Phoenix and Ashes (56 page)

Well,
given how entire families in Broom and Arrow tended to go into service and stay
in service to the Fenyx household, perhaps he had. But the fact that he was so
very young told her something else—no matter how sheltered the great
house was from the real world, the real world could still affect it profoundly.
Longacre Park was as subject to compulsory conscription as any other place in this
country. Reggie might have been the first to go to the war, but it seemed that
every other able-bodied man here had followed.

Sarah
drove the carriage away before the illusion could waver at all, leaving Eleanor
alone on the paved landing at the bottom of the stairs. She looked up,
uncertain as to what she should do. She seemed to be the only person arriving
alone, which made her feel very self-conscious. The big doors at the top were
both flung open wide. There was another man in livery at the top, and an older
gentlemen in a black swallow-tail coat and stiff white shirt. Another footman,
and the butler, she expected.

All
right. It’s now or never. Escorted or not, I have an invitation, and I
belong
.

She put on her pink
silk domino mask, tying the ribbons behind her head, then carefully picked up
the sides of her gown, and began the long climb towards those huge doors, and
whatever fate held for her inside them.

August 11, 1917
Longacre Park, Warwickshire

SHE HANDED OVER HER
INVITATION to the butler, who inspected it, and to her relief, merely nodded.
She had been afraid he would announce her, and if Alison was anywhere within
hearing distance…

Instead,
she stepped into—well, she wasn’t entirely sure
what
to
call this room. There could easily have been a second floor to this room, and
there wasn’t. The ceiling was somewhere up a full two
stories—easily forty feet. It was surely another forty feet wide and
twice that in length. There were enough candles burning in candelabra all
around the walls to have supplied an entire chandler’s shop,
supplementing the gaslights.

There
was only one name that suited this space—the Great Hall.

And
it was full. In one corner, a small orchestra composed entirely of black-gowned
women (most of them not young) played what sounded suspiciously like ragtime.
Four years ago, either circumstance would have caused a scandal. But as Eleanor
eased herself into the room, she overheard, almost immediately, the end of a
conversation.

“…and
even the band called up, my dear! So fortunate that Lady Virginia was
here!”

“They
seem a bit—modern,” came the doubtful reply.

The
first speaker laughed. “But of course they’re modern! They’re
Virginia’s pet suffragette band! But if
I
had to choose between
holding a ball with a suffragette orchestra or holding one with a gramophone, I
know which one I would take! At least when one engages women, there is no
danger of seeing them called over to France!”

The
second woman turned her masked face in the direction of the orchestra with ever
evidence of interest. “I have a hunt ball in the autumn—I wonder
if—”

Eleanor
was never to hear what the speaker wondered, for the eddies and swirls around
the edge of the area of the dancing carried the speakers away.

If
this had been a fairy tale, the moment that Eleanor had entered the Great Hall,
all conversation would have ceased, and every head would have turned her way.
The butler would have announced her—which would have been a disaster.

But
this was not a fairy tale, and although she did excite a few admiring or unreadable
glances, for the most part, people looked at her, did not recognize her, and
dismissed her from their minds within a few moments. While her gown was
certainly passable, it was neither so very different nor so very outstanding as
to excite interest. She was indeed the only fairy princess, but other girls had
wide pink dresses. And the deeper she went into the room, the more obvious it
was that she was in an entirely different strata of society than she had ever
been before.

And
so were her stepsisters, though they might not yet realize it.

This
was Society, old money, old titles, and though whatever dressmaker Alison went
to might be able to counterfeit the look of these garments, there was a subtle
difference between these costumes and the ones she had just aided Lauralee and
Carolyn into. She suspected that a close examination would prove they did not
hold up to the sort of careful scrutiny that maids who tended these clothes
would bring to bear. And while ladies’ maids did not precisely gossip to
their mistresses, they did have subtle ways of making things known.

Alison
and her progeny might be in for a rude awakening if they ever were invited to
someone else’s country weekend, and she insisted on maintaining the
fiction that she, too was a member of their class.

But
in the meantime, Eleanor’s costume did not mark her out as anything
unusual. She was by no means vivacious enough to attract attention by herself;
the real beauties here were identifiable even behind their little domino masks.

This
suited Eleanor very well. Her goal, after all, was to find the Elemental
Master, and no one here was likely to make her task any easier by identifying
that worthy for her. She only knew that the Master was female, and that only
because she herself had seen the woman at work the night that the revenants
were dispersed.

She
worked her way towards the wall, and realized with a certain dismay that there
was
another
room behind this one, nearly as large, that had been
thrown open to the ball-attendees. This was not going to make her task any
easier.

She
resigned herself, with a pang of disappointment, to the realization that she
was unlikely to see Reggie after all. The young women substantially outnumbered
the young men here, and it was unlikely that he was going to have a single
minute free. And her own, much more pressing task must take precedence if she
was going to get herself free of her stepmother.

Somewhere
in this swirling chaos of people she had to find the traces of Air magic that
would inevitably be hovering about such a Master. And now she was very grateful
that her study of magic had required her to understand the other three Elements
as well as her own. She might not be able to use Air magic, but she could
definitely sniff it out.

She
was nearly at the doorway in the right-hand wall of the Great Hall when she
caught the first “scent” of Air magic. Just a hint of blue at the
corner of her vision, an unexpected breath of cold, and a touch of sharp, clean
scent, like juniper or rosemary. But she was on it like a hound, and followed
it into a drawing room.

This,
too, was evidently open to the guests, older ladies and gentlemen who were so
engrossed in their card games that they didn’t even take any notice of
her. She scanned the area for that hint of magic, but her quarry was none of
them—then she got another hint of it, through another doorway, which led
her into a hall, not so brightly lit. And, quite probably,
not
supposed to be open to the guests.

But
the Air Master was a friend of the family and according to Sarah, a longterm
visitor here, and probably had the run of the place. She would be allowed to go
places where ordinary guests at the ball would be unwelcome.

Better
and better. She must be on the right track.

And
the breath of Air Magic was stronger now; she followed the scent down the
darkened, shadow-haunted hall, and into—

—the
library.

Here,
for the first time since she had entered these doors, she found herself
consumed with envy of the people who lived here. The Great Hall excited her not
at all; she could only think of how it dwarfed everyone who set foot in it.
That drawing room had been far too rich and opulent for her to feel comfortable
in it, and besides that, the furnishings were antique, probably fragile, and
without a doubt irreplaceable. But this room, with its floor-to-ceiling
bookshelves crammed with volumes—
this
, she desired. And in fact,
as she took a few hesitant steps into the dimly lit room, she forgot, for a
moment, why she was here, in the sudden surge of acquisitive desire.

“I
beg your pardon, miss, but the party is—”

She
started, then froze, at the sound of the familiar drawl, and the exclamation
was startled out of her. “Reggie?”

There
was a creak of leather as the figure rose out of the depths of an armchair to
her left, and limped towards her. “Eleanor?” came the incredulous
reply. “Is that you?”

She
jerked at the ends of the ribbon of her mask, and pulled it off. “Of
course it’s me! I have an invitation!” she replied, now full of
indignation. What? Did he think she was so far beneath him that she
shouldn’t be here?

“Of
course you do; I addressed it myself,” was his answer, as he limped out
of the shadows with both hands outstretched. While most of the young men here
were in their uniforms, he was not. He had donned a costume for the occasion;
with a feeling of shock, she recognized the Magician from the Tarot deck, but
the colors were blue, silver and white rather than red, white and gold.
“I waited in the reception line for what seemed like hours, but you never
came, and I thought—your stepmother—”

“She
doesn’t know I’m here,” Eleanor said, her growing anger
erased by the surge of irrational joy she felt at his words. “She’d
have stopped me if she’d known I was coming.” She felt the coercion
of Alison’s spells suddenly uncoil, sealing her lips over anything else
she might have said.

“I
thought it was something like that,” was Reggie’s only reply, as he
took both her hands in his and gazed down into her eyes. “Look,
let’s not talk about your dreadful stepmother, nor your conniving
stepsisters, nor anything else unpleasant. Mater has put on a first-rate show,
so let’s enjoy it together.” He smiled at her, with something of
the charm of the old Reggie. “So long as I’m with a girl, even if
Mater doesn’t know who she is, she’ll leave me alone. If she does,
so will everyone else, and it has not yet become the fashion, thank the good
Lord, for ladies to cut in on men while dancing. Do you dance?”

She
was so caught in those earnest eyes that all she could do was stammer,
“I—haven’t, not for—a long time—”

“Good,
because my knee is a torture. We’ll go revolve a little for form’s
sake, then—how about the garden? Capability Brown, you know, and all lit
up with fairy-lanterns for the occasion. Appropriate for a fairy
princess.”

She
hardly knew what to say. This was the sort of thing out of her wildest dreams,
the ones she knew better than to believe in.

He’s
just using me as a defense against the girls like Carolyn and Lauralee
—cautioned
a bitter voice from her head.

But
her heart replied,
Then why is he looking at me like that
? Because
those pale eyes were warm with an emotion she did not yet dare to believe in,
and he looked very much as if he would like to do more than simply look at her.

And
sheer instinct made her nod, which evidently was answer enough for him. He took
the domino from her nerveless hands, tied it back on, and tucked her right hand
into the crook of his arm. “Let’s go brave the throng.”

This
time, when they passed through the drawing room, the play stopped. Head turned
in their direction, and as they crossed into the Great Hall, she sensed the
whispers begin behind them.

And
as if this had suddenly turned into a fairy tale, as they walked into the Great
Hall, they were surrounded by a zone of silence, and all eyes turned towards
them. Reggie ignored it; she felt her cheeks flushing, but held her head high,
and tried to walk with dignity. He led her to the exact center of the room, as
the musicians in the corner brought their current number to a swift conclusion.
Once there, he swung her to face him, and the next thing she knew, she was
turning in his arms around the floor to the strains of a waltz.

Ravaged
knee or not, he was light on his feet. Not a brilliant dancer, but a competent
one, and the gown she was wearing was practically made for waltzing in. With a
heady feeling of euphoria, she surrendered to the moment and let him guide her
three times around the floor while the musicians kept the tempo a little slower
than usual. After all, wasn’t this the sort of thing she had dreamed of
doing? It felt like a dream. It had all the perfect unreality of a dream.

The
musicians must have had a fine sense of just how long Reggie could dance; about
the time she felt his steps faltering slightly, they brought the waltz to a
close with a flourish.

Under
cover of the polite applause to the orchestra, he bent and whispered, “If
that’s enough for you, would you like to see the gardens?”

All
she could do was nod; once again, as the orchestra began a new piece, he tucked
her hand into the crook of his elbow and escorted her out of the Great Hall,
into the room behind it—she got a glimpse of a long table set with huge
arrangements of flowers and punch-bowls—and then out onto a terrace.

The
view down into the gardens was breathtaking, but he didn’t give her much
chance to look at it. He drew her down the stairs into the gardens themselves,
which had, as he had told her, been lit up with fairy-lanterns. The wave of
perfume that washed over her told her that the roses for which Longacre was famous
were in full bloom. He took her down one of the paths to a stone
bench—still within sight of the terrace, but not a straight
line-of-sight. She carefully arranged her skirt, and gingerly took a seat. With
a sigh of relief, he sat beside her.

“I
was horribly afraid I had offended you past forgiveness,” were the first
words out of his mouth. “I never meant to. When you didn’t come
back—”