Steadfast

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Have you ever seen fireworks?” he asked her.

  “Little ones, the sort that children set off at Guy Fawkes,” she said. “Nothing—”

  And that was when the first of the skyrockets went up.

  Brighton was famous for its fireworks displays that went on all summer long, and no expense was spared to make them as spectacular as possible. Jack listened to Katie suck in her breath and “ooo” and “ah” with the rest of the crowd, and in spite of the fact that he was deucedly uncomfortable, standing out here on the pebbly beach with his wooden leg pressing achingly into his stump, he was glad he had thought of this.

  Although next time, he was going to think ahead and find a place to view the fireworks from the trap, or some other place where they could sit. A caf��, maybe. She’d like that.

  He just wished he was as good at thinking of some way to get her to realize her power. . . .

  And that was when it happened.

  Runaway skyrockets were uncommon, and the displays were shot off from the end of one of the piers just to keep runaways out over the ocean and away from the crowd. Probably no one would have realized that this one was coming straight for them under most circumstances.

  But Jack was a Fire Mage, and he spent most of his energy keeping himself aware of what Fire was doing when it was around him. And he had just spent the afternoon “topping up” his well, so to speak.

  So when the thing unaccountably made an abrupt right-hand and downward turn, and came straight for them, all his senses went alert at once. Which was a very good thing, since they had no more than seconds before it would reach them and burst.

  • • •

  The entire afternoon had been a great deal of fun for Katie. For one thing, she had never before owned the sort of clothing that would allow her to just walk into a nice shop and buy something without harassment. She greatly enjoyed doing that at any time, but knowing she was running needful errands for Jack and Lionel made her happy to be able to help them as well. She greatly enjoyed simply having the money to buy what was on her list, without having to think about counting her pennies as she did even now, when she had what she considered to be a generous wage. And it was rather nice to be treated as a welcome customer rather than “a filthy Traveler.”

  She hadn’t realized how much she missed the presence of horses until she met Lionel’s pony, Paddy. Connemara ponies were highly desired by the Travelers, for their good temper and willingness to work. Paddy wasn’t happy about the heat, but she told him they were going somewhere cooler in Traveler horse-tongue, and he seemed to understand. He recognized her immediately as a Traveler, and accepted her at once. Having his soft nose under her hand made her feel completely at ease.

  She also hadn’t realized how much she missed being somewhere other than inside four walls. Granted, she didn’t feel as suffocated by buildings as most Travelers did—she knew from her mother’s stories that there were Travelers who broke into a sweat and nearly died when they were confined inside a gorger building, which made being thrown in gaol a terrible torture for a Traveler. But still, she missed the open, she missed the green, and once all of Jack and Lionel’s errands were run and the purchases tucked in a secure box beneath the trap’s seat, and they were out on the open road, she felt the oppressiveness of walls fall away from her.

  However, once they stopped, she discovered an entirely new source of . . . unease. And it was completely unexpected. She’d never been this close to the sea before. In fact, she had never actually seen the sea, only heard about it.

  It was fascinating, in a “oh, look at that thing that is monstrously huge, and could swallow you up without thinking about it” sort of way, and she was glad that Jack kept them up on the grass and well back from it. It wasn’t the openness of it—the moors were just as open, and she felt at home there. It was as if some part of her had decided that the sea was probably an enemy, and wanted her to get well clear of it.

  She managed to convince that part of herself that the sea wasn’t going to suddenly rear up, come rushing up after them, and wash them away. The sea itself only seemed to exude a sort of warning after a while, and she wondered if this was nothing more than her own common sense, reminding her that she didn’t know how to swim. Once she had convinced herself she was in no danger, she was able to concentrate on listening to Jack’s stories of Africa.

  It was hard to imagine at first, but he was good at describing things, and his words managed to paint a picture in her mind of a vast place, lying under a burning sun, parched and yet beautiful in its way.

  She wished she could see it.

  She was able to picture the natives quite clearly, though. She’d actually seen men from Africa at the bigger Fairs—there had been an African fire-eater at one, a couple of tiny, frightened people called Pigmies at another. She’d felt sorry for the Pigmies, and had been a little frightened of the fire-eater. He had been fierce and wild in his demeanor, and she had wondered what ever could have brought him to England. She imagined the goat-herding natives as being something like that fire-eater, only less aggressive.

  He was the one she thought of, as Jack described the Hottentot warriors, the fighting natives he had encountered in the course of guarding the railway line. Very black, very tall, very proud, with patterns of scars picked out all over their faces and bodies. The fire-eater had worn ordinary clothing, but Katie imagined Jack’s natives draped in robes of burnt orange, umber, and yellow. Fire colors, for people living under an unforgiving sun.

  Now and again, he paused, and she revealed a little more of her own past to him. It was strange, how she had trusted Jack and Lionel from the very beginning, as if they were kin. She wished she dared tell them everything, but she knew she couldn’t say anything about Dick yet. Not until she was free. But at least now she knew how to get free, and was on her way to doing so.

  • • •

  Keeping her ears open at the music hall, she had discovered that one of the singers was supposed to be divorced; it had taken every bit of her courage to approach the woman, but when at last she had, she found that the lady was sympathetic and a fount of information.

  Katie had made sure to catch her one afternoon when she had come in uncharacteristically early. She had tapped on the door of the woman’s little dressing room, and when invited in, had slipped in quickly and closed the door behind herself.

  The room was as crowded as the dancers’ dressing room, with costumes hanging everywhere, even on the walls, a divan crammed in beside the dressing table and stool, and a changing screen cutting off one whole corner. It didn’t smell of sweat or dirt though, and it was clear that the room was kept spotlessly clean even though Katie knew that the singer smoked cigarettes.

  “I—wonder if I could ask you something?” she stammered, and the woman looked mildly surprised. “Some advice?”

  “Well, I’ll do my best, dearie.” The singer was the older woman, who performed somewhat rowdy, racy comic songs at the end of the show. Something about her inspired confidence in Katie. In a way, the lady reminded Katy of some of the nicer circus wives, the ones that took care of the daily chores around the circus so that the performers could concentrate on their acts. “I don’t know what advice an old hag like me can give a pretty little thing like you, though.”

  “It’s about . . . divorce,” Katie had blurted, flushing painfully. “I wondered if—you knew how to get one.”

  “Oh well! Now that I can help you with.” The woman lit herself a cigarette and gestured to Katie to take a seat on the divan. Katie lowered herself down onto it gingerly, taking care not to crush the flounces of the dress laid out beside her. “Four men I married and divorced, so I have some practice in it, you could say. Well, shall I begin at the beginning?”

  It took a bit of time, with a lot of diversion into “. . . and such a handsome bloke, but a right bastard . . .” but th
e gist of it was fairly simple. The singer—Peggy Kelly, was her name (“Though I’m too fat and old to be called Pretty Peggy Kelly anymore”) knew the answer to one of Katie’s most important questions—that is, she knew to the penny how much this was going to cost. She also knew an amenable lawyer right here in Brighton (“I used him for two of the four, and the only reason I didn’t use him for the other two was because I had to sue in London courts or miss my show dates.”) and from everything Peggy said, the man was sympathetic to a woman without wanting to get his hands all over her, and if he was a trifle too fond of the bottle, he liked and understood show business people.

  And Peggy knew exactly how to go about getting that divorce in the first place, without ever alerting Dick to the fact that it was going on.

  “It’s no use going into court and crying that he beat you,” Peggy said—and when Katie winced, she nodded with sympathy. “Married to a brute, eh, ducks? Well, unless he kills you, the law’s on his side.” It was said with calm acceptance that made Katie hang her head, flushing with shame.

  Peggy took one finger and put it under Katie’s chin, making her look up. “Bright side, ducks. We can get you clear by other ways. But first, you have to tell me all about it. Don’t hold nothing back, there’s not a bloomin’ thing you can tell me that I haven’t seen or been through.”

  This was not what Katie had intended when she first came into Peggy’s dressing room. But the older woman, though she looked like a caricature of a low-class barmaid, past her prime and with nothing more profound in her head than the next pint, the next bloke, and the next new hat, turned out to be kind, shrewd, and worldly. She nodded as Katie told her story, without any judgment. “I can’t say I’ve known more than one or two Travelers in my life,” Peggy said, “But since a lot of the things that nose-in-the-air people say about Travelers are the same things they say about me, I reckon there’s about the same amount of truth in ’em. You and me can be friends, ducky. Like that Kipling man says. Sisters under the skin!” And she meant that. She was as warmhearted as Katie’s own mother, and Katie could feel that warm-heartedness in every word she said. No wonder she was an audience favorite!

  When Katie got to the part about the fire, and agreeing to marry Dick, Peggy frowned fiercely. She asked Katie some pointed questions about those foggy days following the fire. Katie wasn’t sure why she was asking these things, but at this point, she trusted Peggy, and answered them. Peggy didn’t say anything . . . but Katie could tell she was thinking hard, and wondered why.

  Still, since Peggy said nothing, Katie soldiered on with her story.

  “. . . and then I took the train to Brighton, I found an advertisement, and came here,” she finished. “The advertisement was Lionel’s, of course.”

  “Hmm-hmm.” Peggy sat back in her chair and folded her hands over her stomach. When she was on stage, her bulk was constricted into ample curves by a corset that looked to have been designed by railway bridge engineers. Here in her dressing room, inside of the folds of a dressing gown that looked like a waterfall of lace and ribbons, her body was allowed to expand. “Well then. We’ll have to go the same route that I did, ducks. We lie.”

  Katie gaped at her, unsure of how to interpret that. Did Peggy expect just Katie to lie? Or could she possibly mean—“We?” she faltered. “You—”

  Peggy laughed, and reached over to pat her hand. “You may be a thievin’ Traveler, but you’re a bleeding babe in the woods when it comes to law courts. I’m not about to let a little gel like you—much less one that’s our Lionel’s assistant!—go into the den of snakes alone!” Her eyes gleamed with both amusement and anticipation of a battle. “Besides, that blackguard that shackled you sounds like my second, and I’m always game to take down a wife-beating bastard, I am. So now, this will be as simple as anything. You sue for divorce on grounds of infidelity. I lie and say I caught him bedding my maid. She lies and says he did. That’s all we need, we have two witnesses and one of them was the one doing the bedding. My maid’ll cry and say he cuffed her and laughed at her when he was done, and that’ll be enough for the judge to believe. Can he read, this man you’re stuck with?”

  Katie felt dazed. How was it that Peggy had come up with this story so quickly? “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Peggy laughed with glee. “All the better then. We’ll hire a feller to give him a bunch of old newspapers with the legal stuff shoved in the middle of it, and like as not he’ll just use the papers to light the stove with.” She nodded.

  “But your maid—I don’t want to—she’ll be spoilt—” Katie objected weakly. She couldn’t for a moment imagine why the maid would ever do such a thing for her.

  Peggy tossed her head back in gales of laughter. “Oh bless your heart, she’s spoilt herself a dozen times over before this! Two of my four, she served as the key to get me out of their noose. No, we’ll just need a date and a place where the blackguard might have bedded a girl or three, and it’ll have to have been one where we were playing somewhere nearby. I’m partial to a Fair, and I’d be just likely to take a dark day off to go see one, if it was close.”

  Before too very long, they’d come up with a date when the circus was within an hour’s jaunt of Bath, where Peggy had been playing the Crown and Castle. “Now, there we go, deary. It’s just a matter of you saving up your pennies. My maid will need a little present of about five pounds.” Peggy’s eyes twinkled with mirth. “Can’t ask her to lose her honor all over again without a little present, now, can we? I swear, she should make this a second income, that she should.”

  Katie nodded her head, feeling quite as if the entire situation had taken the bit between its teeth and run off with her.

  “And you need to save up for the solicitor. He’ll want his money in advance, these legal-lads always do. He’ll take care of everything else, I’ll advise him about what the fellah needs to serve the papers, and he’ll get the right bloke to do it so your bully-boy gets served without knowing.”

  Katie felt a little like a leaf caught in a gale. It was a good gale, and it was certainly taking her where she wanted to go, but she didn’t seem to have much say in what was happening.

  “Why are you doing this for me?” she asked, finally.

  Now Peggy’s shrewd and calculating gaze softened, and again she reached out to pat Katie’s hand. “Because a long time ago, there was a bawdy old gal that dressed up in trousers that did the same for me, when she found me crying in a corner. Don’t you worry, ducks. Everything will work out fine.”

  • • •

  She had already been to see the solicitor, who had agreed to the same fee Peggy had quoted. Now it was just a matter of raising the money, but as she and Jack rolled along in the trap, heading back to Brighton, she felt more hopeful and more like her old self than she had before her parents died. She was on the way to being free of Dick. She had a lovely room to live in, and good food to eat, and a good job with a good boss. She had friends!

  And now they were going to cap off a wonderful day by seeing fireworks!

  She’d heard them going off at night, of course. You couldn’t miss them, not even being deep inside the music hall at the time the displays were put on. But as she had told Jack, the only fireworks she had ever seen were the Roman candles, squibs, and crackers that settled folk in villages let off at their Guy Fawkes bonfires. Those were pretty and a lot of fun to watch, but these were supposed to fill half the sky. She believed that. She believed the colored pictures she saw on the posters in shop windows and nailed to posts. The Brighton fireworks displays sound like a war from inside the theater, and she could hardly wait to see them.

  When they arrived, Jack found one of the little boys that ran errands for the music hall waiting to hold horses for people who had little carts and traps and riding horses, but wanted to get down to the beach to see the fireworks closer. Brighton beasts were used to the noise and light,
of course, and unless something else startled them, were not going to get spooked by a skyrocket. It was perfectly safe for the boy to hold as many as half a dozen horses, three to each arm. Paddy didn’t seem the least nervous; in fact, when he realized he was staying with the boy, he relaxed into a hipshot pose and put his head down a bit to doze.

  They left Paddy and the trap with the boy, and Jack steered her down onto the beach with one hand politely on her elbow. She was a little worried for his wooden leg on the uneven, pebbly surface, but he seemed to manage all right. She kept feeling, though, as if it was she who should have been putting her hand under his elbow to keep him steady.

  Being right down next to the ocean, though, made her stomach a bit uneasy. There was that feeling again, as if all that water plainly did not like her, and would do her a mischief if it could. Jack had bought them both more lemonades, and she kept sipping the sweet-sour beverage to ease her nervous dry mouth, but that didn’t help the sensation of being in a place she didn’t belong, and a place that was not particularly happy about her being there. It was almost as if the sea was haunted by sullen ghosts that were just waiting for a chance to do her a mischief. It wasn’t a logical or rational feeling, but she couldn’t deny it was there.

  All that fled away, however, with the first rocket.