Phoenix and Ashes Read Free

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 façade 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