Steadfast

by Mercedes Lackey

  This time they followed the passage to the back where there was a room containing a single enormous table with women and girls crammed all around it and a woman presiding at the end—

  A woman that, had Katie not been circus folk, would have caused her to stare and stare, because she had a beard that would have done any man proud, and every inch of skin that could be seen was heavily tattooed.

  The company was chattering at the tops of its lungs. Suzie had to shout to be heard over them. “Mrs. Baird! This is Katie! She’s taking my place at the Palace! She’ll be having my room in a week or so!”

  The bearded visage nodded. “That’s all right then!” Mrs. Baird shouted back. “Four shillings six a week! Breakfast and supper, and we have supper late, after closing! We’ll settle up in the morning!”

  “See, I told you, all settled,” said Suzie, who nudged at the end girl on the bench nearest her, who obligingly squeezed over enough to give them both room. There were plates in a stack at their end of the table, and cutlery and cups. Suzie passed what was needed to Katie, took some for herself, then dished out soup from a big tureen in the center of the table while someone passed Katie a basket of thickly-sliced brown bread and a dish of butter. Someone else filled a mug of tea and handed it to her.

  After that, Katie didn’t think of anything except the food in front of her. No one seemed to be counting how many slices of bread she took, nor how many times anyone refilled her bowl of soup. Not that she was greedy, nor that she stuffed herself, but it was lovely to be able to eat your fill when you were hungry, and leave the table feeling sated.

  Girls left the table and more girls replaced them. Katie watched and saw that it was the done thing to take your dirty dishes with you. She and Suzie took theirs and left them with a cheerful little red-faced maid in an apron three times too big for her who was washing away with all her might.

  “This way,” Suzie said, tugging at her when she turned to go back to the front of the house and the stairs. “You’ll want to wash up every night when you come home. You can’t get all the greasepaint off at the theater, and Mrs. Baird likes her linens to be nice.”

  And sure enough, Suzie pulled her to the room of Katie’s dreams, a room with a row of deep washbasins, and three big bathtubs along one wall, all fed by pipes like Katie had seen in the loo in the train. Without being prompted, Katie stripped herself almost half nude and gave herself a good wash in one of the basins, while Suzie did the same.

  “Usually I take the time to go upstairs, put on a dressing gown, and come down here for a good wash-up,” Suzie said, as they went in single file up the stair. “But it’s awfully late and you look knackered.”

  “I am, a bit,” Katie confessed. “It was a long day, and I didn’t think I’d see a job at the end of it.” She gazed in wonder at the two pound notes in clutched in her hand.

  “I’ll show you where to get a decent bite at lunch, not that nasty, greasy pub food. Breakfast here is always the same, oatmeal and toast and fruit.” Suzie sighed dramatically. “Mrs. Baird is Scottish, you see, and you cannot convince her that breakfast should be anything else.” She opened the door. “Have you a nightgown?”

  Katie blushed. “That’s almost all I have besides my costume,” she admitted, shamefacedly.

  “Well, no worries about that. My sister, I swear, spent every spare penny on clothing, and now she can’t wear any of it!” Suzie chuckled, and shut the door just as two more girls came trudging up the stairs, chattering like sparrows. She flung open the window, and along with the breeze came the distant sounds of celebration. That was all right; Katie had learned to sleep through the sounds of celebration while still in her cradle.

  This must have been a bed for a child, it was so small; that was why two of them fit in the room. But she and Suzie were both small, and fit the beds neatly.

  She slipped out of her clothing and into her threadbare nightgown, and then tumbled into the bed. She didn’t even hear Suzie get into hers.

  • • •

  She had expected she would wake before Suzie did—she always woke up at the crack of dawn, long before Dick, in order to get out of the caravan before he woke. Fortunately she didn’t have to cook for him, for all the circus people ate together in common, and Andy Ball took the cost of it out of their wages.

  But she didn’t wake before Suzie did; in fact, it was Suzie who woke her, humming to herself as she unpacked the trunk at the window.

  She raised herself up on her elbow and stared as Suzie held up a skirt. “These will all fit you,” Suzie said, glancing over her shoulder. “And a good thing, too. Much longer and they’d be so old fashioned that people would stare at you like some sort of Guy.”

  “I can’t—” Katie began. “I mean, you don’t even know me. Why are you being so kind to me?”

  Suzie turned and sat abruptly down on the side of the bed, and took Katie’s hand in hers. “Because, ducks, once upon a time, two starving girls who had just lost their mum and da got taken in by a bearded lady, and taught how to do some dance steps, and were gotten jobs down on the Boardwalk.”

  “Mrs. Baird?” Katie asked, incredulously.

  Suzie nodded and let go of Katie’s hand. “Besides, Lionel hired you right on the spot, and I have never, ever, known Lionel and Jack to be wrong about a person. So! Let’s pick out a gown for you that you’re not going to die of heat in, go down and make things straight with Mrs. Baird, and have breakfast. Then it’s off to the theater.”

  The gown was clearly not new, but Suzie’s sister had taken good care of her clothing; it was oyster-colored linen trimmed with blue piping, very neat and a little nautical. Suzie chose a biscuit-colored skirt and shirtwaist, and the two of them helped each other with their corsets. Katie felt quite different, wearing something like this, a gown she would never have chosen for herself. Almost as if she was entirely another person.

  Mrs. Baird, attired in a crisp linen shirtwaist and walking skirt, was sitting in her office, her ledgers spread out before her, her beard neatly arrayed over her chest. It looked like a lustrous skein of brown silk. She smiled when they came in, accepted Katie’s pound note, and counted out the proper change; Katie ran upstairs to put most of it away safe, then knotted the sixpence into a corner of her handkerchief and put the latter safely in a petticoat pocket.

  Then she ran back downstairs and they went in to breakfast, which was, as Suzie had promised, oatmeal and toast. But there was plenty of both, and there were fresh strawberries for the oatmeal and marmalade for the toast, and anyway, it was much the same as the circus breakfast except that Mrs. Baird’s oatmeal wasn’t burnt on the bottom. Mrs. Baird didn’t stint on the tea, nor boil it till it was bitter and nasty, nor serve leaves steeped so often the “tea” was barely colored water. She wasn’t stingy about the sugar and milk, either. Katie was getting the sense that she was going to get good value for her boarding money.

  The table was not quite as crowded this morning as it had been last night, but girls and young women kept trailing in one and two at a time. As soon as she and Suzie were done, they took their dishes back to the kitchen, where a different, slightly older, but equally cheerful girl was washing away mightily.

  After that, they went out into the streets, and in a few moments were at the theater. Katie could see she would have no difficulty remembering the way back; it really was supernaturally convenient. Her head was spinning as she contemplated her luck. How easy it would have been to get into a place where the landlady was abusive, or worse, a pander! It was almost as if some good spirit had been guiding her from the time she arrived in Brighton. The doorman was already on duty, and smiled at them both, touching the brim of his hat to them.

  He looked as if he had been a very handsome man before pain and grief had etched lines in his face, making him look older than he was. I wonder how he lost his leg? Katie took care to smile back at him.
From his bearing, she guessed that he must have been a soldier. She knew, vaguely, that there was a war going on . . . in Africa? Had that been where he’d been hurt?

  The theater felt emptier this morning, probably because the acts that knew their parts in their sleep didn’t feel the need to turn up to rehearse this early. The corridor was still quite dark, and a bit claustrophobic for someone who was used to the vast expanses underneath circus canvas.

  “Let’s go to wardrobe and see if we can’t find something in the Aladdin panto costumes that you can use for now,” Suzie said, as they threaded their way past the dressing room. “Here—”

  She paused, and there was a set of stairs, just off the corridor, that Katie hadn’t realized was there. They weren’t regular stairs, not wooden stairs with landings; they were made of iron and wound in a tight spiral, taking up very little space. Down they went, ending in a corridor that was a good bit wider than the one above it, and then left, and into a room filled with costumes on racks, and lit by a long line of somewhat dirty windows up near the ceiling, where a sewing machine was clattering away, vigorously pumped by a middle-aged woman in a neat little bonnet.

  “Mrs. Littleton!” Suzie called, and the clattering stopped as the woman looked up. “This is the new girl that’s taking my place. Lionel wants to order a costume for the Turk number for her from you, but until you finish it, is there something in the panto costumes she can use? She fits my sister’s old things a treat.”

  The costume mistress looked Katie up and down. “I should think so,” she said. “Wait here.”

  She vanished into the forest of racked costumes and returned with something bundled in her arms. All that Katie could tell was that it came with a pair of voluminous pantaloons. “This is one of the Sultan’s page boy outfits. It will do,” Mrs. Littleton said, thrusting the outfit at Suzie. “Make sure it comes back without any damage. Watch them swords and other nasty things. Now, hold still.” Before Katie could move, the woman had whisked the tape measure from around her neck and was measuring her at all points, writing the measurements down in a little leather-bound book she pulled out of a pocket of her apron. “What’s your name, gel?”

  “Katie?” Katie replied hesitantly.

  “Right then. It’ll be a week, them Eye-talian acrobats paid me to do them all new suits, and they come first. Tell Lionel I’ll finish this new slave-girl frock in a week, and he’s to pay me right away, and after that if nothing urgent comes up, I’ll do up all the others he’ll need for her before he’s done with the Turk season.”

  And with that, she sat back down at her machine and went back to sewing. Clearly, they had been dismissed.

  They both went out of the wardrobe room, pausing to let a stagehand go past with a piece of scenery—which explained why the corridors were wider here, if things were stored on this floor.

  Suzie handed over the costume to Katie, who took it reflexively, and the two of them went back up the stairs and to the dressing room. “Here,” Suzie said, sitting Katie down at one of the tables. “This is mine, and you might as well have it. We can share until you’re trained and I can leave.” She showed Katie where and what all the makeup was; Katie already knew more than enough about the matter to know what to do with it, and said as much. “I worked in a circus—” she began, and Suzie laughed.

  “Well, as long as you weren’t a clown, then you should be all right.”

  Then they got Suzie into enough of her costume for a rehearsal, and Katie into the page boy outfit, which consisted of a pair of red bloomers and a billowy yellow blouse with a red vest all embroidered with spangles that snugged tight around her chest with front lacings. Like most acrobats she was . . . rather flat. When she looked at herself in the mirror, with her hair up, she did look a good bit like a page boy. Certainly not like pretty Suzie, in her slave girl finery . . .

  “There, that looks good enough,” Suzie said.

  “Is this going to be all right?” she asked, doubtfully. “I look like a boy.”

  Suzie laughed. “Lionel is more than good enough that he doesn’t need a pretty assistant to distract the eye,” she said proudly. “A page boy will do as well as I will. Come on then—Lionel will be waiting, I can promise you. He goes to rehearsals more than a preacher goes to church.”

  Katie followed her mentor back into the cramped corridor, and from there to the stage, and sure enough, there was the magician, in ordinary clothing with his shirtsleeves rolled up, fussing with the sword-basket.

  • • •

  Lionel had been utterly astonished to see one of Jack’s salamanders riding along on the would-be assistant’s shoulders when she had turned up to audition. And within moments, it was quite obvious that she was utterly oblivious to its presence.

  It seemed that the fates or the Elementals had decided to dump an entire barrel of good fortune on him at once. The girl moved easily and freely, she was small and lithe, and—

  Well, that certainly explained why Jack had been so eloquent in his insistence that Lionel run his eyes over this new applicant immediately. He’d even stumped his way up to Lionel’s dressing room to insist on it, though Lionel had (as usual) had people hanging about, and Jack had not been able to be specific about why he was so anxious. There was no doubt, whatsoever, that if there was any chance she was suitable, he should take her on no matter how long it took her to take to the act. An unawakened Fire magician was certainly not going to turn up at the stage door every day.

  He was delighted to see she was clearly a dancer—her costume told him that. Typical little gauze skirt and bodice, useful for a thousand roles, depending on what you decorated it with. Not only was it fitted to her, personally, it was far too worn for her to be anything but a dancer with plenty of experience. Her little routine was quite good—to be honest she was better than every other dancer currently working here at the Palace, although she was not going to set the world on fire at the Paris Opera Ballet. He was even more delighted when she performed some acrobatics and contortion. She was better than those blasted Italians, and he had been getting so desperate he had been thinking strongly of recruiting one of them, though he preferred female assistants.

  She was smart, willing and flexible—and quite desperate for a job, desperate enough to jump right into the sword-basket and let him run the trick on her without a moment of hesitation. By the time she was done, he was convinced, and hired her on the spot. Certain that her desperation for a job indicated an empty pocketbook, he advanced her the first week’s salary. He was not going to chance losing her because she was picked up for vagrancy, or have her fainting at a performance from hunger. The salamander, who had been watching the entire time, flicked its tongue out with satisfaction, spun around in a circle, and vanished.

  After Suzie and his new assistant had left the stage, Lionel shoved his props back into their proper places and headed for his dressing room. He wanted to talk to Jack—badly. But before he did, he needed to get out of the Turk rig.

  As usual, as if the universe was conspiring against him, there were half a dozen people who just had to see him after the performance. When he finally dispensed with them—including the agent who was frantic to sign him, and could not understand why he didn’t want a season at the Hippodrome in London—the theater was nearly empty except for the cleaners.

  Jack must have known that Lionel would want to talk, however, for the doorman was waiting patiently for him, though he had donned his hat and coat.

  “You are coming back with me for supper, old lad, and nothing you can say will change my mind,” Lionel announced as he approached.

  Jack smiled crookedly. “I rather thought as much. Don’t go charging ahead as you usually do. I’m too tired to keep up with you tonight.”

  Lionel nodded, and they left together, Jack pausing to lock the stage door behind himself and turn off the gas lamp.

  They sai
d nothing as they walked, slowly, to Lionel’s little house, with Jack’s wooden leg making an odd thump on the cobbles as they walked. It was near enough that Lionel never took a cab unless the weather was utterly foul. Jack’s flat wasn’t that much farther off, by intention; he’d looked for a place close to Lionel’s as soon as he’d been hired at the music hall. Only Earth mages tended to be recluses. Other Elemental magicians preferred to be reasonably close to one another—there was safety in numbers, and when darkness came calling, it was good to have your allies within shouting distance. Lionel made sure to dine with his friend at least once a week, sometimes—usually in winter—more often. Fire Mages used up more energy than Air, and he wanted to make sure Jack got at least a couple of properly hearty meals during the week.

  Even this late, there were plenty of people on the streets. Most were men, or paired women. The only single women out at this time of night were those who did a private sort of entertaining, and the families who came here to holiday were generally worn out at the end of an evening performance and already back in their lodgings by the time he and Jack left the theater. There were still plenty of bars and pubs open, though, and smaller music halls than the Palace, the sort where the songs were not the sort you wanted your wife to hear, and the can-can dancers might not be wearing knickers.

  Lionel shuddered at the notion that the girl he had just hired might have been reduced to that. It wasn’t just that such work was degrading (which it was) and filthy (which it was) and led down darker paths (which it did), it was that desperation could do bad, mad things to an Elemental Mage’s mind, and of all the unawakened Elemental Magicians you did not want trudging down the path of despair, the highest on the list was the Fire Mage. When a Fire Mage went out of control, emotionally, even an awakened and trained one could do a great deal of damage. If an unawakened Fire Mage went out of control, and awakened during the process—