Reserved for the Cat em-6

by Mercedes Lackey

  “And how is it that the young lady came to shore?” Now that was a dangerous question and one that Ninette had been hoping would not be asked. She would have to tread very carefully here—

  Drop your head, the cat ordered. Don’t look them in the eyes and speak very slowly. You don’t remember a great deal.

  She repeated that verbatim in a hesitant voice.

  The storm came up suddenly, the cat continued. You were asleep. One of the crew came to wake you, and tell you to get dressed. You had never been on a boat before and you were afraid of the violence of the storm. You tried to make your way to the deck, when there was a great crash and you were thrown into the water. Fortunately you are a strong swimmer, but you could see nothing in the storm. You found a plank to cling to for a while, and you thought you saw lights and began to swim towards them. You were determined to live and that was all you could think of. You remember crawling onto the sand, and that is all.

  “She must have wrecked just off the North Pier,” the officer said, and shook his head. “Though why we weren’t alerted—”

  “A yacht that small? In a storm like that? With an inexperienced owner?” Arthur exclaimed. “The Lifeboat Service is hardly to blame, sir. No telling if she was even storm-worthy.”

  “Well that does account for some flotsam that came ashore,” the officer muttered.

  “Really, I cannot imagine anyone holding the Lifeboat Service to account for this. You’ll have to notify the Russian Ambassador of course.” Nigel nodded sagely. “Miss, do you remember the names of the crew?”

  “Nikolas Petrov Vladisky,” murmured Ninette, as the cat dictated. “One pilot was Sasha, I do not know his last name. The other was Ivan Bolodenka. Nikolas’s man’s name was Borya Fedorovich. I never knew what the rest were called except their first names, Dimitri and Yuri.”

  Now cry, the cat ordered. She was so nervous about being found out that it wasn’t at all hard to do as he ordered and start to sob.

  Alarmed, the officer patted her hand clumsily. “There, there, now, miss, you’re a good, brave girl. I’ll let the embassy know these people were lost.”

  She looked up, impulsively, and he flinched.

  “Let the maid take you back to bed,” Nigel said, beckoning the servant over. She waved the maid away; the girl curtsied and left the room. “No, I shall be all right. Is there any sign of—” She looked up again at the Lifesaving Officer, and he winced.

  “Tell her that we probably can’t hold out any hope at this point,” the officer said. “If they wrecked off the North Pier, we probably won’t even find bodies; they’ll be taken out to sea by the tide and turn up in Ireland, if at all.”

  Arthur translated the first part of that, but not the last. She dropped her eyes.

  “Thank you, miss,” the officer said ponderously. “Merci, mademoiselle.” He coughed. “I’ll be on my way, then. I doubt very much I will need to trouble the young lady any more, she’s been most helpful.”

  “You expect to hear anything from the Russians?” Nigel asked in a low voice.

  The officer shook his head. “One bourgeois speculator, related to no one, and a handful of sailors who might or might not have been no better than they should be? Probably not. And this young lady might be a good dancer, but I misdoubt anyone from the Embassy will care unless she was the Empress’s particular pet. I’m afraid you’ll have her on your hands unless you find someone else to hand her off to.”

  “Hand off my golden goose? Not likely.” Nigel winked, as the cat curled up around Ninette’s feet and purred. “I’ll show you out, then, sir. Care for a brandy against the cold?”

  “Shouldn’t drink on duty—”

  “Nonsense, it’s medicinal—” The two left the room as Ninette wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.

  As soon as they were out of earshot, though, she turned to Arthur, holding tightly to the scrap of cloth and lace. “And how is it,” she demanded in French, “that you can hear my cat?”

  “HA! I warned you!” came a third voice, one she thought she remembered from the auto, although she jumped when she heard it. “Didn’t I warn you? I told you she would be a clever little thing, all the dancers I ever knew were!”

  “Yes, Wolf, you told us,” Arthur said with resignation.

  “Who is that?” Ninette asked, heart still in her mouth, looking back over her shoulder and seeing nothing but a parrot in a cage, sitting on a swing.

  Then the parrot reached over to the bars of the cage, and to her astonishment, unlatched the door and flew over to the back of the couch. “I am Wolfgang Amadeus, who for my sins has found himself stuck in the body of a bird,” the parrot said mournfully. “It probably has something to do with The Magic Flute. I was warned not to write a Masonic opera. I, who once visited the courts of Europe and wrote music for Emperors, am now reduced to sitting in a cage, begging for green peas, and writing tinkly little melodies for music hall performances.” He sighed, and tilted his head down, eyeing Thomas evilly. “And don’t get any clever notions, cat. You might be an Elemental Creature, but my beak can still make an impression on your nose.”

  I wouldn’t dream of it, the cat said with immense dignity. Just what do you take me for?

  “Hungry,” said the parrot, and fluffed out all his feathers. Ninette stared at him, and then looked at Arthur.

  “Is he really—?”

  Arthur shrugged. “He’s my Elemental Familiar, so only heaven knows. I’m only a magician, not a Master, so I can’t tell these things.”

  “Even the Master cannot tell if Wolf is telling the truth or making up grand tales,” said Nigel, returning to the room. “All I can say is that those ‘tinkly little melodies’ he hates are quite popular, so I say it doesn’t matter. But you, my dear, are not a mage yourself—”

  But her father was, and he left me in charge of her, the cat replied. Tartly. Ninette eyed him in surprise. I told you that already. Really, if you are going to make me repeat things . . .

  “I beg your pardon, Monsieur Chat, most heartily,” Nigel said with a bow. “Well, I expect we’ll have to look out for you now, Miss Tchereslavsky, since those of us Elemental magicians that actually get along without fighting each other tend to be a close-knit group here in Britain.”

  “Mind, there are far more who don’t get along than those who do, idiot lot that they are,” the parrot added sardonically. “Imagine! There are a goodly number that refuse to even speak with me just because I’m a bird!”

  Intolerable, the cat drawled. The Philistines!

  Wolf glared at him.

  “I am afraid I have nothing,” Ninette said, looking down at her hands. “All my fortune was in my jewels, and those are at the bottom of the sea.”

  “Don’t worry about that for now,” Nigel replied, leaning down to pat her hand. “You just think about getting your strength back so you can dance. You’ll soon be on your feet again once that happens. And I’m sure we can find a way to make that happen. Right, fellows?”

  He winked at her, but she didn’t miss the glance that passed between him and Arthur. She glanced down at the cat, who looked as smug as, well, he deserved to be.

  What did I tell you? the cat asked. Just do as I say, and you’ll be so successful that La Augustine will read about you in the papers and envy you!

  6

  THERE was something comforting and universal about a rehearsal room.

  Always the same. Broad expanses of glass on two walls—windows on one, mirrors on the opposite. Practice barre stretching out along the mirrored wall. Piano in one corner. Dust always hanging in the air, rosin dust, and dust shaken out of cracks in the wooden floor by the pounding of countless feet. Depending on the time of day, and whether or not it was raining again, sunlight might or not be streaming in through the window, filled with that dust, which would then sparkle like fairy dust.

  Rehearsal pianists were always thin, always earnest, always homely, usually bespectacled. They always wore dusty black. This one was thin, e
arnest, homely, bespectacled, and female, her hair put up in a tight little arrangement of braids wrapped around her angular head. She also spoke French, an asset.

  For the first time in her life, Ninette had a rehearsal room to herself. For the first time in her life, she was not being put through her drills by an instructor or a ballet master. She had to remember it all herself.

  She punctuated her requests for tempi with s’il vous plais and merci. After all, rehearsal pianists might utterly forgettable and generally ignored as a kind of extension of the piano itself, but they were still human beings. But in between the please and thank you she concentrated on getting her body back into something capable of a performance.

  Despite all the exercise of walking she had done, she had not been doing any dancing since she had left France, and her muscles told her so. Everything had to be taken slowly. Each group of muscles must be warmed up, stretched, and tested. Then the entire body had to go through the same procedure. Only then was she prepared to try a solo, and a not very demanding one, either.

  She wished she had a partner. She wondered what the odds were of finding one.

  “La Sylphide, first solo, merci,” she said, and proceeded to work through that first piece, where the mischievous Sylph first invades James’ home and finds him sleeping in front of the fire. She interrupted herself often, asking the patient pianist to repeat a phrase, drilling herself mercilessly until her forgetful body got it right again. Oddly enough, there was peace in this. She might have been in Paris; this might have been what she would have been doing had she been lifted to etoile status. Outside this room there were talking cats and men who claimed they were magicians, a stolen name, a life that was not hers, and a fabrication she had to maintain. In here, there was only the music, the relentless tyranny of the choreography, and the discipline of shaping a reluctant body into the graceful movements of the dance, without pause, without faltering.

  How strange that the one thing that she had thought she would like to escape was the thing she now fled to for comfort.

  “Nigel.”

  Nigel looked up from his desk. This was the first day since they had rescued Nina that he had spent a normal morning, and there was a lot of work piled up at his desk here at the Imperial Music Hall. None of it was an emergency, or someone would have made sure a messenger got to him at his flat, but it took up all of his morning and looked as if it was going to stretch well into the afternoon.

  He’d gotten so deep into it that he had lost all track of time until that familiar voice at his door took him out of his trance of work as he dealt with letters from booking agents, descriptions of acts, complaints from the stagehands, requests for materials . . .

  He looked up, and blinked at Arthur. “Band-call over already?”

  “Yes, and you should get some luncheon inside you,” the parrot said from his perch on Arthur’s shoulder. “We’ve made arrangements for Miss Tchereslavsky. We checked around at the performers’ lodgings and found a full flat open over at Breckenridge’s.”

  Nigel brightened up at that. Alfie Breckenridge owed him a favor, and a big one. Nigel had loaned him the collateral to buy the set of lodgings in the first place, when Alfie had retired from the stage. His wife Sarah was a sharp one, and they wouldn’t give him the flat, but—

  “What’s the terms?” he asked.

  “They’ll let her have it—knowing it’s you that’s paying for it for now—at a quarter the going rate until the show is in production and she can pay for it herself.” Arthur looked understandably pleased at that. “Alfie told me it’s too dear for most of our performers anyway, and it went vacant half the time, so he won’t be losing that much by it. He was thinking of cutting it up into rooms, but if our scheme works, Nina will be there in permanent residence. Care to walk over and cast an eye on it after we eat?”

  “Anything to get from behind this desk.” Nigel gratefully cleaned his pen and pushed his chair away. Arthur tucked Wolf away inside his coat with the parrot’s head sticking out under his chin, and off they went.

  “You should get a secretary to take care of that,” Arthur observed, as they left the building via the stage door, turned up their collars against the drizzle, and headed in the direction of the Dial, which was the name of the Imperial Music Hall version of the pub that sprang up in the vicinity of every theater Nigel had ever seen. Not for the benefit of theater patrons, no. For the benefit of the entertainers. It generally would take a great deal of effort on the part of a casual theatergoer to find these pubs, tucked in as they were in backstreet corners, generally behind the theaters themselves.

  And always no more than a few yards from the stage door. They pushed open the doors to a place that had not significantly changed in decades, except for electric lighting instead of gas. A fire burned on the hearth, and the air smelled of tobacco smoke, woodsmoke and bacon. Wolf popped out of Arthur’s coat and took his usual place on Arthur’s shoulder.

  Yellowing playbills and fading autographed photos adorned the walls of pubs such as this. The bill of fare was plain, cheap, and always available. It was clean, but it had seen better days . . . probably its better days had been about a century ago. It was generally run by someone who had once been in the theatrical trade himself—seldom long enough to have garnered a name of his own, but long enough to have gotten a fair notion of what players and acts and musicians needed—or would put up with.

  In the case of the Dial, the proprietor was a benevolent sort. The food was decent, the service prompt, the prices reasonable, and people tended to look the other way if your trained animal came in with you as long as it was well-behaved. Champagne was available, something you didn’t find in many pubs, because theatrical folks had a taste for it.

  The place was full, since morning band-call was over and everyone that didn’t have another place to go had crowded in here to get a bite between band-call and afternoon rehearsal. Most of the people in here were the stagehands, who greeted Nigel, Arthur and Wolf with genial respect. Wolf generally took care to act like a bird around them, and confined himself only to the very occasional clever comment audible to the room. Nigel knew that Arthur’s companion had an ongoing prank though; at quiet moments the bird would lean down and mutter something in Arthur’s ear to try and get him to laugh.

  Not today, though. There was only so much time until the early afternoon rehearsals started; Arthur was needed there and Nigel liked to watch the acts for signs of trouble. Performers were kittle cattle; some were reliable, stable, and would go on until they dropped, giving one solid performance after another. But most weren’t. There was always the ongoing curse of the showman to contend with; the life of a performer, gypsy-like as it was, was not a good one for making and keeping friends or lovers. Performers’ egos being what they were . . .

  And then there was that ongoing curse of the showman, the bottle. Performers being performers, none of this would show when the time came for the curtain to go up. But cracks would appear at afternoon rehearsals, particularly if they weren’t going well. Nigel liked to slip into the back of a box—never the same twice—and watch. Especially now, when he had his prize, his leading lady, for this new kind of music hall idea. Now he wanted to get a solid lot of acts to fit into this show, and he needed to know he would be able to depend on them for most of a year. That meant no missed performances for being drunk, no replacement of partners for infidelity, no screaming fights backstage, no trouble. They would have to comport themselves like the big theatrical and operatic companies did in Europe, where everyone was permanent, you knew who the stars were, and everyone had to get along, at least marginally. Music hall performers were hard workers, but they weren’t used to that.

  Nigel and Arthur ate quickly, but quietly, with Wolf helping himself to what he liked off both their plates. Most of the stagehands were finishing up just as they did, and there was a little awkwardness at the door, quickly settled as Arthur stepped aside so Wolf could climb back into his coat.

  Like m
ost music halls—except, perhaps, in London—this one was also surrounded by buildings given over to theatrical lodgings. These were, as might be expected, of variable quality. Some were actual boarding houses, where the lodgers could expect at least two and sometimes three meals along with their room. Some provided little more than a cheerless, shabby furnished room. Some had actual flats that included rudimentary kitchens. The one thing they all had in common was that the landlords expected the tenants to be there for no less than the week of their engagement, but not much more, and anticipated they would have nothing more with them than would fit in a suitcase and prop-trunk.

  Alfie Breckenridge was unusual in that he and his wife had both been in the theater before retiring to run a theatrical lodging. Most of the house was a classical boarding-house. Sarah kept a good table and their rooms were always full. Breckenridge was able to pick and choose his lodgers, and as a consequence, there were usually no unpleasant folks in his house.

  Two houses, really; he and Sarah had done so well they had purchased the building next to theirs, put in a passage between them, and converted the second from flats to suites of two and three rooms.

  Arthur rang the bell of the first house; Alfie must have been expecting them, since the door flew open, and it was Alfie himself standing there rather than the maid. “Gents! Glad you could make it before rehearsals started! Nige, Sarah’s been asking after you, wonderin’ when you were comin’ for a good dinner. She don’t half fret about that cook of yours.”

  “She’s the one who recommended Mrs. Graves, you know,” Nigel said with a grin. “Surely she doesn’t think so poorly of her own judgment.”

  “Oh you know, Sarah, always second-guessing herself.” Alfie chuckled. “Made her a good partner for my comic-patter though. Well, right, let’s show you these rooms an’ we’ll see if you think they’re good enough for your bally-dancer wench.”