Reserved for the Cat em-6 Read online

  “So whoever did this to him—”

  Did not survive the spellcasting, the cat said, abruptly, so there is no immediate threat. This is not to say that there may not be one in the future, but there is not one now.

  Ninette looked from Nigel to the illusionist and back again, and bit her lip to keep from saying anything. The cat, it seemed, had surprised them both. That was interesting to say the least.

  “Well, in that case,” Nigel said carefully, with a glance at both the other men, “I think we are in a position to speak with you—and your advisor—about a prolonged theatrical engagement.”

  Ninette closed the door to the guest room quietly, but once alone, could hardly restrain her joy. “Thomas!” she whispered, taking a few dancing steps, then whirling around in a pirouette, “I am an etoile! I am a prima! Prima ballerina assoluta! Think of it! The production to be built around me! My own apartment and a maid! And fifty pounds a week!”

  You should have gotten double that, Thomas grumbled.

  “That is more than La Augustine—”

  But not more than Nina Tchereslavsky. Ah well. When the receipts start coming in, we will re-negotiate. And you knew all of this before. I told you. Well, not the apartment, but that was only to be expected.

  “You told me, but I did not believe it, not really.” She sat down on the bed, and examined the hem of her gown with deep satisfaction. Lace three inches deep, and there would be more, many more, gowns like this to come. “I did not believe it until Nigel himself said it, and there were contract papers to sign.”

  This will be hard work, the cat warned.

  “And what I have done up until now has not been?” She sniffed. “The difference between then and now will be that I will not have to rehearse on an empty stomach, nor go home to a garret with no heat.”

  Well, take care that no one else ever hears you say that. Thomas the cat paced up and down her rug, restlessly. That Fire Master is altogether too sharp. Normally Fire Mages are the impulsive sort, ruled by their emotions. I suppose he must be the exception that proves the rule.

  “He is very sharp,” she replied, sobering. “I will be careful around him. He frightens me.”

  He should. Fire is the most powerful of the four Elements in the material world. It is also the most emotional. It takes tremendous control to become a Fire Master, and more still to regularly command the Elementals. They react poorly to coercion. I know of this man; he is very clever. Cleverer still to have come up with a way to make a living that enables him to work in plain sight and leave every ordinary person who sees him assuming he is working some sort of trickery.

  “Will he use any of his real magic on stage?” she asked, watching the cat pace up and down the rug.

  I expect so. Nothing powerful or important, just—fire-works, amusement for the audience. Pay attention, and you might figure out which thing he does is illusion, and which real magic.

  Well, she would do that. It would be fun.

  You should sleep now, the cat commanded.

  She shivered with delicious anticipation, then rang for the maid to help her undress. The cat was right. Tomorrow she would be moving into her new apartment, all her own. She was going to need sleep.

  8

  ELEMENTAL Masters needed a very particular kind of servant. To be precise, they must either be Elemental magicians themselves, or have been aware that magic, real magic, was in the world, for most of their lives. Often enough, their servants came from a close-knit group of people who had been serving Elemental mages for centuries.

  Or, as now, the servant came with a recommendation.

  “So,” Nigel said, looking up from the letter the girl had presented to him. “Sean McLeod says here that you are a Sensitive.” She was a pretty little thing, was Ailse McKenzie: carrot-red hair, green eyes, and clearly as tough as she was tiny. She had good credentials though; she’d served as the ladies’ maid in the shooting season at Sean’s hunting lodge; his guests were all Elemental Masters and magicians and their offspring. She had wide ambitions though, and according to Sean was not content with doing general servants’ work when there were no ladies present. Neither he nor Nigel could blame her; the privileges and pay of a lady’s maid were considerably more elevated than that of a parlor maid.

  “If that means I see the wee cratures you gents can call up when ye’ve a mind to, then aye.” The girl’s Scottish accent was not so heavy he couldn’t understand her. Though it might prove difficult for the other party in this equation. Nina might find it difficult to understand her and that could prove a great hindrance. Sadly that was a mark against hiring her.

  On the other hand there were many more points in her favor. Nina needed a reliable maidservant, and maids who had experience with magic were not all that thick on the ground. While it was true that Nina herself did no magic, Nina had a talking cat. Eventually a maidservant would notice something odd about the mistress’s pet. If she actually overheard what the cat had to say and believed her “ears,” she would probably run screaming from the house. If she did not actually hear it speaking herself, sooner or later she would notice her mistress having one-sided conversations with her pet.

  Then there was the matter of self-defense. This was something every Elemental Master needed to consider if he or she was wealthy enough to employ more than one or two servants. When enemies came calling, they generally did not offer advance warning, nor did they scruple to ask whether or not anyone in the vicinity was an innocent bystander. You could be killed just as dead by Elemental Magic that you could not see and probably would not believe in if you were told about it.

  Miss McKenzie would be able to see it, and might have some defense against it. When it came down to cases, anything that had been sent after Nina probably already had her “scent.” If the storm that had wrecked her yacht had been sent after her. . . .

  “Mademoiselle Tchereslavsky may be . . .” he paused delicately, “. . . hunted. We are not certain, but the storm that sank the yacht she was on might have been sent to harm her.”

  Not entirely to his surprise, because the Scots were a tough race, Miss McKenzie raised her head on her slim neck and looked defiantly down her nose at him. “An’ ye think, a’cause I have never th’ magic of my own, I canna hold my own?” Her eyes blazed fiercely. “Aye, a horse-shoe and a right pair of hobnailed boots will send most of those cratures packing!”

  “Miss Tchereslavsky does not speak much English, you know,” he said tentatively.

  “Lor’ bless ye, sir, three years in a row now, I tended a lady what never chattered in anything but French, and we managed all right,” the girl said proudly. “I’ll find a way t’ understand her, make no mistake.”

  One final thing. “She has a protector,” Nigel said. “It’s her cat.”

  “Does it talk?” the girl wanted to know.

  “After a fashion.”

  “An’ will it talk to me?”

  “That, I don’t know. He might.”

  “Well!” Miss McKenzie said in triumph. “There you are, then.”

  Nigel blinked. Somewhere the conversation had just taken an abrupt turn, and he had missed it. “I beg your pardon?” he ventured. “What exactly did you mean?”

  “If it talks,” the girl explained, patiently, as if he was a very slow child, “then she can tell the cat what she needs, and the cat can tell me.”

  “Ah.” That very practical application had not occurred to Nigel. “Very well then, your services will be required.” He swiftly negotiated her wages and privileges, and sent her on to the flat with instructions to have the landlord show her in and get everything in readiness for Nina. He then wrote a note to his man, instructing him to pack up Nina’s things and send them to the flat.

  As usual, the dancer had gotten up at an hour that would have satisfied the harshest stage director and gone straight to the rehearsal hall. There she would work until noon, stop for a bite and a stroll in the sunshine, then return to the rehearsal hall until dinne
r-time.

  However, he proposed to change that schedule today.

  As the hour approached when she usually stopped for her midday meal, he went upstairs to catch her before she left. She was just going through some complicated faradiddle involving a lot of fast, intricate steps, and he paused in the doorway to watch. And not because her short rehearsal skirt showed her legs, either; he saw more than enough of his fill of legs backstage. No, this was the first time he had actually watched her doing anything other than exercises, and he indulged himself in a moment of self-congratulation. He was no judge of ballerinas, but he knew his audiences, and she was by far and away the best dancer that they would ever likely see.

  She finished the sequence and came down flat-footed in that way that dancers had when they were practicing something and not actually in front of an audience. And only as she was turning around did she catch sight of him in the mirror.

  She jumped, her hand going to her throat. “Blin!” she exclaimed. “You startle me!”

  “Your pardon, Mademoiselle, I certainly didn’t mean to—” he began, but she waved her hand impatiently.

  “It is good you are here,” she said in French. “There is something I wish you to see.”

  She ran to the corner and got what looked to Nigel like a rod of some sort, and nodded to the pianist. “Spring song, s’il vous plais,” she said, and as the pianist began what Wolf would surely have snorted at as a “tinkly little melody,” she unfurled a long ribbon from the rod and began to dance with it.

  Actually there was a great deal more twirling the ribbon in intricate patterns than there was dancing, but Nigel could easily see that this would be no great concern for his audiences. The eye was drawn to the streamer of silk, which was yards and yards long. It seemed almost alive as she made it draw circles and spirals, twine around her and create elaborate figures in the air. And he could just imagine it with some special stage lighting on it too. . . .

  When the pianist ended with a flourish, and so did she, he applauded. She caught up the ribbon and began carefully folding it, looking both flushed and pleased.

  “Bien?” she asked.

  “Tres bien,” he assured her. “I don’t think our people have ever seen anything done like that before.”

  “Oh, it is nothing but a little trick, and I could not do the throws and catches, the ceiling here is not high enough. But it looks grand from a distance,” she replied in French, putting the ribbon and stick up carefully. “There was a troupe of girls from Switzerland, I think, that performed these things. There is also a hoop, and a ball, and I think both will serve in your production.”

  “Anything that looks good from the balcony will sell tickets, Mademoiselle,” he said with pleasure. “Now, I am going to ask you to please forgo your afternoon practice, if you will. I’d like to take you to luncheon, and then to your new flat. It’s all arranged, I’ve had your things sent over, and I just hired you a fine maid to take care of you. She’ll have set everything to rights by the time we get there.”

  To his pleasure, she clapped her hands like a child given a sweet. “Monsieur, you are too good to me!” she exclaimed. He flushed, but smiled.

  “Save the praises for when you see it all,” he cautioned. “After all, you might not like it!”

  The little Scots maidservant answered the door, already looking as if she had been in this place since it was built, her crisp black and white uniform immaculate. “Sir,” she said, with a nod of respect to Nigel. “This would be m’lady then?”

  Nigel nodded. “This is Mademoiselle Tchereslavsky. Mademoiselle, this is the young lady I hired for you, Miss McKenzie.”

  Ninette elected not to imitate La Augustine this time; the dancer was horrible to her servants. Instead, she gave Miss McKenzie a friendly smile as she stepped for the first time into her own parlor, and made sure the door was not shut in Thomas’s face. Then she looked around, and felt a thrill of sheer delight.

  In times of fanciful dreaming she had imagined living somewhere like this. When she daydreamed about being the pet of a rich old man, she had pictured herself in a place virtually identical in every way. Everything about it spoke comfort, not just that the furnishings looked comfortable, which they did, but unlike the boarding house (which was comfort attainable only so long as the money in her purse lasted), or the luxury of Nigel’s flat (which was his, not hers), this place whispered a little message to her. You will never be cold or hungry again.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, milady,” the maidservant said once the door was closed, “but there’s a Brownie in the pantry. Did ye wish me to do sommat about him?”

  A—what? Was Ninette’s reaction. What was a Brownie? Some sort of mouse? Or worse still, a rat?

  It’s quite all right, McKenzie, I invited him, said the cat.

  “Oh well, it’s all right then. Your pardon for interrupting you,” she said, without turning a hair. “Your pardon, but I was preparing m’lady’s lunch. I shall be in the kitchen if you require me.”

  “And I’ll show you about,” said Nigel, looking just a trifle smug.

  But Ninette wasn’t ready to be shown her new flat just yet. “She heard you!” she said, in a tone of accusation.

  Of course. Monsieur Nigel would not have hired an ordinary servant for you. That could have been a problem. Correct, Monsieur?

  “Very much so,” Nigel replied, and turned to Ninette. “Miss McKenzie is not a magician, but she is able to see the same things that you are. We refer to her abilities as being a ‘Sensitive.’ You will not need to hide anything from her.”

  Ninette nodded, with some relief. At least she was not going to have to explain the cat away! “But—how?” she asked in English.

  “Our sort of folk need servants, servants we can trust, after all,” Nigel chuckled. “I simply let it be known I needed a maidservant for my famous dancer, and one was forthcoming.”

  Somehow she doubted that it was quite that simple, but she was willing to let that pass. The tour of the flat took very little time, although the enjoyment she knew she would have in a more leisurely examination of its delights would occupy her for a while to come. When they were finished, Miss McKenzie had a really admirable luncheon laid out for them, which they sat down to enjoy.

  “Excellent, McKenzie,” Nigel said, when she had cleared the last of it away.

  “Och, well, that would be due to our landlord, sir,” McKenzie replied. “’Twas he that brought it all up; I just needed to keep it warm for you.”

  “Ah, now that reminds me,” Nigel said, and began explaining the various meal arrangements she could make. “It’s all because this is theatrical lodgings, you see,” he concluded. “Players eat at odd times, they generally don’t know enough about the matter to keep a good cook, and they don’t stay long. Not as a rule, anyway.”

  Ninette shook her head. It all seemed so irregular to her. “We change programme,” she said, finally. “Not theater.”

  “A more sensible way, to be sure.” Nigel nodded. “At any rate, if you want company, you can go down and dine with the others. If you don’t, they’ll send it up, or McKenzie there can arrange something. The meals will be plain and simple, so if you’re longing for beefsteak, or pheasant, or anything of that sort, you’ll have to send out for it.”

  She nodded; it was definitely a sensible arrangement, if a trifle peculiar. But it made sense.

  “I’ll leave you to settle in,” Nigel said genially. “You can skip practice for one afternoon, I should think?”

  She nodded, and McKenzie showed him out.

  Now the work began in earnest.

  Ninette spent all of one afternoon, on a day when the theater had no matinee, showing Nigel, Arthur, Jonathon, and Wolf all of her little “tricks.” These were, of course, the sort of things that dancers like La Augustine despised—dancing with the ribbon-wand, the ball, and the hoop, skirt dancing with yards and yards and yards of the lightest silk fabric to make ever-moving curtains that light could be pla
yed against. And she showed her other tricks, the showpieces that dancers like La Augustine did not despise, although they might pretend to; the solos from Swan Lake and Tales of Hoffman, from Bayadere and Giselle, from Don Quixote and Corsair.

  All these things the men loved, and when she was done, exhausted and dripping with sweat, she looked out into the empty theater to see the four of them chattering away like so many rooks, planning what tricky bit should go where in their story.

  Wolf was now supposed to write music—or at least adapt it—for all of this, but he seemed to be in a frenzy of delight, and no one ventured to trouble him or Arthur as they sat at the piano, Wolf dictating the music without a pause until they were both often found slumped over the keyboard, the parrot standing with one foot up and head hunched down, on the nape of Arthur’s neck.

  Nor was Jonathon idle, concocting a tremendous stage-business for the Sultan’s burning palace, as well as adapting or reviving several more of his feats of illusion.

  Nigel was busy filling in the spaces between Ninette’s performances and Jonathon’s with other acts. They had to be steady, reliable, and with a minimum of traits that might bring them into conflict with others. This would not be a case where in two weeks, each would go his separate ways. These people, like the theatrical and dance companies she knew, would stay together for months. Little irritations could escalate into harassment, into all-out feuds. It was Nigel’s job to see to it that the people he invited to this production were not the kind to escalate.

  The plot was a simple one. In the Prologue, a ship would be caught in a storm; they had determined that only a segment of this ship would appear on stage, tossing on the artificial waves. There would be cries of “man overboard” and a dummy of her would be tossed down into the waves. This would not be the first nor the last appearance of the hapless dummy. . . .

  She would do a skirt dance among the waves to make it appear that she was drowning, or at least, swimming for her life. She would clear the stage, and then the ship would sink.