Phoenix and Ashes (3 page)

She
got plain bread-and-butter and cooling tea for supper in the kitchen—not
even a single bite of the dainty sandwiches that she had served the
ladies
had she eaten, and of the glorious high tea that the cook had prepared for
Alison and her daughters there was not a scrap to be seen. And by the time she
went up all those stairs to her freezing-cold room, she’d had no strength
for anything except hopeless weeping.

What
does she want from me
?
The question echoed dully in Eleanor’s
mind, and there seemed no logical answer. She had no doubt that Alison had
married Papa for the money—for all her airs at the tea, there was nothing
in the way that Alison behaved in private that made Eleanor think that her
stepmother found Papa’s absence anything other than a relief. But why did
she seem to take such pleasure in tormenting Eleanor
?

There
didn’t seem to be an answer.

Unless
she was hoping that Eleanor would be driven to run away from home.

Oh,
I would, but how far would I get
?
If that was what Alison was hoping,
the very nature of this area—and, ironically, the very picture that
Alison had painted of her stepdaughter today
!—
would conspire to
thwart her. Eleanor wouldn’t get more than a mile before someone would
recognize her, and after that carefully constructed fiction of a sullen and
rebellious child that Alison had created, that same someone would assume she
was running away and make sure she was caught and brought back
!

And
if Alison had wanted to be rid of her by
sending
her away, surely she
would have done so by now.

She’ll
never let me go
, she thought bitterly.
Not when she can make up lies
about me to get more sympathy. And who believes in wicked stepmothers, anyway
?

She
must have dozed off a little, because the faint, far-off sound of the door
knocker made her start. At the sound of voices below, she glanced out the
window to see the automobile belonging to Alison’s solicitor, Warrick
Locke, standing at the gate, gleaming wetly in the lamplight. He looked like
something out of a Dickens novel, all wire-rimmed glasses, sleek black suits
and sleek black hair and too-knowing face.

Oh.
Him again. He seemed to call at least once a week since Papa had gone. Not that
she cared why he came. It was odd for him to come so late, but not unheard-of
.

Someone
uttered an exclamation of anger. It sounded like Alison. Eleanor leaned her
forehead against the cold glass again; she felt feverish now, and the glass
felt good against her aching head. And anyway, the window-seat was more
comfortable than the lumpy mattress of her bed.

Her
door was thrust open and banged into the foot of the bed. She jerked herself
up, and stared at the door.

Lauralee
stood in the doorway with the light behind her. “Mother wants you,
Eleanor,” she said in an expressionless voice. “Now.”

Eleanor
cringed, trying to think of what she could have done wrong. “I was just
going to bed—” she began.

“
Now
,”
Lauralee repeated, this time with force. And then she did something she had
never done before. She took two steps into the room, seized Eleanor’s
wrist, and dragged her to her feet. Then, without another word, she continued
to pull Eleanor out the door, down the hall, and down the narrow
servants’ stair
.

The
stair came out in the kitchen, which at this hour was empty of
servants—but not of people. Alison was there, and Carolyn, and Warrick
Locke. The only light in the kitchen was from the fire on the hearth, and in
it, the solicitor looked positively satanic. His dark eyes glittered, cold and
hard behind the lenses of his spectacles; his dark hair was slicked back,
showing the pointed widow’s peak in the center of his forehead, and his
long thin face with its high cheekbones betrayed no more emotion than
Lauralee’s or Carolyn’s. He regarded Eleanor as he might have
looked at a black beetle he was about to step on.

But
Alison gave her a look full of such hatred that Eleanor quailed before it.
“I—” she faltered.

Alison
thrust a piece of yellow paper at her. She took it dumbly. She read the words,
but they didn’t seem to make any sense.
Regret to inform you,
Sergeant Charles Robinson perished of wounds received in combat
—

Papa?
What was this about Papa? But he was safe, in Headquarters, tending
paperwork—

She
shook her head violently, half in denial, half in bewilderment.
“Papa—” she began.

But
Alison had already turned her attention away towards her solicitor. “I
still say—”

But
Locke shook his head. “She’s protected,” he said. “You
can’t make her deathly ill—you’ve tried today, haven’t
you? And as I warned you, she’s got nothing worse than a bit of a
headache. That proves that you can’t touch her directly with magic, and
if she had an—accident—so soon, there would be talk. It isn’t
the sort of thing that could be covered up.”

“But
I can bind her; when I am finished she will never be able to leave the house
and grounds,” Alison snarled, her beautiful face contorted with rage, and
before Eleanor could make any sense of the words, “you can’t touch
her directly with magic” her stepmother had crossed the room and grabbed
her by one wrist. “Hold her!” she barked, and in an instant, the
solicitor was beside her, pinioning Eleanor’s arms.

Eleanor
screamed.

That
is, she opened her mouth to scream, but quick as a ferret, and with an
expression of great glee on her face, Carolyn darted across the room to stuff a
rag in Eleanor’s open mouth and bind it in place with another.

Terror
flooded through her, and she struggled against Locke’s grip, as he pulled
her over to the hearth, then kicked her feet out from underneath her so that
she fell to the floor beside the fire.

Beside
a gap where one of the hearthstones had been rooted up and laid to one
side—

Locke
shoved her flat, face-down on the flagstone floor, and held her there with one
hand between her shoulder blades, the other holding her right arm, while Alison
made a grab for the left and caught it by the wrist. Eleanor’s head was
twisted to the left, so it was Alison she saw—Alison, with a
butcher’s cleaver and a terrible expression on her face. Alison who held
her left hand flat on the floor and raised the cleaver over her head.

Eleanor
began screaming again, through the gag. She was literally petrified with
fear—

And
the blade came down, severing the smallest finger of her left hand completely.

For
a moment she felt nothing—then the pain struck.

It
was like nothing she had ever felt before. She thrashed in agony, but Locke was
kneeling on her other arm, with all his weight on her back and she
couldn’t move.

Blood
was everywhere, black in the firelight, and through a red haze of pain she
wondered if Alison was going to let her bleed to death. Alison seized the
severed finger, and stood up. Lauralee took her place, holding a red-hot poker
in hands incongruously swallowed up in oven-mitts. And a moment later she
shoved that poker against the wound, and the pain that Eleanor had felt up
until that moment was as nothing.

And
mercifully, she fainted.

She
woke again in the empty kitchen, her hand a throbbing sun of pain.

Like
a dumb animal, she followed her instincts, which forced her to crawl to the
kitchen door, open it on the darkness outside, on rain that had turned to snow,
and plunge her hand into the barrel of rainwater that stood there, a thin skin
of ice forming atop it. She gasped at the cold, then wept for the pain, and
kept weeping as the icy-cold water cooled the hurt and numbed it.

How
long she stood there, she could not have said. Only that at some point her hand
was numb enough to take out of the water, that she found the strength to look
for the medicine chest in the pantry and bandage it. Then she found the
laudanum and drank down a recklessly large dose, and finally took the bottle of
laudanum with her, stumbling back up the stairs to her room in the eerily
silent house.

There
she stayed, wracked with pain and fever, tormented by nightmare, and unable to
muster a single coherent thought.

Except
for one, which had more force for grief than all her own pain.

Papa
was dead.

And
she was alone.

March 10, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

THE SCRUB-BRUSH
RASPED BACK AND forth against the cold flagstones. Eleanor’s knees ached
from kneeling on the hard flagstones. Her shoulders ached too, and the muscles
of her neck and lower back. You would think that after three years of nothing
but working like a charwoman, I would have gotten used to it.

The
kitchen door and window stood open to the breeze, airing the empty kitchen out.
Outside, it was a rare, warm March day, and the air full of tantalizing hints
of spring. Tomorrow it might turn nasty again, but today had been lovely.

Not
that Eleanor could get any further than the kitchen garden. But if she could
leave her scrubbing, at least she could go outside, in the sun—

But
Alison had ordered her to scrub, and scrub she must, until Alison came to give
her a different order, or rang the servants’ bell. And if Alison
“forgot,” as on occasion she did, then Eleanor would be scrubbing
until she fainted from exhaustion, and when she woke, she would scrub
again…

The
nightmare that her life was now had begun on the eighteenth of December, three
years, two months, and a handful of days ago, when Alison Robinson hacked off
the little finger of her left hand, and buried it with spells and incantations
beneath the third hearthstone from the left here in the kitchen. Thus, Alison
Robinson, nee Danbridge, had bound Eleanor into what amounted to slavery with
her black magic.

Magic…

Who
would believe in such a thing?

Eleanor
had wondered how Alison could have bewitched her father—and it had turned
out that “bewitched” was the right word for what had happened. That
night and the nights and days that followed had given her the answer, which
only posed more questions. And if she told anyone—not that she ever
saw
anyone to tell them—they’d think her mad.

For
it was madness, to believe in magic in these days of Zepps and gasworks and
machine guns.

Nevertheless,
Alison was a witch, or something like one, and Warrick Locke was a man-witch,
and Lauralee and Carolyn were little witch’s apprentices (although they
weren’t very good at anything except what Alison called “sex
magic” and Eleanor would have called “vamping”).
Alison’s secret was safe enough, and Eleanor was bound to the kitchen
hearth of her own home and the orders of her stepmother by the severed finger
of her left hand, buried under a piece of flagstone.

She
dipped the brush in the soapy water and moved over to the next stone. Early,
fruitless trials had proved that she could not go past the walls of the kitchen
garden nor the step of the front door. She could get that far, and no farther,
for her feet would stick to the ground as if nailed there, and her voice turn
mute in her throat so that she could not call for help. And when Alison gave
her an order reinforced by a little twiddle of fingers and a burst of sickly
yellow light, she might as well be an automaton, because her body followed that
order until Alison came to set her free.

When
her hand had healed, but while she was still a bit lightheaded and weak, Alison
had made her one and only appearance in Eleanor’s room. Before Eleanor
had been able to say anything, she had made that
gesture
, and Eleanor
had found herself frozen and mute. Alison, smirking with pleasure, explained
the new situation to her.

Her
stepdaughter had not been in the least inclined to take that explanation at
face value.

Eleanor
sighed and brushed limp strands of hair out of her eyes, sitting back on her
heels to rest for a moment. Under the circumstances, you would have thought
that the moment would have been branded into her memory, but all she could
really remember was her rage and fear, warring with each other, and Alison
lording it over her. And then a word, and her body, no longer her own, marching
down to the kitchen to become Mrs.Bennett’s scullery maid and tweenie.

Perhaps
the eeriest and most frightening part of that was that Mrs.Bennett and
all
the help acted, from that moment on, as if that was the way things had always
been. They seemed to have forgotten her last name, forgotten who she really
was. She became “Ellie” to them, lowest in the household hierarchy,
the one to whom all the most disagreeable jobs were given.

The
next days and weeks and months were swallowed up in anger and despair, in
fruitless attempts to break free, until her spirit was worn down to nothing,
the anger a dull ache, and the despair something she rose up with in the morning
and lay down with at night.

She
even knew
why
Alison had done this—not that the knowledge helped
her any.

She,
and not Alison, was the true owner of The Arrows, the business, and fourteen
manufactories that were making a great deal of profit now, turning out sacks
for sandbags to make trench-walls, and barricades, and ramparts along the
beaches… for in all of her plotting and planning, Alison had made one
tiny mistake. She had bewitched Charles Robinson into marrying her, she had
bespelled him into running off to be killed at Ypres, but she had forgotten to
get him to change his will. And not even Warrick Locke could do anything about
that, for the will had been locked up in the safe at the Robinsons’
solicitor’s office and it was the solicitor, not Alison, who was the
executor of the will. There was no changing it, and only because Eleanor was
underage was Alison permitted to act as her guardian and enjoy all the benefits
of the estate. That was why she had been so angry, the night that the death notice
came
.