Phoenix and Ashes Read Online Free Page A

face-down on the flagstone floor, and held her there with one
hand between her shoulder blades, the other holding her right arm, while Alison
made a grab for the left and caught it by the wrist. Eleanor’s head was
twisted to the left, so it was Alison she saw—Alison, with a
butcher’s cleaver and a terrible expression on her face. Alison who held
her left hand flat on the floor and raised the cleaver over her head.
    Eleanor
began screaming again, through the gag. She was literally petrified with
fear—
    And
the blade came down, severing the smallest finger of her left hand completely.
    For
a moment she felt nothing—then the pain struck.
    It
was like nothing she had ever felt before. She thrashed in agony, but Locke was
kneeling on her other arm, with all his weight on her back and she
couldn’t move.
    Blood
was everywhere, black in the firelight, and through a red haze of pain she
wondered if Alison was going to let her bleed to death. Alison seized the
severed finger, and stood up. Lauralee took her place, holding a red-hot poker
in hands incongruously swallowed up in oven-mitts. And a moment later she
shoved that poker against the wound, and the pain that Eleanor had felt up
until that moment was as nothing.
    And
mercifully, she fainted.
     
    She
woke again in the empty kitchen, her hand a throbbing sun of pain.
    Like
a dumb animal, she followed her instincts, which forced her to crawl to the
kitchen door, open it on the darkness outside, on rain that had turned to snow,
and plunge her hand into the barrel of rainwater that stood there, a thin skin
of ice forming atop it. She gasped at the cold, then wept for the pain, and
kept weeping as the icy-cold water cooled the hurt and numbed it.
    How
long she stood there, she could not have said. Only that at some point her hand
was numb enough to take out of the water, that she found the strength to look
for the medicine chest in the pantry and bandage it. Then she found the
laudanum and drank down a recklessly large dose, and finally took the bottle of
laudanum with her, stumbling back up the stairs to her room in the eerily
silent house.
    There
she stayed, wracked with pain and fever, tormented by nightmare, and unable to
muster a single coherent thought.
    Except
for one, which had more force for grief than all her own pain.
    Papa
was dead.
    And
she was alone.
     

2
    March 10, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire
    THE SCRUB-BRUSH
RASPED BACK AND forth against the cold flagstones. Eleanor’s knees ached
from kneeling on the hard flagstones. Her shoulders ached too, and the muscles
of her neck and lower back. You would think that after three years of nothing
but working like a charwoman, I would have gotten used to it.
    The
kitchen door and window stood open to the breeze, airing the empty kitchen out.
Outside, it was a rare, warm March day, and the air full of tantalizing hints
of spring. Tomorrow it might turn nasty again, but today had been lovely.
    Not
that Eleanor could get any further than the kitchen garden. But if she could
leave her scrubbing, at least she could go outside, in the sun—
    But
Alison had ordered her to scrub, and scrub she must, until Alison came to give
her a different order, or rang the servants’ bell. And if Alison
“forgot,” as on occasion she did, then Eleanor would be scrubbing
until she fainted from exhaustion, and when she woke, she would scrub
again…
    The
nightmare that her life was now had begun on the eighteenth of December, three
years, two months, and a handful of days ago, when Alison Robinson hacked off
the little finger of her left hand, and buried it with spells and incantations
beneath the third hearthstone from the left here in the kitchen. Thus, Alison
Robinson, nee Danbridge, had bound Eleanor into what amounted to slavery with
her black magic.
    Magic…
    Who
would believe in such a thing?
    Eleanor
had wondered how Alison could have bewitched her father—and it had turned
out that “bewitched” was the right word for what had