Delusion (27 page)

“There’s room for some in the parts of Stour that still stand,” the Headmaster countered.

“This office and the library are the only intact buildings.”

“And the rest will use the Essence to construct adequate shelter.”

“Ha!” Phil said. “Did you see the hut some of the journeymen tried to erect? It leaned like the Tower of Pisa and finally fell on one of them when he tried to nap inside. He’s nursing a broken ankle and a concussion now. They can make tents at best. You’re the only one who has any knowledge of architecture, and you’ll be busy rebuilding Stour. What’s the harm? It will be for two weeks at the most.”

After much arguing the Headmaster said, “Very well, then. The younger men may go. They’ll be under the direction of a master, and they will perform the Exaltation near their temporary homes. It is close enough to Stour that it shouldn’t make much difference. Close, compared to the wide world.”

And so, beyond Phil’s wildest belief, Headmaster Rudyard agreed that some hundred of his journeymen and masters should for a time leave Stour and live among the commoners, picking apples and assisting with the cider press work by day, and sleeping in the hopper huts by night.

Then another surprise. “Is Mrs. Abernathy still alive?”

It took Phil a moment to place the name. Ah yes, the dear, deaf old woman who, when she’d tried to talk about rationing, thought Phil was hungry and loaded her with food. “Hale as can be expected for a woman of ninety,” she said.

“And Mrs. Braeburn?”

Phil wracked her memory and recalled her first day in Bittersweet. “Granny Braeburn? She died not too long ago. Ninety-five, I think she was.”

“She was the assistant cook at Stour when I was a boy. She used to save the marrow for me, my favorite. And she had a biscuit cutter in the shape of a sailing ship. Father disapproved, but when I had tea in the nursery, I could always play Navy and Pirates with my toast.”

When he’d been captured as a boy, he hadn’t tied messages to pigeons—he’d escaped. How had he been turned into such a steadfast, brutally loyal magician?

“Do you know everyone in Bittersweet?”

“When I returned to Stour in my thirties after Mafeking, as a magician, not a lord, I used to sneak out and watch my old friends. They were friends to me, you know. Tenants to my father, practically serfs, but to me...I had to fuddle them so they didn’t know me, but I looked after every one of them, in the beginning. They were my responsibility as lord of Stour. That didn’t change. I couldn’t study architecture anymore, but I could give my dependents beautiful homes. I couldn’t mediate their disputes or advise them about their farms, but I could use the Essence to make a drunkard decide to be sober, to make the hops and apples flourish. When the Great War came, twenty young men from Bittersweet enlisted the day war was declared. I knew every one of them. Only one came back.”

“Uncle Walter.”

“I remember him as a baby. When I was lord of Stour after my father died, I attended every christening. Walter spat up in the baptismal font, then grinned like a demonic cherub at the vicar. When I saw what war had done to that baby, I swore none of my former tenants would fight in a war again. What a fool I was.”

Phil shook her head.

“You can’t stop it,” the Headmaster went on. “You can only thank heaven there’s a limit to what commoners can do to each other.”

“There is no limit,” Phil said, certain.

“Oh, you’d be surprised.” He stood abruptly. “Enough of this. Memories do no one any good. Three weeks they may help with the harvest.”

“You’ll have Stour rebuilt that soon?”

“No. But it does no good to plan too far ahead in these times. We’ll see what happens in three weeks.”

No, ye daft toff. You cup your palm around it so, like you’re grabbing a nice handful of titty, then you give ’er a lift and a bit of a twist, and off she comes.”

Mr. Tremlett, one of Mrs. Pippin’s orchard men, was giving the new apple pickers their first lesson. He’d been told they were scholars evacuated from their university and sent to Stour. The gossip said the poor blighters were surprised when they showed up with all their trunks and laboratory gizmos and found that Stour was no more than a ruin. Seems it had been left on the surveys as an intact mansion all these years. Now they had volunteered to help with the apple harvest in exchange for living quarters.

And a good thing, too. Besides Mrs. Pippin’s vast acres, there were the Finchley groves (Diana’s family), not to mention all the orts and jots growing here and there. Every family in Bittersweet had an acre or two, and the land was fertile enough that even if they left their trees mostly to their own devices, they were guaranteed a decent crop for eating, drinking, and selling.

Mostly for drinking. Hops go for beer, and apples go for cider.

“It ain’t
really
a tit, Professor,” he called in exasperation. “Don’t stare at it and caress it. Just yank it off and drop it in the basket. Aye, that’s it. Keep up that pace, and you might have the tree bare inside of a fortnight.”

When they had the basics down, the magicians (or professors, as they were universally known) were divvied up among Bittersweet’s various orchards. Most of the villagers joined in the picking, too, and though they were sometimes baffled by the magicians’ peculiar ways, they unanimously pronounced them good eggs.

It was remarkable how spirits had lifted in Bittersweet. They’d found their wartime cheer, the manner the rest of the nation had adopted a year ago, defiance in a smile, stoicism in a joke. Housewives and hostesses put aside old differences to pool their sugar and have grand bridge parties, playing not for coin but for the even scarcer tea and chocolate. They compared the blackout bruises acquired from bumps in the dark. The village, not long ago a somber, deadly place, now rippled with laughter and jokes, all of which they shared like a generous banquet with their guest workers.

The magicians, reserved and diffident at first, found they weren’t proof against commoner camaraderie.

“I think them being so worn out makes it easier,” Fee said as the sisters walked home from the post office. Still no word from Thomas, and though the postmistress promised to send a bicycle messenger to Weasel Rue if anything came, Fee still had to check at least once, often twice a day. “They tried not to fraternize, but by evening they just don’t have the resistance not to laugh at Eamon’s jokes.”

Probably the biggest contribution to the magician-commoner détente was the tapping of last year’s casks.

It was a Bittersweet tradition that when the first apple of the year was plucked, the last barrels of the year before that had been fermented and aged to perfection were opened. Though cider might be ready for general consumption within two months of pressing, the villagers were connoisseurs.

“The Headmaster never forbade it,” Felton said, raising his cup.

“And apples are known to be healthy,” Hereweald added, tipping his, and so the others followed suit, and before long they went from exchanging civilities with the commoners, to exchanging pleasantries, to exchanging pats on the back and tipsy bearish hugs. That night of celebration set the tone for the rest of the apple picking, and to the magicians’ astonishment, they found they rather liked commoners.

All, apparently, except Arden.

He was nominally in charge, even over some of the masters his senior in years and rank, and lived in a hopper hut all his own, the very last in the long row. This caused some resentment among the other magicians, for they were berthed eight and ten to a house, sleeping on pallets on the floor (albeit covered in downy silken cushions they’d conjured up—their dwellings, though cramped, looked like pashas’ tents), but most of them had already formed a special bond in training in Phil’s muster, and they used their new closeness to try out advanced, occasionally dangerous manipulation of the Essence. Phil quizzed them daily, and all were certain there had been no further incursions from the Dresden magicians, but now free from the Headmaster’s eye, they were more determined than ever to be ready. The clique of five had expanded, and every day more magicians were proving themselves perfectly willing to violate everything they’d been taught—as long as no one found out.

From all this, Arden remained aloof. He’d rise early to stalk through the hopper hut village and count his charges. He didn’t pick apples, though he would stride through the orchards with his hands clasped behind his back, never admonishing but frowning severely when any of the magicians became too familiar with one of the villagers, particularly the females.

There weren’t a great many unattached young women in Bittersweet, but by the second week of the harvest, their numbers miraculously swelled as word reached outlying farms and letters sped to the rare distant cousin who had migrated thirty miles away to a neighboring town. Perhaps no one said in quite so many words that Bittersweet swarmed with unattached, eligible young men, but like bees to a flower (or as Phil said with annoyance, like flies to dung, for they all seemed eager to lay their eggs), the women came.

Phil joined in the picking, but Arden rarely spoke to her. She watched him, though, stealthy and intense, as she’d watch a competing illusionist to ferret out the secret of some unknown trick.
What do you have up your sleeve, Arden?
she wondered. The things she’d briefly suspected—they couldn’t be true.

At least Phil’s plan seemed to be working. Slightly under a hundred magicians were working side by side with commoners, treating them like equals. They gossiped about the war, and when someone brought a battery-powered wireless to the groves, they clustered around it, shoulder to shoulder with the villagers, gasping when they heard about the latest casualties, cheering at a successful strike by the RAF. They flirted and argued and ate side by side, and their bond with the commoners grew stronger by the day.

Only, it would all be over soon. The plucked apples were sweetening in the shade, and the press works were being greased. The harvest was almost over, and there would be no excuse for the magicians to stay. Would they go back to their cloister and turn their backs on their new friends in their hour of need, or would they stand up to the Headmaster and hundreds of years of tradition, and fight, for themselves and for England?

One night, when all that remained on the trees were those late-ripening stragglers closest to the trunk, Phil went to the hopper huts just after sunset. They had several small campfires going, and some of the village girls had stayed behind.

“Sing us a song!” the magicians begged them, for this too had become a treat. Most only had dim recollections of cradle songs, and a few gleaned on their journeying.

A girl with a cherry ribbon in her dark hair shyly rose and sang a melody as familiar as birdsong, a lament that had been sung in that land for hundreds of years.

Early one morning, just as the sun was rising,
I heard a maid sing in the valley below,
“Oh, don’t deceive me, oh, never leave me!
How could you use a poor maiden so?”

Her sweet voice rose plaintively above the fire’s crackle, and her face was a mask of practiced anguish, for this was her parlor piece and had charmed more than a few gentleman callers.

“Remember the vows that you made to me truly
Remember how tenderly you nestled me close...”

Phil, who ought to have been immune to it, having heard buskers in the tube belt it out with astounding pathos in hopes of a shilling, found her eyes growing warm and felt that peculiar tingle on the upper lip that heralds a good weep. She opened her eyes wide to keep the tears—foolish things—from falling, and knowing she’d fail, she turned quickly away from the firelight to lose herself in the darkness. A few steps, and she was night-clad.

The darkness made her a stranger, forgotten and obscure, while the rest sported in the merry flicker of firelight, bathed in warmth and glowing human happiness.
All they see are the flames, and each other,
she thought.
And I am alone
. . .

Girls sidled close to young men who hadn’t been so near a woman in years—or at all, for not every magician had turned to debauchery on his journeying. They were better than recruitment posters, better than Churchill’s speeches of dogged fire, these girls. A little more of this, and the magicians would rush en masse to the Continent, forgetting their vows, forgetting the Exaltation, forgetting everything except the tender softness they must protect and the arms they’d be coming home to. Phil only wished she could import a few more women to Bittersweet.

She drifted farther from the light, feeling unwelcome (foolishly, for the magicians adored her, and even the girls were no more jealous than they absolutely had to be, seeing her more as matchmaker than as competition) but unable, quite, to make herself leave. For Arden was there.

She’d seen him, dour as an unlit coal at the edge of the campfire light, and then he’d vanished. She was sure he’d seen her and was, as usual these days, avoiding her.
Perhaps if we had a moment to talk,
Phil thought,
I could find a way through this coldness.
But he never gave her the opportunity.

The singer’s voice grew more wistful.

Here I now wander alone as I wonder,
Why did you leave me to sigh and complain?
I ask of the roses, “Why should I be forsaken?
Why must I here in sorrow remain?”

She heard a sound—a sob—choked quickly off. Could it be Arden? Was he suffering too?
If I find him in the dark, without eyes to avert and blushes to shame us, only voices and breath and body, can we find our understanding again? We were so close.

She crept toward the sound.

Arden was supposed to stay with his fellow magicians at all times, supervise their interactions with the commoners, and, clandestinely, keep tabs on those confirmed or suspected to side with the Dresdeners. All those he was sure of had been included in the apple-picking detail. Rudyard, heeding Arden’s advice, thought it better to keep them away from the college. Now they were liberally mixed with the magicians of Phil’s muster, the loyal (and rebellious) fighters, so that if things erupted before Arden managed to discover the Dresdeners’ plans, he’d have allies.