Phoenix and Ashes

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.