Phoenix and Ashes (52 page)

“Here’s
the uniformed lot, Mater,” he said, with relief, putting his stack beside
the rest of the finished envelopes.

“Ah,
good,” she replied, absently. “Here, there’s just a few more
of the local people. Be a dear and do them, would you?”

Mrs.and
Mrs.Donald Hinshaw, the vicar and his wife. Doctor and Mrs.Robert Sutherland.
And then—

Mrs.Alison
Robinson, Miss Danbridge, Miss Carolyn Danbridge, Miss Eleanor Robinson…

Eleanor?
For a moment, his mind went blank. Then it refocused again. Eleanor Robinson.
His Eleanor?

She
was that—woman’s daughter? But how was that possible?

“Mater,
who’s this Eleanor Robinson?” he asked casually, or at least, as
casually as he could manage.

“Oh,
she’s just dear Alison’s stepdaughter,” his mother said,
indifferently. “The vicar reminded me about her, or at least, I think it
was the vicar. Someone did, anyway. She’s supposed to be at Oxford, so I
suppose she’s a terrible bluestocking not to come home for the summer,
but it wouldn’t do not to invite her, even if she doesn’t
come.”

She’s
supposed to be at Oxford
?
But—He felt as if he’d been
poleaxed, he was so stunned. There was certainly no
monetary reason why she
shouldn’t be at university—that woman spent money as freely as his
own mother did, and it was common knowledge she was well-off, so there should
be no trouble with the fees.

For
that matter, given how Alison Robinson spent lavishly, why was Eleanor always
so shabby-looking? Why did she have hands like a charwoman?

What
was going on there?

And the next
question. How do I find out if I can’t get near Eleanor in the first
place?

July 20, 1917
Longacre Park, Warwickshire

REGGIE HAD DECIDED ON
CAROLYN as the most likely to let something about Eleanor drop—she
clearly was not the more intelligent of the sisters (though neither of them
were a match for their mother) but he still was going to tread very cautiously
around her. He didn’t want to alert any of the three to the fact that he
knew their stepsister was somewhere in Broom. In fact, he didn’t want to
alert them to the fact that he had met her more than once. It had taken a great
deal of willpower not to limp down to his motor and take it right to the door
of The Arrows that day when he had addressed an invitation to her, and only the
fact that so very much was ringing false had kept him from doing so. There was
a great deal more than met the eye going on; he had a notion that he might
eventually want Lady Virginia’s help on this, but not until he had
investigated all other courses of action himself.

A
tennis match presented the best opportunity; his mother was playing against
hers, and he brought her a lemonade as a pretext for sitting next to her. After
some noncommittal chat, he managed to steer the conversation towards Oxford,
and asked, as if in afterthought, “Oh—don’t you have a sister
there?”

She
jerked as if she’d been stung by a bee, and stared at him, wide-eyed. If
he hadn’t known there was something wrong before this, he would have by
her reaction. He knew guilt when he saw it. “A sister?”

“Eleanor?”
he prompted. “It occurred to me that the only Robinsons in Broom had a
daughter named Eleanor. Before the war, I remember talking to her about going to
Oxford—she had her heart set on it, and was taking the examinations in
order to qualify.”

“Oh—
Eleanor
!”
Her brittle laugh rang entirely false. “She’s only my stepsister,
not a real sister. I scarcely think of her at all, actually, we’re
practically strangers.” Her smile was too bright, and she looked very
nervous to him. He fancied that Eleanor was nowhere near as much of a stranger
as she was pretending.

He
smiled slightly, or rather, stretched his lips in something like a smile.
“I suppose for form’s sake we ought to invite her to the ball, too.
It isn’t done to leave out one sister of three. People might talk.”

Again,
that brittle laugh. “Oh, you can if you like, but
I
shouldn’t trouble myself. She’d never come. She’s a dreadful
bluestocking, and she never even comes home on the vacs. I don’t think
she knows such things as balls exist. She
certainly
doesn’t know
how to dress. She’d never leave her—studies—for anything that
frivolous.”

He
leaned back in his chair. He hadn’t missed that moment of hesitation when
she had sought for a word to describe what Eleanor was doing. He yawned.
“Oh, well, in that case, if you think she won’t feel slighted. The
vicar suggested to Mater that she ought to be included on the guest list is
all.”

“Oh.”
The girl’s voice grew hard, and just a touch cold. “The vicar, was
it? No, I really shouldn’t bother if I were you. I’ll make sure
Mother reminds the vicar of how much Eleanor dislikes leaving Oxford. I suppose
she’ll be a don, once they allow such things.”

He
made a sound like a laugh. “It’s not as if there won’t be a
surfeit of young ladies to dance with; too many of them are likely to be
wallflowers as it is, unless I can bring some more cadets from the RFC up to
scratch. I think we can do without her.”

“So
do I.” She swiftly turned the subject to costumes, and whether he thought
it would be too warm for eighteenth-century court dress. “Wouldn’t
an Empire gown be cooler?” she asked.

“I
should think so,” he replied. “And besides, it’d be deuced
difficult to dance in those side-things that stick
out—what-you-call-‘ems—”

“Panniers,”
she said with immense satisfaction. “Lauralee wouldn’t hear of
anything but being Madame Pompadour, but
I
thought Empress Josephine
would be far more elegant
and
cooler.”

“Well,
there I agree with you, but don’t tell her that,” he said, in a
confidential tone of voice. “I’d rather dance with a girl who can
move about in her costume than have to steer some wire contraption around the
floor.” She giggled and agreed. He thought he had effectively distracted
her from the subject of her sister.

As
he continued talking with her to make sure she had forgotten his question in
her flutter of excitement about his attentions, he digested what he had
learned. Well, now he knew this much, at least. He knew that Eleanor
was
Alison’s stepdaughter, and he knew that they were, for some reason,
keeping alive a fiction that she was at Oxford. It was clear that she
wasn’t—but the question was, what was she doing in Broom? His
assumption that she had fallen on hard times was obviously wrong, but why was
she dressed like an inferior servant and clearly doing menial labor?

He
worried at the problem for the rest of the day, through tea, while he dressed
for dinner and all through dinner. It made for a quiet meal, but his aunt more
than made up for his silence, and his mother was so full of her entertainment
plans that they didn’t really notice that he wasn’t talking much.
How was it that neither the vicar nor the doctor were aware that “Eleanor
is at Oxford” was a complete fiction? Surely, if she had been strolling
around Broom, someone would have noticed and said something. And she certainly
wasn’t transporting herself to their meadow by magic carpet. None of this
was making much sense.

After
dinner he went out on the terrace with a drink; the Brigadier joined him as
they watched the sun set; the sky ablaze with red, gold, and purple, the last
rays of the setting sun making streaks across the horizon. It looked like a
Turner painting.

“You
would never know there was a war from here,” the old man said at last,
and Reggie thought he sounded wistful. “Must admit, I was dubious about
this brouhaha your mother set her heart on, but—it won’t be bad to
forget for a little while, and pretend.”

“Like
children playing truant from school,” Reggie replied, with bitter
longing. “But it won’t go away.”

“But
we can rest our minds from it for a little, surely, without feeling
guilty.” The Brigadier sipped his brandy. “We’ll all put on
our dominoes and pretend that outside the walls of Longacre it is 1912; we can
even persuade ourselves for a little that our lost and absent friends are out
there in the crowd, too. And as long as the masks are being worn, we can hold
to the illusion. Is that so wrong?”

Yes,
he wanted to say
. Yes, because the ones that haven’t been killed by
the idiotic strategies of old men fighting a war with last century’s
tactics are out there putting their lives at risk because those same old men
are so certain that what they want is God’s will that they won’t
admit they are wrong or that what they are doing is a hideous, horrible
mistake.

But
he didn’t say it. In part, because he knew that although the Brigadier
agreed with him in his heart, he could never admit it aloud. And in part
because it would only hurt that good old man further.

“Sometimes—one
needs illusions,” he said, carefully, and left it at that.

Illusions.
So much of what was going on here was an illusion. Not just this country
weekend and the ball, but everything on this side of the Channel. No one wanted
to talk about the war anymore, or think about it even, except those who had
been in it. The topics that seemed to obsess most people had nothing whatsoever
to do with the war except as the war had caused the problems. And that drove
him mad, sometimes. He wanted to wake them up, drag them forcibly down to the
hospitals and
show
them the shell-shocked and the maimed, to
make
them care, force them to understand what this war was doing. Was he in the
wrong, then, to want to break into the comfortable illusions and shout at them
all, that their petty little concerns over their comforts, the shortage of
servants, the rationed food, were selfish, self-centered and disgusting to him?
That over there in France, that sound like thunder that came over the Channel
when the wind was right, was the sound of people dying, and it was time they
woke up and acknowledged it?

But
he wanted to forget it too—part of him was so tired of it all that he was
sick with longing for it to just stop, to go away, and take all his memories
with it.

He
turned his mind back to the problem of Eleanor with a feeling almost of relief.
It was something to think about that was
not
the war, and part of him
deeply sympathized with the Brigadier. Like those nights when he would lie in
his bed at the hospital and recite poem after poem in his head to keep from
thinking about what was out there in the dark, waiting for him to fall asleep.
Because you could only think about the war and what it was doing to you and
your mates for so long before you started going mad.

Eleanor
Robinson should have been at Oxford, and was not, and it was not for lack of
money in her family. And in fact, from all appearances, she was working as a
servant. Why, oh why, had she not told him herself what was wrong? Pride?

For
that matter, why had her father married a scheming creature like Alison?

She
vamped him I suppose, like her daughters are trying to vamp me. I suppose if
you’ve never been vamped before, it would be easy to succumb. When would
that have been
?
He tried to reckon up the last time he had seen her.
It was before the war, before he joined the RFC. So at some point between then
and the start of the war, her father had remarried. He’d done some
checking, and her father had died at some time around the first Christmas of
the war. So why had his daughter not been at Oxford at that point
?
Had
Alison persuaded the besotted new husband that it was unnecessary to give a
girl a university education
?
Or had she pled the war as an excuse,
claiming she needed Eleanor at home
?
Just how besotted had he been, to
deny his only child her one dream
?
He must have been caught like a
salmon in a net
.

And
then, just as the last of the sun sank below the horizon, it struck him. What
if her father had altered his will in favor of the new wife before he went off
to the war?

It
was just the sort of thing that Alison would have insisted on, he was sure of
it. Manipulative creature that she was, she would have promised, ever so
sweetly, that she would take as good care of Eleanor as of her own daughters.
So why shouldn’t her dear new husband not change his will to make her
sole inheritor? After all, leaving flighty young girls anything directly was
generally a bad idea. Who could guess what they would do with their inheritance,
and of course, there were always cads who would romance them for their money,
then waste it and leave them penniless and deserted.

He
stared into the growing darkness, as beside him, the Brigadier lit up a
cigarette. The end of it glowed as he pursued that line of thought to its
logical conclusion.

So,
assume that was precisely what had happened. Then her father had died in the
first months of the war, leaving her entirely at the mercy of her stepmother, a
woman who clearly despised her. Then what? What was she doing here, dressed
like a servant?

Well,
what were her choices? To leave—and do what? She wasn’t suited to
anything but marriage, and if she’d had a sweetheart in the village, he
doubted that she would have been so keen to go to university. There was a sad
truth to her condition; she had no skills with which to support herself. She
hadn’t enough education to become a governess. She hadn’t the money
to train as a nurse, and although she could have gone as a VAD no one could
really live on the tiny stipend that was allotted to the volunteers. In the
beginning she wouldn’t have had the stamina for a factory job, and the
Land Girls hadn’t been formed until later. That would have left her with
only one option. To remain at home at the mercy of her stepmother, who must
have seen her as a ready source of free labor and put her to work as a servant.