He took the first few steps, knee crying agony at him, and looked up at the portico again. What am I doing here? he thought. The uniformed staff was lined up beside the door to greet him. Uniformed staff? Neat suits, proper little gowns and aprons?
His world contained slovenly orderlies that stole your whiskey and tobacco, piles of dirty uniforms pitched in the corner of the tent, clutter that was never cleaned, only rearranged.
He took another three steps upwards, feeling as if he was a supplicant climbing to the throne of God. The scene had that same feeling of unreality. Pristine white steps going up to a colonnaded portico, cloudless blue sky, larks overhead, a line of solemn, priest-like people waiting to greet him—
He realized as he was halfway up the stairs that once he had thought he loved Longacre, but he was not the same person who had given that love to this place.
In fact, he was only just coming to the realization that what he loved was not this great stone pile, this display in marble, it was the land around it.
What had he remembered, after all, in those days when he waited to be sent up, in those nights when he listened to the guns? As he climbed all those stairs, what occurred to him was that it had not been the memories set in those rooms with their twenty-foot ceilings, but the ones spent in woods and fields, in the stables and the sheds, that had kept him alive and sane.
There were 6,500 acres of field and farm, meadow and woods belonging to this place; he felt more at home in any of them than in the building itself. If it had not been too much effort to go back down all those steps, he might just have gone down to the car and ordered it away, far away, anywhere but here, this strange place that should have been home and wasn't.
His mother had the entire staff lined up out front to greet him, as if he was some sort of medieval monarch returning. Bloody hell, he thought, with weary resignation. Don't they have things to do? Of course they did. But this was traditional. This was where the staff of Longacre got their largesse—
So why don't I just pay them decently instead, and we can do without this mummery?
But no, no, he must follow the tradition. Noblesse oblige. Can't disappoint the staff.
So he hobbled forward, as one of the men detached himself from the line and moved to his elbow, and pressed several coins into his hand.
Surely they would prefer this in their proper pay-packet?
First and foremost in line were Mrs. Dick, the housekeeper, and James Boatwright, the butler. They had held those positions on the estate for as long as Reggie could recall, and in all that time they had not apparently changed; no one knew if Mrs. Dick had ever actually had a "Mister" Dick; one just referred to the housekeeper by the title of "Mrs." because that was how things were done. He vividly recalled the day he had learned her given name of Catriona—all his life until then he had thought "Mrs." was her first name.
They, at least, seemed genuinely moved to see him. "Boatwright," he said, shaking the upright old man's hand. "Mrs. Dick." They didn't even acknowledge the largesse, simply slipped it into a pocket and went on shaking his hand, and somewhat to his shock, there were tears in their eyes.
Why? What should they care? Even if they remembered him as a child, they could not have done so all that vividly. The people he had spent the most amount of time with had been his nurse, his governess, and then his tutors and his father. All of them were gone, and of all of them, only the nurse remained anywhere nearby—in the pensioners' cottages, if she hadn't died of old age yet.
And he felt so unmoved ... as if it wasn't he who was standing here, greeting old family retainers who, with so many going off and being slaughtered, hadn't expected to see him alive. As if he actually was dead, a ghost come back to observe, but not feel.
Next in the hierarchy, he greeted with somber gravity the cook. Mrs. Murphy was not quite as intimidating as Mrs. Dick, being all Irish and beaming. "Mrs. Murphy," he said, shaking her hand—every time he did this, of course, he left that money in their hands gold sovereigns for the upper servants, smaller coins for the lesser, the tips that servants in great houses were accustomed to get from visitors and on occasions like this, from the family. Or at least, the head of the family, which he now was. His father had simply dropped where he stood, on the first of June, 1915, after Reggie was already in the RFC.
It should have been his father standing here. For God's sake, why couldn't this have been done with less fanfare? It was humiliating, surely, for them, and no great joy for him. And his knee hurt abominably.
He could remember his father doing this, on occasions like the King's birthday, or Boxing Day, or the day he, Reggie, had taken his Oxford degree, just before the war began. Devlin Fenyx had never seemed to find this the ordeal that his son was now experiencing.
Beside him was Michael Turner, his valet, unobtrusively handing him the gold sovereigns. Turner had been his father's valet, and knew the secret that father and son kept from his mother, that both of them were Elemental Masters. Only with Turner did he feel something like normal, and he wished that, if this had to be done, it could have been Turner who attended to it.
I don't belong here. I don't belong to this world anymore, these piles of showy stone, these devoted family retainers. My world is not this place. My world is a world of blood and ruin, of bombs and cannon and the stink of gas.
Still he moved on, smiling, pleasant, while pain lanced through his knee and more and more he wanted only to go lie down somewhere. Next to Mrs. Murphy was Thelma Hawkins; Thelma cooked for the servants. Quiet word, shake hand, slip in the coin, move on. What were these folk to him, or him to them? Just "milord," or something more? And was that something nothing more than a chimera, a fata morgana, an illusion? He was a ghost, a ghost of the past, and no more real than the dreams of a poet.
Then there were the cook's helpers, four of them: Cheryl Case, Maria Bracken, Amanda Hart, and Mary Holman the tweenie. He wasn't supposed to know them, but he did, all but Mary Holman; Turner murmured their names as they curtsied, and this time it was Turner who gave them their largesse, not Reggie, because these were under-servants, the bottom of the hierarchy. And little Matthew Case, who ran errands, was hardly even in the hierarchy at all.
And just why should that be? Reggie knew the helpers better than he knew many blood relations. Reggie had spent many hours in the kitchens as a boy, running away from lessons. The little Holman girl looked up at him in awe, as if he had been the king. It was embarrassing. In the end, he was no better than she. She might one day come to produce something good and useful—all he had produced was death.