Phoenix and Ashes (54 page)

But
it hadn’t been abstract. It had been the whole
world
up there,
looming in a sky that was half storm and half calm, with terrible energies
crackling through it all, and the realization that a single turn of the Wheel
could set random factors into motion that could doom all her plans.

And
even as she had gazed up at it in awe—for it had looked nothing at all
like the card, except in that it was a wheel, or at least
wheel-shaped—she had felt herself and all the world coming apart, then
returning together again, in what she came to understand was a cycle of
creation and destruction, of death and rebirth, and she had grasped things for
that moment that she couldn’t even begin to articulate now. But evidently
she had grasped them correctly, for the huge, looming Wheel settled, and a
little more knowledge and power settled into her mind, and she was given to
understand that she had passed this test, too.

So
it was understandable that at this moment she really didn’t want to think
what the Death card was going to be like. It would have been easier on her
nerves if the card had been called Transfiguration, or something of the sort.

Sarah
gave her an odd look. “This isn’t the path I would have seen you
taking,” she said at last. “Your mother was always so impatient,
the Fire in her wanting to take things quickly—”

“Which
isn’t always a good idea. I think perhaps this business of using the
Tarot to teach me was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
Eleanor grimaced, and rubbed the joint of her right thumb with her left hand,
easing a little ache there. “Much though
I
would like to make
things happen faster, I’m learning about the strengths and weaknesses of
the other three Elements as I go, and I hope that means I won’t be as
vulnerable.”

She
didn’t have to say aloud what she was thinking—that if her mother
had known more about the strengths and weaknesses of the antagonistic Element
of Water, she might not have died. She knew Sarah was thinking the same thing
by the faint expression of regret mixed with other emotions too fleeting to
catch.

But
one of them was pride—pride in the daughter who was, perhaps, a little
wiser than her mother.

“You’re
learning,” was all Sarah said.

“I
bloody well hope so!” Eleanor snapped, with a little show of Fire
temperament, quickly throttled before it could have any other effect.
“And before you say it, I will say it for you. Back to work. We have only
a fortnight, and I have a lot of progress to make before then.”

Sarah
only nodded.

I’ll do it
because I have to. There’s no going back now
.

August 7,1917
Longacre Park, Warwickshire

ON JULY THE 30TH, THE
British had begun a major offensive at Ypres; like most of Britain, Reggie only
got wind that something was afoot when the “regrets” began to come
in. And he hadn’t thought much of it at first, until today.

Today
the post was full of them.

One
or two officers canceling would have been a fluke—all of them at once
meant a big push. When even the band canceled by the morning post (momentarily
throwing his mother into a state of despair until Lady Virginia came to the
rescue, promising a small orchestra made up entirely of women), he had known
that there was something truly major going on.

He
and his old college chums Steve and Geoff had a sort of unwritten code; by the
afternoon post, when both of them sent brief notes referring to Caesar’s
campaigns in Gaul along with their apologies, he had all the information he
needed. And far more than he wanted.

The
Brigadier and his mother had tried to keep it from him, of course, but by late
afternoon it had been in all the papers. He’d managed to keep himself
together long enough to send a hasty telegram to Michael Dolbeare to recruit
more RFC cadets to make up the difference, pledging to cover their train fare
if need be, which considerably calmed his mother down about the holes in her
guest list. That had been going through the motions, actually, because if he
had thought about it, he might have lost his temper with her. How could she be
in such a state over a mere absence of male guests, when across the Channel all
hell was breaking loose? Bad enough that other people were being so callous,
but this was his own mother.

And
he’d been all right until just before dinner, until it hit him, until it
really sank in. Then the shakes had started.

He
kept himself together until he managed to reach the safe haven of his rooms. He
even managed to pull his own curtains closed, and shut and lock the door. Then
the fear got hold of him by the throat and shook him like a dog, sending him to
his knees, making him crawl into the darkest corner of the room, where he
shivered and wept and choked back moans of terror. He couldn’t even put
two ideas together into a whole; he didn’t even know
what
he was
afraid of. He only knew that this vast, insensate, and ravenous beast that was
the war was loose, and it was going to devour the entire world and there was
nothing he could do to stop it…

He
had vaguely heard someone pacing outside his rooms, rattling the knob once or
twice, but they left him alone, for which he was both grateful and felt
betrayed at the same time. Grateful, because he could not bear anyone seeing
him like this. Betrayed, because they were leaving him alone with this fear,
this mind-killing, soul-shriveling fear—

And
all he could do was huddle, and shake, as wave after wave of the terror
engulfed him, then ebbed, only to return.

How
long he was in there, he couldn’t have told; only that some time after
darkness fell, there was the sound of a key in the lock, and the unmistakable
presence in the room of Lady Virginia.

She
closed the door behind her; he heard the scratch of a match, and smelled the
sharp sulfur as she lit candles.

“Reggie,”
she said, quite as calmly as if he was not huddled in a ball in the corner.
“I am not Doctor Maya, but I am very old, and I have seen a very great
deal in my time. And if you can manage to bring yourself here, I may be able to
offer you some little comfort. I should come down there on the floor next to
you, but my bones are not so young that they permit any such thing anymore.”

Somehow,
he managed to crawl out of that corner. Somehow he managed to get to her, and
put his head on her knee like a spaniel, and croak out a few words. He
wasn’t even sure what he was saying, only that he was giving some shape
to the fear that was devouring him alive.

“I
cannot tell you that it will be all right, Reggie,” she said gravely.
“Because we both know that it will not. But if the Brigadier is correct,
and I believe he is, then the enemy is as battle-weary and worn as we, and he
has no flood of energetic Americans coming at last to help. It will not end
soon—but it will end.”

And
she offered silence at the right moment, and a few more words of her own at the
right moment, and slowly, he stopped shaking, the fear lost its grip on him,
and the fog lifted from his mind until he could think again.

Only
then did she call his man in, and he took his drugs and went into a mercifully
dreamless sleep.

And
they
did not come for him in the night; he sensed no malign presence
on the other side of his barrier of slumber, nor did he hear evil mutterings
nor feel the suffocating weight on him of the darker creatures of Earth, trying
to smother him in his sleep. It might have been the drugs, it might have been
his new defenses, it might all have been due to Lady Virginia.

When
he struggled up out of sleep late the next morning, it was with no sense of
victory, though, and not even anything he could call hope. It was, if anything,
a feeling that he might actually live through the despair. He still
wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to, but he felt as if he would, regardless
of his current preferences.

It
was the Brigadier who was with him the next time the fit took him, later that
afternoon. They were outside, on the terrace, and his knees just gave out. The
Brigadier got him to a seat, saying nothing, although he could not have missed
how hard Reggie was shaking, nor the blank, dry-mouthed stare Reggie knew he
must have. And the good old man stayed with him as he closed his eyes and
fought the fear as best he could—which was about as effective as trying
to fight the sea.

After
the first wave ebbed a little, the Brigadier cleared his throat apologetically,
and began talking, sounding a bit self-conscious, but determined, nevertheless.

He
didn’t actually talk
to
Reggie. Instead, he rambled on about
commonplace things. He’d been down to Broom and met some of “the
lads” at the Broom pub, and they were good fellows, to be sure. He
thought there might be something in the manner of work he could put in the way
of one or two of them that were at loose ends. It was a fine little village,
and he’d also been to the estate village of Arrow, which was a credit to
him and his mother. The estate manager wanted him to know that the crops were
looking very good this year, and that someone wanted to bring in another
gasworks, like the one that supplied Longacre and Broom, but this time on manor
property. Filthy things, gasworks, but there was plenty of coal near here and
that would mean there could be gas piped in to the village of Arrow as well,
which might be worth the mess. Perhaps one of the clever RFC fellows could find
a way to make a gasworks less filthy. “We have gas laid on,” the
Brigadier rumbled, “At my bungalow. Deuced convenient for cook. Thinking
about electricity; they electrified my club in London last year, and it’s
better than gas. You ought to consider having the telephone brought up here,
Reggie. Good for your mother; keep her connected to the rest of us. Have to go
forward, my boy, can’t live in the past, and if you try and stick in one
spot the future will run over the top of you.”

Not
a word about the war, not a word about how he looked, and under the paralysis
of fear that made his guts go to water, he knew he must look hellish. Not one
word of reproach, though the poor old man must surely wonder—

Or
perhaps not. Lady Virginia had said he’d been to the Front itself, to the
hospitals where men were brought in, filthy, screaming, their wounds crawling
with maggots, their minds as shattered as their bodies. Maybe he did understand.

But
it was the commonplaces that were anchoring him, little by little, back in the
simple present. The count of new calves, the state of the orchards, thoughts of
gasworks and electricity, the talk down at the Broom.

It
dragged him back out of the pit, though he could not have said how or why. It
let him get his breath back, let him unclench his fists and his jaw, let him
sit in the wake of what proved to be the last wave of fear and turned his
shaking into the mere trembling of exhaustion. And when he was finally able to
think again, let him turn back to the Brigadier with eyes that held sanity
again.

The
old man paused in his rambling; gave him a long, hard look, and sighed.
“Ah. There you are. Her ladyship said you might get taken like
that.”

“Yes,”
Reggie said. “Thank you, sir.” Only three words, but he put a world
of gratitude in them, and the Brigadier flushed a little, and coughed
self-deprecatingly.

“Think
I can leave you now?” he asked.

Reggie
nodded. “Work to do, sir; you reminded me of it yourself, just
now.”

The
Brigadier nodded with evident relief. “Work! There’s the
ticket!” he said, with a shade too much enthusiasm, so much so that
Reggie felt sorry for him. “You concentrate on work, my boy, it’s
the best thing for you. Keep your mind set on solid things.” The
Brigadier’s determinedly cheerful expression made Reggie attempt a feeble
smile of his own.

At
least he doesn’t think I’m feigning or malingering
, he
thought, as the Brigadier retired to the house.
That meant a great
deal—more, in fact, than he had expected. The Brigadier did not think
less of him because he was shell-shocked. That helped
.

Enough
that he did muster enough strength to get to his own feet again, and go in
search of his estate manager. Maybe the Brigadier was right after all. Maybe
keeping himself occupied would work. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t a
lot to be done. Guests would be arriving in two days.

There
was only one way to find out.

August 11, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

Poor Howse’s
hair was coming down from its careful arrangement on the top of her head; bits
of it were straggling down in front of her ears, and her face was red and damp
with exertion. She looked as if she was going to wilt at any moment, and
Eleanor felt ready to scream.

Between
the two of them, Lauralee and Carolyn could have used a dozen maids to get them
into their costumes, instead of only two. Lauralee, in her Madame Pompadour
garb, had petticoats and panniers, underskirts and overskirts, a corset that
pushed her breasts up until they looked like a pair of hard little apples, and
a bodice cut so low that they were threatening to pop out at any moment. Alison
had taken one look at that particular part of the display and ordered that a
fichu of lace be inserted and tacked in place to prevent a disaster—which
meant more work, as Lauralee fidgeted and shrieked every time she thought a
needle was passing too close to her skin. And when all that was taken care of,
came the white, powdered wig, the patches to be pasted on, and all the rest of
it.

Carolyn’s
guise of Empress Josephine looked deceptively simple, and at least it
didn’t require a winch to pull the lacings of her corset tight, but the
requisite hairstyle with its Grecian-inspired diadem and tiny, tight-curled
ringlets done up in imitation of ancient statues had Howse nearly in despair.
She had two burns on her hands from the curling tongs already, and there had
been one accident that had caused Carolyn to slap the hapless maid, and which
had left the bedroom reeking of scorched hair. Fortunately only the very ends
had been scorched; Howse had been able to trim out the ruined bit to
Carolyn’s satisfaction.