Phoenix and Ashes

She had been with him. And right behind them, in their own car, They had come.

She had come arrayed in an enormous scarlet hat with yards and yards of scarlet scarves and veils, and a startling scarlet coat of dramatic cut. Father had handed her out as if she was a queen, and as she raised a scarlet-gloved hand to remove her goggles, he had said, beaming with pride, 'And here's my surprise! This is your new mother—' he hadn't said 'stepmother,' but Eleanor would never, ever call that horrible woman 'Mother' '—Alison, this is my daughter. And look, Eleanor, here are two new sisters to keep you company! Lauralee, Carolyn, this is your sister Eleanor! I'm sure you're going to be the best of friends in no time!'

Two elegant, languid creatures descended from the rear of the second automobile, wearing pastel blue and lavender versions of her getup, and removed their goggles to regard her with stares as blank and unreadable as the goggles had been.

Broom had never seen anything quite like them. They looked as if they had come directly from the pages of some London quarterly. Only she smiled, a knowing little smile, a condescending smile that immediately made Eleanor aware of her untidy hair that was loosely tied with a ribbon like a child's, her very plain linen day-dress, not in vogue and not new, of her uncorseted figure, and her thick, clumsy walking shoes. The two girls raised their heads just a trifle, and gave her little patronizing smirks of their own. Then all three had sailed into the house without so much as a word spoken.

And with a shock, Eleanor had found herself sharing the house and her papa with a stepmother and two stepsisters.

Except—from the moment they entered the door, there wasn't a great deal of 'sharing' going on.

The first sign of trouble came immediately, when the girls inspected the house and the elder, Lauralee, claimed the second-best bedroom—Eleanor's room—as her own. And before Eleanor could protest, she found herself and her things bundled up the stairs to an untenanted attic room that had been used until that moment as a lumber room, with the excuse, 'Well, you'll be at Oxford in the autumn, and you won't need such a big room, now, will you?' Followed by a whispered 'Don't be ungracious, Eleanor—jealousy is a very ugly thing!' and a frown on her papa's face that shocked her into silence.

The thing that still baffled her was the speed with which it had all happened. There'd been not a hint of any such thing as a romance, much less a marriage, ever! Papa had always said that after Mama, no woman could ever claim his heart—he'd gone a dozen times to Stoke-on-Trent before, and he'd never said a word about anything but the factory, and she thought that surely she would have noticed something about a woman before this.

Especially a woman like this one.

Oh, she was beautiful, no question about that: lean and elegant as a greyhound, sleek dark hair, a red-lipped face to rival anything Eleanor had seen in the newspapers and magazines, and the grace of a cat. The daughters, Lauralee and Carolyn, were like her in every regard, lacking only the depth of experience in Alison's eyes and her ability to keep their facade of graciousness intact in private.

Eleanor only noticed that later. At first, they were all bright smiles and simpers.

Alison and her daughters turned the house upside down within a week. They wore gowns—no simple 'dresses' for them—like nothing anyone in Broom had seen, except in glimpses of the country weekends held up at Longacre. They changed two and three times a day, for no other occasion than a meal or a walk. They made incessant demands on the maids that those poor country-bred girls didn't understand, and had them in tears at least once a day. They made equally incredible demands on Cook, who threw up her hands and gave notice after being ordered to produce a dinner full of things she couldn't even pronounce, much less make. A new cook, one Mrs. Bennet, and maids, including a lady's maid just for Alison called Howse, came from London, at length, brought in a charabanc with all their boxes and trunks. Money poured out of the house and returned in the form of tea-gowns from London and enormous hats with elegantly scrolled names on the boxes, delicate shoes from Italy, and gloves from France.

And amid all of this upheaval and confusion, Papa beamed and beamed on 'his elegant fillies' and seemed to have forgotten Eleanor even existed. There were no tea-gowns from London for Eleanor. . . .

Not that she made any great show against them. She looked like a maid herself, in her plain dresses and sensible walking shoes. They didn't have to bully her, not then, when they could simply overawe her and bewilder her and drown her out with their incessant chattering and tinkling laughter. And when she tried to get Papa alone to voice a timid protest, he would just pat her cheek, ask if she wasn't being a jealous little wench, and advise her that she would get on better if she was more like them!

She might have been able to rally herself after the first shock— might have been able to fight back. Except that all those far-off things in the newspapers about assassinations and Balkan uprisings that could never possibly have anything to do with the British Empire and England and Broom—suddenly did.

In August, the world suddenly went mad. In some incomprehensible way, Austria declared war on Serbia, and Prussia joined in, and so did Germany, which apparently declared war on everybody. There were Austrian and Prussian and German troops overrunning France and England was at war too, rushing to send men to stop the flood. And though among the country-folk in Broom there was a certain level of skepticism about all this 'foreign nonsense,' according to the papers, there was a sudden patriotic rush of volunteers signing up to go to France to fight.

And Papa, who was certainly old enough to know better, and never mind that he already had been in the army as a young man, volunteered to go with his regiment. And the next thing she knew,