Phoenix and Ashes

Which explained why she was dressed like one.

Now, her own pride would have kept her hidden from the village. And her stepmother would never have admitted she had treated her own stepdaughter so shabbily. And so the fiction of 'Eleanor is at Oxford' was born, with both sides of the situation eager to maintain it.

His left hand clutched at the stone balustrade, and he downed the last of his drink and set the glass down lest he inadvertently shatter it in his sudden fit of anger. Perhaps it was absurd to be so angry over what was, essentially, a teacup tragedy when there were so many greater tragedies in the wake of this war. She wasn't dead, after all, merely ill-used. She hadn't been struck by a stray bullet and paralyzed, not blown to pieces by a shell.

But feelings, he reminded himself, were not rational. And this shabby treatment of a girl who'd done nothing to earn it made him very, very angry.

He could see how it was that no one noticed that she was still here, especially if she herself took pains to conceal the fact. And no one ever really looked at anyone in servants' clothing. Especially not someone dressed as shabbily as Eleanor was. So on the rare occasions when she escaped her work for a little, so long as she kept her head down— which everyone would expect anyway out of a lower servant—no one would recognize her. He didn't recall that she had socialized much with the girls her age, anyway; it had been the boys that had congregated around his aeroplane that knew her best, boys who were all long gone in the first weeks of the War. Perhaps the adults—the adult women, anyway—might have noticed, but in those first weeks and months, they had more than enough cares of their own to preoccupy them. The longer the charade went on, the less likely it would be that anyone would see the face of the clever schoolgirl in the visage of the work-hardened young woman. That had to be it.

The question now was—what could he do about it? And to that question he had no ready answer. For a start, how could he even get to her to talk to her? Helping her would mean prying her out of her imprisoning shell, the walls of The Arrows, and at the moment, he had no good idea of how to do that.

Once he did that, he also had no good idea of how to offer help without it seeming like charity and pity, and he had a fairly good idea of what she would think about charity and pity. At least, he thought he did.

'Penny for your thoughts,' the Brigadier said, out of the darkness, startling him from his concentration.

'I'd have to give you ha'pence change, Brigadier,' he replied, mendaciously. 'I wasn't thinking about much.'

The old man chuckled. 'Let's go in, then,' he suggested. 'The damp isn't doing either of us any good.'

'Probably not,' he agreed. 'I was thinking of going down to the village, anyway.'

'And I'm for my book and bed,' the Brigadier replied. 'It's peaceful out here. I shall take my rest while I can get it.'

They parted company on the terrace, Reggie limping his way down to the stable to get his motorcar. He decided that he would see what he could learn by steering the conversation in The Broom around to the Robinsons. It would be natural enough, what with The Arrows being almost directly across the street, and that would be a good place to start.

July 22, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

Sarah looked so triumphant when Eleanor arrived just before midnight that Eleanor could not in good conscience deny her the pleasure of revealing whatever it was that had put that smug smile on her face. She hoped it was good news, because today had been particularly brutal. The amount of work that she'd been laden with would have laid her out four years ago. She'd almost been too tired to come here tonight, and really, all that had gotten her out the door was the promise of eventual freedom.

'It is a very good thing that no one would ever entrust you with a state secret, because you could never conceal the fact that you had a secret in the first place,' she told her mentor, as she picked up her mother's notebook to begin her exercises, took a deep breath, and concentrated on getting her second wind. She and Sarah were focusing on one thing now; to extend the length of her 'leash,' so that she could attend the fancy-dress ball—though how she was going to get inside the doors of the manor at Longacre Park without an invitation, she had no notion. There was no chance that one would come for her now. Lauralee, Carolyn, and Alison had long since gotten theirs, and the girls took every chance they could get to take out the precious piece of cream-laid vellum and flourish it about. Their acquaintances—one could hardly call them 'friends,' anymore—in the village were eaten up with envy. The only other villagers who had gotten invitations were the vicar and his wife, and the doctor and his. With this alone, Alison had made it wordlessly clear how much higher her social stature was in the tiny circle of Broom. That, in fact, she had escaped the social circle of Broom for another, more rarified atmosphere.

She had, of course, cleverly feigned confusion to 'discover' that no one else had achieved similar invitations, and unlike her daughters (who might be excused such behavior on the grounds of their callow youth) she did not make much of it after that initial flurry of exquisitely acted discomfiture. In this way, even though she had without doubt made some real enemies among the village elite, none of them would dare come out actively and openly against her. The ladies still came to her teas and her war-effort gatherings—though with all of the invitations up to the manor, those were becoming infrequent. But she presided over them with the