Steadfast

by Mercedes Lackey

  Unlike most of his kind, Lionel did not do “the circuit,” moving from music hall to music hall. Lionel remained in place, forever installed at the Palace. He didn’t change his location, he changed his persona and his act instead. This enabled him to have a house of his own, possessions that did not need to be portable, the luxury of days off that were spent enjoying himself, and the equal luxury of a cook-and-housekeeper who left a lovely dinner on the table waiting for him when he got home, saving him from eating greasy and dubious meals in pubs. It also enabled him to collect large-scale props and effects that very few other magicians outside of the great metropolises could own or use. Transporting big effects was expensive, and the risk of damage was always real. His effects all lived in his warehouse, and only needed to be moved once a season.

  This settled life also meant he saved money. It was much cheaper to keep your own place than it was to live in short-term lodgings.

  He had many personas, and was always creating more. There was Taras Bey, with his sword-tricks and more ways to dismember a lady than Torquemada, Lee Lin Chow who specialized in silks, doves, and Chinese cabinet effects, Antonio Grendini who performed large illusions, Alexander Nazh the mentalist, Professor Corningworth with his sleight of hand, and Saladin the Magnificent who conjured spirits and apparitions. He’d considered adding an escapist routine, but decided that at his age he just wasn’t flexible enough any more. Besides, Grendini already had one big “escape” trick, and he didn’t want to repeat it. He had also considered a mediumistic act, but didn’t like the idea of duping people into thinking he could speak with their beloved dead.

  There was a smell of hot cobblestones from the alley—thankfully no worse than that. The doorman, Jack Prescott, a sturdy and upright man—if battered and much the worse for war—did a fine job of keeping people from using the area as a privy while the music hall was open. All on his own he had taken to sluicing down the area with water and a broom before everyone started arriving for rehearsals. That made things much more pleasant for everyone.

  Prescott turned, as if he had sensed Lionel’s thoughts—which he might have, since both of them were Elemental Magicians; Lionel of Air, and Prescott attuned to Fire. Lionel offered him a cigarette. Prescott took it. Lighting up was never a problem for a Fire mage. Prescott was a handsome man, despite the lines that pain had carved into his face, and he was clearly still every inch the soldier. His brown hair was short and neat under his workman’s cap, his neckcloth tied with mathematical precision, his jacket, hung up on the back of his chair, unrumpled. His shirt had been ironed, and it looked as if his trousers went into a press every night.

  “Did you get up to London for the coronation?” Lionel asked. Edward VII’s coronation had taken place in May, and Lionel remembered Prescott had talked about going there and meeting up with some of his old mates from his regiment.

  Prescott shook his head. “By the time I thought about it, the only rooms you could get were little garret holes up three and four flights of stairs. I couldn’t face stumping up and down a dozen times a day with this.” He tapped his cane on the side of his leg, rapping the wooden peg that took the place of the limb he’d lost in the last gasp of the Boer Wars. “Not to mention what they wanted for a few days was more than I pay for my flat for a month. I shudder to think what everything else was costing, though I suppose I might have been able to eat in the regimental mess, still.” An errand boy ran up with a package. Jack signed for it.

  “I’ll take that,” Lionel offered, and Prescott handed it over.

  “Don’t get excited, it’s beards for the comic acrobats,” Prescott said with a grin. “Not candy for that pretty little can-can dancer.”

  Lionel snorted. “My assistant Suzie is better looking.”

  “Which is why she’s getting married,” Prescott reminded him. “Have you found a replacement yet?”

  Lionel sighed. This was the bane of his existence. You wanted a pretty assistant, but pretty assistants had the temerity to go off and fall in love! I’d hire an ugly girl, but then I would have to cast the illusion that she was pretty—and then face her wondering why men were interested in her when she was on stage but not when off. “Not for lack of trying. She’ll stick until I do, though. She’s a good girl, Suzie is.”

  “I’ll keep my eye out for you,” Prescott promised as Lionel turned to deliver the box of beards. “Sometimes a dancer turns up at the stage door looking for work, and for the Turkish act, a dancer would do.”

  Not for anything else, though, Lionel thought glumly as he made his way back to the dressing rooms. He didn’t often regret his decision to remain in one place and change his act while everyone else around him was on the circuit—but in the matter of getting and keeping good assistants, his mode of life was a handicap. When a girl was only dealing with stage-door beaus, who inevitably thought she would be easy, it wasn’t so hard to keep her. Because you moved every four to six weeks, it was less likely she’d meet anyone but a lot of cads, except the lads in fellow acts. And the lads in fellow acts very often had sisters, wives or mamas that were fiercer than mastiffs at protecting their own. But when you stayed put, well, it gave her the chance to meet someone with more on his mind than improper advances. A local girl had family and friends here already, she might have had a beau or two when she’d hired on. Knowing the town, she had a lot more opportunities to meet nice fellows than someone who was transient. So far in his career, Lionel had watched a full half-dozen good assistants walk down the aisle with Brighton boys.

  On the other hand, since all of them were still local, all of them kept themselves in good fettle, and all of them still kept in touch—in an emergency, he knew he could count on at least half of them to be willing to put in a few nights or even weeks in the old act.

  Still, that slight advantage was far outweighed by the disadvantage. Not for the first time, he wished that he could finally get a good, permanent assistant.

  And while I’m dreaming, let’s dream one that’s got some real magic in her too.

  He’d had two of those; it had been blissful, knowing that he wouldn’t have to watch for some slip to betray him in his act. Lionel was more than just a stage magician; Air Magic was the magic of illusions, and his act was generally more than half real magic as opposed to stage magic. Floating and flying small objects? All done with the aid of sylphs. Levitating? His apparatus hardly needed to bear the weight of a good-sized goose, since the sylphs aided there as well. Bending and shaping the air meant he didn’t have to depend on physical mirrors. In general he didn’t need more than half of the physical apparatus of a conventional stage magician. But you had to be careful when you had an assistant who might notice that there was a lot more going on in the act than you could account for by normal means.

  He squeezed his way along the narrow corridors. Space was at a premium in a theater. The more space backstage, the fewer seats up front. Finally he arrived at the appropriate dressing room. Beards delivered, he went back to his own.

  As the only resident performer, his room had a well-lived-in look, and a great many more creature comforts than those afforded to the transients. As a result it was very popular for lounging, and he discovered the current “drunk gentleman comic” sprawled over his shabby but comfortable armchair when he arrived. There was a matching couch, but evidently Edmund Clay preferred to hang his legs over the arm of the chair and lean his head against the back.

  “I don’t suppose you have any mint cake in that sweets drawer of yours, do you?” that worthy asked as he took his seat at the dressing table to put the finishing touches on his makeup.

  Lionel opened the door with a foot. “Only hard peppermints, but help yourself.”

  “Thanks.” The comedian did so. “I should know better than to eat at the Crown. I try to remind myself every time we come to Brighton, and I always forget.”

  “Well, stop taking those lodgings
right next to it,” Lionel told him.

  “But they’re cheap and clean!” Edmund protested. “How often does one find that particular combination?”

  “Not nearly often enough,” Lionel admitted. “But in this heat, you really should avoid the Crown, or you’re likely to get something more serious than an upset stomach from all the grease. Look, there’s a Tea Room about half a block north—”

  “Tea Room!” Edmund interrupted him. “And sit there amid a gaggle of—”

  “Do shut up and stop interrupting me,” Lionel snapped crossly. “Who is the native here, you or me? It serves cabbies. Nice thick mugs of proper strong tea, nice thick cheese sandwiches. You can’t go wrong.”

  “Oh well, in that case,” Edmund replied, and set to sucking on a peppermint. Lionel went back to putting the finishing touches on Taras Bey.

  There was a perfunctory tap on the door and it opened. “Lionel, are we doing the basket trick first, or the—oh, hullo, Edmund!”

  “Hello Suzie,” the comic said, looking up at the pert little blond wearing an “Arabian” costume that served double duty when she worked the chorus during the Christmas pantos. “Your veil’s working loose on the right side.”

  “Oh golly, thank you,” the assistant replied, and hastily refastened the offending drapery. “If I weren’t about to leave poor Lionel in the lurch it would be time to think about a new costume, I guess.”

  “But you are about to leave poor Lionel in the lurch,” Lionel said heartlessly, watching her in the mirror. “So you’ll just have to keep mending it. I’m not buying two new costumes for the Turk act in one season. And yes. Basket first. Then the Cabinet. Then I saw you in half. It’s working better with the audience that way.”

  “Right-oh!” Suzie said brightly, and scampered off to fix her outfit after blowing Edmund a kiss.

  “Well, that peppermint seems to have done the trick—”

  “For heaven’s sake, come back with me for dinner when the show’s over,” Lionel ordered. “Mrs. Buckthorn said she’s baking me a hen; I can never finish a whole one by myself, and this is no weather to go saving it for tomorrow. I’d probably poison myself.”

  “Don’t have to ask me twice,” Edmund said complacently. “Right, getting on for curtain time. Break a leg.”

  He swung his long legs over to the floor, got up and sauntered off. Lionel could tell from the sounds in the theater that the curtain was about to go up. He finished the last touches on his makeup, stood up, and thrust his two trick scimitars through the hangers on his silk sash.

  Why, oh why, did Suzie have to get married now?

  • • •

  Jack Prescott listened to the hum of the theater behind him, and kept a sharp eye out for little boys trying to sneak in. From now until curtain-down, that would be his main task. Not overly daunting for anyone, even a fellow with only one good leg to his name. The alley out there was like an oven; even though the sun was down, it still radiated heat. If you weren’t moving, if you accepted the heat the way he had learned to in Africa, it felt good. Or maybe that was just his talent as a Fire mage talking; Fire mages always seemed to take heat better than anyone else.

  He lit another cigarette and inhaled the fragrant smoke. Tobacco caused no harm to a Fire magician, who could make sure nothing inimical entered his lungs—nor to an Air magician, who could do the same. And the tobacco seemed to help a bit with the ever-present ache of his stump.

  He poked his head out of the door, and looked up and down the alley. Even the little boys had gone now, discouraged by the heat, and knowing there would be no more coming and going from the door until the show ended. A real play or a ballet or some other, tonier performance would give the actors, dancers and singers a break now and then to come to the stage door, catch a smoke, get a little air. A music hall tended to work you a lot harder. Acts often had two or three different sets and had to rush to change between them. Only star turns appeared once a night. Lionel was a star turn, even though he never appeared anywhere but here; he was just that good. But his assistant Suzie did double duty in the chorus behind a couple of the singing acts for a bit of extra money, so Lionel, being the good sport that he was, did the same as well.

  Jack sat down on the stool propping the door open for a bit of air, and rubbed the stump. It always hurt. He wasn’t like some fellows, he never got the feeling he still had a leg and a foot there. He didn’t know if that was bad or good. He did dream about having two legs again, sometimes . . . but except for the ache, and the difficulty in doing some things, he reckoned he wasn’t that badly off. There were others that had lost two limbs or more. Or worse, come back half paralyzed. Or blind. At least he could hold down a job—a job he liked, moreover. Alderscroft in London had arranged it when he’d come back an invalid, through the secret network of Masters and magicians. It had taken time to arrange, virtually all of the time he was in the hospital recovering and learning to walk again, but hunting for a job on his own would have taken a lot longer.

  The only other magician here was Lionel, so Jack wasn’t entirely sure how the job had come about, only that the offer had turned up in the mail, inside an envelope with the address of Alderscroft’s club on it. That had been about two months after the hospital had given him the boot and he was pensioned out. At that point, he’d jumped on it; he’d been staying with his sister, but they’d never been all that close as kids, and her husband had been giving him looks that suggested he was overstaying his welcome.

  He’d expected that, of course. In a way, he’d been surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. He was a lot older than this, his youngest sister, and he reckoned she had mostly offered to let him stay out of a feeling of obligation. He couldn’t move in with his older sister, the one he was actually close to—she was living with their parents, in their tiny pensioners’ cottage, and there wasn’t room for a kitten in there, much less him. They weren’t the only children, but all his other siblings were in service. He’d have been in service himself—he’d been a footman—if he hadn’t joined the Army.

  And of course, no one had any use for a one-legged footman.

  Behind him, he could hear the orchestra in the pits, and the reaction of the audience. Out there past the door, if he strained his ears, he could hear the sounds of motorcars chugging past on the road beyond the alley and the vague hum of the city. The heat was keeping people out later than usual. Probably, between the excitement of being on holiday and the heat, they weren’t able to sleep. Well, it was intolerable heat to them; having been in Africa, where you slept even if it felt like you were sleeping in an oven, it wasn’t so bad to him. He knew all the tricks of getting yourself cool. Not a cold bath, but a hot one, so when you got out you were cooler than the air. Cold, wet cloths on your wrists and around your neck. Tricks like that.

  But if it got hotter, and all his instincts as a Fire magician told him it was going to, people would certainly die. They didn’t know the tricks. They’d work in the midday heat, instead of changing their hours to wake before dawn, take midday naps, and then work as the air cooled in late afternoon. It was going to be bad, this summer. He’d have to see if he could do anything with his magic to mitigate things in the theater. At least, he and Lionel could get together and see what the two of them could do.

  He’d have to be on high alert for fires in the theater too. In fact, when he’d been hired on, that seemed to have been the chief reason he’d been taken.

  “Says here you have a sense for fire,” the theater manager, old Barnaby Shen, had said, peering at the paper in his hand.

  “Aye, sir. Maybe just a keen nose for a bit of smoke, but I’m never wrong, and I never miss one.” All true of course, though it was the little salamander that told him, and not his nose. That had saved his life, his and his mates, more times than he cared to count in Africa. Knowing when a brush fire had been set against them, knowing where someone wa
s camped because of their fire . . . even once, knowing when lightning had started a wildfire and the direction it was going in time to escape it.

  He hadn’t really even been a combatant, just a member of one of the details set to guarding the rail lines. The Boers rightly saw a way to be effective with relatively few men by sabotaging the rail system, hampering the British ability to move troops and resupply, and at the same time tying up a substantial number of Tommies by forcing the commanders to guard those lines.

  It was a weary, thankless task, that. Kipling had got it right. Few, forgotten and lonely where the empty metals shine. No, not combatants—only details guarding the line. A handful of men to patrol miles of rail, never seeing anything but natives, and those but few and far between.

  He’d cursed his luck, the luck that kept him out of real combat . . . until new orders had come down that made him grateful to be where he was.

  They’d almost left him, the salamanders, when he’d first turned up in Africa, and the orders came to burn the Boer homes and take the women and children left behind to the camps. They hadn’t left only because he’d escaped that duty right up until the moment he’d gotten injured, by getting assigned to patrol. But he’d heard about the camps from other men in the hospital. Camps where half the children starved to death, or died of dysentery, and the women didn’t do much better. Fortunately—he supposed, if you could call losing a leg “fortunate”—he’d never had to either burn a home out, or drive the helpless into captivity. He hadn’t even lost the leg to a man. It had been a stupid accident that got him, a fall and a broken ankle that went septic, far from medical help. When you were on the rail detail you were pretty far from help, and his commander reckoned it could wait until the weekly train came in. So he’d waited, in the poisonous African heat. By the time he had got that help, all that could be done was to cut the leg off just below the knee, but by that time he’d been so fevered he hadn’t known or cared.