Reserved for the Cat em-6

by Mercedes Lackey

  He led the way through the communal sitting-room to the passage that had been cut in the wall between the two houses. “When we got the place, I had the notion I wanted to set things up for them as wanted a bit more privacy and a bit more space. House was four flats, I sectioned it up into bed-sitters with one or two bedrooms, so people that had an act with family could lodge together and couples—” here Alfie winked, and Nigel smiled, since he knew Alfie was not in the least concerned if the “couples” in question were married or not “—could have a bit more privacy. But we left the flat at the top alone, thinkin’ mebbe we could let it out to them as stay longer than just a week or so.” He shook his head, leading the way up the stairs. “Happen you didn’t book a lot of those, and it’s a bit of a journey from here to, say, the Opera House. I was just about to call in the carpenters and give the orders to cut it up too, when Arthur rang me up. And here we are!”

  He stopped at the top landing, took out a key with a flourish, and opened the door.

  Nigel stepped inside and looked around. He nodded with approval. The rose-papered sitting room had clearly been furnished by a woman, Sarah probably. Light, airy, and comfortable. Plain, but good furniture upholstered in dark rose. Small fireplace with a wooden mantel, and a mirror over the mantelpiece. Electric lighting, which was far safer than gas. Not as ostentatious as his own flat, but he was, after all, the theater owner. “Let’s see the rest of it.”

  “Got a small kitchen here, bit of a pantry, but Sarah an’ me are figuring your gel will want us to cater her,” Alfie explained, throwing up the door on a doll’s kitchen, with a tiny stove and oven. “This’s enough for her maid to cook her up an egg and a bit of toast and the like, or keep dinner warm in the oven for her. That’s what everyone else in this flat has done, sent down to us for real meals and all. Some of them even come down to eat around the big table with the rest.” He opened the next door. “This’d be the maid’s room, I reckon. Last person that let the place was a family act, they had their daughter in here.”

  A small, neat, plain white bedroom with a thick blue coverlet and blanket on the bed, blue china washbasin and pitcher on the stand, with a blue-curtained window looking out on the backyard seemed adequate enough to Nigel. It didn’t have a fire, but maids’ rooms seldom did, and it did share the wall with the kitchen, which should keep it warm enough.

  And then he got a glimpse of something, out of the corner of his eye. A small, clever-faced little gnome with a kindly sparkle to his eyes.

  An Earth-Elemental, one of the benevolent ones. A brownie. Interesting. Had it been here all along, or had it come in response to the movement through the invisible workings of the Elementals themselves who said Nina was coming here?

  He would have liked to question the creature, but obviously he couldn’t, not with Alfie there. It saw him looking at it, gave him a saucy wink, and vanished.

  Pity. As an Air Master he couldn’t actually call the Earth creatures; they would only talk to him if they felt like it.

  “An’ here’d be the gel’s little nest,” Alfie said, opening the final door. Again, it was an airy, bright room, this time with a big four-post bed of the old fashioned sort with curtains around it. Not a bad thing, when the winter winds came roaring off the sea, and to drive off the damp from the ubiquitous rain. There was a good fireplace here, and it was as clean and neat as anyone could want. Walls papered in cream, rose, and brown, coverlets, curtains, and furnishings to match. The room was warm without feeling stuffy. “Nice little dressing-room and bath through there,” Alfie continued, pointing at a door in the far wall. “Hot water up from a boiler in the basement, modern as you please. Maid can use the bath on the second floor, or this one if her mistress ain’t particular. Even put a telephone in. Reckon this’ll suit?”

  “If she’s got any sense, she’ll think she’s in cream, Alfie,” Nigel replied with satisfaction. They concluded the bargain, Nigel sealed it with the first month’s rent, and he and Arthur and Wolf headed back to the theater. The street was quieter now, people settling back into their businesses after the rush about for lunch.

  “Nigel,” Wolf said, with uncharacteristic seriousness, as they made their way on foot through the back streets, “I have a concern.”

  Nigel glanced down at the little gray head peering out from Arthur’s coat. “Then I would like to hear it.”

  “Do either of you have any attraction to this girl? Are you likely to?” Wolf’s shiny black eyes looked at him piercingly. “You know very well she is quite likely to have some sort of attraction to you, one or both, if only the attraction of a young woman to a man of means. She’s in shock now, but when she gets over it, she does not strike me as the sort to go without a gentleman for very long.”

  Nigel laughed. “She’ll have plenty of those—”

  “You know what I mean,” Wolf said severely. Arthur sighed.

  “The bird has a good point, Nigel,” he said reluctantly. “We rescued her, after all. That tends to make a young lady look at you in a different sort of way. It could be a complication unless we are careful about how we treat her.”

  “Hmm. Then the sooner we get her established in her own rooms, the better.” Nigel found the dancer attractive enough, and had she been anyone other than one of his performers, he would have had no qualms about pursuing whatever seemed appropriate . . .

  But she was one of his performers, and he had always had a strict rule for himself about that. That is, his female performers were not under any circumstances to be socialized with in that way. Invite them to parties, yes. Have them at dinners, yes. But only in a party with other performers and nothing outside of the same sort of thing that he would offer to his male performers. It was just too much of a risk. He’d seen this happen to owners in the past; let a star performer become something more, and the next thing you knew, they thought they could dictate the running of the theater to you. He was going to showcase this girl as his star turn. He was not going to allow her to turn it into “her” theater.

  Wolf made the sound of a sigh of relief. “Good. As long as you keep that in mind.”

  “Oh, I will,” Nigel said fervently. “Business and pleasure shouldn’t be mixed. Ever.” Besides the other considerations, the last thing he needed or wanted was an entanglement at a time when he wanted to have the upper hand in negotiating with this young woman.

  He would give her a fair offer, but he was not about to treat her on the level of someone who could fill entire concert halls just on the basis of their name on a playbill. She was an unknown here. To an extent he could use her European reputation, but English audiences would make up their own minds about her. And he could certainly use the romantic circumstances of her shipwreck. But none of these things were going to compensate for an outrageous salary, especially not in the beginning. He was taking a risk, and he knew it, on this new sort of musical performance. What worked so brilliantly in America might not work here.

  By this time they had reached the Music Hall, and Nigel made up his mind at that moment that he was going to do something a bit different today. “You and Wolf keep an eye on the rehearsals, would you please?”

  “You have something in mind?” asked Arthur.

  Nigel nodded. “I think it’s time that I talked to Jonathon Hightower.”

  “Kung Chow?” Arthur nodded. “The plot I have outlined for this production makes very heavy use of him. I can’t think of a stage magician better suited to this.”

  “Just as long as he doesn’t want me in his act,” Wolf added, with a shudder. “Really, I don’t like bird acts at all. Filthy things, and no conversation. Now, Jonathon, however . . . he is excellent company. Good taste in music too.”

  Nigel repressed a smile. Wolf would think that; Jonathon was a great aficionado of Mozart.

  “I can’t think of an Elemental Mage I would rather have here,” Nigel responded, thoughtfully. “Something just occurred to me, you see. What if that storm and the yacht sinking weren’t an accident?”<
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  Arthur paused just outside the Stage Door, and two heads, his and Wolf’s, swiveled to look at Nigel. “You think someone was trying to stop her from coming here?”

  “Or merely was getting revenge on her father,” Nigel replied, and opened the door for them. “He created that cat as a guardian for her. You would assume he had a reason to think she would need one.”

  Arthur let Wolf out of his coat. The parrot clambered up to his shoulder. “In that case, there might be more such attacks,” Wolf pointed out, as Arthur nodded agreement.

  The three of them paused for a moment in the area just past the backstage porter, where the mail was left for performers. There was no one here at the moment, although the sounds of the orchestra warming up for rehearsal were just beginning, and from one of the practice studios came the sound of a piano.

  “If the sinking wasn’t an accident, yes. I want Jonathon here. There is nothing like a Fire Master to discourage meddlers.” Nigel shrugged. “I could be alarmist. But I had rather not find out that I wasn’t when the scenery collapses atop someone. Or a rope snaps and a sandbag breaks our star dancer’s neck.”

  Arthur shuddered. “Touch wood that you are being alarmist. But Jonathon can certainly tell us. I think it is probably time for you to find him the fastest way possible.”

  Nigel grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  Nigel locked the door to his office—another reason not to have a secretary—and flexed his fingers. The “fastest way possible” was very fast indeed for an Elemental Master. Whereas an ordinary theater manager would have to rely on a call to Hightower’s booking agent, and then a telegram to whatever theater the magician was playing at, Nigel could be a great deal more direct.

  He opened the eastern window to his office, rolled back the Persian rug laid over the carpet, and exposed the very special design woven into the flatter carpet beneath.

  It was an Invocation Circle, for Air, specifically. Every Elemental Master had his own way of calling his Elementals; Nigel just happened to have one that was uniquely suited to his profession, and the reason why he and Arthur had met in the first place.

  In fact, it was probably the reason why the Grey Parrot that claimed he was the incarnation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had flown in this same window ten years ago.

  From a locked drawer in his desk, Nigel removed a glass flute.

  From the time he was a boy, Nigel had used music to call and communicate with his Elementals. The patterns of the notes just seemed to fit the patterning of the magic. He was not a brilliant musician, not in the way that Arthur was; Arthur could play virtually ever instrument in the orchestra, and do it well enough to fill in any vacant position if he had to. Nigel had never been good enough to pretend to being a professional musician, but he was more than good enough to master something like the flute. For a long time he’d used a metal instrument, but that hadn’t quite gotten the effect he had wanted. Finally, on a whim, he had asked a glass-blower to make him a glass flute, and the results had been everything he could have hoped for.

  Even better had been when Wolf had arrived in their midst. The parrot had volunteered to write little melodies for virtually every summoning purpose that the three of them had been able to think of.

  This time, when he raised the flute to his lips and felt the first stirrings of his magic in the tingling of his fingers, he began the melody that Wolf called “The Messenger.”

  The first soft, breathy notes broke the silence of the office. He felt power swirl around him in a cool, crisp whirlwind of pale blue energies. He hadn’t played more than three bars when the curtains billowed inward, and the transparent, laughing face of a sexless child winked at him once from the zephyr that circled him, riding the waves of power.

  With a smile he put down the flute, and the elemental spun into shape, a fluttering, translucent bird-child with big eyes and a knowing smile. It waited for his request.

  “Please go to Jonathon Hightower,” Nigel told it, giving it, as he spoke, the kind of mental “signature” of the Fire Master. “Tell him that I want to speak with him immediately.”

  And to reward it, he reached for the energies of the air and conjured up a sparkling, dancing, animated spark, a kind of elemental toy that would last as long as the Elemental he gave it to had interest in it. With a crow of delight, the creature seized the offering, and with a shake of wings, sped off through the window, and out into the sun.

  Nigel closed the window, rolled his rug back and went back to his desk. Nothing now but to wait, so he might as well get some work done while he did.

  7

  NIGEL had not gotten a reply by the time the curtain rose on the first performance, and by the time the curtain fell on the last act, he was alternating between concern and irritation. After all, Masters never used Elementals as messengers frivolously, and Hightower of all people ought to know that if Nigel had done so it meant there was some urgency to the request.

  Wolf, who was always backstage during performances, flew down from his perch in the flies and landed on Nigel’s shoulder as the latter cursed the Fire Master mentally.

  “There could be a dozen reasons why Hightower hasn’t contacted you, Nigel,” the bird said quietly into his ear. “Chief of which is that he is a performer, with his own act to rehearse and perform. Unlike you, he does not have the luxury of a private office in which to conduct rites.”

  “There’s nothing out of the ordinary about sending a telegram,” Nigel replied, with irritation. “Nothing that difficult. Step around the corner to the post office and—”

  “But why should I do that, when I can come here in person?” said Jonathon Hightower, stepping around a gaggle of little chorus dancers. He grinned, and they tittered nervously; Jonathon looked very much like a caricature of Satan, minus the horns, and he played on the resemblance by cultivating a slim moustache and goatee, and wearing a scarlet-lined black evening cape and top hat whenever possible.

  Amazingly this seemingly Satanic appearance translated seamlessly into his stage persona of the mysterious Chinese magician, Kung Chow. Very few people outside the theatrical world connected the flamboyant Hightower with the secretive Kung Chow, and that was the way Hightower liked it.

  “Jonathon, you wretch—” Nigel exclaimed.

  Hightower laughed. “Now how could I resist coming here myself, after all the newspaper stories about the beautiful Russian dancer you rescued from the briny deep?” He lifted an eyebrow significantly. “Had to come see her for myself, don’t you know.”

  Nigel looked at him with exasperation. “Come back to the flat with me, and you can meet her yourself.”

  “Oh, really?” Jonathon grinned. Nigel gritted his teeth.

  “Obviously she had nowhere else to go, Jonathon,” he said. “She’ll be moving into her own establishment shortly.”

  Jonathon kept grinning as Nigel passed Wolf over to Arthur and made his round of the backstage before leading him out the stage door. But once outside and away from anyone likely to overhear them, he rounded on his friend.

  “First of all, there is nothing going on with that young woman,” he said fiercely, as they walked to where he had left his auto parked, moving from patch of gaslight to patch of gaslight. “I have a new sort of musical theater I am planning, I intend to make her the central figure in it, and the last thing in the world I am ever going to do is mix my personal pleasures with the business of my theater!”

  Jonathon sobered immediately. “Look, old man, I—”

  “And secondly,” Nigel went on, without losing a bit of his heat, “The girl is one of us, or at least her father was. Enough of a mage that he was able to create a protector for her. What else was I to do but take her in? For heaven’s sake, it was her cat that summoned us to aid her!”

  By that point, they had reached the auto; Jonathon got in, silently, and remained quiet while Nigel went through the complicated little ritual that the auto demanded to get it started. Only when they were well down the
street did he speak again.

  “Well, I feel a right fool.”

  “You should,” Nigel snapped. “Now the reasons I asked you to contact me in the first place are part of all that. I want to engage you for a full year at the least, and I want to make you the other star attraction of this production. Now here is what I have in mind—”

  He explained his plans for the new sort of musical theater as the auto chugged down the street. Jonathon said nothing, only nodded from time to time, but Nigel could tell that he was interested.

  “Well,” Jonathon said, as Nigel pulled his auto into the carriage house that now served it as its garage, “I’m equally torn by two questions, one mundane, the other arcane. The mundane one is rather simple; would you rather cast me as the villain of the piece, or sympathetic?”

  “Well, I suppose that would depend on how sophisticated we think the audience will be, wouldn’t it?” Nigel closed up and prudently locked the carriage house doors. That was the grand thing about having an auto; no horse to feed or stalls to clean out. One could talk all one wanted about the romance of horseflesh, but the amount of cleaning up and caring for—he had far rather pay the mechanic once in a while to fix the motorcar than keep a stableman day in, day out.

  “If we thought they would be capable of it, we could write something that casts you as the villain but redeems you in the end,” Nigel suggested, as they made their way into the foyer of the building, brightly lit in the newest fashion with fine electric fixtures. “Say . . . your character has a change of heart and helps the girl escape, staying to face the wrath of the sultan?” Nigel’s flat was on the third floor of this rather posh establishment, reached by a modern, brass-caged elevator, although stairs were available. It was self-operated, although the owners of the other two flats in the building generally had their servants do the operating.

  “I must say, I like that idea,” Jonathon mused, as they both strolled into the anteroom of Nigel’s flat, to be met by a servant who took their coats. “By the way, I took the liberty of sending my things here . . .”