Phoenix and Ashes

"I cannot tell you that it will be all right, Reggie," she said gravely. "Because we both know that it will not. But if the Brigadier is correct, and I believe he is, then the enemy is as battle-weary and worn as we, and he has no flood of energetic Americans coming at last to help. It will not end soon—but it will end."

And she offered silence at the right moment, and a few more words of her own at the right moment, and slowly, he stopped shaking, the fear lost its grip on him, and the fog lifted from his mind until he could think again.

Only then did she call his man in, and he took his drugs and went into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

And they did not come for him in the night; he sensed no malign presence on the other side of his barrier of slumber, nor did he hear evil mutterings nor feel the suffocating weight on him of the darker creatures of Earth, trying to smother him in his sleep. It might have been the drugs, it might have been his new defenses, it might all have been due to Lady Virginia.

When he struggled up out of sleep late the next morning, it was with no sense of victory, though, and not even anything he could call hope. It was, if anything, a feeling that he might actually live through the despair. He still wasn't entirely sure he wanted to, but he felt as if he would, regardless of his current preferences.

It was the Brigadier who was with him the next time the fit took him, later that afternoon. They were outside, on the terrace, and his knees just gave out. The Brigadier got him to a seat, saying nothing, although he could not have missed how hard Reggie was shaking, nor the blank, dry-mouthed stare Reggie knew he must have. And the good old man stayed with him as he closed his eyes and fought the fear as best he could—which was about as effective as trying to fight the sea.

After the first wave ebbed a little, the Brigadier cleared his throat apologetically, and began talking, sounding a bit self-conscious, but determined, nevertheless.

He didn't actually talk to Reggie. Instead, he rambled on about commonplace things. He'd been down to Broom and met some of "the lads" at the Broom pub, and they were good fellows, to be sure. He thought there might be something in the manner of work he could put in the way of one or two of them that were at loose ends. It was a fine little village, and he'd also been to the estate village of Arrow, which was a credit to him and his mother. The estate manager wanted him to know that the crops were looking very good this year, and that someone wanted to bring in another gasworks, like the one that supplied Longacre and Broom, but this time on manor property. Filthy things, gasworks, but there was plenty of coal near here and that would mean there could be gas piped in to the village of Arrow as well, which might be worth the mess. Perhaps one of the clever RFC fellows could find a way to make a gasworks less filthy. "We have gas laid on," the Brigadier rumbled, "At my bungalow. Deuced convenient for cook. Thinking about electricity; they electrified my club in London last year, and it's better than gas. You ought to consider having the telephone brought up here, Reggie. Good for your mother; keep her connected to the rest of us. Have to go forward, my boy, can't live in the past, and if you try and stick in one spot the future will run over the top of you."

Not a word about the war, not a word about how he looked, and under the paralysis of fear that made his guts go to water, he knew he must look hellish. Not one word of reproach, though the poor old man must surely wonder—

Or perhaps not. Lady Virginia had said he'd been to the Front itself, to the hospitals where men were brought in, filthy, screaming, their wounds crawling with maggots, their minds as shattered as their bodies. Maybe he did understand.

But it was the commonplaces that were anchoring him, little by little, back in the simple present. The count of new calves, the state of the orchards, thoughts of gasworks and electricity, the talk down at the Broom.

It dragged him back out of the pit, though he could not have said how or why. It let him get his breath back, let him unclench his fists and his jaw, let him sit in the wake of what proved to be the last wave of fear and turned his shaking into the mere trembling of exhaustion. And when he was finally able to think again, let him turn back to the Brigadier with eyes that held sanity again.

The old man paused in his rambling; gave him a long, hard look, and sighed. "Ah. There you are. Her ladyship said you might get taken like that."

"Yes," Reggie said. "Thank you, sir." Only three words, but he put a world of gratitude in them, and the Brigadier flushed a little, and coughed self-deprecatingly.

"Think I can leave you now?" he asked.

Reggie nodded. "Work to do, sir; you reminded me of it yourself, just now."