Phoenix and Ashes

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).