted to hear what
had happened. So she sat by the hearth with mending in her hands, and waited
for them to come back.

The
motorcar rattled and chugged its way into the old stable, and the three came
chattering up the walk and in through the door.

Or
rather, the girls were chattering. Alison was silent. Rather to Eleanor’s
surprise, they were not chattering about Reggie; instead they were talking
about his aunt.

“…dotty!”
Lauralee laughed. “Absolutely dotty! Why she couldn’t even keep
track of which of us was which! And if I heard one more story about her cat, I
think I should have begun screaming!”

“Mother,
if that’s all we have to worry about, I don’t believe you are in
any danger of being discovered,” Carolyn said, sounding complacent.

“On
the whole, I am inclined to agree with you,” Alison replied, her voice
plummy with satisfaction. “Calling that silly old woman an Elemental Mage
is beyond being charitable. She hasn’t any more power than a village
witch.”

They
moved into the sitting-room. Eleanor did not need to work magic to hear them.
They spoke as if they were unaware that she was still sitting there in the
kitchen.

“Aren’t
we doing anything tonight, Mother?” Carolyn continued. “It’s
Midsummer Eve—I thought you’d decline the invitation to the card
party tonight.”

“And
not
a time when we should be stirring anything,” Alison said
warningly. “No, not on the shortest night of the year. It is true that
the boundaries between the seen and the unseen weaken on this night, but it is
not in our favor. We will leave the work we performed on May Eve to
strengthen—which it will, so long as nothing interferes with it. Our
revenants will draw sustenance through the weakened boundaries on their
own—and trust me, they have no wish to pass on to the unseen
world.”

Revenants
?
What does she mean by that
? Eleanor heard Alison’s footsteps on
the floor, coming towards the kitchen, and bent studiously over her mending. It
was one of Carolyn’s tennis dresses; she’d caught the hem and it
needed putting up again, so it was a legitimate task.

“What
are you doing, Ellie?”

Eleanor
looked up, and held out her hands. It was obvious that she was holding a
garment that wasn’t her own—she didn’t own anything white.
Only those with leisure, whose work was all done by servants, could have white
clothing. It was a fact of poverty that Eleanor had come to learn.

“Ah.”
Alison nodded in satisfaction. “Yes, that will be needed tomorrow. I
trust you have dinner well in hand?”

Eleanor
nodded. She did—thanks to cleverly putting together things that could be
made well in advance. The only things left were the new peas and new potatoes
on the stove.

“We’ll
be eating early, then we’ll be going up to Longacre Park for the
evening.” Alison smirked. “Put supper forward to six. I trust you
can keep yourself out of mischief while we’re gone.”

“Yes
ma’am,” Eleanor mumbled, dropping her head so that Alison
wouldn’t see her expression.

If
the girls had had their way, they’d have gone up to the Manor in
ballgowns, and Eleanor would happily have let them make that
faux pas
—but
their mother was watching, and chose their gowns herself. “Slightly more
elegant than your fine afternoon gowns, my dears, but not evening dress. If we
had been invited to dinner instead of a card-party, it would have been
appropriate, but otherwise, no.” They looked stunning, Lauralee in mauve
silk, Carolyn in blue.

If
Eleanor had dared to look up, she knew they would have seen the hatred and
anger blazing in her eyes, so as she fastened hooks and tied lacings, she kept
her gaze on her own hands, or on the floor. Alison shooed her back down to the
kitchen so that her own maid could see to the girls’ hair. Eleanor was
glad enough to go.

And
she could scarcely wait for them to get out of the house.

She
sat next to the fire in the kitchen, trembling with anger. The anger actually
surprised her a little; it had welled up the moment Alison called her
“Ellie.”

That
name seemed to embody everything that Alison had done to her. She had never
been “Ellie” to her father, or anyone else. Servants were called
“Ellie” and “girl.”

And
I am a servant in my own house. But the moment I show any signs of rebellion,
Alison is going to look for what inspired the rebellion
.

So
she busied her hands, waited impatiently for them to
go
, and tried to
remember where she had heard or read anything about revenants.

Whatever
they were, Alison was using them for something, and if Alison was using them,
it couldn’t be for any good purpose.

For
some reason the word was making her think of ghosts—and she was sure her
recollection was of something that Sarah had said, not anything that she had
read.

That
would make things difficult, since Sarah was out tonight, doing whatever it was
that witches did on the solar and seasonal holidays.

Finally
the three of them left, and once again, the house was still. Eleanor expected
to hear the sound of the motorcar starting up, but instead, she heard one
approaching The Arrows. And in fact, she didn’t think anything at all of
this, until it pulled up to the front door and stopped.

The
sound of a car door opening and closing echoed over area, and Eleanor had a
sudden vision of Reggie himself come to pick them up.

But
no. No, she realized even as the thought crossed her mind, that it
wouldn’t be at all proper. Not the “done thing.” No,
he’d have sent his chauffeur.

But
it made her angrier still that they were getting all this fuss made over them.
Would it have hurt Reggie, just once, to have offered her a lift back to the
village? After all, he was always coming there himself, to go to the Broom
Pub—which was just across the street from The Arrows.

Of
course it wouldn’t have inconvenienced him in any way. But
she
was hardly in his social class, now, was she?

He
would scarcely wish to be seen with the likes of her.

In
the back of her mind, a small voice protested that if Reginald Fenyx were seen
giving a ride in his automobile to a young serving girl, people would assume
the worst—and that he wasn’t being snobbish, he was protecting her
reputation.

But
that voice was swiftly drowned in the clamor from the rest of her mind, which
bristled with envy of her stepsisters, anger at her own situation, and
bitterness.

She
kept her head down and her hands steady in case anyone should look in on
her—but no one did. With a soft swish of silk and laughter as light as
their gowns, all three of the Robinsons hurried out the door. The sound of two
automobile doors slamming echoed in the street, then the chugging of the engine
faded away in the distance.

Eleanor
counted to fifty before she got up and went into the library.

Extravagant
as ever, Alison had left a lamp burning there. In the section where Eleanor had
found the alchemy books was one she had passed over as irrelevant, a book that
purported to describe various supernatural creatures and how to be rid of them.
Now she took it out, because she thought she remembered something about
revenants in there.

What
she found was a brief, and vague, reference, and she put the book back with a
feeling of discontent. Ghosts, but not ghosts; at least that seemed to be the
definition. Or else, some were ghosts, actual spirits unwilling or unable to
move on, but others were memories, mechanically playing out whatever tragedy
had created them. She sat there, nibbling on the rough edge of her thumbnail,
while she considered her options for learning anything. Sarah was unavailable;
as she had been on May Eve, she was off doing something that had to do with
being a witch. There was nothing in her alchemy books, and she didn’t
recall anything from her mother’s notebook.

But
what had Sarah said? That she, Eleanor, was getting direct teaching in dreams?

She
was using the Tarot to guide her, after a suggestion in one of the alchemy
books, and she was concentrating on the cards whenever she fell asleep,
assuming that she would find her way into the Tarot realm. So if she was being
taken up by some sort of teacher or teachers, perhaps they were using what she
was thinking about as the structure to their lessons.

Well,
what if she went to bed and concentrated on a question instead of the cards? Would
she get an answer to it?

Only
one way to find out.

She
went up the stairs to her own room—it was unlikely the girls would come
up here to wake her when they returned, since it was less work to get out of
their dresses alone than it was to climb the stairs to find her and wake
her—or, if Alison was feeling generous, she would send her own maid to
help them. Howse would be waiting in Alison’s rooms until the Robinsons
returned—not that this was any hardship. There was a lounge there, and a
stack of the latest magazines. Howse didn’t lack for anything, truth to
be told.

Though
if more truth were to be told, except for the extra place at dinner, Eleanor
scarcely knew Howse was in the house. She hardly spoke at all; she might have
been a clockwork for all the notice she took of anything.

Then
again, it was probably that Howse considered Eleanor to be so far beneath her
that she would sooner turn desperado than acknowledge Eleanor’s presence.
If the hierarchy between lower class and upper was rigid, it was even more so
among servants. Eleanor had never really understood that until she had been
made into a servant herself, but it was the truth. Upper servants spoke to
lower only to give orders, and would never even think of socializing with them.

So
it was no great surprise that she heard nothing from Howse as she closed the
door of her little garret room. Once settled into bed, she closed her eyes and
concentrated. What are revenants, and what has Alison to do with them?

She
could not have told the moment when she slipped from waking into sleeping, but
she found herself—strangely enough—walking down the road, heading
to the meadow where she met Reggie. It was dark, with hardly any moonlight at
all, and yet the whole landscape seemed as bright as day to her.

It
was deserted, of course. Anyone in the farms along here was already in bed.
Dawn came early, and with it, the demands of livestock and crops.

She
wasn’t so much walking, she quickly discovered, as she was
being
walked
. Her body—if, indeed, this was her body and not the sort of
other self she inhabited when she was in the world of the Tarot—moved
along of its own volition and under the control of someone other than herself.
She didn’t fight it; there was no reason to. As near as she could tell,
she was going to be given the answer to her question—or why else take her
outside the magical protections that Sarah had placed around the village? The
revenants could not pass those—therefore, to see them, she must go
outside them.

Finally
she came to the boundary of Longacre Park.

And
there, along the fence, she saw—them. The moment she did, she felt a
shock of pure terror the like of which she had never felt in all her life. The
nasty little creatures that she had driven away in the meadow had frightened
her, but not like this. This was pure, atavistic fear, the fear that said to
the gut, these things can do worse than kill you.

She’d
have screamed, if her instincts hadn’t caught the scream in her throat
before it began. They didn’t know she was there yet, and there was no
reason to do something that would certainly attract their attention!

Transparent,
glowing, there was no mistaking them for living creatures. For one thing, they
were in a variety of costumes—but for another, they weren’t all
whole. At least half of them were missing pieces of themselves; arms, legs, and
in at least one case, a head. And most of the rest were rather gruesomely the
worse for wear and time. She was very, very glad that they all had their backs
to her; if they faced her, she didn’t think she would be able to hold
back a scream.

There
were a great many of them, all pressing against some invisible boundary at the
edge of Longacre Park lands. The oldest were dressed in some sort of outlandish
robes and animal skins; the newest in the uniform of the British infantry.

All
of them wanted in. All of them were consumed with rage.

Why
?
she thought irrelevantly.
Why them
?
What could anyone up at
Longacre Park have possibly done to anger a Druid
? That is, she assumed
the ones in the robes were Druids. She couldn’t think what else they
could be.

Well,
whatever it was, Alison had given their anger a form and a force of will, and
now they were ready to press that advantage as far into the “enemy”
territory as they could.