Steadfast

by Mercedes Lackey

  “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.”

  Katie felt actually giddy. She truly had not expected to be in this position so quickly, once she had realized how much work was involved in being the magician’s assistant.

  “Are you still wanting to wear a mask?” Lionel continued, turning to Katie—and suddenly she went from giddy to sober, and cold. What if he didn’t want her to wear a mask? What if someone from the circus came in here? What if there was a performer out there in one of the other shows, or on the Boardwalk, who had known her and her parents before they joined the circus? Performers talked, and word could spread to the most unlikely of places, and Dick could find out where she was by so many means—

  “Because I rather like it,” Lionel continued, and she felt faint with relief. “I think it gives a properly mysterious air to the act. I don’t want you to do so if you feel it restricts your vision, but a pretty little mask, with the bit of veil fastened across the bottom of it? It would not only look exotic, it would solve the problem Suzie always has of her veil coming loose. One less thing to worry about.”

  “I would love to wear a mask,” she said fervently.

  “Good then, it’s settled.” Lionel gave a decisive nod, which Katie had noticed that he always did when he was satisfied with something. “You two scuttle along and get your luncheon, and go talk to the Wardrobe Mistress about that mask and veil before you come back for the last run-through.” He made a shooing motion with his hands, and the two of them went off to the dressing room to hurry on enough of their street clothing to be respectable.

  Many of the girls sent out for luncheons, as Jack and Lionel did, but Suzie was just as concerned with saving pennies as Katie was, and she knew the best places to eat cheaply and well. Today she guided Katie to a little cockle stall, where they ate their fill of shellfish so fresh they were still moving when plunged into the steam for a quick cooking. The proprietor was Welsh, and Suzie insisted on them having something he called “laver bread” as well. “It’s good for you,” she insisted—and Katie, who had eaten much more dubious things than an oatmeal cake mixed with seaweed, was not inclined to argue with her. Besides, to her mind, it was delicious. The stall owner seemed utterly delighted that they liked his “delicacy.”

  “Welsh caviar, that is, girls!” he told them urging second helpings on them. “Welsh caviar!”

  “Think you can find your way back here?” Suzie asked, as she always did. Katie nodded. She’d always had an unerring sense of direction, and not even the twisty little “twinnings,” the alleys among the fishermen’s shacks that required you to go in single file, confused her. “Good. Now, listen . . . I am fairly certain Lionel is going to use luncheon tomorrow as a reason to ask you all about yourself.” Suzie craned her neck to look earnestly into Katie’s face. “Please don’t try to lie to him. He can always tell when someone is lying and he never forgives that.”

  That took Katie just a bit aback for a moment, and she thought hard before she answered. Do I . . . should I . . .

  Suzie obviously took her silence for exactly what it was. “Listen to me . . . no matter what you’ve done, what scrape you’ve been in, I promise you, if you haven’t actually broken the law too much, Lionel won’t care as long as you tell him!”

  That surprised an answer out of her and she spoke before she intended to. “I never broke any laws!” she said, breathlessly. “But . . . I’m trying to keep away from . . . someone . . .”

  “Then tell them, tell them everything!” Suzie urged. “They can’t help you—and they will!—if you don’t tell them.”

  But when Katie thought about Dick . . . his hideous strength, and his boundless rage . . . all she could do was shake her head. Oh no, she thought. It isn’t them that would be protecting me. It’s me keeping him off them.

  5

  “TEA, lemonade, or squash, Miss Kate?” Jack asked politely, as Lionel skillfully carved the ham. He could tell by the girl’s expression that this was the first time she had ever been presented with a meal like this one, a proper “Sunday dinner” type meal, although it wasn’t Sunday. It reminded him every time he shared dark-day dinner with Lionel of the meals in the little farmhouse where he had grown up. Proper country meals, made by a farmwife, born and bred. Meals were the fuel on which a farm ran, and a good farm served up good meals, never stinting anyone.

  Even though this was summer, the hottest summer Jack could remember, the housekeeper and cook would not have dreamed of serving a cold dinner. Mrs. Buckthorn, Lionel’s housekeeper, was a proper country cook, and she was cooking for someone she considered to be a “gentleman,” so it was a gentleman’s dinner. The only difference between her meal and one that would be served in the house of a prosperous merchant was that her meals were served farmhouse style, with everything on the table at once, and people helping themselves.

  The aroma was enough to make a dead man rise and walk to the table to join them, at least as far as Jack was concerned.

  Katie gazed on it all with wonder. The meal began with a bit of clear soup, then on came the rest: ham with a succulent honey glaze that glistened in the dim light that came in through the dining room windows, the green peas with butter melting over the top of them, the fluffy mashed potatoes heaped in a bowl like a great mound of steaming snow, the cabbage, apples, and onions baked together into a succulent mass, the brandied carrots shining like gold, the big dish of pickles lying cool in their juice, the fine loaf of fresh-baked bread, the dish of sweet butter, and jewel-like dishes of apple and current jelly. The poor girl hardly knew where to look next as her gaze wandered over the laden table.

  “Tea, please,” she said in a soft voice. Then she smiled tentatively and a little shyly at them all. “I feel sorry for Suzie. She can’t be having nearly as good a dinner as this one.”

  Savory aromas swam about them . . . and Jack chuckled. “Her beau’s half-owner in his parent’s oyster-house, and it’s a big, prosperous one. She’ll be tucking into lobster about now, I should think, so don’t feel sorry for her. It’ll be just as good a dinner. Seafood, not ham, but just as good.”

  Lionel gestured with his knife and fork that he was ready, and served the ham as Mrs. Buckthorn passed him plates. Jack filled the rest of Katie’s plate for her; he had the feeling she would just have put a little potato and a few peas on it otherwise. Mrs. Buckthorn and the maid sat right down with the rest of them—an anomaly in any other household, where the servants would eat separately, but this was no ordinary household. For one thing, Lionel wouldn’t hear of his housekeeper eating in the kitchen when all he had was the housekeeper and her little niece, who served as maid-of-all-work, and for another, Mrs. Buckthorn was a very, very minor Elemental Magician herself. Just enough to be aware of the magic and the Elementals, but that was more than enough for Lionel to consider her as an equal who happened to take his wages. As for Mrs. Buckthorn herself, she was farm-bred and saw no difficulty, for servants always ate with the family on the farms. Servants were considered part of a farmhouse family, at least on good farms.

  Katie, of course, would never have been around anyone who had servants, so she wouldn’t know how unusual this was.

  Lionel was very careful which of his assistants he had invited to dark-day dinners; some of them would have been
shocked, for oddly, it was often those who were poorest who had the most rigid ideas about what was, and was not, “proper.” It was odd, but it was often so.

  Unless, of course, they were born and raised entertainers, who had no set ideas of any sort of household etiquette, for they rarely had servants, and almost never had houses. Rooms in a theatrical boarding house, or flats rented by retired theater people, that was what they had. Servant and master etiquette was as loose among entertainers as it was among farm folk.

  In deference to Mrs. Buckthorn’s finer feelings, they bowed their heads while the housekeeper uttered a brief blessing. Then they all gave proper, thoughtful respect to the food, and Jack got a great deal of pleasure from the happiness on Katie’s face as she ate. He rather thought that Lionel did too.

  There was a very nice breeze cutting right through the house, and as wild as the back garden was, it held an untamed old-fashioned rosebush that had taken over one entire corner. It added its scent to the savory aromas of the food.

  They kept the conversation to extreme commonplaces—and compliments to Mrs. Buckthorn, who dimpled like a girl over them. They discussed the show, some of the backstage goings-on, whether the summer was going to continue to be as hot as it was now, and Mrs. Buckthorn held forth at length on Queen Alexandra, for whom she had enormous admiration.

  There was Eton Mess for dessert, and Jack thought that Katie might perish on the spot from pleasure over the sweet. When they were done, Mrs. Buckthorn set to clearing the remains back to the kitchen, and Lionel led the way to a peculiar back parlor that shared the back part of the ground floor with the kitchen.

  The one delightful thing about this overshadowed house—particularly this summer, which was proving to be unnaturally hot—was that because it was in near-perpetual shade, it remained deliciously cool while the rest of Brighton baked. The back parlor had exceptionally large windows, which Lionel had made to be able to open completely, with gauze curtains fastened over them to keep out the dust and flies while allowing in the breeze. There was also a French-style door.

  The garden, as overgrown as it was, held the cool as well. There were two trees, the enormous rose-bush, vines of some sort that rambled all over everything, and between the shaggy bits of lawn, the remains of a little gravel path that led to a birdbath that Mrs. Buckthorn kept filled. Jack wondered what the more prosperous neighbors thought of the pocket wilderness on the other side of their garden walls. Well, the brick and stone walls were pretty high; probably they couldn’t see anything but the trees and shaggy rosebush.

  If they know, they are probably having quiet furies about it. Of course, if they knew their neighbor was in the theater, they would probably be fulminating over it every Sunday dinner!

  Lionel also had ceiling fans of the sort that were found in Indian bungalows, but rather than being powered by a small native boy, these were set in motion by an ingenious clockwork that Mrs. Buckthorn wound up every morning. Lionel tripped the mechanism as they entered, and the flat fans began lazily swaying back and forth with the mechanism ticking pleasantly away.

  Everything about the parlor was light and cool; the wallpaper was a pattern of twining green acanthus vines on white, the furnishings were all of white wickerwork with cotton cushions that matched the paper, the tables of metal—more twining acanthus vines—with glass tops. The table nearest the window had been set up with cards and four chairs, but Lionel didn’t immediately repair to it.

  “Now, until this moment, Katie,” Lionel said carefully, as he lowered himself onto a padded wicker settee, “We have let your skill speak for you. But as I have invited you into my house, and into my trust, I would very much like it if you would reciprocate by giving us your trust. Would you do us the great favor of telling us just where, exactly, you come from and where you learned your dancing and acrobatics. Hmm?”

  Katie hesitated a moment, and her face went very still. Jack could imagine her mind racing, and he couldn’t blame her for her hesitation. If she was running from something, she probably had plenty of reasons to be wary.

  Lionel had used that “there, there,” sort of soothing voice, that a parent would use to assure a child that it was perfectly all right to tell everything. Into the silence of hesitation, Jack put in his own words.

  “Really, Miss Kate, you’ve seen how much the act needs you. You needn’t worry that Lionel is going to run you off; we just want to know a bit more about you. It doesn’t matter where you come from, not really. You could be a little Hottentot, or a Hindoo beggar, and it would be all the same to us. What matters is that you be honest with us, you see? Show people can’t be too nice about pointing fingers; plenty of people who come to see us think we live lives of terrible immorality—and sometimes they’re right.” He chuckled a little, hoping to put her at her ease. “Honestly, the number of times I’ve had to cover for a husband or a daughter having a gay old time with someone they shouldn’t have been with don’t bear counting. We know you aren’t a thief now, whatever you might have had to do in the past. Short of murdering someone, I can’t think of anything you might have done that would cause us to turn you out.” He smiled into her troubled eyes. “And as for us, if we’d meant to do you mischief, we had plenty of opportunities, yet here you are, safe as houses, full of a good ham dinner and in a lovely chair and with lemonade when you want it. And you’ll notice, there’s a French door, right there—” He pointed at the door that led into the bedraggled garden. “—and neither of us is spry enough to keep you from it, if you cared to bolt. So.” He leaned back in his own chair. “Why don’t you tell us what sort of cuckoo we’re fostering?”

  Her face had gradually begun to clear as he spoke. After all, everything he had just told her was perfectly reasonable and sensible, and as she thought about it, he reckoned that she realized everything he had said was true.

  “I’m—half Traveler,” she said hesitantly, and waited for their reactions. When all they did was nod, her face lost some of its worry. There were not a lot of Travelers on the music hall circuit, but there were some. Jack knew of an entire enormous family of singers, guitarists and dancers from Spain—or so they said, you could never tell with Travelers. But their music sounded Spanish to him, and they did that foot-stamping sort of dancing that he vaguely associated with Spain.

  Maybe they were Gypsies, not Travelers, strictly speaking. He also vaguely knew that not all Travelers were Gypsies, and not all Gypsies were Travelers, or cared to be taken for Travelers.

  “Ma was the Traveler, Pa was an acrobat. They met at a horse fair, and they just fell right in love there on the spot.” Her eyes softened when she said that, and Jack smiled a little. “He properly asked to court her, but when her people wouldn’t take him, as mostly Travelers won’t take outsiders, she ran off from them and back to be with him. When she did that, by Traveler law, she was spoilt, and her good name was just right gone, and since she didn’t have any brothers to come after her and beat him for it, just her father, then she was cast out.”

  “He was a lucky man, from what I’ve heard,” Lionel mused. “Travelers can be hard men, and they don’t take to having their women interfered with.”

  “Well, Ma was a lucky woman, for a spoilt Traveler girl will never get a husband, and will have to live and tend to her parents all her life, and do all the work,” the girl replied, then shrugged. “Well, Pa taught me the acrobatics, and Ma taught me dances, and I learnt more from every dancer we traveled with.”

  That, Jack thought, explained a great deal about her dancing skill. Had she learned one discipline and been taught in it in a proper school, she might have been great. Stupendous, even. She surely had raw talent, and must have a knack for picking things right up. But without proper training, her dancing was something of a muddle, and even he could see she’d never get out of it now. The more was the pity. But on the other hand . . . it meant she was versatile, and that was certainly what Lionel
needed.

  “Things started to get hard though,” she continued. “It was getting hard for us to make money at fairs, with so many other new things coming along to take peoples’ pennies. We were small, and . . . and people would want to go see a Hindoo dancer, or Chinese acrobats, even if they weren’t as good as us. So we joined a circus. That was easier. We could always count on eating. I learned a lot of dancing there. There was even a girl who danced on her toes, who said she was a—a—bally-dancer.”

  “Ballet,” Lionel corrected, gently. Katie nodded.

  “Aye, that was what she said. I learned that. That’s hard! It looks so floaty and graceful, and the circus people, they liked me to balance that way on one leg a lot, and it really hurts!” Unconsciously, she rubbed at her leg through her skirt, as if in memory of the aching. “But after a while, it wasn’t so bad. And we did all right in the circus, even if we were working harder, better than being alone.” She sucked in a long breath. “We went to another circus when the first one had a row between the owner and his partner, and we didn’t want to get caught up in the middle of it all. The owner gave us a good name, and this one was bigger. They had a lion tamer and an elephant. They gave us a sideshow booth as well as work under the canvas. We thought it was good.”

  She started to tense up, her eyes got very bright, and two of Jack’s salamanders suddenly appeared at his feet, ran to hers, eeled up the legs of the chair, and settled in on either side of her—to comfort her? That was what it looked like! It didn’t take that to tell him that what was coming was very painful, even tragic. She’d gone quite pale, and her throat showed strain as she swallowed.

  She ducked her head, and clasped her hands tight in her lap, oblivious to the salamanders cuddled up next to her. When she spoke, her voice was tight and choked with grief.