Phoenix and Ashes (41 page)

She
paused, waiting. Eleanor sensed she was waiting for her pupil to come up with
some answers of her own. “So, this concentration on his physical
body—that’s his Earth aspect? It looks to me like he’s mostly
Fire and Earth. Not much water symbolism here. Of course, though, there’s
Air—the Air he could step off into.”

Sarah
nodded. “Change might be the Water aspect, but mostly the Fool is
Intellect and Passion, and that’s Air and Fire. Which makes him even more
appropriate for you.”

She
turned over a second card, this one showing a man in a white robe and a red
cloak. He stood among roses and lilies, with a rose-vine overhead. He had a
wand in his hand and was next to a table on which were a cup, a knife, another
wand, and a disk. There was something like the number eight lying on its side
hovering like a halo above his head. Eleanor read the card’s name aloud.
“The Magician.”

“What
else can you tell me?” Sarah asked.

She
studied it, and was struck by the objects on the table, which reminded her of
something in one of the Alchemy books. “That’s all four Elements,
there,” she said, pointing to the table. “The Cup is Water, the
Disk is Earth, the Wand is Air and the Knife is Fire. So he has command of all
of the elements?”

“Or
he hasn’t yet chosen which one his Element is,” Sarah countered.
“That wand he’s holding is a symbol of his power, not of a
particular Element. He’s the symbol of the mind, too, like the Fool, but
in his case, it’s Creativity, not Intellect He knows what he wants out of
Heaven
and
Earth, and so long as he stays focused, he’ll get
it.”

Eleanor
studied the card further. “But he can run right over the top of you to
get what he wants,” she said slowly. “Which is the negative side of
him; selfish and self-centered. So he’s like the Fool in that way, in a
way, their negative side is being self-centered.”

“Good!”
Sarah applauded. “And what else?”

“Well,
if his positive side is that he can get anything if he can stay focused, then I
guess his weakness is that he’s likely to lose concentration and be
scattered.” She pondered that for a moment. “So, where this card is
all elements, I’d say that the Magician himself is mostly Air?”

“That’s
how I’ve always seen him, but remember he’s a channel for all of
them, more so than most other cards. So he gets being charming and attractive
from Earth, he gets a streak of passion and genius from Fire, he gets
independence and the willingness to break rules from Air, and the ability to
handle power and make changes from Water.” Sarah got up and went back to
her cupboard, taking out a similar wrapped bundle. She pulled a second card
out, and laid it beside the Magician. This one, too, was labeled the Magician,
but it wasn’t a ceremonial Magician. This one looked like a circus
trickster, a charlatan, who was juggling cups and balls. “This is an
older version, from a deck I don’t use much. It shows you the
Magician’s darker side.”

“A
cheat, a stage-magician,” Eleanor said at once. “I can
see—his dark side is that charm used to gull people, the intellect used
to practice deception, the willingness to break rules can make him a criminal,
and Water can sweep away everything, leaving you with nothing.”

“
Very
good
!” Sarah replied. “And those two cards are enough to think
about for one night, so the lesson is over. Did you say you had a book that
talked about the Tarot in alchemical terms?”

She
nodded.

“Then
go home and read what it has to say about the Fool and the Magician.”
Sarah folded her cards back up in their silk and put them away.
“We’ll look at another card tomorrow. Meanwhile, you think about
these tonight.”

Eleanor
took her leave, and made her way back to The Arrows well before her sprig of
rosemary withered. She went to bed and followed Sarah’s orders, reading
about and thinking about those two cards until she fell asleep—

At which point she
found herself in dreams, dressed in clothing of a medieval Italian page,
dancing on the edge of a cliff with the sun high overhead and not a cloud in
the sky…

May 3-21,1917
Broom, Warwickshire

MAY THIRD HAD DAWNED
IN rain, and it kept raining all day long, a steady pour that made Eleanor
reluctant even to venture to Sarah’s cottage, much less to the meadow.
Not that she ever thought that she would have met Reggie there. No, if
he’d been kept away merely because he wanted to give rides to kiddies in
his motorcar, the prospect of a soaking would certainly keep him inside four
walls.

So
Eleanor had stayed where she was, took the opportunity to further increase her
wardrobe, and when she wasn’t obeying Alison’s spells, studied her
books diligently. The dream she’d had the previous night, of being the
Fool, had given her impetus. It had been vividly realistic, too; she’d
felt nothing but euphoria and a curiosity about absolutely everything. No fear,
none at all, when she’d stopped dancing for a moment, leaned over, and
stared into the abyss below her. In the dream, the thought that she might fall
had not even flitted across her mind. No fear, when she stared up into the sky,
straight at the blazing sun, wondering what it was. Fortunately, it was the sun
of the card, and not of reality; bright though it was, and hot, too, it
didn’t blind her. Of course, that had been in retrospect. At the time,
all she had thought was, What is that? Why is it so hot? Can I reach it?

She
had half-awakened, but no more than that, fallen asleep again, to find herself,
still the Fool, in a garden of roses and lilies, though she had no idea of how
she had gotten there. She followed a path—then she was at the end of the
path suddenly, and there was an altar there. On it were a cup, a scepter, a
golden disk the size of a dinner-plate, and a sword. Behind the altar was
someone in a white robe and a red cloak, with a broom in her hand. A broom,
because it wasn’t a man, as in the card, it was Sarah.

“So,
what do you see?” the Magician asked. Eleanor said the first thing that
came into her mind—not an answer, but a question.

“What
cup is that, and what does it hold?”

Sarah
nodded. “Good. Come and find out for yourself.” She leaned the
broom against the altar, picked up the cup, and held it out to Eleanor, just
like a priest offering the sacrament. Eleanor came and took it from her, and
drank from it—

And
suddenly, it was
she
who was in the white robes and red cloak and
behind the altar, and Sarah and her broom were nowhere to be seen. But even as,
when she had been the Fool, her mind was full of questions,
now
it was
full of knowledge.

She
put the cup down, dazzled by all of the things flooding through her thoughts,
when a voice interrupted her from the table.

“Well,
now that you have Wisdom, you ought to know what to do with the other three
Gifts,” the voice said, and she looked down at the Cup to see that it was
much larger, nearly the size of a washtub, and there was a great salmon sticking
its head out of the water and looking up at her. “Well?” said the
salmon. “With all that Wisdom, what are you going to do next?”

She
looked at the other three items; her hand moved towards the sword, then she
stopped.

“Quite
right,” said the salmon, sounding like something out of Alice’s
Adventures. “You aren’t nearly strong enough to wield the Passion
of Fire. What else is there?”

Her
hand hovered between the Coin of Earth and the Wand of Air, and she had just
started to reach for the latter—

When
she woke up. It was dawn, and time to get to work.

It
was still raining, and didn’t look as if it was going to stop at any time
soon. So that day was a repeat of the previous one, and at least she finished
sewing all the rest of her new wardrobe, because the weather cleared off in the
night, and by teatime of the fifth, there was the sound of a motorcar and
Alison and the girls chugged into the old stable that now served as a garage.

There
was nothing to make into what Alison would have called a “decent”
tea and dinner except tinned stuff, of course. And in any event, it was too
late for Eleanor to start anything, so as Eleanor hauled their baggage up to
their rooms, they tidied themselves up, then pulled the motor back out again to
go to the Broom Hall Inn for tea and order that a dinner be sent around. And
life went right back to normal.

Neither
Alison nor the girls noticed Eleanor’s new clothing, nor did anyone note
books missing from the library. They were all very full of chatter about
London—there were Americans moving through now, and Lauralee was very
taken with them. She kept exclaiming about how tall they were.

As
for Alison, she acted like a cat that had gotten into cream. Whatever she had
done while she’d been gone, she was very pleased with it, and herself.

So
things went back to the way they had been, except that every two or three days,
Eleanor would slip away after the household was in bed, and get down to
Sarah’s cottage, which was where Sarah would take out her cards and they
would go over all of the ones that she had already seen as Eleanor tried to
glean a little more meaning out of them. Then Sarah would lay out a new one.

There
was no chance to get out to the meadow. But as May became June, she certainly
heard enough about Reggie. The campaign to ingratiate themselves into the
Longacre circle was well underway, and twice-weekly tennis-parties were the
artillery pounding away at the gates. Longacre had its own courts, and Lady
Devlin loved to both watch and play. Even though Reggie couldn’t play
because of his knee, he always came to watch his mother—and Alison and
both girls were good enough to give her ladyship a good game of doubles. This,
of course, was according to what Alison told her little coterie of the Broom
elite over tea.

Eleanor
knew the truth. Of course they were good enough—because of magic.
They’d shown no aptitude before this, but one of the things that had come
back from London had been a set of three tennis raquettes with a faint feeling
of magic about them. Eleanor had no doubt, no doubt at all, that Alison had
somehow stolen someone’s tennis-prowess and put it into those raquettes.

Alison
and her daughters were also up at the manor at least once a week for tea, and
Eleanor expected that would change to two or even three times a week before
long.

There
was company due at Longacre Park in the first week of June, too—which
would probably mean more entertaining. Tea-dances, card-parties, boating on the
river, riding on the grounds, as well as tennis and croquet, and more chances
for Lauralee and Carolyn to use whatever they could to ensnare Reggie…

Well
,
she thought, more than once,
If he’s stupid enough to let himself be
ensnared, then he’s not worth wasting time on
.

But
she couldn’t help contrasting herself with her stepsisters, whenever they
sailed out of the house in their modish tennis-dresses or flirty tea-gowns.
Once, perhaps, she had been the equal of her stepsisters, and might have been
able to pass herself off as belonging in Reggie’s social set. Money was
still not the equal of breeding in the eyes of some, but it was certainly
approaching that equivalency—and to Reggie’s generation, perhaps it
had achieved equality. At least, so long as one had the right accent, the right
education, the right manners and conversation, the right outward appearance.

Now—well,
he might sit with her in a meadow and be amused by her conversation, but her
hands were callused and rough with manual labor, her clothing was fit only for
the lowest servants, and with those two handicaps, it didn’t matter how
fine her mind was. If he’d been penniless but blue-blooded,
perhaps—but not while he was lord of Longacre Park. With that insurmountable
social gulf between them, while he might amuse himself in private, he would
never acknowledge the friendship in public.

And
a friend who won’t treat me the same, in public as in private,
isn’t worth having
.

She
tried not to feel eaten up with envy as the girls chattered about “dear
Reggie” and tormented one another over which he had paid more attention
to that day. But it would have been difficult enough to watch them swanning
about with their airs and their chatter about going “up the hill.”
It was very difficult indeed to hear them boasting about “dear
Reggie” this and “dear Reggie” that.

She
took what grim solace she could in her study of Elemental Magic. The sooner she
mastered that, the sooner she could free herself. And then—well, then she
would worry about when she was freed.

She’d
had no trouble getting to sleep; now that it was June, the days were getting
longer, and longer days just meant that Alison found more work for her to do.
And she was not at all surprised to find herself immediately in a dream.

The
dream began now in a familiar pattern; Eleanor found herself as the Fool,
resolutely turned away from the cliff-edge, and passed up the path to the
Magician. The Tarot cards were providing the framework for the quest for
Mastery; there was no doubt in her mind about
that
. But this time, the
Magician was not Sarah, but a stranger. Still, she asked the right question,
became the Magician, and prepared to pass on—

The
Salmon of Wisdom did not appear in the cup now that she had the key to this
card. She was able at this point to actually pick up the blade, the cup, the
wand and the coin—and yet she sensed she was not able to use more than a
fraction of the power in each, not even of her own Element. And she would
not—she knew that now—until she had journeyed through all of the
Major Arcana. But she needed to prove that she could handle the tools of the
four Elements, so she picked each up in turn from the altar, sensed and
identified the magical energies in each, then turned and walked up the path
that appeared behind her. It led between two severely manicured flowerbeds, and
she followed it until she came to a pavilion. She had been here before and knew
who awaited her.