Steadfast (8 page)

“I’ll do my best, but wouldn’t Suzie be better suited to that?” he asked.

“I’ll put a word in with Suzie myself,” Lionel promised, finally popping the cork
on his lemonade and taking a long drink. “But you never know. She might feel safer
confiding in you.”

I’d like her to confide in me,
Jack thought, a bit wistfully—surprising himself with the thought. “Well then, I’ll
see what I can do,” he promised.

“And I’ll go find the girl a mask and get into my rig.” Lionel tilted the bottle at
his fellow Elemental Mage in salute, and headed back down into the bowels of the theater,
leaving Jack to wonder what it was about the new girl that had made him think of her
as a
girl,
and not a performer . . .

•   •   •

Katie pelted after Lionel in a feigned rage, feeling a bit giddy with the shouts and
cheers that followed her offstage. Of course, she was used to applause—but this somehow
seemed—bigger.

Maybe it was the size of the audience. When she performed in the sideshow tent with
Dick, the audiences were not very large. When she’d performed with her parents at
fairs and market-days, although there were a lot of people, the number who could actually
see her at any one time was smaller still. And when she performed under the main tent,
she was never the star, she was never even close to being the star, she was just one
dancer among the half dozen, and more often than not, they were all in support of
one of the thrill acts.

So that might have been it. But whatever the reason, the cheers and shouts left her
feeling breathless and flushed and very excited.

Suzie caught her shoulders as she tumbled into the wings, and the two of them hopped
up and down for sheer excitement for a few moments. “That was
brilliant,
” Suzie crowed. “Really, really brilliant! I was actually a little afraid of you out
there!”

Lionel had found her a fez and a soft leather mask that looked a bit like a monkey.
It fit very well, and scarcely restricted her vision at all. She had dredged up all
of her memories of the circus monkeys—a vile-tempered lot, not that she blamed them,
given how their trainer seemed to think that “training” meant “tormenting”—and had
put every bit of her heart, soul, and energy into acting the Turk’s demented “pet.”
She’d done so well that not only had she caught a couple of whispered “well dones”
during the act, but the limelight had actually followed her and not Suzie while they
were supposed to be distracting the audience.

“I am an evil little monkey,” she giggled back, then fanned herself with her hand,
and pushed the mask up onto her forehead. “Oh, I need a breath of air after that.”

“Remember, you can’t change,” Suzie warned her. “And don’t forget curtain call. I
have to go change for the dancing-act.”

Actually getting changed was the last thing on Katie’s mind; the costume was cooler
than her street clothing. But she was perishing for a drink of water, and she desperately
needed a loo!

Surely one didn’t “go” out in the alley . . . she turned to ask Suzie, but her mentor
was already gone, running off to change into a fluffy gown for her turn in the chorus
behind one of the dancing acts.

Jack will know,
she decided, and made her way to the stage door.

•   •   •

They always wanted to know because somehow that was always the one thing everyone
else forgot to mention; Jack knew the moment that he saw Miss Kate slipping her way
past hurrying performers exactly what she needed. “Down the spirals, past Wardrobe.
There’s a Gents and a Ladies,” he said, before she opened her mouth. “And if you go
to the other side of the stage from here, and take what looks like a door into the
orchestra pit, it actually comes out at the bar. Water’s free, beer’s not.”

A look of gratitude suffused her face, and she beamed at him before turning and hurrying
back the way she had come. He chuckled.

A salamander zipped up the side of his desk and curled up in the empty inkwell, blinking
glowing eyes at him. He cupped his hand over the top of it, and felt it vibrate with
pleasure. “So you like her, then, eh?” he whispered to it, when he was sure he wouldn’t
be overheard in the general din.

The salamander nodded. Jack smiled a little. That was a good sign. He hoped
this
girl would stick around and not go get herself married. Or at least, if she was going
to get married, it ought to be to someone in the theater. Not one of the other acts—that
would just take her away after the season. But maybe one of the stagehands, or the
barkeepers, or a musician. Davey the piano player would be a good choice, he was a
steady lad. Lionel himself—well, he was long in the tooth, but you never knew with
women. Sometimes they favored men old enough to be their fathers.

He laughed at himself then. He was really turning into an old woman, sitting here,
trying to be a matchmaker just so Lionel could keep the new assistant! They didn’t
need to get her married off to keep her. They only needed to get her to understand
that there was real magic out there, and once she got a taste of it, the only way
she would leave would be if she got called away by the Old Lion—which had happened
to the first of Lionel’s assistants with the gift of magic—or if she fell in love
with another Elemental Mage—which was what happened to the second.

Third time is the charm. We’ll hang onto this one, I’m sure of it.

•   •   •

By the end of the second performance, Katie was limp with exertion, but practically
fizzing with excitement. This was the first time she’d actually enjoyed performing
since her parents had died.

She took the final bow with the entire company, holding hands with one of the Italian
acrobats on one side, and Suzie on the other, with the footlights blazing up in their
faces and the band thundering out the overture as hard as they could. Applause at
the circus had never been like this.

They all ran offstage, and then milled a bit while people filed into the corridor
for the dressing rooms. The Italian paused for a moment in the wings with her as she
caught her breath.

“You are a fine tumbler,
signorina,”
he said graciously. “Not so good as the Famous Fanellis, but good!” And before she
could thank him, he pinched her bottom and scampered off before she could squeal.

“I warned you!” Suzie laughed from behind her. “Didn’t I warn you? Never let those
lechers get within reach of any part of you!”

“Well, that was my lesson learnt,” Katie replied ruefully, as they joined the crush
heading for the dressing rooms. “Oh, but I am
knackered.
Is it going to be like this every night?”

“You did twice the work I did,” Suzie pointed out. “All that tumbling and dancing
and running about. The only time I do anything that strenuous is when I go up the
rope.” They squirmed their way into the dressing room; since Katie had her mask, she
didn’t need to use greasepaint, so she left the stool and dressing table to Suzie
while she wiggled her way into her street clothing using as little space as humanly
possible. “Honestly,” Suzie continued, “That is the worst part of the act. I am always
terrified when I go pulling myself up that rope. I don’t know how you managed to do
it without fainting in rehearsal today.”

“I was in the circus,” Katie replied, as some of the other girls muted their chatter
a bit, the better to overhear her. “I had a notion I might try rope dancing—you know,
the sort where you climb a rope and do contortion and acrobatics on it? So my father
used to string a rope in the trees when we camped for me to practice on. I didn’t
like the fast unwinds, though, and you have to do those if you’re going to have a
good act.”

“Fast unwinds?” one of the other girls asked.

“You know, where you wind the rope or the silk around your waist, then let go and
unspool yourself like string on an unwinding bobbin and stop just short of the ground.”
She mimed it with her hands. “It made me dizzy, and I never wanted to go as fast as
you have to if you are going to have a good act. So all I kept out of it was the ability
to go up a rope like a monkey.” She shrugged. “That was useful, still, since I could
always help with the tightrope and trapeze rigging.”

Suzie shuddered. “I could
never
do that,” she declared, wiping the greasepaint from her face with a lotion-soaked
cloth. “Not
ever.”

Katie just shrugged again, and hung up her costume in its proper place. The other
girls seemed a bit impressed, though, at her daring. But it hadn’t seemed like daring
at the time; she’d been enthralled by the rope and silk-dancers, and had longed with
all her heart to be able to do what they did. To dance in mid-air, free from the earth!
She would have loved that.

But there had been no one to teach her properly when she was young, and that was a
skill that needed learning very young indeed.

Still, who would have thought that her rope climbing would come in so handy!

She and Suzie chattered away about the act all the way back to the boarding house,
where Mrs. Baird presided tonight over some sort of delicious white bean dish. Katie
couldn’t remember having eaten anything with beans in it that tasted this good.

Scrubbed clean and pleasantly exhausted, Katie had only time to reflect on her incredible,
almost supernatural good luck in getting this job, and this place, before she dropped
like a stone into a well into a deep, dark, and dreamless sleep.

•   •   •

“There’s a sort of gentlemen’s agreement among the music halls,” Suzie explained,
as they hurried to the theater the next morning. “The good ones, anyway. The bad ones
never close, but the good ones give us one day off a week. It depends which hall you
are at, which day off you get.”

Katie nodded at that; the circus did that too. It was called “going dark,” probably
for the logical reason that none of the evening illuminations were done that lit up
the tents, or the front of the music hall.

“At any rate, our dark night is tomorrow, so we’ll have a day off. I’m going off with
my boy, but did you have any notion of what you would like to do?” They had just reached
the stage door as Suzie said that, looking at her a bit anxiously.

Truth to tell, Katie didn’t have the slightest idea of what she wanted to do. She
knew she was going to have to live frugally; that salary was not bad, but things were
more expensive in the city, even if she
had
been gifted with an entire wardrobe for nothing.

“Actually, Lionel wanted me to tender an invitation to join him at his house for luncheon,
Miss Kate,” Jack said, putting a hand briefly on her forearm to make her pause for
a moment. “I generally join him there on our dark days. It’s quite pleasant, we have
a nice card game, his housekeeper joins us if we have three to make a fourth.”

Katie had hesitated until he mentioned the housekeeper; she felt some relief. A girl
alone with two men—well, if the housekeeper joined them, that wouldn’t be so bad.

“I’ve gone over heaps of times,” Suzie said with relief. “If we don’t play cards,
we go over what we’ll do in the next season, and make changes just to keep the act
fresh from the last time we did it.” She winked at Katie. “I guess he’s going to keep
you, if he’s asking you to luncheon!”

“I will, then,” she said decisively, and when they got to the stage for rehearsal
she told the magician herself.

“Beef or ham?” was all that Lionel asked, as he set up the sword-basket.

Goodness! She hadn’t had either in such a long time—except for wafer-thin slices of
ham, now and again, between thick, thick slices of bread, as a treat. “Ham?” she said
tentatively, hoping she was choosing the cheaper of the options. She didn’t want to
appear greedy.

“Ham it is,” said Lionel, and sent her into the basket again.

As she fitted herself in where the swords wouldn’t reach her, she realized she was
smiling in the hemp-scented gloom. This was unexpectedly—fun. She had been overjoyed
at the job, pleased to be dancing and tumbling and not trying to set up at the seaside
with her acrobatics and a scrap of cloth, and the last several days of the show had
been the most glorious she had ever experienced as a performer. But the last time
she had actually had
fun
in performing had been had been when she was a child, and had no idea that the occasional
hard times she and her family went through were anything but adventures. There had
been no anxiety about making enough money to eat, or repair the caravan, or buy the
wool and cloth so that her father could have a warm winter cloak and jumper, his old
one could pass down to her mother, and her mother’s could be cut down for her.

Now, this was fun. Amazing fun. The magician was gentle in his corrections, and enthusiastic
in his praise. She was almost as good at most of the tricks as Suzie now, and better
at the climactic rope trick at the end. The hardest one for her was the flying carpet;
it was very hard for her to lie perfectly still and trust that the stranger on the
other end of the apparatus was going to be able to lift her up and down safely. It
felt entirely too much like being at the mercy of Dick’s strength.

This time, at last, she fitted herself through the swords with perfect ease when Lionel
was going at full speed. When she popped out of the basket, Lionel was very pleased.

“Suzie,” he said, “Day after tomorrow, Katie here will be the victim. Do you think
you can be my
evil
genie?”

“I won’t be as good as Katie is at being your imp,” Suzie laughed, with a toss of
her blond hair. “But I can add some black to the costume with some scarves, do the
evil-queen makeup from the Snow White panto, and make wild gestures. We can do a full
run-through that morning.”

“Good. Six nights of good shows with Katie as my assistant, and you may take your
leave of us when you please,” Lionel told her, and she actually jumped up and down,
clapping her hands with glee. “By that time, Katie’s slave girl costume will be done,
and the act will be back to normal.”