Phoenix and Ashes (51 page)

“It’s
the only idea that has any chance at all of giving you the results you
want,” he replied, with ill grace. “If she dies, you lose, because
the inheritance goes to the cousin. If she disappears, you lose, because until
she’s proven dead, you can’t touch her money and when she’s
proven dead, the inheritance goes to the cousin. If she stays sane, and attains
her majority, you lose, because sooner or later the trustees are going to want
to see her to turn her fortune over to her and then there’s no telling
what will happen. If you injure her physically to the point that she
can’t care for herself, you still lose, because doctors will be involved,
and someone will find out that you’ve been making a slave of her
and
making free with her inheritance. The only way you win is if you keep her alive
and drive her so completely mad that she withdraws into herself and never comes
out again. That means breaking her will, her spirit, and her mind, and
there’s only one way that I know for certain to do that. After all,
it’s not as if you can drop her down a hole and be done with her.”

“Wait
a moment—” she said, with a sudden surge of interest and a jolt of
euphoria as his words caused an interesting image to flash across her mind. She
caught and held that image; quickly extrapolated something from it, and then,
smiled, slowly. “You just might have something, Warrick. You might just
have solved the conundrum.”

“Pardon?”
He blinked at her, caught off-guard by her words.

“You
said something very interesting. You said that I couldn’t just drop her
down a hole and be done with it.” Her smile broadened. “But that
just might be exactly what we want to do with her. There’s more than one
way to get the results we want from her.”

Now
he was completely confused, that much was very plain. “I thought the best
plan was to break her mind.”

“Be
patient with me. What was the first spell I put on her? To bind her to the
hearth. Correct?” She nodded as he frowned. “So this has kept her confined
to the house and grounds. She can’t go off on her own; that binding was
intended to keep her from looking for help. But that same binding spell may
serve us in another way. If she were to be taken away from the hearth, carried
off somewhere, she would
have
to try and make her way back, no matter
what obstacles were in her path. Or—? Do you remember how I constructed
the bindings? Because I certainly do.”

“I’m
not sure I see where this is going, but I believe the geas you put on her
forces her to try, and keep trying, to make her way back to The Arrows. And the
longer she’s away the more of her mind becomes obsessed with the need to
return, until she can’t even eat or sleep, she’s so driven by and
consumed with that need.” Now his frown looked as if he was beginning to
see the shape of something, but hadn’t yet deciphered the puzzle she had
set him.

She
helped him out with some clues. “Warwickshire is full of abandoned coal
mines. Lady Devlin was just complaining about one of them last
week—it’s collapsing, evidently, and causing subsidence on the
property of one of her friends, spoiling a good meadow. Now suppose, just
suppose, that we were to drop her down one of those, then report that she has
gone missing, as we always intended to do. The first thing and only thing she
would try to do is return to the hearth, driven by her growing obsession, and
if we took care to drop her into one where she couldn’t climb out, where
the tunnels run from the entrance
towards
Broom, can you see what
would happen?”

His
frown deepened. “I—think so—”

Alison
sat forward in her chair, leaning towards him. “She will have to follow
the pull of the geas. Which means she would be forced to penetrate deeper into
the mine, until she could go no further, without lights, without anything to
help her.” She nodded as his eyes widened with understanding.
“Think of that; alone in the dark and possibly injured, she comes to a
dead end. She can’t retrace her steps, because the spell won’t let
her go back. She can’t go on, because she’s at a dead end.
She’s hungry, thirsty, and more and more of her mind is taken up with the
obsession to return. Now, just to add something to ensure that we get the
results we want, a mine is in the earth, and what’s more, it’s in
violated
earth, which means the Elementals associated with it are all of my sort. So if
trying to claw her way through coal-bearing rock with her bare hands
isn’t enough to drive her mad, my little friends can take care of that
problem by pushing her over the edge of sanity. Little monsters with glowing
eyes appearing and vanishing in the dark, things gibbering and drooling on her,
cold hands clutching at her, plucking at her clothing… it would take a
stronger mind than
she
has to come out of that intact!”

“But
you need to have her in your custody in order to keep control of her
inheritance,” Locke objected.

She
was already prepared for the objection. “And I can do that. I merely wait
a day or so, then nudge a rescue party to the right coal mine and allow them to
find her. Fear, thirst, hunger, constant attack by gnomes and kobolds, and the
geas—if she has any mind left after forty-eight hours of that, I will be
shocked and amazed. By that time, I imagine the only thing we’ll need to
worry about is replacing her with a servant.” She did sigh at that. It
was getting impossible to find servants that weren’t thieves, drunks, or
both. With so many women getting much better wages and shorter hours by taking
the places of men than they could ever obtain as servants, only the dregs were
left.

On
the other hand, once the business of Eleanor is settled, perhaps the answer
would be simply to use magical coercions on whatever I can get. I pity any
thief that tries to purloin anything from my house. Or perhaps she could take
someone feeble-minded from the workhouse. The same coercions that kept Eleanor
scrubbing and tending should work on the feeble-minded
.

Locke
gazed at her with astonishment. “My hat is off to you. I would not have
thought of any of that. I hesitate to call anything a
perfect
plan,
but this one is as close to perfect as a reasonable person could wish. I assume
you’ll put her to sleep to make her easier to handle?”

“Probably,”
Alison agreed. “I wouldn’t even need to use a spell, if I
didn’t want to. A little chloroform on a sponge would do the
trick.”

“More
reliably renewable than a spell, too,” Locke murmured admiringly.
“And costs nothing in power. You could even do it with your daughters;
simply wait until the girl has gone to sleep, go up to her room, administer the
sponge, and there will not even be a struggle.”

She
did not ask how he knew that. Presumably he had some experience in such
matters.

“As
I told you, I prefer simple plans,” she replied, feeling so pleased with
her own ideas that she was willing to be very pleasant to the man. “And
it does occur to me that when this works, I’ll be needing to find some
place safe and secure to put the afflicted child. I scarcely intend to keep her
at home; the present servant problem is bad enough without trying to find
someone to care for and stand guard over a madwoman. I presume that
you’ve been looking into such things?”

“Discreetly,
I assure you, and mentioning no names,” he responded immediately, and dug
into his case for a file. “And here are the best places I found—
quite
discreet, very understanding about the need to keep someone alive and healthy,
but once a patient is checked in, they don’t ever emerge.”

She
smiled, and leaned over the table to examine the tastefully subdued brochures.
On his own ground, Locke was knowledgeable and immensely helpful.

She
would definitely keep him around a while longer.

Especially
now that he realized she didn’t
need
him to come up with better
plans than he could. It would make him a little on edge, and anxious not to get
on her bad side, because she was, after all, a most generous client.

July 18, 1917
Longacre Park, Warwickshire

Lady Devlin was a
very old-fashioned hostess, and that meant she believed in doing things the
old-fashioned way. She was writing out every one of the invitations for the
ball herself, since she no longer had a secretary to tend to such things for
her. The estate manager could probably have done it for her, but she claimed
that she was enjoying it. After a while, out of sheer guilt, Reggie elected to
help her. His once-neat copperplate handwriting was gone all to hell, of
course, with lack of practice, but it was good enough to address envelopes.

Which
was tedious, but saved his mother the effort of writing out the addresses and
allowed her to concentrate on the aesthetics of producing the invitations. They
couldn’t be printed, alas; perhaps the middle-class found invitations
where one filled in missing names and dates acceptable, but no one of Lady
Devlin’s stature would even consider resorting to such a stratagem.
Besides, many of them required a certain level of personalization in the form
of a note.

It
did allow him to sit down without looking like a malingerer. It also gave him a
chance to find out who the girls were that would be pursuing him at this little
hunt disguised as a party.

Roberta
and Leva Cygnet;
not much of a surprise there. They were already coming to
teas and tennis-parties
. “Mrs.Regina Towner,”
though
—“
Regina
Towner
?” he asked, casually. “
Do I know the Towners
?”

“An
old friend from school,” his mother replied, just as casually.
Right
enough; mother’s age, which means her daughter is probably my age…
Mr.Robert and Mrs.Tansy, Esq., and daughter. So Ginger will be in the howling
pack. Good gad, I hope some of my lads come through. I need all the
distractions I can muster, and Ginger likes to dance
. Some of the next few
were innocuous enough. Then, “Lt. Commander Matthew Mann, the Hon.
Mrs.Matthew Mann, Miss Mann.”
Ah, good gad. The Brigadier’s
granddaughter, and Mama is an
“
Hon
.”
I’ve
never seen an
“
Hon
.”
that wasn’t on the
hunt for a title for the family. Well, the Brigadier warned me
.
“Vicountess Arabella Reed.”
One of Lady Virginia’s
friends, she was a chatterbox, but at least she didn’t have any daughters
.

Then,
at last, the run of invitations that he hoped would save
him—pilots-in-training at the school headquartered at Oxford, and lads he
knew either were on leave or could get it. Even a cadet was a second
lieutenant, and while Mamas were on the hunt for titles, daughters were easily
distracted by officers’ dress-uniforms.

Second
Lt. Michael Freed, Second Lt. David Jackson, at Reading. Lt. Vincent Paul
Mills,
good gad, I hope he doesn’t get shot to bits before this thing
comes off; that handsome face will be even more of a distraction than his
uniform
. Captain Michael Dolbeare;
good thing he’s training the
lads at Oxford; he’s a got enough medals at this point to sink him if he
fell in the river, and the girls can’t resist the shiny
. Lt. Allen
McBain;
arm in a sling, but even if he can’t dance he’s another
handsome devil. That Scots burr, though; the girls will giggle over it and make
him blush, which is entertaining as well as a distraction
. Now the Oxford
lot. Second Lt. John Oliver, Second Lt. Charles Goddard, Second Lt. Lyman
Evans—
at least they aren’t losing a flying-student a day the
way they were at the start of the war, or half my invitations would never get
answered. Of course Turner had made sure that the names he had given Reggie
were of the better students who had less chance of cracking up. That was a
concern; ambulances were stationed at the students’ fields because they
were, by heaven, needed. The accident rate was appalling, the death-rate even
more so. The Rumpetys killed more lads than combat did. Thank God for the
Gosport system. Things had changed since he was a cadet; now there was a
logical system in place for training. Still. Back in his day, there were always
several dozen crashes a day when the weather permitted and the planes were up.
Usually one cadet died a day, and several more were injured. Not so bad now,
though. Can’t afford to lose that many in training, I suppose. Took those
old men long enough to figure that out
.

He
shook off the shakes that threatened him as he remembered some of those
crashes… fortunately, his sojourn at the school as a cadet had been
mercifully short. He already knew how to fly, and didn’t take long to
prove it.

Captain
William Robert Howe.
Can’t do without him. He’s bringing the
band—Thanks to the Brigadier; this was a regular infantry band, though
they had played for the RFC. That would give some of the PBI a thrill, coming
up to a country house to play. Captain Howe was the officer in charge and the
bandleader, all in one. And, the Brigadier claimed, single. Another alternate
target for the husband-hunters. PBI he might be, and less glamorous than a
pilot, but he was a captain
.

Captain
Steven Stewart,
and he’d damned well better get leave. Steve had
pledged on his life he’d come. Tommy had sworn he’d see to it.
Tommy had incentive; was getting a case of whiskey from the Longacre cellars if
Steve did make it
.

Lt.
Commander Geoffrey Cockburn,
and if he puts his auto in the pond again,
I’ll make him go in after it
. Captain Christopher Whitmore,
and
he had better not bring all that photographic paraphernalia with him. Both had
been chums of his at college. Geoff was a tearaway, Chris studious, both still
single and not at all unhandsome. Yet more fodder for the husband-hunters. With
luck, he’d get a word with them ahead of time so they could help keep the
harpies off
.