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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 PBI, 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.