Not that she made any great show against them. She looked like a maid herself, in her plain dresses and sensible walking shoes. They didn't have to bully her, not then, when they could simply overawe her and bewilder her and drown her out with their incessant chattering and tinkling laughter. And when she tried to get Papa alone to voice a timid protest, he would just pat her cheek, ask if she wasn't being a jealous little wench, and advise her that she would get on better if she was more like them!
She might have been able to rally herself after the first shock— might have been able to fight back. Except that all those far-off things in the newspapers about assassinations and Balkan uprisings that could never possibly have anything to do with the British Empire and England and Broom—suddenly did.
In August, the world suddenly went mad. In some incomprehensible way, Austria declared war on Serbia, and Prussia joined in, and so did Germany, which apparently declared war on everybody. There were Austrian and Prussian and German troops overrunning France and England was at war too, rushing to send men to stop the flood. And though among the country-folk in Broom there was a certain level of skepticism about all this "foreign nonsense," according to the papers, there was a sudden patriotic rush of volunteers signing up to go to France to fight.
And Papa, who was certainly old enough to know better, and never mind that he already had been in the army as a young man, volunteered to go with his regiment. And the next thing she knew, he was a sergeant again, and was gone.
Somehow Oxford never materialized. "Your dear father didn't make any arrangements, child," Stepmother said, sounding surprised, her eyes glittering. "But never mind! This will all be over by Christmas, and surely you would rather be here to greet him when he comes home, wouldn't you? You can go to Oxford in the Hilary term."
But it wasn't over by Christmas, and somehow Papa didn't manage to make arrangements for the Hilary term, either. And now here she was, feeling and being treated as a stranger, an interloper in her own house, subtly bullied by glamour and not understanding how it had happened, sent around on errands like a servant, scarcely an hour she could call her own, and at the end of the day, retreating to this cold, cheerless closet that scarcely had room for her bed and her wardrobe and desk. And Papa never wrote, and every day the papers were full of horrible things covered over with patriotic bombast, and everything was wrong with the world and she couldn't see an end to it.
Two more tears burned their way down her cheeks. Her head pounded, she felt ill and feverish, she was exhausted, but somehow too tired to sleep.
Today had been the day of the Red Cross bazaar and tea dance. Organized by Stepmother, of course—"You have such a genius for such things, Alison!"—at the behest of the Colonel's wife. Though what that meant was that Eleanor and the maids got the dubious privilege of doing all of the actual work while Stepmother and "her girls" stood about in their pretty tea-gowns and accepted congratulations. Eleanor had been on her feet from dawn until well past teatime, serving cup after cup of tea, tending any booth whose owner decided she required a rest, watching with raw envy as her stepsisters and other girls her age flirted with the handsome young officers as they danced to the band Stepmother had hired for the occasion. Dances she didn't know— dances to jaunty melodies that caused raised, but indulgent eyebrows among the village ladies. "Ragtime"—that's what they called it, and perhaps it was more than a little "fast," but this was wartime, and beneath the frenetic music was an unspoken undercurrent that some of these handsome young men wouldn't be coming back, so let them have their fun. . . .
Eleanor had cherished some small hope that at last someone who knew her would see what Alison was doing and the tide of public opinion would rise up to save her. Alison, after all, was the interloper here, and with her ostentatious ways and extravagance, she had surely been providing more than a little fodder for the village cats. But just when she was handing the vicar's wife, Theresa Hinshaw, a cup of tea, the woman abruptly shook her head a little, and finally looked at her, and frowned, and started to say something in a concerned tone of voice, out of the corner of her eye she saw Alison raise her head like a ferret sniffing a mouse on the wind, and suddenly there she was at the woman's elbow.
"Mrs. Hinshaw, how are you?" she purred, and steered Eleanor's hope away into a little knot of other women.
"I was wondering why we haven't seen Eleanor about," the vicar's wife began.
"Yes, she used to run wild all about the village, didn't she, poor thing," replied Alison, in a sweetly reasonable tone of voice. "A firm hand was certainly wanted there, to be sure. You'd never guess to look at them both that she's the same age as my Carolyn, would you?"
Eleanor saw Mrs. Hinshaw make a startled glance from the elegant Carolyn, revolving in the arms of a young subaltern, to Eleanor in her plain frock and apron and ribbon-tied hair, and with a sinking heart, saw herself come off second best.
"No, indeed," murmured Mrs. Sutherland, the doctor's wife.
Alison sighed heavily. "One does one's poor best at establishing discipline, but no child is going to care for a tight rein when she's been accustomed to no curb at all. Keep her busy, seems to be the best answer. And of course, with dear Charles gone—"
The vicar's wife cast a look with more sympathy in it at Eleanor, but her attention was swiftly recaptured by Lauralee, who simpered, "And poor Mama, not even a proper honeymoon!" which remark utterly turned the tide in Alison's favor.
From there it was all downhill, with little hints about Eleanor's supposed "jealousy" and "sullenness" and refusal to "act her age"—all uttered in a tone of weary bravery with soft sighs.
By the time Alison was finished, there wasn't a woman there who would have read her exhaustion and despair as anything other than sulks and pouting.
The music jangled in her ears and made her head ache, and by the time the car came for Alison and her daughters ("Dear little Eleanor, so practical to wear things that won't be hurt by a little wet!") and Eleanor was finished with the cleaning up and could trudge home again, she felt utterly beaten down. Her aching legs and feet were an agony by the time she reached an unwelcoming home and unfriendly servants. Alison and the girls held high celebration in the parlor, their shrill laughter ringing through the house as they made fun of the very people they had just been socializing with.
She got plain bread-and-butter and cooling tea for supper in the kitchen—not even a single bite of the dainty sandwiches that she had served the ladies had she eaten, and of the glorious high tea that the cook had prepared for Alison and her daughters there was not a scrap to be seen. And by the time she went up all those stairs to her freezing-cold room, she'd had no strength for anything except hopeless weeping.
What does she want from me? The question echoed dully in Eleanor's mind, and there seemed no logical answer. She had no doubt that Alison had married Papa for the money—for her all her airs at the tea, there was nothing in the way that Alison behaved in private that made Eleanor think that her stepmother found Papa's absence anything other than a relief. But why did she seem to take such pleasure in tormenting Eleanor?