Phoenix and Ashes (49 page)

Lady
Virginia sighed. “Nevertheless, Reggie, I understand completely what is
motivating her, and it is not entirely the urge to see you bound up in
wedlock.”

He
gritted his teeth, and studiously buttered a piece of dark toast. “Not—entirely,
you say.” The thought of fielding all those women made his head ache. Or
maybe his head was aching because of the way his jaw was clenched.
Nevertheless, it was not something he could contemplate quietly.

The
Brigadier, wisely, was keeping silent, pretending a polite deafness.

“No.”
His godmother looked up at the ceiling for a moment, as if searching for
inspiration in the intricately carved plaster. “I think she has finally
gotten over your father’s death. I think she has realized that the world
still goes on outside the gates of Longacre Park. And I think this is her
first, rather rash step towards rejoining that world. Your aunt and I have both
been attempting to coax her back out of her retired state. I should hate to see
this fail to come off; I fear it might send her back into seclusion
again.”

Reggie
stopped buttering his toast, and stared at Lady Virginia, struck dumb with
first astonishment, then guilt. If that were true—

He
needed another opinion on this, quickly. He turned to the second of his
breakfast companions. “Brigadier? What do you think? You’ve known
Mater for as long as anyone; you should be some sort of judge here.”

The
Brigadier, still erect, still fit, and still every inch the soldier despite his
years and gray hair, coughed once, politely. “I wouldn’t be so
discourteous as to contradict a lady, but I also wouldn’t even make an
attempt at guessing what is going through any lady’s mind, no matter how
long I’ve known her. These are mysteries that a man dares to plumb at his
peril.” He raised one bushy eyebrow and nodded at Lady Virginia. “I
leave that to the members of their own sex.”

Lady
Virginia smiled slightly. “I never thought you were a coward,
Brigadier.”

He
lifted his hand to interrupt her—politely. “I was, in my time, considered
a good strategist, my lady,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.
“And a good strategist never attacks a fortified stronghold. Ever.”
He spread his empty hands in a gesture of conciliation. “Besides, I am at
a disadvantage. My daughter-in-law and granddaughter will be invited for the
ball. If they were to discover that I dared to be against it, however briefly,
I will have to watch for arsenic in my brandy.”

Reggie
swallowed his groan. If it was, indeed, the case that this was the sign his
mother was ready to move back into her old circles again—then how could
he possibly object to something that would get his mother to do what he had
been praying she would ever since his father’s untimely death? She
couldn’t
keep trying to lock the world outside away. It wasn’t healthy.
She’d turn into a Miss Havisham if she weren’t careful.

But
there was no denying the fact that this weekend party was a thinly disguised
attempt to force him to make some sort of choice of fiancée and announce
an engagement. If not announce an engagement
and
a wedding—at
this point in the war there had been so many hasty marriages that virtually any
young man who wanted or needed a special license could get one on a
moment’s notice. Not that he entirely blamed her on that score; he
was
the only heir, and he
was
going back to the Front when his leg
healed—

—when
his mind healed—

But
dash it all, there wasn’t one of these society fillies that he could
stand being in the same room with for the course of a cardparty! How was he to
tolerate one day in, day out, for the rest of his life?

The
mere thought took away his appetite, and he excused himself from the table,
going out onto the terrace to stare unseeing down into the gardens. He had made
some progress towards the goal that Lady Virginia had set for him; his shields
were far more transparent now, and he had been making some small, tentative
attempts at reading the currents of magic around him. As a result, he sensed it
was her coming up behind him, long before she spoke.

She
stood beside him, looking out onto the vista that had cost his distant ancestor
a pretty penny to produce. “Sometimes I wonder if you hate me,
Reggie,” she said, in a voice that sounded tired.

He
turned towards her with surprise. “Hate you? No! Why should I hate
you?”

“Because
I tell you all the uncomfortable truths you would rather not hear. It’s a
privilege of age. But that doesn’t make it less painful to hear them,
I’m sure.” She made a little, annoyed sound in the back of her
throat. “Not that I’m going to stop telling them to you.”

“Not
that I expect you to,” he countered. He leaned on the marble balustrade
and looked out into the garden. “Mater wants me married. She wants it
with a desperation that frightens me. I
don’t
want a wife, or a
fiancé, or anything like one. I won’t insult you by claiming some
noble motives, my lady, or pretending I want to spare some unknown girl grief
when I go back to the Front; the simple fact is that I have not met one single
young woman who would be ‘suitable’ in Mater’s eyes who was
not a dead bore, an empty-headed mannequin suited only for displaying expensive
clothing, or—”

He
almost said, “Or a hard-eyed chit who would wait just long enough for me
to get onto the train to the Channel-ferry before collecting her lovers to
populate my house at my expense,” but decided that discretion was the
better part there. Besides, Lady Virginia would want to know who he was talking
about, and he didn’t want to tell her.

“Or
an opportunist more interested in my title and social connections than
myself,” he concluded, instead.

“Ah,”
said her ladyship, nodding wisely. “The Robinson girls.”

“Among
others.” He laughed without humor. “They aren’t the only ones
by a stretch, but they are the most persistent at the moment. I think even their
mother would be casting her cap at me, if she thought she could slip herself
past Mater’s eye.”

Lady
Virginia sighed. “I almost wish she would try; it might shake your
mother’s friendship with the creature. I know this is unreasonable of me,
and I know that I should be happy for her to have a friend—but there is
something about that woman
and
her girls that puts my back up.”

Reggie
knew what it was, even if Lady Virginia didn’t. She would never admit it,
never recognize it in herself, but Lady Virginia was a snob… the idea of
someone whose money came from trade marrying into the aristocracy secretly
outraged her. Well, it probably wouldn’t outrage her if the girl was also
a Master—but Mastery was another sort of aristocracy.

Or
perhaps, as long as it’s someone else’s blue-blooded family, and
not hers, nor that of her friends, it wouldn’t matter so much
.

It
was hardly her fault; it was the way she’d been raised. And he probably
would not have noticed, if it hadn’t been for that stupid
not-quite-quarrel he’d had with Eleanor.

He
sighed. He missed those conversations. He missed her company, her wit, her
intelligence, and how she was kind without making him feel as if he owed her
something for her kindness. He’d been down to the meadow several times,
but she’d never again appeared. Either he had offended her so much that
she was shunning his company, or else his timing was so exquisitely bad that
she thought
he
was avoiding
her
—and as a result she had
stopped coming.

Or
else, and this was the likeliest, she was kept too busy for frivolous visits in
the middle of the day to the meadow. It was summer, after all, and there were
probably a thousand chores she was being made to do. Oh, it made him depressed
to think about it, that fine, keen mind, shackled to some sort of menial work.
It was like seeing a Derby winner hitched to a plow.

If
only he could do something for her without insulting her further.

If
only some of those empty-headed dolls his mother kept dragging about could have
a fraction of her intelligence and personality.

“There
will be young women you’ve never even seen at this weekend,
Reggie,” Lady Virginia said, breaking into his melancholy thoughts.
“Perhaps—”

“Or
perhaps not,” he said, more harshly than he had intended, and tried to
soften it with a sheepish smile. “I’ll keep an open mind, my lady.
I won’t promise more than that.”

There
was one saving grace in all of this. With the weekend looming up, and all of
the preparations that even Lady Virginia would have to help with, she
wouldn’t be pressuring him so much to take up his magic quickly.

A
silver lining of sorts. These days, he would take whatever sliver of silver he
could get
.

“Exactly
what sort of girl interests you, Reggie?” she asked, out of the blue.
“I’ve never been able to make you out. I must suppose you had your
little flings—”

“Quite
enough, with my debts honorably discharged,” he replied, flippantly.
“There is one thing to be said in favor of a girl who only expects money
and presents from one; you always know where you are with her, and she always
has someone waiting in the wings when you tire of her.”

Lady
Virginia winced. “Is that the prevailing attitude now?” she asked
soberly. “In my day, there was at least a pretense of romance.”

“We
haven’t time to waste on romance, my lady,” he said flatly.
“Not when—”

He
didn’t say it, but it was there, hanging in the air between them. Not
when in a week or two or three you can be just another grave in Flanders.

She
brooded down on the roses. “I expect there is a great deal to be said for
knowing that if the—worst—happens, your current inamorata will
simply shrug and move on to another when she sees your name in the papers. But
those of your generation that live through this hideousness are coming out with
scars of the heart and soul as well as the body, and I do not know what that
will mean in the long run.”

“Neither
do I,” he replied truthfully. “But you asked what sort of girl I
find attractive—”

Involuntarily,
the image of Eleanor, independent, clever, intelligent, entirely unsuitable
Eleanor, flashed through his mind.

“Someone
I can talk to, about
anything
,” he said, finally. “Someone
who has the brains not only to understand what I’m talking about, but to
hold up her side of the conversation. When you have the wherewithal to buy as
much beauty as you want, it isn’t as important. Mind, I’m not
saying that I don’t like a girl to be pretty, but—” He
shrugged helplessly. “Never mind. It’s hardly relevant.”

“Surely
at some point,” Lady Virginia began, “you must have
encountered—”

It
was time to put an end to this, so he put up the one argument he knew there
would be no getting around. “My lady, there’s another condition,
and it’s one I cannot tell Mater. I watched how father struggled to keep
Mater ignorant of his Elemental work, the difficulties and even heartache it
caused for both of them, and I decided a long time ago that I won’t marry
anyone who isn’t an Elemental Master in her own right. I must have
someone I don’t have to keep that sort of secret from, and how likely is
that?”

There.
That will silence her. He actually had sworn that—before the war—so
he wasn’t lying. Not that he ever expected to take up the wand of an Air
Master again. Merely dropping some of his shields had been shudderingly
difficult; he could not even think about working real magic again without
bringing on an attack of panic
.

Lady
Virginia looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. “Perhaps more
likely than you think.”

He
snorted. “They’re not exactly thick on the ground,” was all
he said. He tried not to think of Peter Scott with raw envy. Curse the
man—he had the perfect partner, a woman who was an Elemental Master,
brilliant, self-sufficient, and a stunning, exotic beauty.

Not
that Mater wouldn’t drop dead on the spot if I brought home a half-breed
Hindu
.

She
was the one woman he had ever met who could actually understand, really and
truly, what the war did to a man, did to his soul. Maybe that was the biggest
problem with the girls of his set. They didn’t, and couldn’t. None
of
them
had volunteered as nurses or VAD girls in France or Belgium.
None of them had the least idea of the things that lay inside his mind; none of
them would ever want to know. They preferred to think of the war the way those
first volunteers had, as a chance for glory, and if one must die, to die nobly.
They didn’t know and couldn’t understand that there was nothing
noble or glorious about those churned-over fields, the dead zones of mud and
razor-wire. And if he tried to tell them, they would turn away in horror.

Doctor
Maya knew, and didn’t flinch from it. But how many like her were there?

“It
has been my experience, limited though it is, that if you are really determined
in that direction, the partner will find you when you are both ready,”
she said gravely. “But I am sure that makes me sound like some sort of
mystic, so I will keep my opinions to myself. Just keep an open mind as you
promised—and open eyes as well.”

She
retreated to the house, leaving him staring down at the garden, wondering
bitterly if
anyone
who hadn’t experienced the Front could ever
understand what it did to someone inside.

We look, act,
and talk like our old selves, but we’ve been damaged, each and every one
of us
, he thought.
We’re scarred inside. Like rosebuds with
canker-worms at their hearts. We look the same, but even if we live,
we’ll never blossom. And there is nothing that will change that. Nothing
at all
.