Phoenix and Ashes

"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.