Phoenix and Ashes

today.

Today the post was full of them.

One or two officers canceling would have been a fluke—all of them at once meant a big push. When even the band canceled by the morning post (momentarily throwing his mother into a state of despair until Lady Virginia came to the rescue, promising a small orchestra made up entirely of women), he had known that there was something truly major going on.

He and his old college chums Steve and Geoff had a sort of unwritten code; by the afternoon post, when both of them sent brief notes referring to Caesar's campaigns in Gaul along with their apologies, he had all the information he needed. And far more than he wanted.

The Brigadier and his mother had tried to keep it from him, of course, but by late afternoon it had been in all the papers. He'd managed to keep himself together long enough to send a hasty telegram to Michael Dolbeare to recruit more RFC cadets to make up the difference, pledging to cover their train fare if need be, which considerably calmed his mother down about the holes in her guest list. That had been going through the motions, actually, because if he had thought about it, he might have lost his temper with her. How could she be in such a state over a mere absence of male guests, when across the Channel all hell was breaking loose? Bad enough that other people were being so callous, but this was his own mother.

And he'd been all right until just before dinner, until it hit him, until it really sank in. Then the shakes had started.

He kept himself together until he managed to reach the safe haven of his rooms. He even managed to pull his own curtains closed, and shut and lock the door. Then the fear got hold of him by the throat and shook him like a dog, sending him to his knees, making him crawl into the darkest corner of the room, where he shivered and wept and choked back moans of terror. He couldn't even put two ideas together into a whole; he didn't even know what he was afraid of. He only knew that this vast, insensate, and ravenous beast that was the war was loose, and it was going to devour the entire world and there was nothing he could do to stop it. ...

He had vaguely heard someone pacing outside his rooms, rattling the knob once or twice, but they left him alone, for which he was both grateful and felt betrayed at the same time. Grateful, because he could not bear anyone seeing him like this. Betrayed, because they were leaving him alone with this fear, this mind-killing, soul- shriveling fear—

And all he could do was huddle, and shake, as wave after wave of the terror engulfed him, then ebbed, only to return.

How long he was in there, he couldn't have told; only that some time after darkness fell, there was the sound of a key in the lock, and the unmistakable presence in the room of Lady Virginia.

She closed the door behind her; he heard the scratch of a match, and smelled the sharp sulfur as she lit candles.

'Reggie,' she said, quite as calmly as if he was not huddled in a ball in the corner. 'I am not Doctor Maya, but I am very old, and I have seen a very great deal in my time. And if you can manage to bring yourself here, I may be able to offer you some little comfort. I should come down there on the floor next to you, but my bones are not so young that they permit any such thing anymore.'

Somehow, he managed to crawl out of that corner. Somehow he managed to get to her, and put his head on her knee like a spaniel, and croak out a few words. He wasn't even sure what he was saying, only that he was giving some shape to the fear that was devouring him alive.

'I cannot tell you that it will be all right, Reggie,' she said gravely. 'Because we both know that it will not. But if the Brigadier is correct, and I believe he is, then the enemy is as battle-weary and worn as we, and he has no flood of energetic Americans coming at last to help. It will not end soon—but it will end.'

And she offered silence at the right moment, and a few more words of her own at the right moment, and slowly, he stopped shaking, the fear lost its grip on him, and the fog lifted from his mind until he could think again.

Only then did she call his man in, and he took his drugs and went into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

And they did not come for him in the night; he sensed no malign presence on the other side of his barrier of slumber, nor did he hear evil mutterings nor feel the suffocating weight on him of the darker creatures of Earth, trying to smother him in his sleep. It might have been the drugs, it might have been his new defenses, it might all have been due to Lady Virginia.

When he struggled up out of sleep late the next morning, it was with no sense of victory, though, and not even anything he could call hope. It was, if anything, a feeling that he might actually live through the despair. He still wasn't entirely sure he wanted to, but he felt as if he would, regardless of his current preferences.

It was the Brigadier who was with him the next time the fit took him, later that afternoon. They were outside, on the terrace, and his knees just gave out. The Brigadier got him to a seat, saying nothing, although he could not have missed how hard Reggie was shaking, nor the blank, dry-mouthed stare Reggie knew he must have. And the good old man stayed with him as he closed his eyes and fought the fear as best he could—which was about as effective as trying to fight the sea.