Phoenix and Ashes

This was the first time she had dared try anything with the spell binding her to the house. Every time she meddled with one of Alison's spells in order to bend it even a little and change the conditions by which it held, she got this sensation. Sarah said it was because she wasn't yet able to get power from outside herself.

The spells guarding the pantry were weak, easy to bend enough that she could walk through them just by sheer willpower, because Alison had not troubled herself about them very much. Because this particular piece of magic had been laid using her flesh, blood, and bone, it was one of the strongest spells in the house, and if she actually broke it, no matter how far away her stepmother was, Alison would feel the backlash and know what had happened.

She had asked Sarah why they couldn't simply dig up the stone and destroy the finger (or what was left of it), but Sarah had blanched. "Don't even think of trying that," the witch had said earnestly. "It would kill both of us. The layers of protection she has on that stone would fell a charging elephant. It's not like in a fairy tale, child, where all you need do is find the thing and be rid of it. No magician worth his salt would put his major spells in place without protections."

That left the difficult task of insinuating around the protections and the spell itself, of twisting and distorting the original spell to give Eleanor more freedom, until the spell snapped back to its original form. Sarah could show Eleanor how to work the magic that would lengthen Eleanor's invisible chain for a few hours, but Eleanor was going to have to learn how to actually perform the magic for herself.

Her shielding circle of protection was small, just big enough to hold her and the stone. It was a good thing she wasn't claustrophobic; she could actually feel the boundaries of the circle pressing in on her.

There must be something missing here. Why can't I finish this thing? She stared down at the stone, and tried to remember what had let her get into the pantry—

I was angry. Would that help? She let some of her anger and impatience trickle down into it along with the power. And that turned the trick; the first hints of a sullen glow appeared on the dull, grainy surface of the rock, then the glyph came slowly to life, as if painted in lines that burned with malevolence.

She knew now it would make her ill merely to touch it with a finger. Fortunately, she wouldn't have to.

With twigs of oak, ash and thorn bound together into a wand, she traced the lines of the glyph—and the closer she got to the end of her tracing, the harder it was, physically, to move the wand, the more the nasty thing faded back into the stone, blurring. . . .

It was as if the air had become thick and gluey, and the stone itself was trying to take hold of the end of the wand and keep it from moving any further. The last few fractions of an inch took all her strength.

The moment she finished the tracing, all resistance to her movement vanished, the glowing glyph evaporated, and she bent over her own knees, panting with exertion. Her arms trembled and ached, and she felt as if she had been trying to push Sisyphus's stone up the hill in hell.

But it was worth the effort—for a few hours, at least, she would be free to leave the house now.

She took the sprig of rosemary that she had plucked from the garden, broke it in half, and laid half of it on the stone, putting the other half inside her bodice where she could smell it. For as long as the rosemary was unwithered, she would be free of the spell. The withering of the two sprigs of herb would be her signal that she had about a quarter-hour to get back inside the boundaries set about the house. Sarah had not been able to tell her what would happen if she didn't get back in time; "I know you'll be pulled back, and all I can say," she had opined, "is that you'll regret it, for fair."

Thinking about her stepmother's temper, and her pleasure in the pain of others, Eleanor decided that she didn't want to chance it. Tucking the wand into a pocket along the seam of her skirt where it would be hidden, she dispelled her protective circle and stood up.

"Well done," said Sarah, sounding quite pleased. "Now, since you've done this for the first time, you'll be fair useless for magic today—so what would you like to be doing?"

"But how am I going to learn anything—" she began, feeling alarm.

Sarah shushed her, shaking her head. "Don't get yourself in a pother; after this, 'twill be much easier each time you free yourself.

You've made the spell answer to your will now. You've put your bit of a brick in the door; it can't entirely close now. D'ye see?"

She nodded; she did see. "Then—Sarah, can we get help somehow?" She swallowed hard. If only someone would believe her in the village—

But Sarah shook her head. "There's no magicians in the village at all but me, and no one else is going to see past the spells she's got in place about you to keep people from recognizing you or believing you." She bit her lower lip. "Well, someone who was completely shielded would, but my dear—someone with that sort of shielding would be a Master. Those spells were set with your blood too, and I don't know where or how."

Eleanor closed her eyes for a moment to swallow down her bitter disappointment. "I don't remember anything," she admitted.

"You wouldn't. She probably set them outside the house, with the rags she used to clean up the kitchen after she took off your finger," Sarah said. "Otherwise people wouldn't be thinking that you're up at Oxford. Alison's set the spell to make anyone as sees you think you're some daft little servant girl she got through some charity place."

"That's what the servants we used to have thought," she said, slowly. "So even if I could make people understand what I'm saying to them, they are still going to think I'm mad." If she hadn't spent the last three years in complete misery, she might have been thrown into despair by this crushing of her hopes. "Well, look at me!" She laughed bitterly, because no one would ever have recognized the old Eleanor Robinson, pampered and petted, in the work-worn, shabby creature she was now. "Even without a spell, no one would know me! People don't look past clothing much, do they?"

Sarah shook her head. "I'm sorry, love, no they don't. She doesn't need a spell to make you look like a scullery maid, does she?"

Eleanor felt the sting of tears in her eyes, and rubbed at them angrily with the back of her hand. This was a lesson in humility she hadn't thought she needed, and yet—when she thought of all the times she had looked right past anyone who was dressed as a low servant, expecting only to hear, at most, a low-voiced and humble "Morning, miss," paying no attention whatsoever to anything else that might come out of that person's mouth—

Oh, she had plenty of excuses for herself! That she couldn't help how she'd been brought up, that even the old vicar had on occasion preached sermons about knowing one's place—

Yes, but— Just because you were taught something didn't make it right.

She looked down at her work-worn hands. They were a bit better now, knuckles not quite so swollen, cracks healing, but she would never lose the muscle and the callus and have dainty lady's hands again. She might as well be one of them now, because that was what she looked like, and that was what everyone who saw her would think she was. Servants. The lower classes. Inconsequential, to be silent until spoken to, never to venture an opinion, much less disagree with what their betters said. Of course, they were too ignorant to know what was good for them. That was why God had placed others in authority over them, wasn't it? And the hierarchy of master over servant didn't end there, of course, because the servants themselves had their own hierarchy of greater and lesser, each class lording it over the one beneath. And on what justification? Because you were born into a particular family!

"Gad, Sarah, why don't they all rise up in the night and slit our throats?" she cried, looking up.

Sarah didn't seem at all confused by the outburst. "I'm told." she said dryly, "That's what they're doing in Roosha. So the papers say. So Mad Ross says."

She was distracted for a moment. "Ross Ashley is still here in the village? Trying to make us all socialists?" Even before the war Ross had been notorious in Broom, with his membership in the Clarion Cycling Club, his socialist pamphlets and lectures, going about the country on his bicycle and standing up on soapboxes at church fetes and country fairs and singing "The Red Flag" at the top of his lungs at every opportunity.

Sarah nodded, half wryly, half in sympathy. "Oh, aye. Got conscripted, like everyone else, discharged last year, lost half his left hand when his rifle exploded, and lucky it didn't take all of it and his face, too. Got a quarter interest in a bicycle shop now with Alan Vocksmith. Alan's rifle blew up too; he lost an eye."

The distraction served its purpose; she lost that first, hot rush of anger. She looked up at Sarah, setting her jaw. "If I can ever break this magic, maybe I'll help him," she said. "But first, I have to break free."

"That you do." Sarah stood up and brushed off her apron. "Let's make the first start."

Her first feeling when she walked out of the garden gate was of disbelief, combined with a rush of such elation that she felt giddy. She had not been outside of those walls for so long that the commonplace street seemed as exotic as Timbuktu. She was free! At long last, she was free, free to stand on the street, free to wander where she wanted, free to—

But as she looked up and down the street—and just across the street from the garden gate, where the largest of the village pubs stood—she got the feeling that something was not right.

But what was it?

"Wait—" she said to Sarah, standing beside the garden wall, staring around her, trying to identify what it was that made the familiar street seem so unfamiliar. There were no children playing, but that was scarcely it; first of all, it was cold again, overcast and raw, and second, it was a school day. Little ones wouldn't be outside on a nasty day like this. No, it wasn't the absence of children—

Then, suddenly, as the postman came around the corner, and she saw, not trousers but a skirt, a postwoman, she understood with a hideous feeling of shock what it was that was bothering her.

There were no men.

There were no men anywhere to be seen.

Not opening up the pub, not making deliveries, not making repairs, not carrying the post.

And suddenly, all those notices in the papers that she read without really understanding them became solid and real in her mind. Conscription age dropped to seventeen. Conscription age raised to fifty. No deferments for only sons, for fathers of young children, for students. No deferment for religious objections. No deferments except for what the War Department considered to be "vital work in the national interest" and severe physical impairment. Go to War or go to prison: that was your choice.

England was a nation of women now, sprinkled with old men, boys, and those whose wounds were too serious, too incapacitating to allow them back into the army.

She followed Sarah, numb, feeling a kind of cold chill creeping over her as she passed the small street of the shops and saw women behind the counters, women making the deliveries. And in the shops—the butcher shop had hardly anything on display, most of the bread in the bakery was the same, heavy, rye and oat bread that she ate, and there were more bare places in the tiny grocery than there were goods. When she contrasted those shelves with the ones in Alison's cellar and pantry, she was appalled. Where was Alison getting her treats? Not in Broom—

Everywhere there was a kind of emotional pall that had nothing to do with the weather. It was as if there was no hope anymore in Broom—

But for all of that, the little talk that she overheard was not about the war, not about the lost loved ones. That bleak December when her father had died, that was all that anyone could talk about. Who had gone, where they were, that the war would surely soon be over— hushed whispers about the slaughter at Mons and other places, with glances over the shoulder as if to talk of such things would bring disaster down upon one's own loved ones, or as if it were treasonous to even suggest that things were not going well. Teas and entertainments were being planned for boys in training at nearby camps, there was talk of volunteer work, of parties to knit scarves and roll bandages—

There was none of that now. Just sharp-voiced complaints about the price of butter and the impossibility of getting sugar—of having to make do on thin rations, and the talk of further privations. Of the impossibility of getting servants, of the only help at the farm being Land Girls. Of longing for spring "when at least we'll have our veg garden and won't feel the pinch so—"

Ordinary talk, unless you heard the barely repressed hysteria or depression under the words, the attempt to cover up hopelessness with chatter about nothing. She ghosted along in Sarah's wake, and now saw the signs of actual, physical privation in some places, of sunken cheek and waistbands too large, and realized she wasn't just seeing the effect of lack of luxuries, she was seeing real hunger.

And if that were so, in the country, where people were likely enough skirting the rationing by hiding pigs in the forest, geese and ducks on the farm-ponds, chickens, pigeons, and rabbits in the garden, reporting less milk than their cows actually gave—what was it like in the city?

She felt battered, actually battered, by revelation after cruel revelation. She couldn't have managed to speak to any of these familiar strangers, even if she hadn't been walled off from them by appearance and spell. She didn't know them. These were not her people. They were some odd breed of changeling that looked superficially like her old neighbors, but who were mere shells, filled with despair, over which a cracking veneer of commonplace was held in place by a fading will to pretend that everything was all right.

Sarah glanced soberly at her from time to time, but said nothing. She only led the way to her little cottage, propped up on either side by larger Tudor buildings, and opened the door to let them both inside, hanging up her plain brown wool shawl on the peg beside the door.

Once inside, Eleanor put her back to the wall and stared at Sarah incredulously. "Why didn't you tell me?" she blurted, wanting nothing more than to bolt back to the safety of her kitchen where the privations of the years had not penetrated, and where she could pretend that nothing outside the walls had changed.

"Would you have believed me?" Sarah countered, stirring up the fire in her tiny fireplace and putting another log on it. "Could I have told you in any way that you would have believed? You've been seeing some of the papers, now and again, I'm sure."

Eleanor collapsed into the old wooden chair that Sarah indicated, hands limply in her lap. "But—" she said, helplessly. "But that doesn't tell you—"

"Because no one wants the truth to be printed in the papers," Sarah said cruelly. "If they did, it'd be like Roosha all over again. Or so them fellows in the government think."

"How many?" Eleanor asked, feeling numb.

"How many what?" Sarah responded.

"I didn't see any men—" she began. Sarah nodded. "Most of them—well; we think they're still alive, though some haven't been heard from in a fair while," she said, sadly. "But then again, it's one thing to come home on leave when you live in London or you've ready in your pocket. 'Tis quite another when all your pay comes home, and you haven't the money for a train ticket when they give you leave." She sighed. "I don't know but what you'll not recognize the names— Matt Brennan lost a leg. Ross Ashley you know lost his hand and Alan Vocksmith his eye. Michael Kabon—that's the butcher that came in after you were bespelled, finding we hadn't one—he's all scarred up outside and in from gas. Jack Samburs lost an arm, Eric Whitcomb his wits. Then the ones as won't be home at all—" She took a deep breath. "They're on the monument that got put up at the Church. Bruce Gulken, Thomas Golding, John McGregor, Daniel Heistand, Jock Williamson, William Williamson, Daniel Linden, Harry Brown the baker, and Sean Newton. Sean's the latest; his mum just heard last week."

Each name fell like a stone into the silence. So—it was Pamela Brown at the bakery now, not her husband. Eleanor really hadn't known most of them, but Willie Williamson had been one year older and one of the boys who had hero-worshipped Reggie Fenyx, and Sean Newton had used to ask her to dance at village fetes. Daniel Heistand had been another of Reggie's devoted followers, and had always frowned at her so fiercely when she was the one who got to pull the wheel-chocks away. . . .

Not coming home. Or maimed so badly no one would put them back out again. Horrible. Horrible. What was that, a third of the men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five in this village? Sean— Sean had been his widowed mother's only child. She shook her head; it hurt, even to think about. "It's never going to end, is it?" she asked, faintly. "It's just going to go on and on and on until there are no men left in England—"

Sarah only sighed, and closed her eyes, her shoulders hunched as if she found the weight of it all too much to bear. "I don't pretend to see the future," she replied, sadly. "But the present is nasty enough to worry about. Even Mad Ross come home all grim and quiet. No more riding about, hardly ever makes a speech, unless it's in the pub and he's had some courage in him. The ones as came home, well, they don't talk to their wives and they don't talk to their sweethearts, they just sit in pub and stare at wall. Shellshocked, they call it. I call it that they've seen too much to bear and stay entirely sane. They don't talk about tomorrows, either, and a man what won't plan for tomorrow is a man who believes he won't see it. That's what you feel on the village; that's what come home from the war with the ones that did come home. Nobody thinks about tomorrow if they can help it. Nobody. Church and chapel, they're both alike. Stopped praying for victory, they have; now they just pray for it to be over and have no faith it ever will. I s'pose it's easier to whinge about not having beef and the cost of butter than it is to have hope."

Eleanor shuddered. "What is going on over there?" she whispered. "What is it?"

"I don't know," Sarah said, staring deeply into the fire on her hearth, as if searching there for answers. "But I'll tell you this much. Whatever it is, it eats a man's soul. They talk to each other, them as came home, but never to the rest of us."

She had thought to walk about the village; now she couldn't bear the idea. "I'm going to see if I can get as far as the aeroplane field at Longacre," she said, standing up. "I'll do it now, while the spell's still fresh."

Sarah just nodded. "Mind the wind," was all she said. "You can borrow that shawl by the door, if you'd like."

Eleanor hadn't thought to bring a shawl when they left the kitchen, and for a moment, she looked at the plain, shabby garment with the disfavor the old Eleanor might have—

Oh, who and what am I to be so picky? she asked herself. "Thank you, Sarah, if it's no inconvenience—"

"I won't be going out before you're back," Sarah said with certainty. Eleanor paused with one hand on the door.

"Sarah—what is it you do?" she asked, bewildered. "For a living?" She couldn't bear it if Sarah was teetering on the edge of poverty.

Sarah laughed. "What, no one ever told you? I'm the district nurse and licensed midwife! Never a doctor between here and Stratford almost, especially now, so I do for all of those that need simple tending." She nodded at Eleanor's silent "oh" of understanding. "It's what my sort does now. Hide in plain sight. People call me 'witch,' they're joking— and I've license to cure as much of their ills as I'm able. I do well enough. Better than some—most of my patients are farm folk, and barter is better for them than money, so I get some of that butter and beef no one else can find. And it's a help to have enough of the magic that I have a good sense of when I'll be needed, and often as not, where. So shoo—off with you, find out how far you can go. Nobody'll call me out until after dark, when you had best be back in your kitchen."

"Thank you," Eleanor told her, then wrapped the heavy shawl around herself, pulling it up over her head, and went back out onto the street. It smelled pleasantly of lavender, and was softer than it looked. No one gave her a second look; she had the feeling this was part of the magic her stepmother had put on her. People wouldn't look at her, probably, unless they actually bumped into her.

Well, that was one thing working like a slavey all these years had done for her—a walk she would have quailed at four years ago was nothing. She set off up the road, heading for Longacre, to see how far she could get before she was stopped.

The village was tiny; five minutes, and she was off cobbles and onto hard-packed earth, rutted by farm carts and marked by hooves, passing between farm fields she had known all her life. Hedgerows showed a lack of tending that would have been shocking three years ago. It was too early for planting, but the meadows were full of cattle and sheep, the only creatures that looked to be prospering at prewar levels. As she passed the Gulkens' dairy-farm—Theresa's now, alone— she heard Louis Blue's shrill whistle, and saw the cattle raise their heads and begin to amble in the direction of the milking-barn. So Louis, probably around about sixty now, was old enough to escape conscription; though she didn't know Theresa except as the supplier of butter and milk, she still felt an absent sort of relief. Hard enough to find yourself a widow, but how could one woman keep up a busy dairy farm by herself? Louis, however, she knew from her rambles about as a child; always with a kitten in his pocket, for cats and dairy farms went together like clotted cream and jam. He could never bear to drown the kittens, and was always looking for homes for them. The thought of him going off to the horror that this war must be was an obscenity, he, who couldn't bear to kill a kitten. At least he'd been spared that.

Beyond the dairy-farm was the Scroggins' orchard, and again, with relief, she saw another bit of normality. Brian Scroggins was out, checking the apple trees, with his wife Tracy in the next row, and Brianna and Zach picking up every twig of fallen applewood they could carry. Everyone liked a bit of applewood on their fire, and applewood-smoked bacon and ham were a treat; no wasting in Brian Scroggins' orchard. But he couldn't be fifty. How had he escaped being called up? Oh— as Brian plodded like a donkey along the row of trees, head down, she remembered. He was so short-sighted as to be almost blind; Tracy did anything that required reading and writing. Just as well. If anyone dared to call up the maker of the best scrumpy in the county, she didn't doubt there'd be an uprising. . . .

She trudged along the road, pulling the shawl out of the grip of the wind. The lovely weather a few days ago had been a lie, it had. There might even be snow tonight. Or if rain, it would be ice-edged.

Across from the Scroggins was the farm of Joanne and Michael Van, and here it was painfully clear that all was not as normal. There was no sign of Michael, who surely must be in France now, and all of the figures picking stones in the field were female. One was probably Joanne, but no Broom native had red hair of the sort that flamed under one of the scarves, nor the midnight-black bob of another of the girls. Were these Land Girls, young women who volunteered to work on farms and take the place of the absent farmers? If so, they were Eleanor's first sight of the breed, and for all the complaints of how they were lazy or vamps out to tease the country boys, they seemed to know their job well enough, and they were sensibly clothed in heavy coats, boots, and long, warm skirts.

Finally, the last farm before the fields belonging to Longacre began, was the Samburs' sheep farm. And as she trudged up the road, she saw Sarah hurrying after a male figure with one sleeve pinned up to his chest, supporting himself with a stick, following two sheepdogs with more determination than steadiness. But she didn't call after him, did Sarah, nor did she take over the direction of the sheepdogs. She seemed more like one of the dogs herself, waiting to see what her husband wanted, then doing it, without a word, just as silent, just as faithful. You do for yourself, she seemed to say, until you can't do no more. I know you have to.

It made tears spring into Eleanor's eyes, and she had to turn away and hide her face in the shawl. The last thing she wanted to do was let either of them catch this sign of her pity. They likely got more than enough of it as it was.

But neither of them looked in her direction as she hurried past, the cold, raw wind plastering her skirts to her legs. All of his attention was on the dogs and the sheep, and all of hers was on him.

Eleanor passed their farmhouse, and more of their fields, dotted with sheep, who raised their heads and looked at her with their foolish faces when she passed.

And then—the hedgerows became fences, marking the beginning of the fields of Longacre.

She paused for a moment at the side of the road; these were grazing fields too, but for horses, not cattle or sheep, the hunters of Longacre Park. The grass was thick and rank here, for the horses were gone, gone to the war, to pull gun-carriages, not leap fences in the hunt. Only off in the distance were three old, gray-nosed fellows, too old to be of use across the Channel.

She had gotten this far. Could she possibly get so far as the field where Reggie had kept his aeroplane?

She trudged on, past the horse field, past one of the woods kept stocked with pheasant for the shooting season. Was there still a shooting season? Did anyone come out to hunt, or were they all hunting men now in the trenches? And then, the second field; she climbed over the stile and down into it. The grass was up to her knees, but this was it; this was Reggie's field.

She could walk here, just.

Trembling a little, and feeling the pull start, she paused beside the old shed, empty and falling to pieces, where the aeroplane had lived. No sign of it now, beyond a discarded and broken propeller, some bits and bobs of wing-struts and a half-rotten roll of canvas inside. She lingered as long as she could, but the pull homewards became more insistent with each passing minute, and when she pulled out the rosemary sprig, it was clearly beginning to wither.

But she turned her back on the place and headed back in the growing gloom with no real sense of disappointment. She had gotten this far—and this place held nothing but melancholy, as sad and abandoned as the places in the village where the men used to gather and socialize.

Enough despair for one day. Time to go back to Sarah, and try to scrape up enough hope to carry on her own fight.

8

April 3, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

"NOW WE MUST PLAY THESE cards slowly and carefully, girls," Alison said, as the three of them sat over a light luncheon of potted-shrimp sandwiches and teacakes. The girls had taken up smoking while in London, and were indulging in malicious enjoyment as they ruined their leftovers with ash and stubs. So much for the stepsister grazing on what was left. Oat-bread and bean soup was more than good enough for her.

Alison reflected for a moment on the quiet occupant of the kitchen. That wretched girl Eleanor didn't seem any the worse for having been left on her own for longer than usual, and in fact, the absence seemed to have made her more subdued. This was a pleasant development. More than that, it now seemed more likely that Alison would find a way to render her into a helpless object without having to resort to any of Locke's complicated schemes.

While she had initially been in favor of the idea, Alison dislike complication intensely. The simpler the plan, the better, for the less there was that was likely to go wrong. She didn't like the idea of bringing in a stranger, who certainly would be a criminal, and thus, unreliable. Criminals often thought they would be clever and turn on the one who had hired them.

The more she thought about it, the more she began to believe that in dealing with the girl Eleanor, it was probably better not to bring Locke or any of his friends into it at all. After all, she was an Earth Master. There ought to be some way for an Earth Master to damage someone's mind irreparably. And much as she would enjoy Eleanor's pain, there were other ways to extract the same pleasure.

She took a reflective sip of her tea, and returned her attention to the subject at hand.

"By now, the first letter will have been received up at Longacre Park," she continued, "But we must not give an appearance of being too eager to make this connection. The opposite, in fact; the last thing we wish is to make it seem as if we are pursuing the Fenyx family. Remember, I allegedly married far below me, and I might find that fact uncomfortable. In fact, we must appear to be—"

"Diffident?" suggested Carolyn. "Shamefaced?" was Lauralee's choice.

"Diffident," Alison replied decidedly, which made Carolyn smirk and Lauralee pout a trifle. "These days there is nothing shameful about repairing a great line's fortunes by marrying into trade. The only shame comes about when one tries to push in before one is invited, or to use one's name and connections as a kind of commodity." She pursed her lips; frowning only made the brow wrinkle. "You see, Lauralee, we must appear to be modest above all. We must appear to be reticent about taking advantage of this tentative connection. You two should look hopeful and eager but say nothing until we are actually established and accepting invitations. And when the invitations arrive, you must be—"

"Retiring and modest," Carolyn supplied, with a glance at Lauralee. "No flirtations. Friendly wallflowers, so to speak."

"Exactly right." Alison bestowed a smile of favor on her elder-born. "You must appear to be grateful without fawning, and without any hint that you intend to take advantage of the new situation."

"New situation?" Lauralee laughed, and flicked her cigarette ash into the remains of her buttered toast. "Any parties we're invited to will be rather thin on male company! Unless you want us to cozy up to grandfathers and schoolboys."

Alison stared at her in astonishment. " 'Cozy up!' Where did you get that expression? You've been going to too many American cinema shows, young lady—"

"Well—" Lauralee flushed, and looked at her in defiance Alison quelled the defiance with another look.

"No 'well' about it." Alison sketched a sign in the air, and Lauralee squealed in pained surprise as her mother administered a mild correction. "Let that be a lesson to you: no slang, no impudence. You will maintain impeccable manners from this point on. No, you will not be courting old men or schoolboys. You will be comforting Reginald Fenyx, who is returning to Longacre in extremely fragile condition on medical leave. You will be compassionate, understanding, and willing to listen to or do anything he asks, which likely won't be much. You will become indispensible to him. And I don't care which of you does it, either, so long as one of you gets him to the point where he cannot do without you, at which point we will ensure he asks for your hand. I will be assisting considerably, of course," she added. "Let's just say he'll be plagued by things he would rather not see, and the only time he will be free of them will be in your presence."

Lauralee understood immediately; Carolyn took a moment or two of thought, and the hint, from her older sister, of "he's shellshocked."

It was Alison's considered opinion at that point, that regardless of Carolyn's superior looks and predilection for flirtation, Lauralee was probably going to win this particular contest. "That will be up to the two of you," she said serenly. "I will supply the structure."

"Which is all any good daughter could ask, Mama," said Carolyn sweetly. Lauralee leveled a withering glance at her, but said nothing. Alison was pleased. With a contest of rivalry set up between the two, things should proceed apace, as soon as Reggie made his appearance back home.

"Now, I have something important that I must tend to," she said, and got to her feet. "A small matter on behalf of the Lodge and the Department combined. I will take the auto, and I should be back by dark. Has that odd butcher sent anything of my order? Or the tavern?"

Carolyn shook her head. "Just notes that there is no meat to be had today, so no roast and no ham."

"Have the girl do something with potted pheasant then," Alison said, absently. "Get it out of the pantry for her."

"Certainly, Mama." Carolyn always enjoyed the opportunity to humiliate Eleanor, even when it meant having to set foot in the kitchen.

Eleanor still wasn't much of a cook. Fortunately, there wasn't much that the girl could do to ruin a potted pheasant "I will see you at dinner, then," she repeated, and went out, jingling her keys.

It was a distinct inconvenience to be required to drive herself, but there wasn't a man to chauffeur to be had, and Alison had learned to cope. The auto was less than comfortable on the country roads around Broom, but a carriage would have been just as bad, and at least the weather hadn't left the roads nothing but muck or kicking up choking clouds of dust. She needed her duster and her hat and goggles though. This time it was going to be a considerable drive—into Stratford.

Even now, three years into the war, Stratford-on-Avon was an attraction for visitors, who came to see Anne Hathaway's cottage and other Shakespearian landmarks. That most of them were elderly or female was of no matter. Strangers, even strangers with accents, occasioned no undue attention. There was an industry—no longer thriving, but still in place—of people renting out their cottages to visitors.

The Lodge had been good enough to give Alison not only a name, but directions to the quarry, who had established himself in a cottage on the outskirts of Stratford, one that had once been a farm cottage for a tenant, until the land was given over to grazing.

Rose Cottage was exceptionally remote, tucked off by itself down a little by-lane; the owners had probably been pathetically grateful that anyone was willing to take it these days. Grateful enough to look the other way when the man claiming to be a refugee from Belgium had turned up wanting to take it.

Alison stopped the car at the head of the lane in the partial concealment of some overgrown hedges, and cautiously cast a shield of protection about herself. She had no intention of going into this unprotected. Then, without taking off the enveloping duster and goggles that hid her identity, she walked cautiously down the lane. That few people came this way was given mute testimony to by the grass growing rank over the road. That fit with what Alison had been told.

As she approached the cottage, it was clear that it was several hundred years old, and "improvements" to it had been minimal. No gas, probably no water pipes, certainly no electricity or telephone, and what heat there was would be supplied by one or two fireplaces. There was a single chimney, and the roof was of thatch.

The aura of magic was muted and subdued; probably no one would have noticed, if not for the tell-tale traces of Elementals that were strangers to this part of the world. What was it about Germans that so attracted them to Tibetan magic? That was something that had always puzzled Alison. Weren't their native creatures powerful enough for them?

Well, the little air-demons of the Everest were not going to be able to deal with the Earth Elementals of England on their own ground.

Particularly not as Alison had surprise on her side.

She stopped just long enough at the gate to invoke a gnome, a twisted and ugly little manikin the color of old stone.

"Where is the master of this place?" she asked quietly, as it emerged out of the rock of the garden wall and stood there, rock-silent itself, looking at her.

"Gone," the gnome croaked, and waved in the direction of meadows.

Good. She dismissed the creature, which melted back into the stone. She entered the garden gate and sauntered up the path to the cottage—it had been gravel once, but was now as overgrown as the road, and as she took in the rather picturesque little dwelling, she could not help but smile broadly. A vine-covered cottage—and beneath the vines was stone. Good Cotswold stone. Thatched roof. Earth and earth and earth. What had he been thinking?

Probably not that an Earth Master would come hunting him.

She laid one hand on wall beside the thick oaken door, and allowed the stone to speak to her. Her duster blended nicely with the gray of the stone, and even if anyone came along here and saw her, she could claim to be looking for the tenant. Not that anyone would. The spell of avoidance she had laid across the lane would keep even cattle from wandering down this way.

Needless to say, the German agent did not work his spells within the confines of the cottage, the spells he had laid here were all of protection, a dome of mixed shielding that melded with the walls of the cottage. His purpose here was twofold: to gather information by means of his Air Elementals, and, whenever possible, to disrupt the training of the Royal Flying Corps. Now, from the little that Alison had learned about the RFC, it took very little to disrupt that training. Fog, rain, contrary winds—things that were all easy to direct and create would render it difficult and dangerous to go up, and they were all things that occurred frequently and naturally. Impossible to say how many casualties, if any, were due to his interference. Possibly none whatsoever; the Flying Corps was quite efficient at killing off its young recruits all by itself. One recruit a day died at each of the two training fields, so Alison had been told, and there could be upwards of two dozen crashes a day, and that was without any magical interference whatsoever.

Insane. But no more insane, presumably, than the generals whose only strategy seemed to be that of amassing men in trenches, then sending them in charges against machine-gun nests across open land littered with shell-holes, razor-wire, and bits of the last lot to make the charge.

Absolutely insane. If Alison had been in charge of the war, the slaughter would certainly have been as great, but it would have been to more purpose. There were other ways of killing men than flinging them straight to their deaths. And she would not have pursued a policy that spent so much to gain nothing.

She didn't know this man's real name, and she didn't care to learn it. She didn't want to know precisely what he was doing, outside of what he was doing magically. She did not care to know who he was reporting to, or how. The War Office, of course, did want to know these things.

The War Office would have to go on wanting.

If the War Office was interested discovering these things, the War Office could send its own men.

Of course . . . they had tried doing just that. They had sent conventional agents against Elemental Masters before, but like the generals, it seemed that they never learned what not to do. They had gotten less than satisfactory results in their investigations of this man, for instance. Those two agents that had been sent to find out what this man was up to, at least according to what the Lodge had told Alison, had been found wandering around the countryside, scorched and witless.

Lightning, of course. Well known as the weapon of choice for Far Eastern Air Elementals, especially the ones associated with Tibetan shamanism.

Alison might have started life as an ignorant working-class girl, but knowledge was power, and she intended to be as powerful as knowledge could make her. It was astonishing, the amount of information that she had accumulated about traditions other than her own. Thus far, the magic of choice for Germans seemed equally split between Nordic and Tibetan; agents of the Irish in league with the Germans stuck to their dark Celtic ways. The walls of this cottage spoke to her of foreign creatures with multiple limbs and eyes, and boar-like tushes. Definitely Tibetan.

So, her quarry was out in a field somewhere, communing with his slant-eyed demons, interfering with the lives of the young bucks at the two Schools of Military Aeronautics, one at Reading, one at Oxford. And all without going more than a half mile from this house.

So why choose Stratford as a base? That Alison couldn't guess, and didn't really care. Perhaps it was simply that there was nothing much of military significance around her, and so there was less chance of his being found out. It didn't matter where an Air Master was in relation to what he wanted to investigate. The only question was how long he was willing to wait to find out the information, and how sure his control over his Elementals was. He could operate at a distance of a couple hundred miles if he had firm control of his creatures. It was certainly less than that from Stratford to Oxford or Reading. He would have no difficulty at all in controlling weather from here, and depending on how fast his Elementals flew, he could have his information within an hour or two. Of all of the Elemental Masters, it was the Air Masters who made the best spies, for precisely that reason. Earth and Water Masters tended to have more control over their creatures, but needed to be in close proximity to what they were investigating, because their Elementals could not travel nearly so fast. And Fire Masters could work at a distance, but their control tended to be problematical. If Fire Elementals did not like you, they didn't have a great deal of difficulty in slipping their bonds. And when they did, even the friendliest ones could prove deadly. So Fire Masters, in general, were very poor intelligence agents.

Well, the one thing that this Air Master had neglected to do was to leave one of his little servants here to guard his dwelling in person.

That had certainly been a mistake. Even an Elemental with no power could have run to alert his Master that there was another Elemental Mage in his territory, and she probably would not have been able to catch or stop it.

Well, perhaps he had made the mistake that so many in the past had. He had looked for a male Master, assuming that a female would be inconsequential. The Germans seemed to have that habit of dismissing female Masters out of hand. Or, like many Masters of a "superior" Element, he could have assumed that an Earth Master was in control of an inferior power.

If that was the case, he should have known better. There was a reason why opposite pairings were considered inimical to each other. It might be a bit more difficult for an Earth Master to get an Air Master in a position where he was under her control, but when it happened— the results were unfortunate for the Air Master.

Or it might be because he had never seen an Earth Master who had dominion over the hostile creatures of the Element. Earth Masters tended to be healing, nurturing types. Alison curled her lip in contempt. If that was the case, if he hadn't bothered to do his research, he deserved what he was about to get.

She placed both hands on the wall, and summoned her own creatures. They would bypass the protections on this place—one great fault Air Masters often had was that they forgot that things could come up from below as well as down from above. Their protections tended to be domes rather than spheres. Water Masters and Fire Masters rarely made that mistake.

Up they came, slow and cold, investing the walls and the floor with their presence, swimming through the stone as an undine would swim through water. Kobolds and tommyknockers, mostly, those creatures that invested rock rather than earth, and who hated mankind with an enduring passion as the invader and despoiler of their secret underground fastnesses. They had the power to bring down mines when angered, and the only reason that they weren't more dangerous than trolls and giants was that they were slow to work on their own, and solitary, and found it difficult to work with one another.

She bound them with spell and command, it wasn't difficult, given what she intended them to do. They hated mankind in general, and Air Magicians worst of all. Ah, the benefit of working against a Master of the inimical Elemental; it was seldom that she commanded any of her creatures under these circumstances that was not pleased to do her will.

The spell was set, the trap laid, and there was no point in remaining. The Air Master would be returning soon. He would check his boundaries and find them untouched, because her invaders had not forced, had not even crossed them. Only when the clock crossed into the dark side of the night, at just past midnight, would her minions—"strike" was not the correct word, for they would approach by stealth. "Envelop" was more accurate. As he slept, they would creep upon him, imprison him, paralyze him. And then, they would slowly, so slowly, squeeze the breath out of him, sitting on his chest while he struggled for air, until the lungs collapsed and the laboring heart gave out. There would be no sign that he had died of anything other than natural causes.

This was far superior to invoking a were-creature and tearing her victim apart, which is what she had been forced to do the last time. Stealth was always preferable to direct conflict. Whenever she could avoid a mage-battle, she felt that she had won two victories in one.

She sauntered back to the waiting automobile, feeling altogether pleased with herself. The amount of terror and pain that this particular murder would produce would be remarkable, and that in turn, would enrich the power given up at the death. The victim might well last most of the night. The kobolds would absorb that power—retain some for themselves—but deliver the lion's share to her.

Which would, in turn, give her more power for the conquest of Reginald Fenyx. She would need extra power; Earth Elementals had already feasted on his fear and pain, and would hunger for more. If she had meant to destroy him, that would have been fine, but she would need all her magic and cunning to keep them restrained and held in check.

She drove back home in the sunset; the auto was constructed of enough of the materials of Earth—though it was powered by Fire and Air—that it did not dare misbehave under her hand. Which was more than could be said of horses, or, for that matter, any other living beast that she hadn't specifically bred, altered, and trained. That was the drawback to being a Dark Master; animals didn't much care for you.

Well, the antipathy was mutual.

She brought it to a halt inside what had been the stable, and turned it off as the last light of the day slowly faded. Through the garden door she came, walking briskly up the path as light shown warmly through the kitchen windows.

Of course, she did not have to go through the kitchen, for there were two doors into the garden—the kitchen door and this one. It would never do for her to take a servant's entrance, not even when there was no one there to see; the passage from the garden led directly to the sitting and dining rooms. However, the savory aroma coming from the kitchen told her that the girl had concocted something tasty with the potted pheasant.

She went upstairs to clean herself from the drive, and smiled at herself in the mirror. It had been a most satisfactory day.

Orders to use potted pheasant for dinner had made Eleanor seethe with repressed anger, and this time, it was not only on her own behalf. Outside these walls, people were getting by on a few ounces of meat in a day, stretching it by stewing, putting it in soup, concocting pie— using parts of the cow, pig, sheep, and chicken that no one would have dreamed of using before this. Here within the walls of The Arrows, the announcement that there would be no ham or roast had been met with an order to make a meal with a potted pheasant, as if this was a great hardship. While the trio had been gone, Eleanor had learned a great deal about life in the village in this third year of the war, and she knew that the steady submarine attacks on convoys coming from the United States were taking a significant toll on what was getting to the island. It wasn't only munitions. Far more than she had ever dreamed came into Britain from across the oceans.

Taking a greater toll on people's everyday lives was the rationing and simple scarcity, for there was no need to formally ration what simply was not available. The greater share of meat, white flour, fat, dairy, and sugar was simply taken to go to those who were fighting, or who, like the medical services overseas, were serving those fighting. The result had an impact everywhere. She wasn't sure if people were actually hungry, but it wouldn't surprise her.

There were no sweets in the village store for children, for instance, and when sugar was available, everyone rushed to get what they could. The butcher, Michael Kabon—to Eleanor's initial shock, he was a black man, from somewhere in Africa—made the most of every bit of meat and bone that fell beneath his cleaver.

Mr. Kabon was well-regarded in normally insular Broom, but then, when his personal sacrifice was so visible in his own flesh, Broom would have found it difficult to turn away from him, even had he not been as good-natured as he was. Whatever had moved him to volunteer, she could not say, but he was never going to go back to the lines again—not the way he fought for each breath after the dose of mustard gas that had also scarred his face and body.

And he had proved to be very useful for the village. Of course, here in the country, no one ever complained about eating organ-meat, so he had no trouble finding buyers for kidneys and livers, lungs and brains. But he knew of other options. People were poor where he came from; he had some interesting suggestions about how unlikely things could be cooked, and by this time, the women of Broom were getting desperate enough to try them.

Chicken feet, it turned out, did make a tasty soup when cooked long enough . . . and cow hooves were not all that far from pig-trotters and could be used to make more than jelly. So long as housewives disguised the origin of their culinary adventures, no one seemed to mind where the taste of meat came from. Any bone could be used to make a stock, and stock meant soup. It was amazing how much meat could be gotten when you scraped bones, too.

So, outside these four walls, families were dining tonight on chicken-foot soup and oat-bread, while within, the ladies of The Arrows thought it hard that they were reduced to a casserole of potted pheasant. If there was a sweet course on the tables of the village, it would probably be a jam tart—with the jam spread as thin as might be. Alison and her daughters feasted on sugar-frosted cake.

Eleanor wondered just what the reaction would be in the village if anyone knew this. Or knew that the innocuous parcels that came on a regular basis to The Arrows contained foodstuffs no one in Broom had seen for days or weeks, or even months.

Certainly Alison's reputation in the village would suffer the loss of some of its shine.

Eleanor had planned to go to visit Sarah tonight, but as she had gotten ready to add Sarah's herbs to the tea, something had hissed out of the fire.

She had turned to see a Salamander writhing on the hearth, watching her with agitation. When it knew it had caught her eye, it beckoned her nearer.

"Not tonight," it had hissed. "She walks and wakes tonight. Tomorrow."

For a moment she had hesitated, but then had put the herbs away. The Salamanders didn't often speak to her, or even appear in the fire during the hours in which they might be seen by someone else. If this one felt it needful to deliver a warning, why take chances?

So she resigned herself to a night of hard work alone. If Alison was going to be awake, there was no point in fighting the compulsions and arousing her suspicion.

She stared at her own reflection in the window as she washed up the dinner dishes. In some ways, none of this made any sense at all. At this point, there were days when if Alison had simply come to her and said, "If you sign over your inheritance, I will let you go" that she would have agreed in a flash. It wasn't as if, given all she had learned perforce, she couldn't earn a living as a servant.

Of course, that would have meant giving up a great deal of what made life tolerable. Servants didn't have a lot of time nor leisure to read. And once she did that, the life of an Oxford scholar would have been quite out of reach.

But why should she give up what was hers? Especially when Alison had essentially stolen it in the first place?

Because freedom was worth more than things. If she had learned one lesson in all of this, it was that. Freedom was worth far more than things.

She finished the dishes, and sighed. Alison would never let her go, not even for that. She knew too much. Ordinary people might not believe in magic, but there were more like Alison out there, and if she was ever able to leave these four walls, she would be in a position to tell them herself what Alison was up to, how she had bewitched Eleanor's father, and all the rest. Those people might not pay attention, but then again, they might. Alison would never let her go as long as there was a chance that her scheme would be exposed.

Because even if those people did nothing about what had happened to Eleanor and her father, they would be warned for the future, and any new scheme Alison had in mind could be thwarted.

She reached for a towel to dry off her hands, and made a face as she looked at the left. Well, there was another reason for Alison not to let her go. She wouldn't even have to say anything about magic, just that her stepmother had kept her prisoner and abused her all these years, and here was her little finger buried beneath the hearthstone to prove it. She certainly wouldn't have chopped her own finger off and buried it, now would she?

With the dishes finished, she took some mending and sat beside the hearth to do it. The Salamander was still there, coiling restlessly around the flames, sometimes flickering out and around her ankles before diving back in again. She had expected the house to settle, and indeed, she heard the two girls going to their rooms, but Alison kept walking back and forth restlessly.

Or was she walking back and forth?

Eleanor cocked her head and listened intently. No, this wasn't a simple to-and-fro. Alison was walking in a circle. The house was too well-built for her to hear if her stepmother was saying anything, but—

The Salamander looked up. "It is near midnight," it observed. "She walks."

"You mean, she's doing magic?" Eleanor whispered.

The Salamander nodded.

So that was what the creature had meant!

Eleanor looked up and shivered. Whatever was going on, it couldn't mean anything good. Who, or what else, did Alison have in her power now?

And what was she doing to them?

9

April 20, 1917

Longacre Park, Warwickshire

REGGIE GOT OUT OF THE car stiffly, gazing up at the imposing front of Longacre feeling not that he was coming home, but that he was a stranger in a foreign land. He wasn't comfortable standing on the steps of a place like this anymore; he kept wondering when the next barrage would come in and knock it all to pieces. This was not reality, this quiet, peaceful country, this grand house with its velvety lawns. This was not where he lived. His home was a tent or a hastily-thrown-up wood hut, the earth churned by bombs, with the echoing thud of cannon that never stopped. This was no longer his world. Beautiful, yes, it was. With its stone columns rising to support a Grecian-inspired portico, it looked more like a government monument than a place where people lived. The Georgians built to impress, rather than to house.

He took the first few steps, knee crying agony at him, and looked up at the portico again. What am I doing here? he thought. The uniformed staff was lined up beside the door to greet him. Uniformed staff? Neat suits, proper little gowns and aprons?

His world contained slovenly orderlies that stole your whiskey and tobacco, piles of dirty uniforms pitched in the corner of the tent, clutter that was never cleaned, only rearranged.

He took another three steps upwards, feeling as if he was a supplicant climbing to the throne of God. The scene had that same feeling of unreality. Pristine white steps going up to a colonnaded portico, cloudless blue sky, larks overhead, a line of solemn, priest-like people waiting to greet him—

He realized as he was halfway up the stairs that once he had thought he loved Longacre, but he was not the same person who had given that love to this place.

In fact, he was only just coming to the realization that what he loved was not this great stone pile, this display in marble, it was the land around it.

What had he remembered, after all, in those days when he waited to be sent up, in those nights when he listened to the guns? As he climbed all those stairs, what occurred to him was that it had not been the memories set in those rooms with their twenty-foot ceilings, but the ones spent in woods and fields, in the stables and the sheds, that had kept him alive and sane.

There were 6,500 acres of field and farm, meadow and woods belonging to this place; he felt more at home in any of them than in the building itself. If it had not been too much effort to go back down all those steps, he might just have gone down to the car and ordered it away, far away, anywhere but here, this strange place that should have been home and wasn't.

His mother had the entire staff lined up out front to greet him, as if he was some sort of medieval monarch returning. Bloody hell, he thought, with weary resignation. Don't they have things to do? Of course they did. But this was traditional. This was where the staff of Longacre got their largesse—

So why don't I just pay them decently instead, and we can do without this mummery?

But no, no, he must follow the tradition. Noblesse oblige. Can't disappoint the staff.

So he hobbled forward, as one of the men detached himself from the line and moved to his elbow, and pressed several coins into his hand.

Surely they would prefer this in their proper pay-packet?

First and foremost in line were Mrs. Dick, the housekeeper, and James Boatwright, the butler. They had held those positions on the estate for as long as Reggie could recall, and in all that time they had not apparently changed; no one knew if Mrs. Dick had ever actually had a "Mister" Dick; one just referred to the housekeeper by the title of "Mrs." because that was how things were done. He vividly recalled the day he had learned her given name of Catriona—all his life until then he had thought "Mrs." was her first name.

They, at least, seemed genuinely moved to see him. "Boatwright," he said, shaking the upright old man's hand. "Mrs. Dick." They didn't even acknowledge the largesse, simply slipped it into a pocket and went on shaking his hand, and somewhat to his shock, there were tears in their eyes.

Why? What should they care? Even if they remembered him as a child, they could not have done so all that vividly. The people he had spent the most amount of time with had been his nurse, his governess, and then his tutors and his father. All of them were gone, and of all of them, only the nurse remained anywhere nearby—in the pensioners' cottages, if she hadn't died of old age yet.

And he felt so unmoved ... as if it wasn't he who was standing here, greeting old family retainers who, with so many going off and being slaughtered, hadn't expected to see him alive. As if he actually was dead, a ghost come back to observe, but not feel.

Next in the hierarchy, he greeted with somber gravity the cook. Mrs. Murphy was not quite as intimidating as Mrs. Dick, being all Irish and beaming. "Mrs. Murphy," he said, shaking her hand—every time he did this, of course, he left that money in their hands gold sovereigns for the upper servants, smaller coins for the lesser, the tips that servants in great houses were accustomed to get from visitors and on occasions like this, from the family. Or at least, the head of the family, which he now was. His father had simply dropped where he stood, on the first of June, 1915, after Reggie was already in the RFC.

It should have been his father standing here. For God's sake, why couldn't this have been done with less fanfare? It was humiliating, surely, for them, and no great joy for him. And his knee hurt abominably.

He could remember his father doing this, on occasions like the King's birthday, or Boxing Day, or the day he, Reggie, had taken his Oxford degree, just before the war began. Devlin Fenyx had never seemed to find this the ordeal that his son was now experiencing.

Beside him was Michael Turner, his valet, unobtrusively handing him the gold sovereigns. Turner had been his father's valet, and knew the secret that father and son kept from his mother, that both of them were Elemental Masters. Only with Turner did he feel something like normal, and he wished that, if this had to be done, it could have been Turner who attended to it.

I don't belong here. I don't belong to this world anymore, these piles of showy stone, these devoted family retainers. My world is not this place. My world is a world of blood and ruin, of bombs and cannon and the stink of gas.

Still he moved on, smiling, pleasant, while pain lanced through his knee and more and more he wanted only to go lie down somewhere. Next to Mrs. Murphy was Thelma Hawkins; Thelma cooked for the servants. Quiet word, shake hand, slip in the coin, move on. What were these folk to him, or him to them? Just "milord," or something more? And was that something nothing more than a chimera, a fata morgana, an illusion? He was a ghost, a ghost of the past, and no more real than the dreams of a poet.

Then there were the cook's helpers, four of them: Cheryl Case, Maria Bracken, Amanda Hart, and Mary Holman the tweenie. He wasn't supposed to know them, but he did, all but Mary Holman; Turner murmured their names as they curtsied, and this time it was Turner who gave them their largesse, not Reggie, because these were under-servants, the bottom of the hierarchy. And little Matthew Case, who ran errands, was hardly even in the hierarchy at all.

And just why should that be? Reggie knew the helpers better than he knew many blood relations. Reggie had spent many hours in the kitchens as a boy, running away from lessons. The little Holman girl looked up at him in awe, as if he had been the king. It was embarrassing. In the end, he was no better than she. She might one day come to produce something good and useful—all he had produced was death.

Next, the housekeeping staff, women first. Upstairs maids in their crisp black dresses with white collars and cuffs and starched white aprons with lace caps—all of which must have been wretched to keep clean when your job was to clean. Downstairs maids, in gray-striped gowns of the same cut. One of them, Mary, had been the one who had taught him how to slide down the banister. Turner gave them their little gift. They didn't say a word, other than a murmur of thanks directed to him and not to Turner.

They curtseyed, too, like stiff little puppets, their faces without expression. Even Mary. Didn't she remember? Or was this one of the things she wasn't supposed to remember, lest she embarrass the master?

Men next, the footmen, George Woodward, James Jennings (Reggie remembered this old fellow was a talented hobbyist cabinetmaker), and Steven Druce. All three of them were from his father's staff, and definitely too old to be conscripted. Poor old men! They should have gone to a pensioners' cottage long ago. He couldn't help but think of the prewar descriptions in the newspaper for those seeking footmen—tall, of particular hair-color, and with a handsome leg— well, George and James probably looked like that when his father was a youngster, but they were very much past their prime now.

In contrast to their years was the hall boy, Jason Long, who couldn't have been more than fifteen. The hall boy had that name because his position required that he sleep in the hall to answer the door after hours, but Lord Devlin had found that distasteful. "That might do for some medieval blockhead," he had said with a grimace, "but I am neither, and we do have some modern conveniences these days." So instead of sleeping in the hall on a cot behind a screen, the hall boy had a room just off the kitchen, with a bell connected up to the door. And if anyone was foolish enough to come calling after everyone had gone to bed, Lord Devlin had felt that they deserved to have to wait in the cold and dark until the hall boy made his way to the door. Reggie was glad the change had been made. The head stableman was in the same age-bracket as the two footmen. And the stable boys were both boys, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, and looking stricken and anxious as he greeted them.

There was a pattern building here. No men between the ages of seventeen and fifty. He had known that in the abstract, but seeing it on the staff—babies and grandfathers. How many hundreds of thousands of men were dead in the killing fields of Flanders and France? No way of telling, not when a barrage came in and blew everyone to bits, and you just estimated who had been there. But it was bad—bad—if you could look at people here at home and see a gap where there just were no men of a certain age Of course, it cut across all nations, and surely the French had suffered the worst of all, but—but this was home— He moved on, looked down at a face, and got a shock that almost made him stagger. The head gardener—who was responsible for Longacre's famous rose garden—was not the man he recalled, but a woman. "Mrs. Green" was murmured into his ear, and he recalled with a start that her husband had been killed in the first year of the war. "A sad loss," he said, with as much sincerity as he could. The next face was another shock, for another mere boy was the second gardener.

Now the staff that did not get largesse, the business staff. Gray old Paul McMahon, the estate accountant, and the estate manager, which should have been Owen McGregor, but Reggie found another female face looking at him where a man's should have been. "Lee McGregor, sir," she said to him, without waiting for Michael. "Owen was conscripted in June of ' 16 and we heard we'd lost him in January."

"Good Lord," he said, feeling knocked a-kilter. He took her hand and shook it. "I'm so sorry—"

She managed a wan smile. "I'm hoping you'll keep me on in his place, sir."

He glanced over at McMahon, who lifted his brow and gave a slight nod of approval. "If Paul thinks you're handling the job, then certainly," he replied, still feeling off-balance.

So now women were taking men's jobs, because there were no men to fill them. What else? When he went down into Broom, what would he find there? Female shopkeepers, surely—female postmen? Female constables?

Female farmers—how many of the tenant farmers are gone? Are their wives managing? Do we need Land Girls to help them? He hadn't been home a half an hour, he was supposed to be here to recover, but already he felt burdens settling onto his shoulders—

Until he looked down at Lee McGregor again, and realized that his concerns were misplaced. Old Paul approved. She probably already had everything in hand. He would just be meddling.

But then he moved to old friends; he was so happy to see Peter Budd, despite his new chauffeur's hook-hand, that he nearly shook the hook off. Budd had been the one responsible for helping to dig him out of that wretched bunker—Budd had heard him screaming his lungs hoarse, insisted there was someone still alive in there, and had begun the digging with only a bit of board to help him. And that, ironically, had led to the loss of his hand; he'd gotten a splinter of all damned things, the wound had gone septic immediately as happened all too often in the trenches, and before anyone could do anything about it, it had gotten so black it had to come off. When Reggie had gotten wind of that, he had sent to his fellow-sufferer to offer him a job. Peter had been a chauffeur before the war; Reggie assumed that anyone with the gumption to dig a man out with a board had the gumption to learn to drive again with a hook.

"How are you doing, old man?" he asked.

Budd grinned. "Ready to race, milord," he said saluting with his hook. "Took the liberty, milord, of lookin' up me mate, Bruce Kenny, and turned out he was already working here." He jerked his head to the side at another new face. "Good mechanic, milord, and made bold to conscript 'im. Wasted on horses."

It was obvious why Kenny was working at Longacre, given Reggie's standing order to replace staff that were not going to return with unemployed veterans of the war. Kenny had a wooden leg. A wooden leg was unlikely to impede his abilities as a mechanic.

"Excellent," Reggie replied, feeling much more heartened than he had been a few moments ago. And feeling relieved that the review of the staff was apparently over. There might be some groundskeeping staff, and eventually Gaffer Norman, the gameskeeper, would present himself, probably with his pretty daughter Eva in tow (Gaffer had read too many romantic novels in which the gameskeeper's daughter marries the lord of the manor). He would be expected to make the rounds and meet all of the tenant farmers. And he should inspect the woodlands. Not that he intended to hunt, but there was a sawmill on the property, and it might not be such a bad idea to think about producing lumber for fine cabinetry . . . the woodlands were old, and properly managed, could remain woodlands and provide timber.

No, he wouldn't hunt. He had had enough of hunting. He never wanted to shoot anything again. Not ever.

But he should also look over the accounts of all the rental properties in Stratford and elsewhere; reliable sources of income needed to be cared for.

The welcome being over, the staff filing away to their various duties, he could now enter his house—

How can anyone call this monster a "house"?

The first room was the Great Hall, and it was guaranteed to make virtually anyone feel utterly insignificant. Here, the ceiling was thirty feet above the floor, and the magnificence of the room matched the size. It might be beautiful but it had never been built for humans—

But that was the moment of epiphany when Reggie realized that it had been built for Air Masters.

He stepped inside, and between the height of the ceiling and the windows up high as well as low, he realized that he felt—comfortable. He could draw a breath as easy as if he had been outside. For the first time since he had come back, he was in a room that didn't feel as if it was pressing in on him.

Of course; this wasn't just a monument to display, it was the retreat and stronghold of someone who needed the sky above him to feel truly happy. The public rooms on the ground floor, all with twenty-foot ceilings with the exception of the Great Hall, virtually guaranteed that no Air Master would ever feel claustrophobic. And the private rooms on the next floor were nearly as spacious. He mentally apologized to his ancestor. What he had thought had been built to intimidate had actually been constructed to comfort. . . .

He'd suffered from gnawing claustrophobia, he suddenly realized, ever since his return from France. The proportions made sense when you thought of it as a house built for those most comfortable under the open sky. Even the ceiling murals with their clouds and birds made sense.

His mother was waiting for him, posed in the exact center of the Great Hall, with her hands outstretched. He limped toward her, and took both her hands in his.

She studied his face anxiously, and he produced a surface smile for her. His poor mother! She was not very clever, being one of those fluttery, helpless creatures, but she had loved her husband dearly, and he, her. She just hadn't known what to do with the two Fenyx males in her life, who had bonded more closely than mother and child right from the first. "Oh, my dear boy," she said, "You look so pale—"

"I'm tired, mother," he replied, with partial honesty. "It was a brutal trip down. Not good on the knee." That was nothing less than the truth. Every little bump had sent a lance of pain through it. And he hadn't had a decent night of sleep without being drugged for months.

"Well, go along to your old room then, dear, and have a lie-down. You don't mind that you're still in your old room, do you?" her voice sharpened with anxiety.

As if I'd want father's room. Not a chance. "It will suit me just fine," he told her, and followed one of the footmen up the stairs and down the corridor, though he hardly needed to be shown the way.

His room had not been touched since he left, except to clean and tidy it. He paused just over the threshold, feeling, with another sense of shock, that it had been preserved as a sort of shrine. Perhaps to his safety—perhaps to his memory.

And because of that, it was now a shrine to something that didn't exist anymore.

He'd known this when he had come home on leave, in a vague way. But now—now the contrast between what he had been and what he had become could not have been greater.

Here was his room—it was, thank goodness, not the room of the cricket-playing boy-in-a-man's-body that had gone off to Oxford. He had made some changes since that time. But it was the room of an enthusiast, for everywhere you looked were items having to do with flight. Books, models, pictures of 'planes, a stack of the blueprints for his own 'bus, framed pictures of himself in her. Bits of a carburetor were still lovingly arranged on the desk from the last time he'd taken it to bits. Whoever had been doing the arrangement had lined up the parts by order of size, and had polished them until they gleamed. How long had that taken?

He could not help but contrast this room with the aerodrome on the Western Front he'd last been posted to. More of a cubbyhole in a tent, really, his sleeping-quarters had been cluttered with binoculars, maps, bits of aeroplanes—some souvenirs, some just picked up out of idle curiosity. He generally shared his quarters with at least two cats on account of the rats and mice being everywhere, but in general, an aerodrome was overrun with dogs.

It was mad, really, there were always dogs everywhere, puppies peeking their heads out from under cots, adult dogs fighting or fornicating in the runways. Dogs in the club, dogs in the enlisted men's tent barracks, dogs of every shape and size but with no pedigree whatsoever. Why all the dogs? It had finally occurred to him that the aerodromes were probably where every pet in Belgium and France that had been bombed out of its home had come—in the cities that were still intact, they had their own pets, and there was no safety nor comfort in the trenches for any animal. So the aerodromes were where the homeless hounds of France had come, following their noses to where there might be food and friends.

He hadn't much cared for the fleas that the dogs brought, and liked the quiet company of cats, so there were usually a couple lounging about his bunk. He, like so many others, decorated the canvas of his tent or hut with enemy insignia cut from downed planes, and illustrations cut from magazines—

Then there had been the photos. Every flier had them, layered onto the wall. He'd never indulged in the gruesome hobby of snapping dead enemies and posting them on the walls of his quarters, though plenty of the others did, but in a way, his collection was quite as bad, for so many of those in the snaps were dead. Ghost arms circled the shoulders of the living, dead eyes shone at the camera with the same enthusiasm as those who had survived.

Usually there wasn't room for more in his sleeping quarters than bed, kit-bag, a little table and a chair—with perhaps an ammunition crate serving as a bedside stand. The bed would be covered in cats and clothing, the stand would have something to give light, the chair would be draped with two or three jackets or waistcoats.

And on his table, more bits of motors, bills, brandy bottles half-full, whiskey bottles either full or empty, letters, tobacco for his friends, light novels borrowed from those who had finished them, boxes of stomach pills, for every flyer he knew ate them like candy, himself not excepted. How not, when every time you went up you stood a good chance of coming down in pieces? The RFC pitied the FBI, but the FBI called the RFC the "suicide corps" or the "sixty-minute men" because a total of sixty minutes in the air was allegedly the average lifespan of a pilot.

Dirty clothes on the floor, a floor of rough wood full of splinters— the sound of a gramophone bawling somewhere down the row, Harry Tate or sentimental music-hall songs. In the last bivouac, it had been "The Rose of Tralee," over and over; the chap with the gramophone never shut it off. The smell—as distinct as in the trenches but thank God not so—unbearable. Oil, hot metal, glue, paraffin, the French cook conjuring up something—tobacco—brandy.

His unit had a French cook and kept hold of him grimly. Having a Frenchie to do for you meant you could actually eat the food—the sad substitutes for cooks supplied by the British Army took whatever they got, boiled it for three hours, then served it with a white sauce with the look and taste of flour-paste. The Frenchies did you right; a good soup, a little salad, and making the most of whatever they could get from the quartermaster and by scrounging. He suspected horse, many times, but that was preferable to the slimy "bully-beef" which he also suspected to be horse.

He'd always been in places where the commanding officer took as firm a hand as one could over such a collection of misfits as pilots tended to be, so there had always been some semblance of order, at least on the surface. The monkeys were kept on leads, the goats in pens, the trash policed, the meals on time. But even in the English aerodromes, no two pilots were alike. Take an inventory, and you could come up with anything. He'd served with fellows who'd left the seminary to fly, and fellows who he suspected had been (and might still be) whoremongers. With country lads and cockneys. With fellow Oxford and Cambridge men, and men who could barely read. With Canadians and Americans, raised on Wild West shows and inclined to die rather quickly from an overabundance of enthusiasm combined with a lack of skill and an absolute certainty that instinct was better than training. . . .

He propped his cane on the bureau and laid himself down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Another mural of sky and clouds.

And I'm up above the ground floor. Too far up for them to find me. They won't come up here—

Relief washed over him. He had thought that coming home to convalesce was the worst thing he could have done. Now he was prepared to admit he might have been wrong.

And for the first time in far too long, he felt his eyelids grow heavy, and he let them close, and drifted into sleep.

Not a true sleep; it was too light for that. A kind of half-conscious doze, for he heard the servants moving about in this wing, going about their duties. Mrs. Dick was very strict with her girls; unless some task was so heavy it needed two, they were to keep to the schedule and stay strictly apart to avoid wasting time on gossip. But evidently, she wasn't so hard on them that they were unhappy; as a counterpart to his dozing he could hear the one working across the hall humming to herself.

Heavier footsteps in the hall; the girl said, "Right there, please," and there was a thud of logs, the rattle of a scuttle. One of the boys must have brought up coal and wood for the fire.

More humming; it was so unlike the sounds in the hospitals or the camps that it felt as if he was in another world entirely.

Well, he was, really. Though it wasn't the world he had left behind. Mind, he hadn't been home on leave for more than a year; instead, he had come over to London, roughly ever other time meeting his mother there instead of coming down to Longacre. It was easier that way; making a round of theater prevented any need to talk. She didn't want to hear about the war, and he didn't want to hear about the nice young ladies she wanted him to meet.

When he'd come over on his own, there had been other entertainment than theater. And his mother, no doubt, would have been shocked to learn that some of those same "nice young ladies" were dispensing their favors with freedom and enthusiasm at the parties given by William Waldorf, Viscount Astor, Lady Anson. Always it was the war, the war, the war, giving a feverish cast to these parties, with everyone grimly determined to have—if not enjoyment, then pure physical pleasure.

Here it seemed as if his mother had dedicated her life and all of her strength to trying to preserve life here at Longacre as it had been before the war. He had noted the last time he was on leave that she assiduously avoided any mention of the war and anything connected to it, and there had been a kind of brittleness about her.

He wondered what would have happened to her if he had died. Would she have dedicated the rest of her life to keeping things absolutely the same, frozen in time, like an Edwardian iteration of Miss Havisham?

He could easily see that. Poor mother.

It was a lost cause, of course. The juggernaut that this war had become had its own momentum. It was devouring everything in its path, and everything it could possibly touch. She didn't have a chance against it.

In the end, nothing and no one did.

He came down to dinner, to discover, to his horror, that he and his mother were not alone in the house. His grandfather on his mother's side was in residence. Unfortunately, the old man considered himself a military expert, having served in a tame regiment in India, that saw no more exciting action than polo games.

He kept a civil tongue in his head all through the rather strained dinner, while the old man held forth on the wisdom of the war Office, the grand strategies of Kitchener, and the superiority of "real army tactics" to the new weaponry of tanks and machine guns and, especially, aeroplanes.

"Damned useless, said it before, and I'll say it again," the old man fulminated, as Reggie shoved bits of rabbit cassoulet around on his plate. "Damned cowards are what's holdin' the victory up! Too damned cowardly to make the charges. One good push, over the top, that'd be all it'd take!"

Reggie closed his eyes, counted to ten, feeling a vein throbbing in his temple. He thought of all the times he'd looked down on the FBI in their "big pushes," how often he had watched them slaughtered by the machine guns. Thought of the men who had become his friends back on the ward, men who had been thrown into a meat-chopper by old fools who could not and would not understand that war had changed, changed in unrecognizable ways, and that the old tactics that had worked once did not work anymore.

He held his temper and his words all through dinner, and after, when what should have been a nice, quiet moment for a smoke in the sunset turned into another occasion for a rant from the old man, who seemed determined to confront him, for some reason. Finally, it was only when his mother retired, that her father came to the real point.

"Now that we're alone, boy," Grandfather said, with a particularly vicious look out of the corner of his eye at Reggie, "I want you to know I don't hold with this 'shellshock' nonsense. A bust-up leg, that's fair. But the other, that's just malingering." The old man gave him a particularly malicious glance. "I've got my eye on you."

Suddenly, a fury that Reggie had not realized he possessed welled up in him, and he actually began to shake. He clenched his fist around the handle of his cane to stop it from trembling, a bitter bile rose up in his throat.

To keep from giving the old man the answer he deserved, he bit down hard and clenched his teeth together. Life was difficult enough for his mother; he was not going to make it harder by having a row with her evil-minded old father.

"You can believe what you like, sir," he got out between his clenched teeth, staring at the old bastard who stood a silhouette, black against the fire in the study. "I cannot hope to change your mind."

"Huh," Grandfather snorted, and turned away. Reggie, still full of fury, limped off out of the study, not really knowing where to go, but only knowing that if he didn't get away from that house and that horrible old man he was going to say or do something that would make his mother unhappy.

He forced himself into a walk around the garden; it might be night, but the layout of the rose garden hadn't changed in two hundred years, and he didn't need light to know his way around.

But after limping around the turfed paths for a half an hour, his temper still hadn't cooled, and he knew he wanted something he could not get in that house.

He limped down to the stables, where horses were sharing their accommodations with his motor cars. There were three of them now, an enclosed model for his mother, his own fast Allard, and a Bentley that he could either drive himself or be chauffeured in. Or rather, he could when the knee healed up. The condition of the knee made shifting problematic for a while.

But down there in the stable were two men with whom he had something in common. A million times more than he shared with that vicious old man who had driven him out of his own house, though they were neither officers nor gentlemen.

The stables had been neatly divided into horse and auto sides, with the autos being housed in the part that had once held the carriages. There was one farm cart there now, one pony trap (perhaps his mother liked to drive herself around) and one small, open carriage. The rest of the space was made into a proper garage, and the glow of a cigarette in the shadows told him that someone was out for a smoke.

"Care for a gasper, milord?" asked Peter Budd.

"Thanks," Reggie replied, taking the metaphorical strides that crossed all the boundaries of rank, class, wealth, and education, to arrive at the side of someone who deserved a hundred times more respect than that horrible old man. "I would."

10

April 24, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

THE BROOM HALL INN WAS where the autumn hunts began, the hounds and horses assembling in the courtyard for the traditional stirrup cup, marking it as a distinctly upper-class establishment. It was certainly of the proper standard for Lady Devlin to meet Alison Robinson and her daughters for tea.

It was a safe way for Lady Devlin to examine these curious women for herself, without incurring any obligations beyond a single meeting. Tea in an inn didn't require a response other than a "thank you, I enjoyed your company," and it didn't imply that invitations to one's house should or could be forthcoming.

Alison knew all of this, and also knew that she had passed the first test by agreeing to this meeting. It was a public place, and while that was an initial advantage, socially, it could prove to be a disaster if the single meeting was all that there was, and the rest of Broom could read the snub for themselves.

This was all part of the social game that the gentry played among themselves, to ferret out the unworthy, the unmannered, the ill-bred.

Alison knew all of the moves of the game by heart, and there was only one question in her mind as she listened to her girls snap waspishly at each other while Howse attended to their hair.

To drive, or not to drive?

The big Crosley auto could fit four, which the Hispano-Suiza would not and the inn was just far enough away that driving would not be terribly gauche. On the other hand, it was within easy walking distance, and these were times in which some self-sacrifice was expected. Decisions, decisions. . . .

It was the shoes that finally decided her; the frocks she had picked out for all three of them required town shoes, not country shoes, and in their high-heeled town shoes the girls were at risk of spraining an ankle. So off they went, rattling and chugging up the street, and when she arrived at the Inn, Alison was glad she had made that decision. Lady Devlin's auto, a magnificent Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, and her chauffeur were already there.

And Lady Devlin waited in a private parlor.

It was not, by any means, the first time that Alison had dined here, and this place and the Broom Pub with the White Swan alternated in supplying some of their meals. But this was not the usual private parlor she took; it was clear from the outset, that this room was not available for just anyone.

Lady Devlin had already ordered tea; it was waiting when they arrived, and she served as the hostess, pouring for all four of them. She was of the kind that Alison thought of as "wispy"—soft, blond hair going to gray, styled in a fashionable chignon, soft, gray-blue linen walking suit, slight figure, doll-pretty face with soft blue eyes.

"Mrs. Robinson," she said, as she poured the tea as a good hostess did, "I understand that you have lived in Broom since just before the war began."

"That is quite true, Lady Devlin," Alison replied, taking the cup and saucer from her hostess, and making sure that their fingers touched as she did so—

Because, while Alderscroft would never have dreamed she would use magic to ensure that she became Lady Devlin's bosom friend, Alison had no scruples whatsoever on the subject. But it would have to be subtle, and work with more mundane methods of influencing Reggie's mother. So what passed between them in that moment, was a spell as wispy, as fragile, as Lady Devlin herself. And, unless you were very, very good, it was exceedingly difficult to detect.

Affinity—we are the same, you and I—

"Then I wonder why I heard nothing of you until now?" Lady Devlin continued, pouring tea now for Carolyn, who accepted her cup with a diffident murmur of thanks.

"Oh, Lady Devlin, I would never have dreamed of pushing myself into your notice!" Alison replied, putting down her teacup and looking at Lady Devlin in consternation. "Truth to tell, I do not know why my cousin Alderscroft elected to do so for me. But Alderscroft is a kind man, and perhaps. . .." She looked away and let the words trail off. The letter to Lady Devlin had stressed how lonely, how hungry for refined company Alison was. But that was not what one would say for one's own self. "One wishes for compatible company, now and again. One does one's best," she murmured, dropping her eyes. "But sometimes, I worry about my daughters. I should think that Broom would feel very confining for a young person."

"Oh, no, Mama, not at all!" Carolyn, looking very pretty in soft lilac, exclaimed. "Why, our days are very full here! We have the parish work, the Red Cross, the Ladies' Friendly Society—now that spring is come, there will be tennis at the country club—we scarcely have time to ourselves, some days!"

Now Alison exchanged a significant look with Lady Devlin. These are all productive things, no doubt, but hardly entertaining for a pretty young girl] And they do not put her into company appropriate to her breeding.

"And of course—the war—" Lauralee's hands fluttered over her cup, the sleeves of her pink gown fluttering gently as well. "There are so many things one can do for the war—"

"Well, when we were your age," Lady Devlin said, with a friendly glance at Alison, "I'm sure we didn't think half as much about parish work and the like. It seems a pity this war has reached so far into our lives."

Alison let the corners of her mouth droop. "All of England seems so sad," she agreed. "And yet, one feels guilty if one does anything the least frivolous, when so many are suffering."

A slight movement of her hands drew subtle attention to her lapel, where she wore her widow's ribbon.

"And your dear husband was one of the first of our sacrifices," said Lady Devlin, with an air of sympathy.

"Mr. Robinson and I were only just married, too," she replied, now putting on a faint look of patient suffering, one she had practiced long in the mirror. "My first husband—the father of my girls—was a fine, fine man, but Robinson was my true love, late though he came to my life, and brief though his stay in it was."

Calculated, slyly calculated, to appeal to the romantic in her. And it worked, sublimely well. Lady Devlin passed her the plate of potted-salmon sandwiches with a sigh of commiseration.

"You poor dear]" she said, with an air of having made up her mind after careful consideration, which Alison did not in the least doubt. "You must come up to tea at Longacre next week, you and your charming daughters. Will Tuesday be reasonable for you?"

"My lady, any day you choose to honor us will be convenient," Alison replied, with eager humility. "We would never wish to be a burden on you, no matter what our cousin has told you."

"Oh, pish-tush," Lady Devlin said, waving her hand. "How could three more ladies be a burden at tea? The vicar and his wife will be there, and Roberta Cygnet and her daughter Leva, and Gina Towner, Miss Elizabeth Tansy—the Devon Tansys, you know, she's visiting with Leva, and Mr. Hartwell—"

Alison placed her fingers over her lips and allowed a smile to appear. "You don't mean William Hartwell, surely? The one who keeps exploding his sheds with his inventions?"

Lady Devlin laughed. "He does seem convinced that he will win the war, does he not? Well, he's a dear, and the worst that will come along with him is a faint aroma of gunpowder—"

There was a light tap at the doorframe, the stocky form of the innkeeper hunched diffidently there. "Is all to your liking, my lady? Is there anything else I can serve you with?"

"No, Mr. Caffrey, thank you," Lady Devlin sighed. "You've done a remarkable job under the trying circumstances that surround us. Thank you."

"Very well, my lady." The innkeeper bowed himself out, leaving them alone once more.

"Will your son come to tea, Lady Devlin?" Carolyn asked, ingenuously. "I had heard that he was home at last. I have always wanted to meet an aeroplane pilot! It must be so thrilling to be able to fly!"

But to both girls' vast disappointment, she shook her head. "I'm afraid not, dear," she said, in a kindly tone. "Company is a trial for him right now. But that's all right; sometime soon you'll be sure to meet him."

I hope to hell I don't meet Mother or any of her kittenish friends, Reggie thought, as he drove the auto at a snail's pace down into the village. Every bounce and rut made his knee sing with pain. This was not a bad thing, in some ways; when he was in physical pain, he could ignore the emotional turmoil within him. Grandfather had been up to his old tricks this morning, hovering just on the edge of his vision and glowering, every so often mouthing the word, "Malingerer." He'd taken refuge in the garage to overhaul the Vauxhall Prince Henry he'd bought just before the war.

That was when Budd had made the current suggestion, and he couldn't have leapt upon it faster if he'd had both good legs back.

He had Budd along with him, just in case his knee gave out and he couldn't wrestle the old bus any further along, but he was looking forward to the day when he could go out on his own. On his own—because then, he could open her up and let tear, and if he went smash, he'd hurt no one but himself.

And if I go smash, no one's to know how much of an accident it is . . . or isn't. Once he had fought death off like a tiger. That had been before every day was a battle, and every night a little war, and he could feel his sanity slipping through his fingers like water. Maybe death was just the door into another life. At the moment, he didn't believe it. He didn't believe in a higher power, either. What higher power would ever let the slaughter across the Channel go on and on and on as it had? Unless that higher power were stark raving mad.

So the big thing would be to do yourself in a way that was fast, and hopefully painless. A good smash into a solid oak tree at the Prince Henry's top end would do that.

But that wouldn't be today. Today, Budd had tendered that rather awkward and shy invitation to—a pub.

"Not just any pub, milord," he'd hastily said. "Used to be the workingman's pub, afore the war, so they say. Now—" He'd shrugged. "Not many workingmen in Broom. Them of us got mustered out, took it over, more or less."

He'd captured Reggie's dull attention with that. The only men that were "mustered out" these days were those who were too maimed to go back into the lines.

"Really?" he'd said, looking up at Budd over the Prince Henry's bonnet. "Tell me more."

"Not much to tell," Budd had replied. "Just—we didn't feel none too comfortable around—people who weren't there, d'ye see?"

"I do see, believe me, I do." He had tried to give Budd that look. "So, no one else ever comes in?"

"Mostly not, and they mostly goes back out again pretty quick." Budd had sighed, and stared glumly down at the carburetor. "Not a cheery lot, are we. Don't go in for darts, much. Skittles, right out. Tend to swap stories as make th' old reg'lars get the collie-wobbles and look for the door. Now, we're a rough lot. And old Mad Ross the socialist is one of us. But I wondered, milord, if you might find a pint there go down a bit easier than a brandy—" and he had jerked his head up at the house.

"I have no doubt of that," he'd said savagely, giving his wrench a hard crank. "And I'd be obliged if you'd be my introduction."

So that was how he found himself now on dusty High Street holding his fast auto to a chugging crawl she did not in the least like, while curious urchins came out to watch him pass.

Now, he had not, as a rule, held himself aloof from Broom in the old days. He wasn't at all averse to a pint or a meal at Broom Hall Inn. He tried to make some sort of a point of knowing a bit about his villagers, and he'd had a good memory for names and faces. And it was a shock, a real shock, to see what was going on now.

There was a woman delivering the mail. He thought it might be Aurora Cook. The postman had been Howard Sydneyson—the postmaster had been Thomas Price—

Who were both something like thirty. . . . Gone, of course, by now. Conscripted. Neither job came under the heading of "vital to the needs of the nation."

David Toback had been the constable—another shock came when Reggie saw poor old sixty-year-old Thomas Lament making the rounds in his stead. What would he do to a miscreant? Talk them to death? It was a good thing that most of the troublemakers were gone too—also conscripted, or else told by the judge it was the infantry or jail.

Carlton McKenney's blacksmith shop was closed; there were no sons to take his place at the forge, and blacksmithing was no job for a daughter. . . .

Thank heaven for a moment of normality—Stephen Kirby's apothecary shop was still open with Kirby in it—but then, the poor man was the next thing to blind, and his wife Morgan had to read out all of the doctor's prescriptions to him. Not good on the front line.

The saddlery was closed. Reggie bit his lip, remembering that one of the last things he had done before going off to the RFC Flying College at Oxford was to take his hunting saddle down there for repairs.

He finally stopped glancing to the side; there always seemed to be more bad news than there was good. Finally Budd directed him to park next to a whitewashed, two-story building he wouldn't have known was a pub except for the sign "The Broom" over the door.

"Here we are, milord," Budd said, getting out. "Now, don't you mind Mad Ross. He'll probably be on you the minute you're inside."

Reggie raised an eyebrow. "If I can't manage Ross Ashley, I'm in worse condition than I thought," he said wryly.

Budd held open the door for him, and the two of them entered, Reggie going first, his cane thudding on the dark wooden floor like a third foot.

It was dark inside, with a low, beamed ceiling, and plastered walls that hadn't been painted in some time and had turned the color of perfect toast. The usual pub furniture. Big inglenook fireplace at one end. Nothing roasting on it though; whole pigs were hard to come by these days. Just a little bit of a fire to keep the chill off.

All eyes were on them as they stepped up to the bar.

"This'll be—" Budd began "Reggie Fenyx," Reggie said gently. He held out his hand to the barman, who took it gingerly.

"Thomas Brennan, sir," the man said. "What'll it be, gents?"

"Bitter," said Reggie, and "Stout," said Budd. They took their drinks, both in good pint glasses, solid and substantial.

"That'll be my round, then," said Reggie, loud enough for the rest of the pub to hear, and cast a look around to make sure that everyone did hear him. Then he left a pound note casually on the bar. "And one for yourself," he added to Brennan. "Let me know when that runs out."

"Thenkee, sir." The barman made the pound note vanish.

There wasn't a rush for the bar, more of an orderly shuffle. Everyone seemed to know his place in the pecking order, and no one was in such a tearing hurry as to care to dare to jump the queue. Budd and Reggie took a little table at the back of the place to wait for people to come to them.

And predictably, the first was Ross Ashley, stumping over to them with determination on his face and a pint in one hand.

And before he could say a word, Reggie beat him to it. "Take a chair, Ross," he said mildly. "Don't stand there and sing The Red Flag at me, you couldn't carry a tune to save your soul, and I already know all the words."

Budd kicked a chair over to Ashley, who, all the wind knocked out of his sails, took it.

"Now, old man, if you're more of the 'share the wealth' sort of socialist and not the 'murder the oppressors in their beds,' sort, I think we can talk," said Reggie, as the rest of the pub denizens pretended to be very interested in their beers, while their ears were stretched to the furthest extent. "If you persuade me of a few things, you're a good enough speaker, and you aren't too mad, I might be persuaded to help you stand for Parliament. But you'd better be able to make a good speech and prepared to live up to what you promise in it."

Now Ross's mouth was opening and closing like a stranded fish's. Reggie was quite enjoying himself at this point—a sardonic sort of enjoyment, but more amusement than he'd had since the day Emily Welsh, his nurse in the hospital, had tipped a matchbox with a live spider in it into a particularly abusive doctor's pocket, and when the man had gone to light his cigar—

Served him right, too; acting as if the VADs were his personal slaveys.

Now, he wasn't going to do anything malicious to Ross, who he recalled as being passionate, but not particularly obnoxious. The man probably resented having one of the gentry, the oppressive ruling class invading his pub, and Reggie didn't blame him.

But he was tired of class separation. He was tired of officer and enlisted. He was tired of RFC and FBI. And he was tired to death of the boundaries between men that the war should have broken down and smashed to bits by now. He would have to take his father's seat in the House of Lords eventually—if he didn't do himself first—but he damned well would like to see a man in Commons for this district that had some ideas that weren't spawned in the seventeenth century.

Finally Ross managed to say something. "You'll not be bribing me, Reginald Fenyx," he growled. "You'll not be paying me off with the promise of a seat!"

"Of course I won't; I don't intend to." Reggie took a pull on his pint and sighed. He was very glad that Budd had brought him here. If nothing else, Brennan could brew. "And it's not a promise of a seat, it's a promise of support. You'll have to win the seat yourself; if you can't persuade people to vote for you, too bad. I want a fellow from here who'll argue for the people, even if it's against me. Better butting heads in Parliament than storming the walls of Longacre."

Ashley regarded him with a remnant of suspicion for a moment. "And I can say what I like?"

"I wouldn't begin to try to stop you," Reggie said sincerely. "Just remember you aren't recruiting for the socialists if you do go out there for a seat. You'll be stumping for votes. That's two different things. About as different as FBI and the sixty-minute men."

Once again, Ross sat there opening and closing his mouth a few times before stopping it by taking a pull of his pint.

"You are the damndest fellow I ever did see," he said, coming up out of the glass at last.

Reggie looked around, at the scarred faces, the missing limbs, the haunted looks. "I think we're all damned, Ross," he said quietly. "I think this is hell's own waiting-room. And I think we might as well make good company for each other while we're still here."

With Alison and the girls out of the house for a little, Eleanor hastily painted the glyph on the hearthstone with her sprig of rosemary (which worked better than the wand, actually), cracked it in half, and slipped out the back door and the back gate.

What she wanted, was a newspaper and gossip, in that order.

It never failed to amaze her, every time that she slipped out, how no one ever recognized her, not even the people she knew well. Their eyes just slipped past her, almost as if they actually could not see her. If something happened, such as physically bumping into someone, the person in question would look down at her in puzzlement or irritation, as if they could not imagine where she had sprung from, and depending on their natures, pass on with a vague smile or an annoyed frown without saying a word.

Then again, as a scullery maid, she didn't warrant a second glance, much less an apology.

I swear, if this is ever over, I will hunt down Ross Ashley and become a socialist. . . .

The newspaper could be found on the top of Morgan Kirby's dustbin, neatly folded. An old one, of course, but old was better than none. The gossip could be heard by creeping under the window of Nancy Barber's hairdressing establishment and listening there. Her husband had been the eponymous barber of the village, but he was gone, and Nancy had children to feed, so the barber-shop became a ladies' hairdressing salon where esoteric creations like marcel waves were produced, the very daring (or very young) had their hair bobbed, and the gossip flowed. . . .

Eleanor crept into place beneath the window just in time to catch the tail end of a sentence.

"—oh definitely back! Colonel Davies, the stationmaster, saw him when he got off the train, and his people sent a car down for him from Longacre."

Longacre! Well either they were talking about a guest or Reggie Fenyx was back from the war.

"Well, how did he look?" someone asked.

"The Colonel said none too healthy," replied the first speaker, sounding uncertain. "Though what he meant by that, I can't say."

"It could be anything," a third woman said, with resignation. "Men have no notion."

"Well, he was wounded. I should think he has every right to look unhealthy," said the first. "What's more interesting to me is that his mother, Lady Devlin, is having tea right this minute with Alison Robinson and her two girls."

"No!" "What?" "Really?" The replies came quickly, too quickly for the speaker to answer.

And now I understand why she was in such a pother over going to tea. It's not just that it's Lady Devlin and nobby society. It's Reggie. Unmarried Reggie.

"And her with two pretty daughters too. Hmm," said the owner of the third voice thoughtfully. "Well, we know where the wind blows there."

"Social climber," said the second with contempt. "So Broom society isn't good enough for milady Robinson—"

"Be fair! She never said anything about being gentry]" said the first. "Some nob relative of hers sent Lady Devlin a letter about her."

"At least now she'll stop her girls angling for every lad with a bit in his pocket here," said the second. "Not that they're so many on the ground anymore, but still."

"With your Tamara about?" giggled the third. "Those chits didn't have a chance. Oh, I wish you'd seen them at the Christmas party, swanning about in their fashionable London frocks, and in comes Tamara in her two-year-old velvet from Glennis White, and there go all the officers! Oh, their faces were a sight!"

"Fine feathers aren't everything," the mother of the village beauty, Tamara Budd, said complacently. "Nor, when it comes to it, is a pretty face, if there's a mean, nasty heart behind it."

Eleanor didn't have to hide a smirk, since there was no one to see her. If there was a single soul in all of the village that her stepsisters hated, truly hated, it was Tamara Budd. She had been pretty when Eleanor had been locked within the walls of the house. Now, evidently, she had blossomed into true beauty, for any time some entertainment was on offer, be it a tea-dance for soldiers or a gathering at some house or at the Broom Hall Inn, according to the girls, it was Tamara who was the center of male attention.

There was no doubt that the stepsisters would have killed or disfigured her if they could. Eleanor could tell that from the vicious things they said, the way they stabbed their cigarettes in the air, the mere tone that their voices took when they spoke about her.

For her part, she might have been alarmed that they would succeed in doing Tamara harm, except that she also heard them complaining that something protected their rival from any charms or cantrips they attempted to cast. She had a good idea that it might be Sarah who was responsible, but you never knew.

She listened a while longer, but it was clear enough that there was nothing more to hear, and it would not be long before Alison and girls returned from their tea with Lady Devlin.

She crept out of hiding, and hurried back to the kitchen with her purloined newspaper hidden in the folds of her skirt. From there it went underneath the pile of logs for the stove and the kitchen fire; there wasn't a chance that either of the girls nor Alison would move a single one of those logs. Now that she had gotten outside—and discovered what shocking changes had happened to the world that she had known—she was afire to find out how much more had been happening.

Not that any of it had been good. She had read with horror of ships being torpedoed by German submarines and sent to the bottom with most of their human cargo—even hospital ships! Bombs had actually been dropped on parts of London and the eastern coast by both zeppelins and huge aeroplanes and several hundred perfectly innocent people had been blown to bits. As for the war itself, her head reeled to think about it, and she knew she was getting no more than the barest, most sanitized idea of what was going on from the papers. How could something be a "glorious victory" when all it got you was possession of a long trench a hundred yards east of where you had been when an assault started—a trench you had occupied several times already, only to have been driven out of it by the Germans—who doubtless also crowed about their "glorious victory."

She couldn't help but wonder, was this how her father had died? No one had ever told her the details. All that she had ever known was that he was dead. She had nightmares about it sometimes; that he was blown to pieces by a shell, that he was killed in a charge, that he was shot by a sniper. That he died instantly, or that he had lain in agony for hours, while his fellow soldiers watched, unable to help him. It was horrible; she woke from those dreams sobbing, and only seeking solace from the little Salamanders in her fire helped.

She sighed, and went to work on dinner preparations. The girls were going to get chicken stew and dumplings, and like it, for it was the only way to stretch the poor, thin chicken that had come by way of the butcher shop today.

So, Reggie Fenyx was home again—and looking ill, and had been wounded. She could not imagine the energetic young man, boiling over with enthusiasm that she had known, as being ill or hurt. Such a thing never seemed possible.

But she couldn't imagine him in a uniform, either.

She couldn't think of him as shooting people, and killing them; he had always seemed so gentle in his way.

As she chopped vegetables, she reflected that now she knew why Alison was so afire over the invitation to tea with Lady Devlin—so much so, that the girls had left frocks spread all over their rooms for her to pick up, trying on this one and that one until Alison was satisfied with their appearance. It all made perfect sense. Alison wanted to get invitations up to Longacre Park so that the girls would have an unrestricted chance to snare Reggie.

She chopped savagely at the old, withered carrots. Miserable creatures! They would do nothing other than make poor Reggie unhappy! Here he was coming home in a weakened state, and they were going to descend on him like vultures to nibble on the carcass—

But wait a moment; hadn't Sarah said that the Fenyx family were Elemental Masters?

She had!

Eleanor felt her shoulders unknot. Of course. Reggie was an Air Master; Alison's girls would have no more chance of bewitching him than of taking one of his aeroplanes up by themselves.

But that opened up another thought. If Reggie was an Air Master, wouldn't he be able to see the magic spells on her? And even if he couldn't do anything about them himself, couldn't he tell someone who could?

Her heart fluttered in her throat at the very idea—

Don't get your hopes up, she scolded herself severely. First you have to get out of here. Then you have to be somewhere that he is. And last, he has to be willing to help you.

Still, the mere chance of a hope was more than she'd had in a long time.

I can at least make plans.

11

April 23, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

"SO THE BLOODY YANKS FINALLY decided to give us a hand, then." That was Matt Brennan, the barman's brother. Poor Matt had lost a leg and his arm had been terribly mangled, and half the time seemed to have lost his speech as well. Brother Thomas kept him on as potman, collecting the glasses, doing a bit of sweeping up, and let him sleep somewhere on the premises once the place was closed. It wasn't much, but it was work.

The news had finally percolated to Broom that the United States had actually joined the war that the rest of the world had been fighting for the past three years, and it was likely to be the sole topic of conversation here in this pub for the rest of the week. Everyone who came in started it over again.

"What d'ye think of them Yanks, captain?" Ross Ashley asked. "Never caught sight of one myself."

"Well," Reggie said, measuring his words carefully. "We got quite a few Yanks in the RFC, boys that wouldn't sit still and watch while someone else was having a fight. I heard the French picked up a few, especially in the Foreign Legion."

"So they got the gumption to stick it, ye think?" asked Will Stevens, who had been a good yeoman farmer before the war began, and was again, just without three fingers on his right hand.

Reggie shrugged. "Hard to tell, really. The ones I saw all seemed to think of themselves as being in some sort of Wild West show. Talked about 'flying by the seat of the pants, didn't pay a lot of attention to instruction, and tended to be 'thirty-minute men' if that. Though when they were good enough to survive, they were quite good. I don't know what their infantry will be like."

Young Albert Norman (chest wound, lost a lung) coughed and cleared his throat. Mind, he coughed a great deal, but this was the sort of cough he used when about to say something.

"There are a great many of them," he said carefully. "It's a bigger country than Canada. And I shouldn't think it would be too terribly difficult for them to turn all those factories to making armaments."

Reggie nodded. Albeit was well read; Reggie didn't doubt in the least that he had the right of it.

"So," Doug Baird (shrapnel to the legs) said bitterly. "We'll have fought the Kaiser to a standstill for three bloody years, and the Yanks will just come in with convoys of fresh troops and all the damned supplies you could ask for, roll over the trenches, and take credit for the whole thing, then?"

Reggie sighed. To be brutally honest, he didn't see it turning out any other way. But he decided not to say anything. These men were bitter enough without his adding to their discontent—or despair.

"At least it will be over," Richard Bowen said, with resignation. "That's all I care about. Just let it be over."

Thomas Brennan cleared his throat. "Last call, gentlemen." "My round again," Reggie said decisively.

He did a lot of round-buying—not so much as to make it seem as if he was patronizing them, but because he knew very well that there was not a lot of money to spare in their households, and it seemed a hard thing to him to have a man leave bits of himself in France in the service of his country only to find he couldn't afford his pint when he came home again. A hard thing, and a wicked, cruel thing; there wasn't a lot of pleasure left in the world for these men.

Those that had gone back to their work—farmers, mostly—were finding it difficult. Those who hadn't lost limbs outright still had injuries bad enough to muster them out. Legs didn't work right anymore, arms didn't have the same strength. They found themselves depending on their wives or children to help them with difficult physical jobs, and that was humiliating. Often the young horses they'd depended on to help with plowing had been taken for the war, leaving only the old fellows who should have been taking up pasture-space. They found themselves with a house full of Land Girls, who might or might not be of any use. Nothing was the same, everything was more difficult, and what had they gotten out of it all? Nothing to speak of. The best, the very best that they could say was that because they were at the production end of the food supply it was easier for them to hide a bit from the government and circumvent some of the shortages. If you were a farmer, you could still have your sweets, if you made do with honey instead of sugar, and though sugar was rationed for tea, it was, oddly enough, not rationed for jam-making—you could hide a pig in your wood-lot, or raise rabbits openly, since rabbit-meat wasn't in short supply. When you brought your wheat to David Miller, he'd generally "forget" about a few of the bags of white flour he loaded back on your cart. And if you had a cow of your own, your kiddies weren't forced to drink that thin, blue skimmed milk that made the city children so thin and pale-looking.

But that was the best you could say. For the rest, between rationing and scarcity, the prices were up, and what you got for your produce was the same as it had been before the war, just about. Someone was making a profit, but it wasn't you.

And if you didn't own or lease a farm—well, things were very hard indeed. Sometimes you couldn't do your old job, and it was hard to find a new one. Especially around here.

So if Reggie could help out a little by buying more than his share of rounds, it seemed a small thing.

Mater wouldn't like it by half if she knew where I was going of a night. Hanging about with socialists. . . . But what she doesn't know, she can't object to. I'm more welcome here than there. Her father had gotten so poisonously aggressive in his accusations of malingering of late that even she had started to protest weakly. Never mind that there were days Reggie couldn't leave his room, days when he locked the door and spent half the day crouched in a corner like a terrified mouse, too afraid to so much as move. "Acting" was what Grandfather Sutton would have called it. Oh, yes, acting. As if he enjoyed spending his time huddled behind the furniture too afraid to make a sound, and completely unable to say what it was he was afraid of, only knowing that the bottom was out of the universe and doom was upon him.

But there was a letter in Reggie's pocket right now that might well prove to be the old man's undoing.

The address on the envelope said it all: Brigadier Eric Mann (Ret.) The Elms, Dorcester.

The Brigadier had been a great friend of Reggie's father—he had more experience in a single month with actual combat than Grandfather Sutton had in his entire career. His letter had been phrased with great delicacy, but Reggie had no difficulty whatsoever in interpreting it. The Brigadier had heard about Reggie's injuries, he actually knew what life was like on the front, and he wanted to come visit and offer whatever support he could.

And although in general the very last thing that Reggie wanted at the moment was a parade of visitors through Longacre, this was one letter he had answered as soon as he had read it, in the affirmative. The Brigadier did know what life was like on the front. He had been there. How? Reggie had no idea how he had managed to get out there—but the little he'd read in the letter told him that Eric Mann knew what conditions were really like. The Brigadier would not tolerate any nonsense from Grandfather Sutton. With any luck, once they butted heads a time or two, Sutton would elect to clear out and go back to his club in London and leave Reggie in peace. At the very least, he would keep his mouth shut as long as the Brigadier was there.

Reggie could hardly wait.

"Time, gentlemen!" Thomas called, recalling him to his present surroundings.

There was little more than a half inch of bitter in his glass; he swallowed it down with appreciation, left a little something under the glass for Matt to find, stood up, and pulled on his driving coat. That was one good thing about having an auto over a horse; he didn't have to worry about leaving a horse standing tied up for hours.

On the other hand, the auto won't get you home by itself if you're drunk. . . .

He made his farewells and went out into the night; he really couldn't bear watching the others make their way home. It was just too heartbreaking. If a man staggered away from his favorite pub of an evening, it should be because he'd had just a wee bit too much, not because his legs were too painful to hold him.

Nor because one leg was gone, and he wasn't used to walking on the wooden one.

Instead, he paid excruciatingly careful attention to getting the auto started; by the time he'd done, they were all gone. He climbed stiffly into the driver's seat, and chugged away.

"Well! There goes that Reggie Fenyx again," Sarah said, as the unfamiliar sound of an automobile engine chugged past the front of her cottage.

Eleanor looked up from the runes of warding that she had been learning. "How do you know?"

Sarah snorted. "And who else is it that would be leaving Thomas Brennan's pub after last call in a motorcar?" she asked rhetorically. "Doctor Sutherland's choice is the public bar at the Broom Hall Inn when he goes anywhere, Steven Zachary hasn't got a motor of his own yet, the vicar doesn't drink in public, so there you are! Besides, I happen to know the lads that have all been mustered out have taken the place over since Matt came home, and I expect he feels more at ease there among them than anywhere else."

Eleanor looked down at the little firepot she was using. "It's horrible, isn't it." It was a statement, not a question. "It's horrible, and they can't talk to anyone else about it."

"Well, they could," Sarah replied, somewhat to Eleanor's surprise. "They could talk to their wives, their sweethearts, their mothers. We're stronger than they think. They keep thinking they have to protect us from whatever it is that they went through, so there they are, suffering behind closed mouths, building walls to protect us, they say, but it's all so we won't see they're weak." She shook her head. "As if we don't. But there it is. Silly, isn't it? That they daren't let us see them as less than strong?"

Eleanor looked up and lifted an eyebrow. "I think I see why you never married, Sarah," she replied, with irony.

Sarah laughed. "Well, and I reckoned if I wanted something that'd come and go as he pleased, take me for granted, and ignore me when he chose, I'd get a cat. And if I wanted something I'd always have to be picking up after, getting into trouble, but slavishly devoted, I'd get a dog."

Eleanor shook her head and went back to her firepot, which was a little cast-iron pot on three legs, full of coals over which flames danced bluely. She was learning to write runes in the fire, which was the first step to making it answer her. A Salamander was coiled in the bottom of the pot just above the coals; it watched her with interest, and hissed a warning when she was just starting to go wrong.

Her moment of inattention made it hiss again, and Sarah paused to look down at it. "They're not supposed to do that, you know," she said, in surprise. "Warn you, that is. It's almost like it's trying to help you."

"I think it is," Eleanor said, canceling the rune with a wave of her wand, and holding out her hand to the pot. The salamander uncoiled itself and leapt out of the pot, circled her wrists like ferret three or four times, then leapt back into the pot.

Sarah shook her head. "They're not supposed to do that. I'd not have believed it if I'd been told. There's summat about you they like." "I hope so," she replied.

"Aye, well, they're not so changeable as air and water, though be wary you don't go angering them," Sarah warned. "They're quick to anger, and they ne'er forget, nor forgive."

Eleanor nodded, and bent back to her work. But part of her mind was on Reggie, wondering if Carolyn and Lauralee had been introduced to him, yet, if they'd started trying to charm him yet. It made her angry, that thought, and—yes—jealous. Which made no sense at all. He probably didn't even remember her, and if he did, it was as nothing more than a hoydenish tomboy, a silly little girl with a wild notion of becoming a scholar. He probably wouldn't remember her even if someone reminded him of her.

And as for now, he wouldn't look at her twice. She certainly was so far beneath his notice that if they passed on the same side of the street he wouldn't even see her, not really.

Stop thinking about Reggie! she scolded herself. Get your mind on your work. Because if you can't learn this soon, Alison and her girls will have him, and then where will you be?

"Don't bother fixing anything for tea, Ellie," Alison called through the open kitchen door. "We're having it at Longacre. In fact—" Eleanor could not help but hear the gloating sound in her voice "we'll be having our tea at Longacre for the foreseeable future."

"Yes, ma'am," Eleanor said dutifully, but her heard leapt. Tea at Longacre Park? And for the foreseeable future? That would mean she would be able to get away for the whole afternoon.

Of course, Alison would see it as another privation—if she wasn't permitted to get out tea-things for her stepmother and the girls, she wouldn't be able to make any tea for herself. Which meant that she would have to wait until suppertime for a meal.

Or so Alison thought. Well, that's what I want her to think. So Eleanor contrived to look disappointed and hungry, though she was neither. She could hardly contain her excitement as Alison and her girls bundled up into the motor and chugged off in the direction of Longacre Park. And the moment she was sure they weren't going to return, she wrote her runes on the hearthstone and was off like a shot.

The sky was bright and blue, the wind high, and she only had a few hours—but she knew where she wanted to be. Down at the opposite end of the six thousand or so acres of Longacre, in the round meadow in a little copse of trees at the end of what she still thought of as the Aeroplane Field. No one would see her there, no one ever went there; she was half mad to get out of the house for some sun and air. And this was the farthest Alison's spell would let her go.

She wrapped up a couple of slices of bread and jam for her own tea, broke her sprig of rosemary and left half on the hearthstone, flung on a coat and ran out the door.

She wasn't even entirely sure what she was running from. Maybe it was—well—everything. Her own imprisonment. The war news. Alison's glee and the girls' gloating. And fear, fear, so much fear—now she knew she had a chance to set herself free, and she was afraid. Afraid she would never learn all she needed to, afraid that she would never be able to command her Element as skillfully as Alison could and would lose, and her imprisonment would be even harsher than it was now. Afraid that ever if she did escape, no one would believe what she had to tell them, and she would accomplish nothing, or worse than nothing—that she'd be locked up as mad, or given back over to Alison, or else would have to turn drudge for someone else in order to put food in her stomach and a roof over her head. In a way, things were worse than before; before she'd had no hope and so nothing to lose. Now—now she had hope and all to lose.

So she ran, hoping to outrun her own fear and uncertainty. Hoping to outrun the bleak air of depression that hung over the entire town. Hoping to get to one place where none of this mattered, where she could just be for a few hours, and pretend that there was no war, there was no Alison, that the days of peace and plenty were still upon them all, and that when she came back to the house her father would still be alive and waiting to share supper with her.

She pushed herself so hard, trying to outrun her very thoughts, that she arrived at the meadow winded and out of breath, and flung herself down in the middle of the clear space among the trees to lie on her back in the old, dry grass and look up at the clouds and pant.

And it was glorious, because she could just empty her mind and not think, not about anything or anyone, and just stare up into the blue and watch nothing.

She could, in fact, have lain there forever, with the warm sun shining down on her. At that moment, cutting free of Alison and just going, finding someone else to work for, didn't seem so bad an idea—

Except—

If she did this to me, and to Papa, what would she do to Reggie?

The question struck her like a thunderbolt out of the blue sky, but at that moment she knew that if either Carolyn or Lauralee married Reggie Fenyx, no matter how strong his Air Magic was, he would remain alive no longer than her father had.

She sat bolt upright at the thought—

—and a yelp of strangled fear met her sudden appearance out of the grass.

She twisted around onto her knees to face the sound, and found herself staring into the white face of Reggie Fenyx.

He was sitting on a fallen tree-trunk at the edge of the tiny meadow, quite alone, and clearly her sudden appearance had frightened the wits out of him. As he stared at her with wild, wide eyes, all she could think of to do was to hold out her hand and say, soothingly, "I'm sorry—I beg your pardon—I'm really very sorry—"

He trembled as he stared at her, as if he didn't quite recognize her for what she was. And then, quite suddenly, she saw sense come into his gaze, and of course, he did recognize her, and passed a hand over his pale face. "No—no—" he said, finally. "No, it's quite all right. It's just my nerves. I wasn't expecting anyone—that is, I thought I was alone; no one ever used to come down to this part of Longacre but me."

"Well," she said, slowly getting to her feet, brushing down her threadbare skirt with one hand, and wondering hesitantly if she should leave. "That isn't quite true. But most of the people who used to come here are gone."

"Gone. That would be—the boys, wouldn't it?" His hand was still over his eyes, and still trembling. "Yes. Not boys any longer, though, and they would be gone, wouldn't they? Even the youngest." With an effort, he took his hand away from his eyes and looked at her again. She was horribly ashamed of how shabby she was, but he didn't notice, or at least, if he did, he wasn't letting on. He squinted at her, and then managed a tremulous smile. "You're that little tomboy, Eleanor Robinson from the village, aren't you? Only not such a little tomboy anymore." The smile faded. "I heard about your father. I'm dreadfully sorry."

She looked down at her hands, clasped together in front of her. "Thank you," she said quietly. Then she looked back up again. She kept her frown to herself, but—

But wasn't he supposed to be an Air Master? Yet there were none of the energies, none of the Elementals of Air anywhere about him! Why, he showed no more of magic than—than the schoolmaster, Michael Stone! Less!

Surely that wasn't right.

"So, do you come and invade my private property often?" he was asking, trying to sound normal, trying to make an ordinary conversation of the sort he could so easily back before the war began.

And now she found herself fighting against the prohibitions of Alison's other spells. She would have liked to say, "When I can escape my stepmother's spell—" or "When no one is going to catch me and make my life a purgatory—"

But all she could say was, "When I can." Then she sighed. "It's so peaceful here, and sometimes I can't bear how things are now. Here, nothing's changed. It's all the way it was—before. The meadow probably hasn't changed in a hundred years."

"That's a good answer, Eleanor Robinson," he replied. "That's a very good answer, and I give you leave to come here whenever you want. It's the reason I came down here—well, I tell a lie, it's one of the reasons." He smiled wanly. "My teatime has been unconscionably invaded, and I came to escape the enemy."

She furrowed her brow in puzzlement, and stepped forward a pace or two. "Enemy?" she asked uncertainly.

"Women," he elaborated. "A gaggle of women. Invited by my mother, with malice and intent. Those that weren't there on their own to simper and flirt at me, were mothers eyeing the goods before they set their own daughters on the scent." He shuddered. "I felt like the only fox in the county with three hunts in the field at once."

She couldn't help it; she had to laugh at that. Especially considering that Alison and the girls must have been in that group he so openly despised.

And they thought they were the only ones with an invitation to tea! That was more than enough to make her smile. Oh, they would be so angry when they came home! They hadn't reckoned on there being competition. They should have, though. Reggie would have been quite a prize before the war, and now, with so many young men dead in France and Flanders, he was an even greater prize.

And the best part was that they would be blaming one another. Alison would be blaming the girls for not being sufficiently charming to keep Reggie there, and the girls would be blaming their mother for not knowing this was going to be a competition staged by Reggie's mother, inadvertently or on purpose. There was not a single thing that any of them could blame on her, so they would make poisonous jibes at each other, or stare sullenly, all through dinner.

And meanwhile, here he was, the object of their hunt, hiding from them.

"I'll go if you want to be alone," she offered. It only seemed fair. He'd come here to be alone, hadn't he? "I just—I just wanted to go somewhere today where I could pretend that—all that—hadn't happened. At least for a while."

"I wanted the same thing," he said, and somehow, the wistful, yet completely hopeless way in which he said it, made her heart ache for him. "And—no, Miss Robison—" "Eleanor," she said, instantly.

He smiled a little. "Then if I am to call you Eleanor, you must promise to call me Reggie. No, please don't go. I'm not much company, but I don't want to think I've driven you away from the only peaceful place you can find."

He patted the tree-trunk beside him in a kind of half-hearted invitation to sit; instead, she sat down in the grass at his feet.

He looked a great deal different from the last time she had seen him, and it wasn't just the little moustache or the close-cropped military haircut. He was very pale, and every movement had a nervous quality to it, like one of those high-bred miniature greyhounds that never seems entirely sure something isn't going to step on it or snatch it up and bite it in two. He was also very thin, much thinner than she remembered him being.

And his eyes, his gray-blue eyes, were the saddest things about him. "Haunted" was the very expression she would have used, had anyone asked her. These were eyes that had seen too much, too much loss, too much horror.

She felt tongue-tied, at a loss for anything to say to him, and it was clear that he felt the same. Finally, she said, in desperation, knowing that the topic of an automobile was at least safe, "I heard your motorcar go past the other night. Is it a very fast one?"

With relief, he seized the neutral subject as a drowning man seizes a plank, and went into exacting, excruciating detail about the auto. She had to admit, although she didn't care a jot about the insides of the thing, the other things he could tell her about the auto itself were fascinating. Evidently its type had won many races, and there was no doubt that he was as proud of it as he had been of his aeroplane.

And something instinctively warned her about not talking about flying, though she couldn't have told what. Perhaps it was the vague recollection of hearing his wounds had come when he had crashed. Perhaps it was because he himself didn't bring the subject up, and before he had gone off to the war, that had been the one thing in his life he had been the most passionate about.

When he ran out of things to tell her about his motorcar, she asked about what he had read for at Oxford, and what his friends had been like. He relaxed, more and more, as he spoke of these things, and she thought she just might be doing him some good. Finally, when he looked as if he was searching a little too hard for another good story, she smiled, and asked, "I have some bread and jam. Would you like to share my tea?"

And at that, he laughed weakly, and quoted, " 'Better a dinner of herbs where love is?' Yes, thank you, I should very much like to share your tea. And—" He reached down behind the trunk of the tree and brought up an old rucksack, rummaging around in it for a moment. "Well, yes, good, my old instincts have not failed me; as I fled the harpies, I carried off provender. I can provide drink. I have two bottles of ginger-beer."

With great solemnity he opened the bottles and handed her one; she passed over half of her slightly squashed jam sandwiches.

"I think it was very rude of your mother not to have warned you that guests were coming," she said bluntly, after they clinked bottles. "Especially so many. That was not at all fair."

"Yes, well, if she'd told me I'd have done the bunk beforehand, now, wouldn't I?" he replied logically. "I suppose now I'll have to find some excuse to avoid teatime every day from now on—"

"Oh, don't do that—she'll just invite them to supper or something equally inconvenient]" Eleanor exclaimed. "No, the thing to do—" she screwed up her face as she thought hard. "The thing to do is to sit through it once in a while. Every other day, or every third day, or the like. Only have something, some appointment or task later in the afternoon that you have to do so you can excuse yourself after an hour or two. That way your mother won't ever know when, exactly, you're going to take tea with her, and you will have a good escape ready."

"By Jove, Eleanor, I think that will work! And I know my estate manager will be only too ruddy pleased to have me in the office as often as possible, so I can make that my excuse." He actually looked— happy. Wanly happy, but definitely for one moment, happy. "You should be a tactician, old girl!"

And just at that most pleasant moment, she felt the first faint tugging of Alison's hearth-spell, and looked down to see the sprig of rosemary pinned to the breast of her shirtwaist starting to wilt. She could have cursed. "I have to go!" she exclaimed, jumping to her feet. "I'm really sorry, but I must—"

"What's the hurry?" he asked in bewilderment, as she shoved the empty ginger-beer bottle into his hands. "I say, I haven't said anything to offend you, have I?"

"No, no, no, I just have to get back, I don't have a choice," she shook her head and felt the sting of disappointed tears in her eyes. "It's nothing to do with you; I enjoyed talking with you. I have to or—or— or I'll be in trouble—" she shook her head, and turned away.

"Well, at least say you'll be here tomorrow!" he called after her, as she began to run across the grass.

"I can't—" she called back over her shoulder, then at the sight of his stricken face, she made a reckless promise. "I'll come—I'll come whenever I can! At teatime! Whenever I can!"

And with that, she had to turn to race back to the house, back to captivity, an imprisonment that was now more onerous than it ever had seemed before.

12

April 28, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

DINNER WAS NOT PLEASANT TONIGHT. Animosity and suspicion hung over the table like the cloud of cigarette smoke rising above the heads of all three of the Robinsons at the table. "I don't understand it," Alison said, glaring at her daughters. "He hasn't shown the least bit of interest in either of you. That is just—unnatural." "It wasn't my spells, Mama," Carolyn said petulantly, tossing her head. "You checked them yourself. You watched me work them." She looked sideways at her sister. "Unless you interfered—"

But Alison wasn't accepting that excuse. "She didn't interfere; don't you think I would be able to tell?" Alison snarled. "No, it's not that. I've never seen anyone who was so unaffected by spells, and that's not natural. Even men with no magic at all respond to sex-charms."

Eleanor was unashamedly eavesdropping, and by a means that her stepmother would never guess. If Alison came to look, she would find Eleanor stoically peeling potatoes at the hearth, staring into the fire. Little did she guess that what Eleanor was staring at was not the flames. She had learned a new spell, or to be more precise, she had improvised it out of a scrying spell in Sarah's grimoire, that was supposed to use mirrors, linking the mirrors together, like a transmitter and a wireless radio, so that whatever was reflected in the target mirror was reflected in the one that the scryer held.

Only instead of mirrors, Eleanor was using the flames on the hearth in the kitchen and the one in the dining-room. It had been very odd, actually—Sarah had been struck dumb when she first tried it. And she could not imagine where she had gotten the idea that such a thing would work, either; it just—came to her, as she was reading the grimoire, as if someone had told it to her.

Now it was as if she was looking out from the fireplace there, and what was more, she was able to hear everything that went on as clearly as if she was sitting right there.

"It isn't only sex-charms he doesn't respond to," Lauralee said, stabbing her cigarette down into the center of her plate. "I tried to make him loathe that Leva Cygnet girl, and instead, he sat next to her at teal"

"And I thought you said he was an Air Master, Mama," interrupted Carolyn. "But I haven't seen a single Sylph anywhere about him, nor any hint of magic. Are you sure he's an Air Master?"

And when Carolyn said that, Eleanor watched Alison go through the most curious pantomime she had ever seen in her life. Alison opened her mouth to say something—then a puzzled look came over her—then she closed her mouth, opened it again, closed it, and frowned.

The girls stared at her, as if they had never seen their mother so nonplussed either.

Eleanor wondered what it meant.

"No Sylphs about," Alison said, consideringly. "As if the Sylphs do not recognize him as having Air Mastery either. No Zephyrs. They can't see him—I'm sure that's what that means. And yet, no shields, either. As if ... as if he is a magical cipher, a null. . . ."

"Actually, Mama," Lauralee said reflectively. "It's more as if the spells we cast on him are just swallowed up."

"Drained away," Carolyn echoed. "Or reflected, but not back at us."

"How . . . odd. Then I believe we are going to have to rethink our strategy," Alison brooded. "I wanted him to be attracted to you before I went to work more directly. I am going to need to make new plans."

"What new plans, Mama?" Lauralee asked leaning forward over the table eagerly. "Are you going to teach us new magic?"

Eleanor watched as Alison rubbed her hands along her arms uneasily. "Well, the magic that you two can cast is clearly not going to work. In fact, I would say he is probably resistant to all but the most powerful magic."

Both of them gazed at their mother with hunger now. Eleanor had wondered, ever since Sarah had come to the door, if Alison had been purposefully holding back teaching her daughters, or if her daughters were just not capable of greater magic. It was hard to tell—though it was true that none of the Earth Elementals were attracted to the girls.

Now she heard the answer, or at least, the answer that Alison was going to give them. "I'm afraid, my dears, you have no more inborn ability with magic than Warrick Locke. And I don't think at this point it would be wise to use my greater magics for more than I already have planned. So instead of using magic, use your wiles; show no jealousy of the other girls, but be the most pleasant and charming creatures in the room. Pay attention to everything he does and says. Work out what pleases him and what he would prefer not to deal with. Be sympathetic, and find things to get his mind off the war. That will do for now. Meanwhile, I will need to do some research of my own."

Eleanor had wondered about that. Her own feeling, once she had begun learning about magic herself, had been that neither girl would ever be a Master—because if that were possible for them, they would have surely shown some sign of it by now.

"Yes, Mama," the two chorused as one. They left the table to go up to their rooms, as Alison rang for Eleanor to clean up.

Is that why Reggie recognized me, when no one else in the village does? she wondered, as she carried plates back to the kitchen. Because Alison's spells just don't work on him?

It hadn't been until she had gotten back to the kitchen after first meeting him that she had realized Reggie had recognized her, had known who she was, almost from the first moment he had seen her. Other than Sarah, he was, apparently, the only other person who did. And she hadn't been able to get away to ask Sarah why that could be since the meeting.

Events in the household had conspired against her. First, despite Alison's assertion that she and the girls would be having tea up at Longacre for the foreseeable future, that hadn't exactly come to pass. The next day had been Alison's "at home," and although Alison certainly wanted to claw her way into the social circles of Longacre, she knew better than to abandon her post as leading light of Broom. For one thing, there were quite a number of things that the ladies of Broom could do to undermine Alison's progress if they chose. And for another, as she explained to her daughters, there was no point in prematurely burning bridges. The social set of Broom was still useful—particularly that centered around the vicarage, for the vicar, Donald Hinshaw, and his wife Theresa were the one couple who traveled socially freely between village and the big house.

Then the next day had been a meeting of the Ladies' Friendly Society, and it had been held at The Arrows, though under the auspices of its president, Amy Hammer. It had been yet another bandage-rolling meeting, and as a consequence, the house had been filled with women, all of whom required tea and refreshments. Now, those meetings were ones at which Eleanor had to be particularly careful of what was served; it wouldn't do at all to make it look as if this household was immune from the current privations—but at the same time, Alison was adamant that the tea be something that would elevate her status as a hostess. It all came down on Eleanor's shoulders, of course. It meant a great deal of cutting up heavy brown bread into thin, thin slices, toasting it delicately, and removing the crusts, spreading it with layers of jam and potted shrimp. It meant cutting more wafer-thin slices of brown bread and adding wafer-thin slices of smoked Scottish salmon atop. It meant baking whatever sort of cake could be managed with what was available in the village shops.

So that pretty well put paid to getting away that day. And the next, Warrick Locke had come for the afternoon. It had been all about business and legal papers; there was a good clue now to which sort of "business" was going on when Locke showed up. If it was mundane business, he brought with him his personal secretary, a curiously opaque lady named Jennifer Summers, as well as his "man," Robbie Christopher. Eleanor was not around Miss Summers enough to make a judgment of her, but Robbie made her flesh crawl. There was just something not right about him. As a consequence, she kept well out of their way. Locke spent the entire afternoon closeted with Alison, going over any number of matters concerning the manufactories.

He might be a horrible man, but he did know his business.

So, that meant no leaving the house on that day.

Finally, though, today had sent Alison and the girls out into the village on a series of meetings and whatnot concerning the annual May Day fete for the church, which brought them home exhausted, and made them perfect targets for Sarah's herb-spell. They were in bed by nine and fast asleep by ten, all three of them, and Eleanor was free to cast her spell and run to Sarah's cottage.

Sarah wasn't alone—Annette Monstead, the village midwife-in-training, and sister to Eric, the village sexton, was with her, discussing a possibly difficult case. Rather than intrude, Eleanor didn't even knock; she just waited outside until Annette left. It was scarcely a hardship; it was a beautiful evening, the kind on which—before the war—courting couples would go out walking.

Though that "walking" sometimes resulted in cases for Annette....

Proper young ladies weren't supposed to know about that sort of thing, but Eleanor had never been proper as such—and since the war, there was, if not actually condoning of such matters, certainly more understanding of them, and of the acts of desperation that led to an unexpected pregnancy. A fellow could get emergency leave, at least to get as far as London for a day or two to "put things right." There was not so much counting of months between the wedding-day and the day of the baby's arrival.

Eric turned up to escort his sister home—he, too, was above the conscription age, though his sister was at least twenty years younger. He was the eldest, and she the youngest, of a truly enormous family. Not so much a family as a tribe, in fact. Small wonder Annette had turned out to have a talent for midwifery!

Only after they were gone out of sight did Eleanor knock on Sarah's door and let herself in.

"I've met Reggie!" she burst out, unable to hold herself back. "And Sarah—he recognized me!"

"Well, and he would, wouldn't he, being an Air Master—" she began, but this time Eleanor interrupted her.

"Yes, but there's no Sylphs around him, and no Air energy," she continued, and went on to describe what she had learned watching the fire night after night.

When she was finished, Sarah stood next to her own hearth, arms folded over her chest, tapping her foot. "Hmm. That's a different kettle of fish altogether. It almost sounds like—" But then she frowned, and shook her head. "No, I don't know. And it's not right to speculate. I don't know nearly as much as your mother did, and sending you off in the wrong direction wouldn't do either of you any good."

"Sarah!" Eleanor cried indignantly. "At least give me a hint!" Sarah pursed her lips, and ran her hand through her hair. "Well, if I were to guess, and not being a Master, I have no business in guessing, I would say that something happened to him to make him afraid of using any magic. Now, when a Master decides not to use any magic, none at all, sometimes they stop thinking straight, and their heart—not their heads, the thinking parts, put the heart, the feeling part—is so frightened that the heart decides that means no magic by anyone else is going to get used around them either. So magic around them gets kind of—swallowed up. Things that the heart decides usually happen unless the head is well in charge." Sarah shrugged. "But that's just a guess. People like me don't have enough magic to do that sort of thing."

"But if that's the case, then why couldn't I tell him about Alison?" she asked, feeling desperate now. "Why didn't that spell stop working?"

Sarah grimaced, but with an air as if it should have been obvious to Eleanor that she had no idea why these things had happened or not. "Don't know. Maybe because that spell is stronger. Maybe because the spell to keep people from recognizing you is set to work on them and the one to keep you from telling people the truth is set to work on you." She shook her head. "I don't know, I'm just guessing. I'm not the Master Alison is, nor the Master your mother was. I know I've had my own counter-charms set that let me see you and talk to you freely, but then, I already knew what and who you were and I had a bit of your baby-hair I could use to work them. I don't know the complicated spells; I never bothered to learn them. I'm only strong enough to work cantrips and charms. In the case of countering what's on you, I can make them work for me, but not other people, unless I were to set the charm on each one of them. And maybe all of this guessing is going wide of the mark. I've no way to know."

It was terribly frustrating. To know that she had someone within reach who probably could help her break the spells that were on her, if only he knew what was going on, was agonizing.

"What do I do?" she wailed. Sarah gazed at her sternly.

"You stop whingeing for one," the witch replied. "It isn't going to help. For another, if you can find out what it is he's so afraid of, maybe you can do somewhat about it. Do that, and he may come out of that shell he's built around himself. If you can crack that, he should see you're set about with spells yourself, and wonder why, and try untangling them himself. But you can't do any of that if you're wasting your time feeling sorry for yourself."

Eleanor felt herself flush with anger, but kept a curb on her tongue. Sarah was right—but the witch's tongue got oversharp when she'd had a long day. And it wasn't as if Eleanor's day had been any shorter.

"Now, in the meantime," Sarah was already continuing, "While you're here, you might as well learn something. If Alison ever decides to challenge you Master to Master in a Sorcerer's Duel, your little Salamanders aren't going to be causing her more than a minute of amusement. So you might as well start learning how to call the Greater Fire Elementals, and the best time is now. We'll start with the Phoenyx."

Eleanor was quite ready to fall asleep on Sarah's floor when the wilting of her rosemary sprig told her it was time to go. When she got back, she made up her bed on the kitchen floor again, rather than take the chance of stumbling on the stairs and waking the household. She thought she saw eyes in the embers as she drowsed off—not the golden eyes of the Salamanders, but a hot, burning blue. . . .

Reggie showed up faithfully in the meadow at teatime, every day— though after the second day that the girl failed to materialize, he had brought the 'bus with him, so he could go on down to the pub if she didn't show up. After the third day, as he sat in the sun and listened to the wind in the grass watched the branches overhead with their haze of new green buds, he wondered why he kept coming here—there was nothing very special about her—

—well, other than her quick wit and agile mind.

It wasn't as if she were especially pretty; certainly not compared with all the elegant, doe-like creatures his mother kept trotting past him. She was as raw as a young filly and just as awkward. She seemed to be as poor as a church-mouse, too, from the state of her clothing.

That was odd; as he recalled, old Robinson had been something in the way of a manufacturing fellow, and when he'd known her last the girl had certainly dressed well enough. But maybe the money was all gone, thanks to the war. There were a lot of places that had failed; couldn't get the raw goods they needed to keep making whatever it was they were making.

She looked as if she worked for a living. Maybe she was a maid now, or a kitchen-girl. Or maybe she worked in one of the other pubs or something. Maybe that was what she meant when she said she'd be there "if she could."

What was it about her that made him desert his mother's carefully gathered bouquet of well-bred beauties and come down here to sit on a log for an hour on the chance that she might appear?

She can talk, for one thing. She knows how to listen, for another. And when she talks, she doesn't talk nonsense.

That was half of the reason why he hated those afternoon teas, the inane chatter. What was wrong with those girls, anyway? Half of them acted as if the war didn't exist, and the other half as if it existed only to inconvenience them!

She didn't talk about the war—but it wasn't because she was trying to play as if it wasn't going on. It was as if she was avoiding the subject so as not to trouble me.

It occurred to him that if she was working, working hard somewhere now—well, she wasn't going to be all that sheltered anymore. Maybe he could talk to her, about some of the things you just didn't talk about among men. All right to be bitter, angry, depressed; all right even to admit to being white-knuckle terrified in the night, and ready to do a bunk. All right even to admitting to want to take your faithful old Wembley and stick the barrel in your mouth and—

But you didn't talk to another man about losing your sense of wonder and beauty. You didn't tell him how your ideals were lying dead beside your comrades. Oh, maybe you could with the rare fellow like one or two of his former Oxford chums, the ones that had written damn good poetry, for instance. Not Steven Stewart, for instance— someone who'd call you "Reg" and talk about how he was going to start an air mail service when it was all over. Not Walter Boyes, either; plain as toast and solid as a rock, but who was reading history, and liked facts, plain and simple. Maybe William Howe—he was sensitive enough, just think about the stuff he pulled up for the regimental band to play, not just marches and bombast but Bach and Handel. But Howe was still at the Front.

Daniel Heistand— One of the ghosts, the men in the photos probably still on the canvas wall of his quarters, a dead man with his arms around the shoulders of the living. He was someone Reggie could have talked to about this. He hadn't written poetry; he was a musician, and not one of your ukulele players nor your accordion men. He was a violinist, and composed as well as played; Reggie remembered listening to him play during the pauses in the shelling, on the long, long, nights when nobody could sleep, playing some wistful haunting thing, too melancholy to be a lullaby—

Well, he hadn't lasted six months; a "sixty-minute man"—that was about how much time he'd had in the seat before a Hun in a Fokker shot him down.

Chris Whitmore? Maybe. Hard to tell. . . . That mania he'd had for photography might have been the stirrings of an artist's nature or just that of a tinkerer. He was supposed to be taking recon photos now, last Reggie'd heard, in the Sudan. No bloody mud in the Sudan.

Not Geoffrey Cockburn, that was certain. The boy who put his motorcar into the ornamental pond next to the cricket-grounds because he was roaring drunk the night before vivas was not the sort to have a sensitive soul. And no Lyman Evans, either, who'd been pouring the bubbly in the first place.

Maybe Rene Comeau; he was one of the better-educated French infantrymen attached to the air wing as local guards, and the French— well, they were French. They understood that sort of thing. But Rene was still over there too—unless he was dead.

Melancholy was certainly on him this afternoon. And he desperately wanted someone to talk to about it.

Oh, not Allan McBain either, that hard-headed Scots engineer who cursed them all whenever one of "his" runways got a shell-crater or a bomb-crater in it. As if it was their fault!

Though in a sense it was—if there hadn't been 'planes and pilots there, no one would bother to shell or bomb McBain's runways.

Vincent Mills . . . Another sensitive ghost out of the past, but this time a ghost that hadn't even made it to the Front. He'd trained with Reggie at the Oxford-based branch of the Flying School—and he'd been one of too-frequent fatalities. They'd found him upside-down in a tree, neck broken, a strange and puzzled look on his face as if he couldn't quite fathom what had gone wrong. His demise had been a shock; he was a good flyer. Perhaps the machine had done him wrong. Reggie still had one of his poems, or at least, it was folded into one of his books of sonnets back at the Front, an articulate yearning for higher skies—

No, there wasn't anyone here and now. And the girl was. Perhaps it was no bad thing that she wasn't pretty, wasn't his class, was, in fact, poor from all appearances. She didn't look like the sort to read trashy romantic novels and dream of marrying the duke. She looked like the sort who could be sensible. She'd certainly been more sensible than some of those boys who'd flocked around him.

He nodded to himself, as the golden-green light flooded around him. Maybe that was why he kept coming here. Someone sensitive, and sensible at the same time. Someone he could talk to that wouldn't go carrying tales. Who'd believe a kitchen-girl who told tales about meeting up with Reggie Fenyx in a meadow on odd afternoons to talk, anyway? No one. Without witnesses—and really, no one ever did come here—she'd never be believed.

So, content with his reasoning, he dozed a little in the sun until his watch told him the pub would be open. Who would ever have thought that a working-man's pub would become his refuge?

The Brigadier would be arriving in a few days, though. Perhaps then he wouldn't need a refuge as much.

Reggie came in through the garden entrance; it was just as easy to get to from the stable, and a great deal quieter. He took the entrance beneath the grand marble staircase, rather than the one on the terrace; this passage was generally used more by the staff but as a child he had scampered in and out of all possible entrances. The place was dark, as it should be; his mother and grandfather retired early when there was no entertaining going on, and she hadn't entertained since his father had died. None of the staff was down here now at this time of night, and it felt almost as if he was alone in the huge old house. He walked carefully, his path brightened only by a few gaslights, turned low.

He remembered how his father had brought in the gas. It hadn't been that long ago, it seemed. And now—

Electricity. We need to bring in electricity. And the telephone. He shook his head, and made his way up to the first floor. It was easier to get to the family staircase from this part of the house.

Stone floors below, polished wood above, and all of it too noisy, for all he was walking as quietly as he could. Tonight he was feeling more than a bit tipsy; it had been one of those nights. Something had set off Matt Brennan, and he'd gone down on a chair in the corner and just sat and rocked and wouldn't talk to anyone.

Shell shock. They all knew the signs of it, and Brennan—well, Brennan had more than a few reasons to suffer from it. It was the first time he'd gone into a fit of it in public though (and Reggie could only be grateful that he himself had managed to keep his own fits behind the closed doors of his rooms).

Well, they weren't doctors, but the only doctor that Reggie knew that had any success with shellshock was Doctor Maya, and she wasn't there. They had their own rough-and-ready remedy; maybe not the best, but a damn sight better than doing nothing, or telling a fellow he was malingering. They physically hauled him out to the middle table, put a glass in his hand, and poured drink into him until he came out of it—and of course in order to keep him drinking they had to match him drink for drink. They'd all gotten bawling sentimental, even Kevin Eaches, one of Reggie's tenant farmers, who'd wandered in by accident and somehow never made it out again.

When Brennan was well in hand, Reggie took his leave. It wasn't quite closing time, but this might be one of those nights when Tom locked the doors on a few of the oldest friends, and moved the "cure" into the private part of the building. He wasn't in that select group yet, and he was not inclined to intrude. So out he went, into the spring-scented night.

It had taken some careful navigating to get the 'bus up to the house without incident. Fortunately, there'd been a moon. Unfortunately, there had been cows. He'd had to stop and shoo them off the road.

Not the easiest thing to do, when you were staggering a bit. Cows didn't seem to be impressed with a man who wasn't able to stand without weaving back and forth.

He left the auto in the middle of the round stableyard; the men would park it in the carriage house. He knew that tonight he was in no condition to try and put her away himself.

With the hour so late, and the house so dark and still, he assumed that everyone, including all of the staff, had gone to bed. He expected to get quietly up to his rooms without anyone the wiser.

The last thing he anticipated was to find his mother waiting for him in the settle at the top of the family staircase.

She had an oil-lamp burning on the table beside her, and was pretending to work on some of that infernal knitting every woman seemed to be doing these days, making stockings for soldiers. He staggered back a pace or two on seeing her. "Ah. Evening, Mater," he said carefully. "I've been out."

"So I see." She put the knitting down in her lap. She was still dressed for dinner, in a navy-blue gown. Her tone could have frozen the flowers in the vase beside her. "I presume it was the same place you have been going to every night. The working-man's pub. The—

Broom."

She acted as if she had never heard the name before. As if she had been completely unaware that there was a working-man's pub. He drew himself up. "Yes, I have. I've been to The Broom. I went last night, I went tonight, and I intend to go tomorrow night. In fact, I will continue to go to The Broom for as long as I am on medical leave."

Her face crumpled. "Reggie—how could you? Everyone in the village certainly knows—it won't be long before the whole county knows, you're down there every night, consorting with socialists and riff-raff—"

"Who give me a better and warmer welcome than I have in my own home," Reggie retorted, anger burning out some of the whiskey fumes and clearing his head. "Where I'm not called coward to my face, and told I'm malingering! Why, I'd rather spend four hours in Mad Ross's company than five minutes in your father's!"

Even as he said the words, he was glad they were out, that it was all out in the open, at last. He didn't need the Brigadier for this. Not to lay the truth plain to his mother. He should have stood on his own two feet a long time ago.

His mother cried out, and her hands flew to her mouth. Tears started up in his eyes.

He felt coldly, curiously unmoved.

"If you want to know why I go there, why don't you watch how your father drives me out of my own home every night?" he asked, angrily. "And you had better get used to my new friends, Mater, because they are my friends, and I have far more in common with them than you could ever understand! We're—" he could find no words to tell her. "We're soldiers" he said at last. "Real soldiers. Not tin-toys like your father, who strutted his way around cowing poor little Hindu heathen until he was old enough to claim a pension, and now wants to lord it over me the same way."

He stared at her, stared her down, stared at her until she shrank back in her seat and dropped her eyes. He took a deep breath, and walked past her, all the stagger gone from his step. He walked straight to his rooms, feeling full of a cold dignity he hadn't known he possessed.

And then, once the door was shut, he sat down abruptly on the side of the bed, and blinked.

"What did I just do?" he asked aloud.

But of course, there was no one there to answer him.

13

April 30, 1917

Broom, Warwickshirte

THE ARROWS WAS EMPTY; ALISON was gone. So were Carolyn and Lauralee, and it wasn't off to tea at Longacre again. It was a two-day excursion somewhere that they did not talk about even amongst themselves. But it was going to involve Warrick Locke.

And it was going to involve the contents of three brass-bound cases that Alison had taken with her.

Magic. That was Eleanor's guess, anyway. They were going somewhere to work magic, somewhere that was special. There were a lot of special places of power around, or so Sarah said; Stonehenge was only the most obvious. There had been enough blood spilled on English soil to make plenty of spots where Alison and her nasty Earth Elementals would feel right at home. Eleanor only hoped that they hadn't gotten hold of anything personal of Reggie's. With luck, this wouldn't have anything at all to do with Reggie, or this new magic would just break itself on the walls of his unbelief.

But that meant that at long last, she was going to be able to run down to the meadow at teatime—and hope against hope that Reggie Fenyx was the sort of fellow who kept his word.

The lot of them were finally packed up and gone by luncheon, a meal that stretched on interminably so far as she was concerned. She had to keep her mouth shut and her eyes cast down meekly the whole time, as the foursome pretended she didn't even exist while she waited on them.

Finally they packed up the big motorcar and all four of them drove away, with no more clue as to where they were going than Alison's careless, "Keep the house neat and clean, Ellie, and don't expect us back before Saturday."

When she was utterly certain they were gone, she could scarcely believe her luck. And the first place she went—since, of course, she had not had time or opportunity to snatch more than a bite of bread for luncheon—was the pantry.

This time she packed a basket with a real tea, recklessly plundering the stores she wasn't supposed to be able to get into for the making of a meal that even Reggie Fenyx would find appealing. Sarah walked in on her in the midst of her preparations.

"Well, what's all this, then?" she asked, hands on hips, surveying the state of the kitchen. "I thought we might do some work, with Alison gone—"

"I—" Eleanor found herself flushing. "I was going to take a picnic to Round Meadow."

Sarah blinked her deceptively mild eyes once or twice, then a slight smile curved her lips. "So that's the way the wind blows. No wonder young Reggie's been there every afternoon."

"He has?" she gasped. "But—how do you know?"

"He leaves his auto parked below it," Sarah said dismissively. "It's his meadow, after all, and it's part of the field his aeroplane used to be in, I doubt anyone thinks anything at all about it. I just wondered, why does he always come at teatime?"

"Because that's when I met him there the first time." She looked around distractedly for something to take with her to drink. "Does wine go with tea?" she asked, rather desperately.

"No, wine does not, and moreover, you're not used to it, you'll be tipsy in no time," Sarah scolded. "There's the stream running through there; drink water. But go, go now, before he gets tired of waiting and goes off to his cronies at The Broom."

She caught up the basket, and ran.

The few people on the street did not seem to notice her as she ran; that was something that seemed to happen a great deal. Unless she was actually in the way, no one in Broom paid the least bit of attention to her no matter what she did. Today that was all to the good.

Her heart lifted as she saw in the distance that there was an automobile—presumably Reggie's—tucked off the road down near Round Meadow.

Her feet felt lighter at that moment too, but she was struck with a sudden feeling of shyness, and instead of speeding up, she slowed down to a walk. And then the doubts began.

After all, why should Reggie care if she turned up? He was probably just down here to enjoy the solitude of his own meadow. She'd be an invader, as she had been the first day. Oh, he'd be polite, but he wouldn't want her there, surely—

She almost turned back at the stile; almost didn't climb it to get into the wooded end of the field. But she'd come this far—and she had a lovely tea with her. He'd surely appreciate that. And she wouldn't chatter like the girls his mother was inviting for tea.

I don't have to stay very long, she told herself, as she clambered over the stile. The minute it seems as if he wants to be alone, I can go.

After all, what did they have in common? She hadn't been to university, she didn't drive a motorcar or fly, she knew nothing about the war except what she read in the papers, and besides, he wouldn't want to talk about that. She was years his junior. She couldn't even talk to him about magic, which was probably the only thing they had in common. He probably was only being polite the last time—

And what happened last time? A voice like cool flame in the back of her mind said, in a reasoned town. You didn't talk about anything. You listened. He did the talking. Just go. See what happens.

By that point, she was among the trees, with the meadow just beyond her, golden sunlight pouring down before her at the end of the corridor of trees. I might as well go as not, she thought, and tossed her head. He did ask me to come back, and if he didn't mean it, he shouldn't have asked me.

When she came through the trees, at first she didn't see him. He wasn't sitting on the tree trunk where he had been the last time she had seen him. Then she saw he had spread a blanket out on the new grass, and was lying on his back—she thought he was looking up at the sky, but as she got closer, she saw that he was asleep.

She sat down carefully, just on the edge of the blanket, to avoid waking him. There were dark circles under his eyes and it seemed to her that he looked more tired and worn than the last time she had seen him. Isn't he getting enough sleep? That seemed strange to her; wasn't that why he was here in the first place, to rest and recover from his injuries? Why shouldn't he be sleeping enough?

He looked so sad; there were so many lines in his brow that only unhappiness and pain could have put there.

In fact, he looked so very vulnerable that she began to feel uncomfortable about watching him like this; it seemed a violation of his privacy.

She began to look around, feeling more and more uncomfortable. And that was when she saw—Them.

Horrible, ugly, deformed little gnomes.

She could tell, just by the sickly yellow-brown shimmer around them, that they were not something that most people would see. So they must be Elementals. They ignored her completely, concentrating avidly on Reggie, as if he was something tasty, and they were ravenous.

They had mouths full of nasty, yellowed, pointed teeth, tiny eyes like black beads, and they drooled. No two of them were alike, but they all looked misshapen, and all were colors that just seemed unhealthy.

They stood on the edge of the meadow, just under the trees, skulking in the underbrush, and as she stood up, slowly, she saw that they had formed into a rough circle, completely surrounding the place where Reggie was sleeping.

The sight of them absolutely infuriated her, for no reason that she could name, except perhaps that these evil little creatures were clearly ganging up on a sleeping, helpless man.

She stood up, and quick as a thought, cast a Fire shield around both of them.

That certainly got their attention. The expressions on their faces changed abruptly from the sort you might see on the face of a schoolyard bully, to startled alarm and shock.

Now they looked at her—and she glared back. Can I call a Salamander here? Now? Without a physical fire around? She didn't think she dared try anything larger and more powerful, but she didn't know if the Salamanders would answer her here, either—

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She sketched the proper signs in the air, and concentrated, not commanding, but entreating. The last thing she wanted to do now was to anger an Elemental by commanding it. Not when she was so new to this sort of thing.

To her amazement and delight, she was answered immediately, and not by one, but by a bevy of the fiery little creatures, who appeared within the shield as she had specified, and swarmed all over her, twining around her ankles, her arms, around her head and neck like so many fiery ferrets. And then, suddenly, they all stopped moving. And their heads moved as one, as they stared at the evil gnomes ringing the meadow.

They hissed; it sounded like a hundred steam-kettles, and there was absolutely no doubt that whatever those things were, the Salamanders hated them on sight.

"Go!" she whispered. "Get them!" And the Salamanders flowed off her, surging across the perimeter of the shield, and heading for the gnomes at a speed that made her blink.

The gnomes apparently did not intend to wait around to see what the Salamanders could do to them. They made no sound, or at least, no sound that Eleanor could hear, but they turned with looks of frantic fear and began swimming into the turf.

It wasn't digging, because the ground remained physically undisturbed, without so much as a blade of grass being displaced, and the motions they made reminded her far more of swimming than of digging. But there was no doubt that they were trying to escape the Salamanders, and when one of her Elementals caught up with one of the gnomes that was a little too slow, she saw exactly why.

The Salamander writhed around the gnome with blinding speed; there was a "pop" like a champagne cork, and a puff of muddy brown smoke, and the gnome was gone.

No more than a couple of the gnomes were too tardy to escape, however. The rest were under the turf by the time the Salamanders reached them.

The Salamanders surged around the periphery of the meadow like terriers hunting for rats, but the vast majority of the gnomes had escaped, and the Salamanders didn't seem able to follow them underground. Finally they gave up, and flowed back to her, winding around her again until she giggled under her breath, clearly wanting to be told how clever and brave they had been. She obliged them, though keeping to whispers, not wanting to awaken poor Reggie. Finally they seemed content with the praise, and she sensed they were ready to be dismissed. With a wave of her hand and the proper glyph she obliged them, and they dispersed, fading into the sunlight, leaving nothing of themselves behind but the faintest of warmth around her ankles and wrists.

Which left her still with the unanswered question of what to do about Reggie. Finally she dispersed the shield, picked up her basket and walked to edge of the meadow. Once there, she did the only thing she could think of. She began to whistle, and saunter along as if she had only just arrived.