Phoenix and Ashes (5 page)

Alison
hadn’t felt that way, but the pantry still had no lock on it, and while
Mrs.Bennett had lived here, it hadn’t needed one. The cook had kept a
strict accounting of foodstuffs, but that wasn’t why there was no
pilferage. Mrs.Bennett had kept everyone so well fed that none of the other
servants had seen the need to raid the stores.

With
Mrs.Bennett gone, however, Alison had changed the spell that bound Eleanor to
keep her from the stores. Howse, of course, never appeared in the kitchen, and
wasn’t going short either, since she shared Alison’s meals.

But
Eleanor had heard all the servants’ gossip, before they’d given
notice, and she knew all the tricks for stealing food now that she hadn’t
known back before Alison came. So if she had even one chance at the
pantry—well, she knew how and what to purloin so that even if Alison
inspected, it would not be apparent that anyone had been into the stores.

What
a thought! No more going to bed hungry—or feeling sick from eating food
that had “gone off” and been rejected by Alison because that was
all that there
was
for her to eat. Or at least, there would be none of
that
if
she could bend the spell enough to get into the pantry at
least once.

And
suddenly, with a great leap of her heart, she realized that within a few days
or a week at most, she would have the house to herself, as she always did in
spring and fall. The annual pilgrimage to London was coming, when Alison and
her daughters went to obtain their spring and summer wardrobes. Always before
this, she had found herself restricted to the kitchen and her own room entirely
for those few days. But perhaps
this
spring—

The
sound of fashionable shoes with high heels clicking on hard stone broke into
her reverie, and she quickly bent to her scrubbing. When Alison appeared in the
doorway, striking a languid pose, Eleanor looked up, stony-faced, but did not
stop her scrubbing. But she was much more conscious of the fire on the hearth
than usual, and to keep her face still, she concentrated on it. The warmth
felt—supportive. As if there was a friend here in the room with her. She
concentrated on that.

Alison
wore a lovely purple velvet tea-gown with ornaments of a cobwebby gray lace,
with sleeves caught into cuffs at the wrist. As usual, her every dark hair was
in place—and there was a tiny smile on her ageless face. She made a tiny
gesture towards her stepdaughter, and Eleanor fought to keep her expression
unchanging, as she saw, more clearly than she ever had before, a lance of muddy
yellow light shoot from the tip of that finger towards her, and briefly
illuminate her.

But
she also saw, with a sense of shock, something entirely new. As that light
struck her, there appeared a kind of cage of twisted and tangled, darkly
glowing cords that pent her in. The cords absorbed the light, writhed into a
new configuration, then faded away, and Eleanor sat up straighter, just as she
would have if she had felt the compulsion to scrub ebbing.

“That’s
enough, Ellie,” Alison said. “The laundry’s been left at the
tradesman’s entrance. Go get it and put the linens away, then leave the
rest for Howse.”

“Yes,
ma’am,” Eleanor said, casting her eyes down, and thinking, wishing
with all her might, Tell me you’re going to London! Go to London! Stay
for a long time, a fortnight, or more! Go to London!

And
she bit her lip again to stifle the impulse to giggle, when Alison added
thoughtfully, “I believe we’ll be going on our London trip in two
days, if the weather hold fine. You’ll be a good girl while we’re
gone, and do all your work, won’t you, Ellie.”

“Yes,
ma’am,” she replied, getting to her feet, slowly, and brushing off
her apron, using both actions as an excuse to keep her head down.

“Go
tend the laundry.” And once again, out of the corner of her eye, she saw
a lance of grayish yellow light strike that tangle of “cords” and
make it visible for a moment, saw the cords writhe into a new configuration.
But this time she felt something, the faint ghost of the sort of compulsion she
usually experienced, driving her towards the hall and the tradesmen’s
entrance. She allowed it to direct her, because the last thing she wanted was
for Alison to guess that her magic was no longer controlling her stepdaughter
completely.

As
she folded and put away the linens, though, she wondered—what had
happened? And why now?

I’d
better take advantage of it while I have the chance, she decided, finally. Who
knows how long this respite will last?

The
usual chores occupied her until dinner, more floor-scrubbing, bath-drawing,
tidying and dusting and dishwashing, while Howse tended to her own duties, and
Alison and her daughters went out to pay calls or do their “work.”
It wasn’t what Eleanor would have called work—sitting in meetings
debating over what sort of parcels should be sent to “our boys in the
trenches,” or paying visits to the recovering wounded officers in the
hospital to “help” them by writing letters for them or reading to
them. Alison and her daughters did not deign to “help” mere
unranked soldiers.

Eleanor
heard them return and go upstairs to change for dinner. That was when she
prepared what she was able to cook, then laid the table and waited in the
kitchen until summoned by the bell. Then she served the four courses to the
four diners in the candlelit dining room with a fresh, white apron over her
plain dress. It was ham tonight, from the Swan, preceded by a delicate
consommé from a tin, a beetroot salad, and ending with a fine tart from
the Browns’ bakery. Though this was one of the more difficult times of
the day, as she served food she was not allowed to touch and watched the girls
deliberately spoil what they left on their plates with slatherings of salt and
pepper so that she could not even salvage it for herself, tonight she comforted
herself with the knowledge that
her
dinner was not going to be as
meager as it had been for far too long—

While
Alison and the girls were lingering over their tart, she went upstairs and
turned down the beds, picked up the scattered garments that they had left on
the floor and laid them ready for Howse to put away. She swept out the rooms
for the last time today, then went back down to the kitchen to wait for them to
leave the table. When she heard them going back up to their rooms for the
evening, she went into the dining room again to clear the table and return the
ham and a few other items to the pantry. But she smiled as she did so, because
once she had closed the pantry door, she made a little test of opening the door
again—and found that she could.

Ha
!

It
was her turn to linger now, and she did so over the dishes, over cleaning the
kitchen, until she heard all four sets of heels going up the stairs to their
rooms. Then she waited, staring into the fire, until the house quieted. Oddly,
tonight there seemed to be more than a
suggestion
of creatures dancing
in the flames—once or twice she blinked and shook her head, sure she had
also seen eyes where no eyes could be.

And
then she stole to the pantry, and opened it again. There was a faint feeling of
resistance, but nothing more. And the culinary Aladdin’s cave was open to
her plundering.

Now,
she knew this house as no one else did, and she knew where all of the hiding
places in it were. One, in particular, was secure to herself alone. There was a
hidden hatch under the servants’ stair that for some reason her father
had never shown Alison. Perhaps it was because Eleanor had been the one to
discover it, and as a child had used it to store her secret treasures, and
sometimes even hid in it when she had been frightened by storms. The hatch
disclosed a set of narrow stone stairs that led down into a tiny stone cellar
that
he
thought was a priest’s hole, perhaps because of the
little wooden crucifix, about the size to fit on the end of a rosary, they had
found on the floor of the place. Eleanor had always thought it was a place
where Royalist spies had hidden; perhaps it had served both functions.

Here
Eleanor kept those few things she didn’t want to fall into Alison’s
hands, such as most of the books that she had been using to study for the
Oxford entrance examinations, other volumes she managed to purloin in the
course of cleaning, and her mother’s jewelry. Alison and her daughters
didn’t know about the jewelry, and never missed the books, which didn’t
much surprise Eleanor, as they seemed singularly uninterested in reading. Now
the place was going to serve another purpose, as the repository for her stolen
bounty of food, in case Alison managed to strengthen her magic, and there was
not another chance for a while.

For
the next hour or so she went back and forth between the pantry and the closet,
never carrying much at a time, so that if she heard Alison or the girls coming,
she could hide what she had. Jam, jelly, and marmalade, two bags of
caster-sugar, some tinned meats and bacon, tinned cream and condensed milk, and
many more imperishable things went into that cellar that night. She was very
careful not to take the
last
of anything, and in fact to take nothing
that was not present in abundance, removing items from the back of the shelf
rather than the front. By the time she was finished, she had a small wealth of
foodstuffs hidden away that made her giddy with pleasure.

Then
she cut herself a generous slice of ham and a piece of buttered white bread to
go with her soup, cut a little slice of the tart, and added milk and sugar to
tea made with fresh leaves. And she had the first filling meal she had gotten
since Mrs.Bennett left. She felt
so
good, and
so
sleepy with
content, in fact, that she didn’t bother to go up to her own room.
Instead, she cleaned up every last trace of her illicit meal, and pulled the
pallet she used in cold weather out of its cupboard, spreading it out in front
of the fire.

And as she fell
asleep, she smiled to think she saw sleepy eyes blinking with contented
satisfaction back at her from the coals.

March 10, 1917
First London General Hospital

AT THIS TIME OF DAY,
the ward was full of people; relatives hovering over their boys—though
some of the boys were almost old enough to be Reggie’s father, had Devlin
Fenyx still been alive. Reggie was in the officer’s wards, which meant
that he had the luxury of being in the hospital building, and not outside in a
tent as the enlisted men were. He usually didn’t have any visitors, since
his mother was afraid to travel alone and to her, “with a servant”
qualified as “alone.” Today, however, was different. Two of the men
from 11 Squadron were on leave and had come to visit.

“Dashed
handsome young fillies they’ve got hovering about you, Reg,” said
Lt. Steven Stewart, enviously. One of the “handsome young
fillies”—a VAD called Ivy Grove—clearly overheard him. She
blushed, bit her lip, and hurried off. Small wonder; almost any pilot got the
hero-treatment from the women, and Steven was an infernally handsome fellow,
who still hadn’t shaken the “Oxford manner.”

Reginald
Fenyx could not have cared what the VAD nurses—or any others—looked
like. All he cared about was that they were
there
, they talked to him,
kept his mind on other things during the day—that they noticed when he
was about to “go off,” and came over on any pretext to keep the
shakes away. Because when they were gone—

Tommy
Arnolds, Reggie’s flight mechanic and a wizard with the Bristol aircraft,
wasn’t nearly as subtle as Steven was; he stared after Ivy’s trim
figure with raw longing. He was a short, bandy-legged bloke, but what he could
do with a plane was enough to make the pilot lucky enough to get him weep with
joy when he took a bird that had been in Tommy’s hands up. “Blimey,”
Tommy said contemplatively. “Wish they’d send a trim bit like
that
over, ‘stead of those old ‘orses—”

“They
do send the trim bits over, Tommy,” Steven said, fingering his trim
moustache with a laugh. “But the old horses keep them out of
your
way. Your reputation precedes you, old man!”

Reggie
managed a real smile, as Tommy preened a little, but his heart wasn’t in
it. They’d generously spent five hours of leave time here with him, but
there was a limit to their generosity.

“And
speaking of trim bits—” Steven tweaked the hem of his already
perfect tunic. Steven, like Reggie, did not have to rely on the fifty-pound
uniform allowance for
his
outfitting, and like Reggie had been before
the crash, he was never less than impeccably turned out. “If Tommy and I
are going to find ourselves a bit of company on this leave, we’d better
push off. Can’t have the PBIs showing up the Flying Corps, what?”

“Thanks
for turning up, fellows,” Reggie said, fervently. “Give my best to
the rest of the lads. But not
too
soon.”

“You
can bet on that!” Steven laughed, and he and Tommy sketched salutes and
sauntered out of the ward, winking at Ivy, the VAD girl, as they passed her,
making her blush furiously.

Reggie
lay back against his pillows, feeling exhausted by the effort to keep up the
charade that he was perfectly all right, aside from being knocked about a bit.
It was grand seeing the fellows, but—it was easier when people he knew
weren’t
here and he didn’t have to pretend. He had more in common with the lad in
the next bed over, a mere second lieutenant by the name of William West, for
all that West was PBI and Reggie was—
had been
—a pilot, a
captain, and an ace at that. All the shellshock victims were in this end of the
ward, together. Sometimes Reggie thought, cynically, it was so that their screaming
in nightmares and their shaking fits by day wouldn’t bother anyone else.