Mercedes Lackey: Phoenix and Ashes

Perhaps the eeriest and most frightening part of that was that Mrs. Bennett and all the help acted, from that moment on, as if that was the way things had always been. They seemed to have forgotten her last name, forgotten who she really was. She became "Ellie" to them, lowest in the household hierarchy, the one to whom all the most disagreeable jobs were given.

The next days and weeks and months were swallowed up in anger and despair, in fruitless attempts to break free, until her spirit was worn down to nothing, the anger a dull ache, and the despair something she rose up with in the morning and lay down with at night.

She even knew why Alison had done this—not that the knowledge helped her any.

She, and not Alison, was the true owner of The Arrows, the business, and fourteen manufactories that were making a great deal of profit now, turning out sacks for sandbags to make trench-walls, and barricades, and ramparts along the beaches . . . for in all of her plotting and planning, Alison had made one tiny mistake. She had bewitched Charles Robinson into marrying her, she had bespelled him into running off to be killed at Ypres, but she had forgotten to get him to change his will. And not even Warrick Locke could do anything about that, for the will had been locked up in the safe at the Robinsons' solicitor's office and it was the solicitor, not Alison, who was the executor of the will. There was no changing it, and only because Eleanor was underage was Alison permitted to act as her guardian and enjoy all the benefits of the estate. That was why she had been so angry, the night that the death notice came.

And after Warrick Locke investigated further, that was why she was forced to keep Eleanor alive and enslaved. Because if Eleanor died, the property went to some impoverished cousin in the North Country, and not Alison at all. Periodically, Eleanor was called into the parlor and given paper and pen, and wrote a letter under Alison's sorcerous dictation to the solicitor, directing him to give Alison money for this or that luxury beyond the household allowance. Alison fumed the entire time she was dictating these letters, but Eleanor was far, far angrier.

There were times when Eleanor wished she could die, just out of spite. . . .

She had eavesdropped on as many conversations as she could, which wasn't as difficult as it sounded, because Alison and Locke discussed such matters as if she wasn't present even when she was in the same room. She knew that her stepmother was something called an "Elemental Master" and that her power was over earth. What that meant, she had no real notion, but that was probably why Alison had buried Eleanor's severed finger. She knew that Warrick Locke was an "Elemental Mage," and that his power was also over earth, and that he was nothing near as powerful as Alison was. Lauralee and Carolyn were one rank below Warrick, evidently.

That Alison had far more power even than she had demonstrated against Eleanor was not in doubt. Eleanor had overheard plenty in the last three years, more than enough to be sure that the two of them were up to a great deal of no good. But of course, they wouldn't care what she heard; even if she could get out of the house, who would believe her wild tales about magicians?

For that matter, she hardly knew anything of what was going on in the world outside this house—just what she could glean from the occasional newspaper she saw. In the early part of the war, she had been able to get more information by listening to the servants, but—well, that was one way in which the war had affected her. There had been nine servants in the Robinson household—three more than the six that Eleanor and her father had thought sufficient—at the time when her father was killed. A man-of-all-work, a gardener, a parlormaid, three house maids, the cook Mrs. Bennett, and two ladies' maids, one (Howse) for Alison herself, one shared by Carolyn and Lauralee. Now there were two, Eric Whitcomb from the village who had returned from the war with a scar across the front of his head from some unspecified wound, and rather less than half his wits, and who did the gardening, the rough work and heavy hauling, and Alison's maid Howse. All the rest of the work was done by Eleanor. No one outside the house knew this, of course. Alison's status would have dropped considerably.

The man-of-all work had gone first, not so much out of patriotism (for after March of 1915 as the true nature of the slaughter in the trenches became known, it became more and more difficult to find volunteers) than because he had caught wind of conscription in the offing, and at the same time, was given the opportunity to join up with a regiment that was going somewhere other than France. "I'm off to the Suez, lovey," he'd told the downstairs house maid, Miranda Reed. "I'll bring you back a camel. I'll still be FBI, but at least my feet'll be dry."

Miranda had wept steadily for two months, then turned in her notice to go and train as a VAD nurse ("It can't be more work than this, and I'll surely get more thanks," she'd said tartly on departing]. The next to go had been the parlormaid, Patricia Sheller, after her brothers were conscripted, leaving no one to help at her aged parents' London shop, and it wasn't long before Katy Feely, the stepsisters' maid, followed, when the work of the upstairs maid was added to her own load—she claimed she too was going to be a VAD nurse, but it wasn't true. "I've had enough of those cats, Mrs. Bennett," Katy had whispered to the cook in Eleanor's hearing. "And enough of this grubby little village. I'm off! There's heaps of better positions in London going begging now!"

By then, even married men were being conscripted, and Mrs. Bennett's son had been killed, leaving a wife and two tiny children with a third baby on the way; Mrs. Bennett turned in her notice to go and help care for them.

The result had been a sea change in how meals were dealt with in this household. Alison could compel Eleanor to cook—but she couldn't compel Eleanor to cook well. And it appeared that no matter how great Alison's powers were, they weren't enough to put the knowledge of an expert cook into Eleanor's mind, nor the skill of that cook into her hands. Eleanor hadn't done more than boil an egg and make toast in her life, and cooking was an undisclosed mystery to her. So for one week, Eleanor labored her way through the instructions in the cookery books, but the resulting meals were anything but edible. After that week, Alison gave up; the White Swan had supplied most of the components of luncheon and dinner to the household from that time on, while Brown's Bakery provided bread, crumpets, scones, muffins, cake and pie for afternoon tea.

The rest of the help had followed when Alison proved disinclined to pay for their meals from the pub as well as hers. Kent Adkins the gardener and Mary Chance the other maid vanished without bothering to give notice.

Eleanor still wasn't more than an adequate plain cook, and she took a certain amount of grim satisfaction in the fact that no more dishes with fancy French names graced Alison's table unless they came ready-made out of a tin. She could not bake much of anything—her bread never seemed to rise, and her pie crust was always sodden. She could make ordinary soup, most eggy things, toast, tea, and boil veg. She could make pancakes and fry most things that required frying. Anything that took a lot of practice and preparation came from the Swan or out of hampers from Harrods and Fortnum and Mason, things that only required heating up before they were presented at table.

There was rationing now—sugar, according to complaints Eleanor overheard or saw in the newspaper, was impossible to get, and the authorities were urging meatless days. There were rumors in the newspapers that other things would soon be rationed—but none of that touched this household as privation. However it happened, and Eleanor strongly suspected black-marketeering, there were plenty of good things stocked away in the pantry and the cellar, including enough sugar to see them through another two or three years, and plenty of tinned and potted meats, jams and jellies, honey, tinned cream, white flour, and other scarce commodities, enough to feed a much larger household than this one. Not that Eleanor ever saw any of that on her plate. Rye and barley-bread was her lot, a great many potatoes roasted in the ashes or boiled and served with nothing but salt and perhaps a bit of dripping, and whatever was left over from the night before put into the ever-cooking soup-pot, sugarless tea made with yesterday's leaves, and a great deal of sugarless porridge. In fact, the only time she tasted sweets now was when an empty jam jar came her way, and she made a little syrup from the near-invisible leavings to pour over her porridge or into her tea.