Reserved for the Cat

by Mercedes Lackey

  But the next day brought another unpleasant surprise.

  Three of the acts just . . . quit, with four more weeks to run on their contracts. They wouldn’t tell him why, nor would their agents, but he suspected that a rumored Australian impresario with a supposed “golden tour” was to blame. On the one hand, he viciously wished all of them to perdition. On the other... he knew how most of these things turned out—with performers stranded in the middle of nowhere with no money and no prospects of getting any, sick with heat and tropical disease and bitterly regretting the decision that had brought them to that pass. He had already made up his mind that he was not going to ask these acts to stick for the big show, but still, he needed them now. He was not going to ask Nina to put in another turn, and anyway, she could hardly make up for half the show missing.

  As it happened, though, Nigel was the rare sort who always assumed some disaster was going to overtake his shows, his theater, or the season, and planned accordingly.

  He regularly made forays into the countryside and as far as Liverpool, looking for people with talent who had not yet “caught on.” Two fast trips in his motorcar yielded him a perky little singer with a genuine gift for comic timing and a “novelty” juggler and his partner, a fellow who impersonated a drunken “toff” with an impertinent maid who kept piling things into his arms when he came home after a night on the tiles. He rushed them to the theater in time for a quick rehearsal; to fill the last slot, Jonathon put in an act he seldom performed anymore, a Hindoo fire-eater. It was all real magic, of course, and as such it was something of a risk. If there was an untrained Elemental mage in the audience, Jonathon’s performance might “wake him up.” And there were those who hunted Masters as well, though usually feuds were of a personal nature.

  Jonathon, however, swore that there were precautions he could take, shields he could set up. Nigel was disposed to believe him, but he wanted the act safely tucked away as soon as possible. He simply did not want to take any chances when there might be someone hunting for Nina—why give a hunter an opening for an attack?

  So a morning on the phone and running back and forth from the telegraph office to London netted him a brother and sister “minstrel” act from America; the idea of a woman in blackface playing a banjo and tap dancing seemed to have put some booking agents off. But on the basis of an enthusiastic report from one of his scouts, which he trusted, he pursued the lead. He learned they were starving in London; he engaged them on the spot and arranged for the agent to advance them money so that they could buy train tickets to Blackpool.

  All three of the new acts were enthusiastic and terribly grateful for the opportunity to play in one of the “big” halls. All of the acts were solid, if not brilliant. By the weekend, the programme was full again, and Jonathon and Nina were able to drop their extra turns, and not a moment too soon. It was clear that the extra work had just begun to wear on them.

  Nigel watched the two of them from the wings as they ran smoothly through the “evil magician” turn, feeling unspeakably grateful that they had both come through without a murmur of complaint. No matter what else could be said about this Russian girl, there was no doubt in his mind that she was willing to work, and work hard. She was an imitator rather than an original, but no one on holiday in Blackpool and spending time in a music hall was likely to have seen the originals, and the girl gave you a good show for your money. Who did it harm, that she borrowed Loie Fuller’s serpentine skirt dance without a blush of shame? How did it matter than she turned Pavlova’s “California Poppy” into her own “Water-lily”? Was Pavlova losing money by it? Had Pavlova ever even heard of Blackpool? Would Fuller ever set foot in this city? Since the answer to all of these questions was “no,” Nigel didn’t see that anyone could have any quarrel with the girl. In fact, he thought she ought to be commended. She was probably the first ballet dancer most of these people had ever seen. And having seen, the holiday-makers might choose to have a look-in on a real ballet corps. Who could tell? They might even become regulars at the theater.

  It wasn’t as if she was claiming to be Pavlova, after all. In the theater, nothing was new, and the only people that ever successfully kept the secrets of how they did things were magicians.

  He watched her with the eye of a critic rather than a showman as she went through her paces in Jonathon’s act. She was certainly graceful, but that went with being a dancer. She wasn’t much of an actress, but then, she wouldn’t have studied acting. Nigel didn’t know much about ballet, but he had the vague notion that the dancers were far too busy keeping track of their steps to do much acting. She didn’t have to be much of an actress anyway; the audience for Music Halls was not one for subtle nuances. They liked showy tricks, melodrama; they wanted to be thrilled and amazed; they wanted to laugh and be dazzled. The Divine Sarah and Eleanor Duse had no place in the music hall. Little Tich, however, dancing in boots that were as long as he was tall . . . that was what they wanted.

  He continued to watch. She was good. The audience liked her. Part of that was her youth, part her apparent fragility, part the romance of her rescue these several weeks ago. She connected with the audience too, she had an instinct for that. Performers had been a success on that alone.

  One thing he didn’t get from her was that . . . spark, that something special, that he felt from people that really were geniuses. He was hardly an ignoramus; he made a point of going to London when he could, to see what the world considered great. And there was a magic, a special something, in those for whom the stage was a kind of home, that the rest of theatrical humanity just did not possess. Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, they had it, and the audience reveled in seeing it displayed. He’d gone to ballets as well as the theater; he had seen Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Isadora Duncan too. They had it, they had it and made the stage sing beneath their feet. Eleanor Duse. The Divine Sarah, dear God, she had it, she could make you believe she was anything she chose to be, and you would completely forget that she was not fourteen years old as she spoke tremulously from her balcony to Romeo, that she was not the courtesan Marguerite Gautier and dying of consumption, that she was not even a woman, as she donned the breeches of Hamlet.

  Nina Tchereslavsky did not have that gift. She had another, a gift for evoking emotion, and for giving it back, and she was good. She would never be immortal.

  On the other hand, the people who had that spark often didn’t do well in life. It was almost as if having been granted this enormous gift, the Fates decided that you had to make up for it in other ways. Those who had it seldom prospered in love; those who had it often drank to excess, or dosed themselves with morphia or hashish or some other drug. Those that had it knew that their gift was a jealous mistress and would tolerate no others.

  Besides the people that came to music halls didn’t want to see genius. Genius wasn’t comfortable, it didn’t actually care about what an audience wanted. Genius didn’t set out to entertain you; if you were entertained by genius, that was incidental. Genius burned, and if you weren’t careful, you burned with it. Genius didn’t want you to forget your troubles, make you laugh, make you gasp. Genius wanted to take your troubles and make art out of them, which was all very well, but made it cursed uncomfortable to live around genius.

  No, for his purposes, he didn’t want genius, he didn’t want art, and he certainly didn’t want artists. He wanted entertainers. He wanted people who lived for the sound of applause and would turn themselves inside out to get it. People like that tended to be troupers, and when something bad happened, they pulled together to make sure the show went on. Genius regarded an audience as a sometimes-inconvenient thing that insisted it should be the judge of what it was shown. Genius only wanted to show the audience something that would make it go away and try very hard to think. Of course, people who lived for audience approval could be trouble too, craving that approval to the exclusion of everything else, making a dreadful pother about themselves offstage and hogging the limelight when on. In fact, there didn’t ever
really seem to be an offstage for them. They played to the people around them as if they were always in front of an audience. In their own way, they were going to always be lonely, for there was no room in that place for anyone who was not audience.

  But after all this time, Nigel was fairly good at recognizing that sort, and he generally did not extend their contracts unless there was absolutely no helping it. He knew Jonathon; Jonathon craved that applause but was far too cynical about it to recognize it for anything other than what it was—the momentary pleasure and approval of people who were prepared to like you, so long as you weren’t appallingly bad. Jonathon enjoyed tricking them—in the sense that he was, at least once in his act, performing real magic right in front of their noses.

  And Nina seemed to be level headed about it as well. He was happy to see how much she desired that short-lived accolade, though, because it meant he wasn’t going to lose her to one of those fellows who thronged her dressing room after the show.

  That was always a worry with a pretty young girl, a solo act. After a while, they got tired of moving from town to town, never staying longer than six weeks in any one place. They wanted to settle, and he didn’t blame them. And if one of those fellows with their motorcars and champagne and jewelry offered to take her off the boards and set her up in a neat little nest with all the modern conveniences and all . . . well, you couldn’t blame a girl for taking them up on it.

  That was what the brilliant thing was, from a player’s point of view, about this scheme of his. It was going to be exactly like one of those ballet or opera companies. The players would stay. It would be the production that changed. Everyone would get to have a home, rather than lodgings. People could stop living out of a suitcase, could acquire things like furniture and dishes, could sleep in a bed they could truly say was their own at night.

  And then there was Jonathon.

  Nigel smiled a little, watching the magician once again flawlessly execute the finale of his act, the part other magicians called “the Prestige.” Jonathon did have that spark, but it was not for stage magic.

  Sometimes Nigel wondered if he knew his friend better than Jonathon knew himself. Perhaps he did.

  Jonathon Hightower, unlike Nina Tchereslavsky, did not live to hear the audience applaud. For him, in a way, the audience was irrelevant. He didn’t want to amaze them; he often remarked sarcastically how very easy it was to amaze them. He was thoroughly devoted to seeing that they did not leave unsatisfied at the end of his act, but after that, he really didn’t much care.

  He said he was more interested in astonishing his fellow magicians, but that was not it either. Nigel had been watching him for many years now, and the conclusion he had come to was one that would probably shock Jonathon.

  Jonathon was not a showman. Jonathon performed stage magic only so that he could make a living at a profession that permitted him to be what he was without having to answer too many questions. If he could have done the same thing by being a farrier or an automobile mechanic, he would have done so, provided he’d had the aptitude for either of those things. He needed the sort of profession and living space where odd things could happen without anyone taking notice. Granted most people could not see the Elementals—but they could certainly see the effects of the Elementals. Rains of fish and frogs, crops flattened in patterns, weird lights in the sky—too many of these occurrences and people started to talk. Accidents happened, but when you were supposed to be an ordinary fellow, a clerk or a carpenter, fingers were much more likely to be pointed in your direction than if you were rich, if you lived in the sort of place where everybody knew everybody else’s business.

  No, stage magic was for Jonathon only the means to an end. What Jonathon really was—was an Elemental Master.

  Nigel had seen it, when Jonathon talked about Elemental magic, about things he had learned about the creatures of Fire, of the things he had seen. The spark had been there, and no doubt about it. Other stage magicians that Nigel had known over the years had been passionate about the tricks they invented, but not Jonathon. He was careful and craftsman-like about mastering the tricks he had purchased, and he clearly enjoyed the acting part of his turn, but it was only when he spoke of how he was integrating Fire magic into things in a way that made it appear to be more stage effects that he really lit up with enthusiasm.

  He had been born to wield the power, to study the power, to learn more about it. But Nigel very much doubted that his friend had figured this out for himself yet.

  Then again, he hadn’t had the leisure or the space to do any proper work with his power. The designation of “Mage” or “Master” had to do with the amount of innate power and control you had, not how well you had learned how to wield it. In many ways, Arthur, who was “only” a Mage, had more mastery over his Element than Jonathon had. Arthur had other things too, for he was a Sensitive as well as a Mage, and the need to control the one had brought discipline to the other.

  But Jonathon had been itinerant for almost as long as Nigel had known him. They had first met when Nigel had been the proprietor of a much smaller “music hall,” a place that was mostly intended for drinking with a nod to entertainment, and a Water Master out in Lancashire County had suggested he give the young stage magician a trial. It was very hard setting up proper spellcasting when you were in lodgings, and you could be interrupted at any moment by a landlord who wanted to know what all the funny sounds and lights were about. And that was just for the magics that you could be taught or learn on your own—researching new Elemental spells took a deal more time, space, and effort, and a traveling showman rarely had a lot of any of those.

  Of course, once the big show was on, and Jonathon realized he had settled in a place, would he realize that it was possible for him to start in serious study of his powers and abilities? Right now, in this building, Nigel had a flat that covered all of the first floor, and Arthur had one of the two that took up the second floor. As he watched Jonathon work, and thought about the kind of house guest he had been, it occurred to Nigel that he would not be at all averse to having Jonathon as a neighbor. That would mean the first and second floors were all taken up by Elemental mages, all in the business of entertainment. No one would make any inquiries about strange lights, odd sounds, or unexpected smells. In fact, no one would think twice about it. “Oh, it’s the music hall people,” would be the general consensus, and the neighbors would go about their own business.

  As for Nina . . .

  Star performers had been made of lesser stuff than she was. Now, Nigel did not know a great deal about ballet, but there was one thing he could tell. Nina connected with her audience. She made them want to like her. That was a rare gift; ninety-nine performers out of a hundred couldn’t do it. In fact, Nigel had come to suspect that those who were able to enchant an audience in that way might just have some talent of a psychical nature about them. Now, once they got this business of who was after her settled—and he was sure that they would—then there was just one thing to worry about with Miss Nina.

  How to make it worth it to her to stay with the company instead of finding a rich man to care for her.

  He would have to think about that. There was this much; the girl had a talking cat, and she had witnessed magic, real magic. No one who understood that magic actually existed could ever look at the world in the same way again. She needed to be around people who had seen the sorts of things that she had seen, knew the sorts of things she knew. That just might be enough to hold her.

  Add to that, a nice flat of her very own, the accoutrements of a star performer . . . even if she was only the star of one music hall in Blackpool. For some, that might be enough, and Nina did not strike him as being greedy.

  He needed to put his mind to it. He knew what Jonathon needed, and soon enough Jonathon himself would come to realize this too. Now he had to figure out just what it was that Nina needed.

  Watching these two work together, he could see that he could set any number of shows based around t
hem . . . they didn’t have to be fairy tales either, or at least not ones with working magic in them. Already an idea was forming in his mind . . . there were all those popular operettas based around minor royalty from tiny little European monarchies that no one had ever heard of running away to pretend to be peasants and falling in love . . . The person in question was generally a prince, but what if it was a princess? A princess who just wants to dance on the stage? Who runs away because she’s about to be married off to some other minor prince she has never even met, gets a job with a musical theater, falls in love with the stage magician . . . Yes, and when her parents come to collect her, the stage magician reveals himself as the prince she was supposed to marry, who also ran away because he couldn’t bear to be shackled to some girl he had never met . . .

  Yes, that would be an excellent plot for their second production. It wouldn’t do to get too bound to fairy tales. Variety, that was the way to go.

  Now he just needed to deduce what would keep Nina happy and contented.

  The genuine Nina knew the signs. People were starting to eye the mysterious Russian with a bit less awe and a bit more suspicion. This was taking longer than she had thought it would.

  Sabotaging the theater had not worked. It was impossible to get at the girl directly. None of the men that flocked to her dressing room came up to the mark for causing scandal.

  Well, she needed to find a place to live, a place where there would be room enough to work some real magic, and where no one would be looking askance at the comings and goings into the night.

  A few moments with the concierge elicited regrets that she was leaving and the name of a reliable agent. Within half a day, the agent had found and taken her to view three suitable flats. She rented the first one, which came furnished. More importantly, it was on the ground floor, and had a separate servants’ entrance which was not overlooked by any of the other flats in the building. She could come and go whenever she liked without being seen. It also included the cellar, which meant her Elemental slaves could come and go without needing recourse to any outside entrances.