Katie played with the ribbon without actually dancing with it, listening while they talked.
“I’ve seen the Russians, too, Charlie,” Peggy said. “Katie’s no Pavlova, but the long and the short of it is, this ain’t Covent Garden either. Our people want something pretty and fun, and our Katie can give ’em that, without needing a genius in toe shoes.”
That actually made Katie feel a lot less anxious. She remembered what Mary Small had said about her dancing . . . well, if she was supposed to come up to some sort of impossible standard, she might just as well tell them it wasn’t going to happen! But produce something pretty and fun . . . yes, she could do that.
Lionel watched her playing about with the ribbon as she worked out how it moved. “We should go through the panto costumes and see if we can find some fairy wings or somewhat for Kate, and with that ribbon, there’s the second third of the act right there.” He got up and paced a bit, watching her. “First routine—living statue. Just her and some drapery, and a white light on her. Second routine—fairy, with the ribbon.”
“All you need then, is the last third,” Peggy observed, tucking her frothy dressing gown around herself.
“Well, let’s see if this won’t do that.”
Hearing the familiar voice of Mrs. Litttleton, the Wardrobe Mistress, everyone turned to see her laboring onto the stage beneath what looked like a giant cloud. She dropped the whole thing on the stage at Katie’s feet, then stooped down to pluck at the folds. “Anyone remember four years ago, that horse-faced Meg Farmer, how she came back from Paris and wouldn’t have it but I make up this costume? Twenty yards of silk tulle, if it’s an inch, and she could no more manipulate it like that Loie Fuller wench than I can fly.”
“I remember she nearly strangled herself on it,” Lionel chuckled. “The general impression I got was a lot of flailing about.”
“She danced like a cow,” observed one of the chorus girls, the one who had been nice about Katie’s dancing. “And that was without putting on that set of sails.”
“Ah, here we go!” The Wardrobe Mistress evidently found something, and before Katie was quite aware what was happening, she found herself swathed in yard and yards of ethereal fabric. She felt rather as if she was the center pole of a tent—
“Here—” she felt something like the ribbon-wand thrust into each hand, except that these wands were attached somehow in all the fabric. The Wardrobe Mistress stepped away a bit, and eyed her. “All right, Katie, see what you can do with that. Move the wands about. Something like those skirt-dances I’ve seen Travelers do—start slow, see what you can do with it.”
But Katie found her attention caught by something up in the light above the orchestra pit. She stared upward, manipulating the wands a little, but not really paying attention.
It was one of Lionel’s little sylphs, but this one seemed to have more of a sense of modesty than the others, for it was swathed from neck to below the ankles in what looked for all the world just like this voluminous gown the Wardrobe Mistress had enveloped her in. And as soon as Katie’s eyes lit on the little creature, she began to dance with the fabric—
Katie watched her, fascinated at first, and then, as she watched, she understood immediately just what it was she was supposed to do! As the sylph moved, making every movement as exaggerated as possible, Katie imitated her. It was exactly like learning a new circus dance number, where you followed the one girl who knew how to do it. This was exactly what she needed—if she could see what it was she was supposed to be doing, she could almost always imitate it.
She started out simply, turning first one way, then the other, leading the turns with her arms, the wands in her hands pulling the fabric along behind like wings. The more the costume answered her, the bolder she became, sweeping her arms up and around in huge serpentine gestures as she turned and twisted.
“There now!” applauded the Wardrobe Mistress. “That’s much more like the thing. Don’t that Fuller woman have all manner of lights and things on her when she dances, Lionel?”
“That’s what I recall,” Lionel observed. “I think we could manage with a couple of magic lanterns and some plain colored slides.”
“And I think that’s the third part of the act,” Mayhew declared, levering himself up out of the chair he’d taken in the pits. “All right, boys and girls, I applaud you all. Ruination is not staring us in the face, and I dunno how to thank you except that there’s not a man jack or woman jill of you that’s going to pay for a beer at my bar for the rest of your last two weeks.”
Spontaneous applause erupted at that pronouncement, as the Wardrobe Mistress helped Katie out of the strange gown and hung it up so that all the folds fell correctly.
“Now, let’s get ourselves to our beds. Good night’s work. Harder work for you to come, Miss Kate.” Mayhew tipped two fingers at her. “Hope you’re up to it. You’ve got an act to build.”
9
TWO weeks. Katie had to turn a few vague movements into three dance routines in two weeks. She’d have completely given up in two days, if it hadn’t been for Lionel, Mrs. Littleton, and Peggy, who all took it upon themselves to help her. Mrs. Littleton spent all of the first day tinkering with the voluminous gown, fussing with the many layers until it suddenly settled down and behaved itself, as if it was made of magic.
Although . . . that wasn’t entirely Mrs. Littleton’s doing. Lionel’s sylphs helped. They seemed to like the idea of buzzing about inside the thing, adding lift right when it was most needed and making sure nothing got twisted up.
It was Peggy who decided that the dance with the dress should be called Dance of the Fire Lily, and the magic lanterns should project red and yellow on the folds as she twisted and flung them around. With that theme in mind, Davey, the piano player, came up with some wild music of a sort that Katie had never heard of in her life—although Peggy rolled her eyes and said “Good Gad, Davey, not old Samson! Really?”
“The band knows it by heart,” Davey replied, pounding it out on the piano, as Katie worked out moves to it.
“They should, since every skirt-dancer and kootch-dancer from here to Blackpool thinks it’ll make her act class,” Peggy snorted, and sang through her nose. “Neener neener nee-ner, neener neener nee-ner. Neener neener neee-ner, neener neener neee-ner!”
“Pay no attention, Katie,” Lionel advised her, as she faltered. “Davey’s right, it’s the perfect music, and if it’s familiar, that’ll be all to the good. Let’s not forget who brings down the house every night by singing ‘She Sits Among Her Cabbages and Peas,’ now, shall we?”
Peggy made a raspberry at him, but said no more on the subject of the music for what Katie was coming to think of as the “Dress Dance.” Because goodness only knew, it wasn’t she who was the star of the thing, it was the dress.
Davey picked out perfect music for the other two pieces of the act as well. Something bright and sprightly for the Fairy Dance with the ribbon—Lionel said it was by a gent named Mendelssohn—and something slow, dignified, and pretty that Lionel said was by a fellow named Glook, or something like that. A strange name, but Katie couldn’t pay it any mind when the music was so nice. Davey wouldn’t let anyone in the band play the Statue Dance piece except himself and the flute-player, he said they’d just hammer it out like it was the acrobat music and ruin it. The same went for the Fairy Dance, it was just Davey and the flute player and a couple of the fiddlers.
For the Fairy Dance she used her old dance dress, but Mrs. Littleton came up with a pretty spangled bit of gauze to wear over the top of it, some spangled gauze wings, and a masked headdress that had beaded wire curlicue things on top of it. She just had to make sure the ribbon didn’t get tangled in the curlicues—but that was where Lionel’s sylphs came in again.
Mrs. Littleton managed the cleverest thing for the Statue Dance—an all-over white body stocking like weight lifter
s wore under their leopard skins so they wouldn’t be indecent, and over that, long, slender pantaloons and a bit of a tunic belted in at the waist. So no matter how she twisted herself up, there wouldn’t be anything improper showing.
With that, she wore a white wig and dusted her face and hands with white powder so she looked like a proper statue, like rich people had out in their gardens, or nice theaters had arrayed out front.
She was awfully glad that Lionel had given over the idea of starting rehearsal for the new act for the fall season, because things were absolutely mad, trying to work out the dancing act and make sure she got in at least a part-rehearsal on the magic act every day.
Charlie was going to get his revenge on the perfidious “Russian Dancer” who had canceled on him, too. He left the playbills exactly as he’d paid to have them printed up. After all, what was the woman going to do? Complain? She was the one who had canceled so she could make more money in London under a different name—she couldn’t do anything about Charlie using her old name without exposing her fraud.
So Katie was being billed as “Natalya Bayonova, the brilliant Russian Ballerina, straight from the Ballet Russe de Moscow.” There wasn’t any “Ballet Russe de Moscow” so far as any of them knew, but then, that hadn’t been their choice of name in the first place. And anyway, as Peggy said, “No one coming to a music hall for some fun is going to know the Bally Russe de Moscow from the Bally Russe de Blackpool, and as long as they get something they ain’t seen before, nor will they care.”
• • •
As Katie fanned herself with a scrap of scenery board, it occurred to her that there was something peculiar in the fact that the hottest summer anyone could ever remember was also being known as the “Summer of the Russian Dancers.” Russia was cold, wasn’t it? She wondered how the real Russian Dancers in London were dealing with the heat. Poor things, she pitied them; they didn’t have the tricks that Jack had taught her, the Fire Magician ways of making the heat invigorate you. This morning over breakfast some of the girls had been talking about how horses and even people had been dropping dead in the streets of the heat—not here, but in London and other towns. At least Brighton had the advantage of a steady sea breeze to keep the heat from killing people.
Charlie was scarcely the only impresario in Brighton to be featuring a Russian act, although in some cases connecting “Russian” to the “act” was something of a strain. Charlie had merely been the first to catch wind of how popular the Russians were going to be and act on it—and look where that had gotten him! He thought he’d bagged a good headline act, and then the act had abandoned him and his theater! She wondered how many other impresarios were going to find themselves in the same situation before the summer was out. The lure of a lot of money quickly might well overcome the risk of finding people unwilling to hire you once the craze was over.
The biggest and best music hall in the city, The Coliseum, had what Katie supposed to be the genuine article. After all, a theater that boasted the likes of Dan Leno and Little Tich could probably afford Anna Pavlova herself, if she wasn’t already booked in London. The ballerina’s name, Irina Tcherkaskaya, sounded genuine enough, at least to Katie. Katie had looked over the playbill from The Coliseum, and the dancer’s program sounded quite original—“The Dance of the Polivetsian,” “Saber Dance,” “Dance of the Rusalka,” and “Scene from Swan Lake.” They all sounded like solo pieces from larger ballets.
The Brighton Music Hall also had a Russian Ballerina that was probably at least a real ballerina, if not a real Russian. She was billed only as “Marina,” and her bill listed “Tzarina Dance,” “Bayadere,” and “Scene from Sleeping Beauty.”
Just about every other theater and music hall had something that was supposed to be Russian. It was when you got down to this level that Katie had some severe doubts about the authenticity of any of the dancers, much less their performances. After all, look at her: she knew she was an outright fraud.
And putting some poor can-can dancer in a fur hat and fur-trimmed dress was not going to make her Russian, it was only going to make her faint with the heat.
According to Jack, there was plenty of that going on in the lesser halls. Mrs. Littleton had reported a run on rabbit fur to the point where there wasn’t any to be had in the entire town, and wouldn’t you know it, there were at least three different “Russian Cossack Choruses” being billed in halls smaller than this one.
The smart thing, of course, if you couldn’t get a real Russian dancer, was to cobble up some act around a dancer that was something like the acts that were in all the papers coming down from London. As long as you could get your hands on a reasonably good ballerina, one that might actually have seen Pavlova and the Ballet Russe, Peggy was right; people would pay to see the act and wouldn’t complain.
And that was what other halls larger than Charlie’s but smaller than The Coliseum were doing. You could read the playbills in the papers, and it was actually rather funny. There were enough “Dying Swans” populating the stages to have put a serious dent in the supply of white feathers and down—and Lionel had made the joke that if only the Swans would just die there’d be roast bird in every kitchen in Brighton.
There was even one comic version of the “Dying Swan,” according to the girls at the boarding house, who’d seen it on their dark day and had come back convulsed with laughter. One of the male comics whose act was to be in a dress had got himself a swan costume made up and staggered about the stage scattering handfuls of chicken feathers before falling over, kicking his legs in the air, and taking a good long time to “die.” Katie hoped she would get a chance to see him.
There were “Ghosts” of various flowers flinging themselves into and out of the wings—“Ghost of a Rose,” “Ghost of a Violet,” “Ghost of a Lily,” “Ghost of a Daisy” . . . and to add a pleasing variety to the mix, some dancers were crossing the flowers with the swans and creating “Dying Rose,” “Dying Lily,” “Dying Camellia.” How one was supposed to create an impression of a dying flower, she had no idea. Not to mention that with all these creatures dropping dead on the stage, it was not creating the atmosphere of fun and laughter you were supposed to find in a music hall . . .
Oh well, she supposed the other acts just had to make up for it.
The various kootch- and skirt-dancers down on the Boardwalk, not to be left out of the craze, had relabeled themselves “Russian Harem Girls,” “Russian Cossack Slaves,” and “Russian Sword Dancers.” They didn’t actually change anything, of course, just put up new signs. And it wasn’t as if the men that crowded the kootch-tents were actually there for the dancing.
I’d actually like to see the real thing, the real Russian dancers, she thought, wistfully, waiting for the dog act to finish its last run through the hoops and the curtains to close so she could run out and take her pose on the pedestal for the Living Icon number. She hadn’t any notion of what an “Icon” was supposed to be, other than it was some sort of Russian art . . . but then, neither would anyone out there in the audience. Lionel had picked the name, and she trusted it looked all right on the playbill.
As Peggy had reminded her over and over again, just before the singer took her leave of the house regulars and went on to her next booking—what mattered was only that people got their money’s worth, even if they had no idea what it was that they wanted. It was never about reality in music hall. “All those people out there, all they care about is that they see something they ain’t never seen before in the middle of the fun they know and like. Then they can go home and say Coo! Mazie! I saw one of them Rooshans when we was on ’oliday, and she didn’t half make me eyes stand out in me head! And by the time they get done with the telling, you wouldn’t recognize your own act.”
Well, that was true enough. Every one of the people out there in that audience was perfectly willing to believe that she and Lionel were some sort of wild Turkish magicians,
and that all the magic was perfectly real. They all believed that the Clever Cow actually counted things, and not that the Cow’s handler signaled how many times she was to paw her hoof by tapping her with a wand. They believed with all their hearts that the Drunken Gent comedian was going to tumble into the band pit at any moment, and that the swords the latest juggling act was tossing through the air were sharp enough to shave with.
Given that, believing that Katie was a Russian was scarcely a stretch for them.
The dogs ran off, the trainer ran off collecting their hoops as he went, and the curtain closed. One of the stagehands ran on from the opposite wing, placed Katie’s platform, and waited while she ran on from the other side. He lifted her up onto it, she took her pose, and waited.
This was it. This was the moment when they would all see if the hard work of the last two weeks was going to pay off. This would be the very first performance before an audience that was not of her peers.
The curtain parted. Behind her, the backdrop was plain black. The curtain only parted halfway, leaving her framed in red velvet against the black. The limelight burned down on her from above. She stood absolutely motionless, and should, she hoped, look like a white stone statue in the middle of the stage.
The crowd hushed its noise. That was a very good sign; music hall crowds were a noisy lot, this wasn’t like a theater, where people were expected to sit quietly in seats. The best seats in the music hall were the ones at the tables, where people drank and ate and were jolly, and expected to be able to enjoy everything about being there as loudly as they liked.
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