Steadfast

by Mercedes Lackey

  She turned a corner to find herself staring at the back of a huge, muscled man—and froze in panic for a moment. He’s found me! He tracked me here and he found me! she thought, before the man turned around—and it wasn’t Dick at all. It was someone who was almost certainly a strongman in a show, but he had a sweet face, with puppy-like eyes. She flattened herself against the wall of the building anyway as he passed, her bundle clutched to her chest, and felt too limp to move for many minutes when he had gone.

  It was going to be suppertime soon, as her stomach reminded her. She wondered where she could possibly find the cheapest food here. Concern knotted her stomach as much as hunger. Maybe if I followed some of the performers—

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a scrap of paper—

  It caught her eye as it danced toward her like a butterfly, and then suddenly lodged itself in the cleavage of her gown. Annoyed, she fished it out and was about to throw it away, when she realized it was an advertisement torn from a newspaper. Curious now, she read it, excitement growing with every word.

  Wanted: Female Dancer or Acrobat. Position open as assistant to stage magician. Must be slender, limber, and fearless, prepared to work hard, eager to learn. Apply to Lionel Hawkins, Palace Music Hall.

  She could hardly believe it. This seemed like a miracle—too good to be true—

  But what did she have to lose by answering it? The worst that would happen would be that the position had been filled, and she could ask at the music hall about cheap lodgings and food. At least she knew there was an opening, or had been when this advertisement had been torn from the paper!

  Bit of newsprint clutched in her hand, she slipped in among the crowds, looking for someone who could direct her to the theater, hope rising in her that Mary Small might have sent her to the right place after all.

  • • •

  The girl in the alley caught Jack’s attention mostly because she wasn’t the usual sort to be lingering at a stage door. She was small, lithe, and dark—Gypsy, he’d have said, or part-Gypsy. She was dressed neatly, and was very clean, but her clothing had seen a lot of use and wear. She peered at the open door with a hesitant look on her face, and he stumped out to where she could see him.

  “Something I can do for you, miss?” he called. He half expected her to bolt, but instead, she looked a little relieved, and hurried toward him.

  “I was told to come to this door—” she said, holding out a scrap of newspaper. “—there is a position open?”

  He recognized it at a glance for what it was—Lionel’s advertisement. When he looked back up at her, her little face shaded with hunger and apprehension, she continued. “I am a dancer and an acrobat,” she said, in a hushed voice with an inflection of doubt, as if she was afraid he wouldn’t believe her.

  But he hadn’t been the doorman of this theater this long without knowing how to judge who was a performer and who was not.

  “The show’s on now,” he said, in as kindly a voice as he could manage. “But the position is still open, and it’s getting a bit urgent to fill it. Here—” he handed her a ticket for the gallery. “Why don’t you run along to the front, watch the show and rest your feet, and come back here after? I’ll make sure Lionel sees you, and you’ll make a better impression if you’re rested.”

  For a moment he thought that she might take that as rejection, but after a moment of hesitation, she accepted the ticket and squared her shoulders. “Thank you,” she said. “I will come after the show.”

  And with that she turned and went back into the oven-hot alley.

  • • •

  For one moment, seeing the doorman in his respectable suit, Katie had been tempted to flee. But then she had seen that his eyes were kind, but pain-shadowed, and that he had only the one leg, and felt a stirring of pity for him.

  He hadn’t been haughty with her either, and took her statement for what she was at face value. When he offered her the ticket, though, she almost refused. She was getting quite hungry now, and she would gladly have traded that ticket for a penny bun—

  But she didn’t know where to get one here. And at least she would be able to sit down and rest.

  And . . . she had never actually been in a theater before.

  She thanked him, and went around to the front, presenting her ticket at the booth. Already she was feeling very much out of her depth. She was not used to buildings this tall, and they were all around her, towering over her like mountains. The Andy Ball Circus confined itself to entertaining villages and small towns; the tallest building she had ever seen, an old Tudor inn of the sort built in a square around a courtyard, was only two stories tall. This theater was four!

  Once inside, she wasn’t allowed to linger in the lobby, but ushers directed her to a set of stairs, and then up and up to the highest floor. She came out at the back of the top gallery, a full four stories above the stage, where she gasped and put her back tight to the wall. It was so high she felt dizzy for a moment, the bright lights on the stage dazzled her, and it seemed too warm and stuffy. She was afraid to move for a moment, until the usher, getting impatient, hissed at her to “just sit anywhere.”

  Moving gingerly, she shuffled sideways along the wall until she came to the corner. She could see that the chair in front of her was empty, so she groped for the back of it, and took it.

  Only then did she really look at the stage, and felt dizziness come over her again. She had never, in all of her life, been so far from the ground.

  It took her a good three acts to recover, as she clutched her bundle on her lap and peered shakily at the performers below her.

  It was the acrobats, and the dancers that followed them, that finally shook her out of her nerves. The acrobats were not as good as she was—the dancers were doing the same bouncy-kick, skirt-tossing routines as she had seen out on the Boardwalk, but when you managed to look past the tinsel and glitter, their costumes were a bit . . . tat. They certainly wouldn’t bear close inspection—unlike those of the boardwalk dancers, who looked gaudy, these costumes seemed nearly worn out. And when she watched more closely—well, as “close” as this lofty perch allowed—she could see the little tricks both the dancers and acrobats were using to make it look as if they weren’t taking shortcuts. If this was what the magician was looking for, well . . . she could do this! She could do better than this!

  She relaxed a bit after that, though the smell of food and beer from the tables down on the main floor made her hungrier. Next, there was a man who appeared to be drunk, and his antics on stage made even her laugh, and then the curtain opened on the magician himself.

  He was nothing like tat. Not the least bit shabby. In fact, he was a little terrifying. If she hadn’t known his Christian name, and been well acquainted with stage makeup, she’d have been perfectly ready to believe he was a genuine Turk. He looked powerful and fierce and quite prepared to cut his pretty assistant into any number of bits on the least provocation.

  And he did just that—he seemingly ran swords into her, sawed her in half, chopped her into six pieces, sent her from one cabinet to another across the stage, and finally, made her climb a rope he managed to levitate right up into the air, from which precarious position she waved at the crowd and vanished from full view, leaving the Turk to roar with impotent anger and rush off stage, presumably to search for her. It was quite the performance. Katie was captivated. But part of her had been paying attention to every little move that the assistant had made, and she had no doubt, no doubt at all, that she could duplicate what the other girl had done.

  Then came a lady dressed up as a man who sang some sentimental ballads, and the dancers came on again, then two performing dogs, a lady comic singer, a dancing couple, a clown, the dancers, and finally a man who led the entire theater in singing popular songs, then everyone came out, took bows, and the curtain came down. Katie waited for everyone to clear
out of the gallery so she wouldn’t attract anyone’s notice by pushing in among them; as she stood, once again with her back to the wall, she realized once the magician had come on, she had quite forgotten that she was hungry. Now her stomach contracted painfully.

  Well, she had gone without food for longer than this before. There had been times, before her family joined the circus, that had been quite lean indeed, and those suppers gleaned from the woods had been all that stood between them and starvation. Sternly, she told her stomach to behave itself, and edged along the wall to the exit.

  She made her way carefully and quietly down the stairs, trying to keep from drawing attention to herself. It wasn’t hard; the people leaving were all happy, having had a grand time, and some were even singing scraps of the songs that the last performer had led them in.

  It had been near sunset when she first entered the theater; now it was full dark. The lobby was brightly lit with gas lamps, but outside the doors, there was nothing but dark and shadows. She got outside, waited a little more for the crowd to thin, then hurried back down the street to what she had been told was the “stage door.” She was a little nervous about entering a dark alley all alone, but as she turned the corner, she realized she need not have been. There was a bright gas light at the stage door, and the alley itself was actually crowded; a laughing group of women was just leaving, all in a surge of skirts and feathered hats, and it appeared there had been at least one young man—sometimes two or three—waiting for each of them. She flattened herself against the wall of the theater to let them pass, and made her way toward the door, where the one-legged man was waiting, peering anxiously into the darkness.

  His face cleared when he saw her, and he smiled. “Ah, well done! I was afraid you might have had second thoughts about the job. Lionel is fearfully anxious to audition you, would you feel prepared to perform for him right now?”

  Her heart jumped with nervous elation. But although before she had seen the performers here, she might have wondered why he was anxious to audition her, now she had no trouble imagining the reason. If the common sort of dancer in this hall was all he’d had to choose from, it was no sort of choice at all. There was no place in this man’s act for someone who didn’t put out full effort, every time. Or who tried to cheat her way through a performance. “Of—of course,” she stammered, and he stood aside for her as she climbed the steps and entered a very tall, but incredibly narrow corridor. A young, blond lady in a neat green walking dress with matching hat was just approaching them, and the one-legged man hailed her with relief.

  “Suzie! This is the dancer who wants to audition for Lionel. Would—”

  The young lady didn’t even let him finish what he was about to say. “The girl that wants to try out for assistant? Golly, that’s a bit of all right, you turning up before I left! Come on, ducky, I’ll take you right to the boss!” She seized Katie’s elbow, even though there was scarcely enough room for one person in the corridor, much less two. “I’ll get you to the stage—oh wait, would you have a bit of a costume with you? That’ll make it all easier than trying out in street clothes.”

  “Y-ye—” Katie hadn’t even gotten the whole word out before Suzie was hauling her off like a mother with a toddler in tow, chattering the whole time. She popped Katie into a room crammed with dressing tables, mirrors and hanging costumes, waited while she slipped into her gauze skirt, mended tights, and tight bodice, took possession of her clothing and bundle, and chivvied her out, further along the corridor, and finally, before she was quite ready, out onto a bare stage with a couple of bright footlights shining up on it.

  There was the magician, half in, half out of his costume—without the turban, or the huge, fierce moustache, and with the greasepaint wiped off, but still in the voluminous crimson pants and wide blue satin sash. “Here’s the little dancer, Lionel!” Suzie called cheerfully, as the magician turned to see who had intruded. “Hire her quick so I can get married!”

  The magician snorted good-naturedly, and turned to Katie. “All right then, my dear,” he said in a kind voice that reminded her oddly of her father. “I can see by your costume you’re no stranger to performing. What is it you do?”

  “I’m an acrobat, m-mostly,” she stammered, and before he could command her to do anything—or she lost her nerve—she went through one of the shorter routines she did for the circus, a combination of tumbling and contortion, with a little dance thrown in for good measure. She had not realized that there was a pianist still in the orchestra pit until a few notes started right after she did; the man was good, he picked up the rhythm of her performance immediately, and ended when she did, with a flourish as she pirouetted.

  “Well!” Suzie said, admiration in her voice. “I’m off! I can’t wait to tell—”

  “Not so fast,” the magician said. “Go wheel out the sword-basket, you little minx.”

  With a laugh, Suzie went offstage, and returned pushing the basket in which she had been impaled with swords on its wheeled pedestal before her.

  “Now this is how it works,” Lionel said, leading her over to it by the hand. “You get in here.” He gestured to the giant basket, as Suzie helpfully pushed a little stair up to it. He led her up the stair by the hand, and she stepped into the basket. Having seen the act, she dropped down inside. Lionel leaned over and whispered to her. “Some of the swords have collapsible blades. Some you can just avoid. See the slots for them?”

  When she looked at the inside of the basket from where she crouched inside, she saw that, rather than being a real basket made of coiled rope, it was a cunning imitation of one, made of much sturdier material that had pre-made slots for the swords in it. “I’m going to go very slowly so you can get your skirt out of the way,” he whispered in further explanation. “I don’t want to ruin it for you. As limber as you are, you should have no trouble with this. Ready?”

  She wasn’t, but she nodded. He popped the top of the basket on. In the next moment, she heard him utter the fearful roar that the “Turk” had given as he ran a great sword through the basket.

  But true to his promise, the sword was inserted slowly, and she had no trouble avoiding it. She realized in the next moment why he uttered that roar each time he drove in a blade—it told her where the sword was coming from. And he was right—it would certainly take a very limber girl to fit in the spaces among the blades, but it wasn’t that difficult for her.

  “I say, Lionel, I rather like you doing it slowly like that,” said the pianist from the pit, as he played. “It looks ever so much more menacing.”

  The swords were withdrawn, the top of the basket taken off, and she popped up, breathless and flushing. Without warning her, Lionel’s hands encircled her waist and he lifted her out and put her on the floor. “And light as a feather,” the magician said, approvingly. “Tell your lad you’re posting the banns, Suzie.” He grinned at Katie. “You may consider yourself hired, my dear—ah—what is your name?”

  3

  “K-KATIE,” she stammered. “Katie Langford. I—”

  But he had plunged his hand into that sash and come out with a pocketbook, from which he was extracting some pound notes. “You’ll be needing lodgings of course, so we’ll just advance you your first week’s pay.” He shoved them into her hands before she could blink. “There you go! Now, Suzie—”

  Suzie rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, all right, I’ll see she’s put up. And fed, I’m starving and she must be too.” The girl took possession of Katie’s elbow. “Come on, ducks, let’s get you respectable again, and it’s off to the boarding house.”

  “But—” Katie said feebly. Suzie ignored her, and towed her back off to the little dressing room. It was like being in the circus again, back when her parents were still alive and Katie had been allowed to change with the rest of the circus dancers and acrobats. Suzie had the bodice undone in a trice, was pulling off her gauze skirt while she was doing up
her corset, and between them they had her tidy in half the time it usually took her to dress. “You’re the size my sister used to be,” Suzie said, as she gently shoved Katie ahead of her, down the now-mostly-deserted hall to the stage door. “I have an entire trunk of her things in my room I’ve been dying to be rid of.”

  “But—won’t she want them back?” Katie asked, now completely bedazzled by the swift turn of events.

  “She got pregnant and too plump to wear them, and besides, she’s a farm wife now and she’s got no use for ’em. Coo! That gives me a capital idea!” Suzie went on. “You can share my room till I move out of it! That will give me plenty of time to coach you!” She waved at the doorman. “Jack! This is Katie Langford, and she’s hired. As soon as she has the routine I’ll be off with my boy, so don’t let anyone take advantage of her!”

  The doorman pulled the brim of his hat. “Wouldn’t think of it, Suzie. Welcome, Katie. Rehearsal is at ten.”

  Suzie gave Katie no chance whatsoever to reply. Down the street they went, but not very far, not nearly as far as Katie would have thought. They cut down an alley to a quiet cul-de-sac, and it was obvious what their goal was: the only building in the circle that was still brightly lit up. There was a sign above the front door: Mrs. Baird’s Theatrical Lodgings For Ladies.

  “Boarding house,” Suzie explained, tugging on Katie’s arm when she hesitated, pulling her up the stairs to the door. “It’s cramped-small, but lovely. Four shillings six a week, breakfast and supper included. Come on, I have a lovely room.”

  There was a heavenly smell wafting down the passage, but Suzie urged her up a narrow stair, past two landings, and unlocked a door on the third.

  Maybe Suzie thought her room was cramped for space, but by the standards of someone who had lived most of her life in a caravan it was impossibly spacious. There were two narrow little beds, a wardrobe, a tiny dressing table, a chest at the foot of each bed, and one at the window. One of the beds was covered in odds and ends; Suzie cleared it swiftly and dropped Katie’s bundle on it, then hurried her downstairs again.