Phoenix and Ashes Read Free Page A

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, he was a sergeant again, and
was gone.
    Somehow
Oxford never materialized. “Your dear father didn’t make any
arrangements, child,” Stepmother said, sounding surprised, her eyes
glittering. “But never mind! This will all be over by Christmas, and
surely
you would rather be here to greet him when he comes home, wouldn’t you?
You can go to Oxford in the Hilary term.”
    But
it wasn’t over by Christmas, and somehow Papa didn’t manage to make
arrangements for the Hilary term, either. And now here she was, feeling and
being treated as a stranger, an interloper in her own house, subtly bullied by
glamour and not understanding how it had happened, sent around on errands like
a servant, scarcely an hour she could call her own, and at the end of the day,
retreating to this cold, cheerless closet that scarcely had room for her bed
and her wardrobe and desk. And Papa never wrote, and every day the papers were
full of horrible things covered over with patriotic bombast, and everything was
wrong with the world and she couldn’t see an end to it.
    Two
more tears burned their way down her cheeks. Her head pounded, she felt ill and
feverish, she was exhausted, but somehow too tired to sleep.
    Today
had been the day of the Red Cross bazaar and tea dance. Organized by
Stepmother, of course—“
You have such a genius for such things,
Alison
!”—at the behest of the Colonel’s wife. Though
what that meant was that Eleanor and the maids got the dubious privilege of
doing all of the actual work while Stepmother and “her girls” stood
about in their pretty tea-gowns and accepted congratulations. Eleanor had been
on her feet from dawn until well past teatime, serving cup after cup of tea,
tending any booth whose owner decided she required a rest, watching with raw
envy as her stepsisters and other girls her age flirted with the handsome young
officers as they danced to the band Stepmother had hired for the occasion.
Dances she didn’t know—dances to jaunty melodies that caused
raised, but indulgent eyebrows among the village ladies.
“Ragtime”—that’s what they called it, and perhaps it
was more than a little “fast,” but this was wartime, and beneath
the frenetic music was an unspoken undercurrent that some of these handsome
young men wouldn’t be coming back, so let them have their fun…
    Eleanor
had cherished some small hope that
at last
someone who knew her would
see what Alison was doing and the tide of public opinion would rise up to save
her. Alison, after all, was the interloper here, and with her ostentatious ways
and extravagance, she had surely been providing more than a little fodder for
the village cats. But
just
when she was handing the vicar’s
wife, Theresa Hinshaw, a cup of tea, the woman abruptly shook her head a
little, and finally
looked
at her, and frowned, and started to say
something in a concerned tone of voice, out of the corner of her eye she saw
Alison raise her head like a ferret sniffing a mouse on the wind, and suddenly
there she was at the woman’s elbow.
    “Mrs.Hinshaw,
how
are
you?” she purred, and steered Eleanor’s hope away
into a little knot of other women.
    “I
was wondering why we haven’t seen