“Lionel’s, eight in the morning, Katie,” Jack murmured to her as she bid him good night, wishing that she could think only of what Mrs. Baird was going to be offering for supper.
“Eight in the morning. I’ll be there,” she said, then added rebelliously. “But he had better give me breakfast! Mrs. Baird doesn’t serve so early.”
Jack chuckled dryly; the sound teased a smile out of her.
“You strike a hard bargain, Kate,” he said. “I’ll let him know.”
And then she was out into lamp-lit streets, which, on any other summer than this one, she would have thought unusually warm. But compared to the baking heat of the day, well, this was the closest thing to “cool.”
She passed a newsboy, still out and crying his headlines. There was a lot about strikes—strikes at the coal mines, threatened strikes at the docks. Then one caught her attention.
A rail strike.
“Holiday towns” like Brighton and Blackpool depended on the railways. It was the only way that people who couldn’t afford to keep their own automobiles and carriages could get to the seaside for a week or so. What would happen if there was a rail strike? It was no good saying that people that were stuck here would come to the Boardwalk and the halls! They wouldn’t be able to afford to—they’d have spent all their holiday money and would frantically be trying to figure a way to stretch whatever they had with them, or to find a way back. The last thing on their minds would be spending more money to go to a music hall.
Was Charlie aware of this? Was Lionel?
She realized a moment later that she was standing still in the street, and people were giving her peculiar looks as they had to get around her. She hurried her steps to the boarding house.
Once there, she discovered that the topic of heated conversation around the table was not any of the impending strikes, but the heat itself. “. . . niver thought I’d be asking to wear less,” one of the girls was saying as Katie came in. “I’m telling you, they are right daft, thinking we can go prancin’ about in fur and all in this heat!”
As Katie had suspected, the Russian craze was taking its toll on chorus dancers and acrobats being asked to pass as foreigners. Katie was all the more happy with Charlie now, who had consulted with Mrs. Littleton and seen to it that his chorus dancers were not going to expire of heat under layers of velvet and fur more suited to the bitterest winter than the hottest summer on record.
The bathroom was very crowded, and for once the girls stripped to almost nothing without shame in order to get themselves at least a cooling sponge bath in a basin, if they couldn’t get a soak in the tub. Nor did most of them trouble to do more than wrap the thinnest of wrappers over themselves to go upstairs to their rooms.
Katie counted herself wise that she had taken her bath before supper, rather than after, and went straight up wishing that she was an Air Magician and could conjure a breeze, rather than Fire.
But then she remembered Jack’s lessons, and instead of trying to fight the heat, she embraced it, lying down on the still-made-up bed, and reminding herself of how good the heat would feel if it were winter, not summer.
The trick worked, and she fell asleep immediately.
On waking, she felt cool and refreshed, rather than hot and sticky as she had yesterday morning. There definitely was power in Jack’s tricks. And . . . maybe there was power in the other things he’d talked about yesterday. Usually she had at least one uncomfortable dream every night, if not a nightmare. Last night—nothing. She’d slept as easily as she used to as a child in the caravan.
Mrs. Baird was only just putting out the breakfast things—Katie had fibbed just a little about that—and Katie was happy to sit down to tea and fruit and a little toast. All that dancing was certainly giving her an appetite; she got up still feeling hungry, and started toward Lionel’s house certain that when she got there she could easily eat a second breakfast without thinking about it.
When she arrived, Jack let her in, and she and he proceeded to the dining room to smell the heavenly aroma of bacon wafting down the hall. Does anything smell as good as bacon? she thought. Still, she wouldn’t have wanted bacon or anything else heavy if she was going to be in the hot theater all day, but they would, presumably, be spending their time here, in Lionel’s cool little house, and the bacon and eggs and all the other lovely stuff that was waiting on the sideboard were so welcome that her stomach gave a little growl in anticipation.
Lionel was already eating; Jack had obviously gotten up from his breakfast to let her in. She helped herself and joined them. She had to admit that the male habit of eating in silence and devoting yourself to your food was a rather nice change from the twittering chorus that accompanied breakfast and supper at Mrs. Baird’s.
Only when everyone was satisfied and Jack and Lionel were sitting back and nursing cups of tea did anyone speak.
“Today will be a real day of magic lessons, Kate,” Lionel said. “We need to show you how to shield yourself, first of all, for if you are feeling very strong emotions, Fire shields will protect the Elementals from your feelings, as well as being able to prevent other magicians from finding you, and protecting you in part from attack.”
“Wait—” she said. “Prevent other magicians from finding me? Attack?”
“I told you that you don’t want to go down the wrong path, Miss Kate,” Jack replied. “There are those that will take your power if they can, and kill you if they can’t have it, for fear that one day you might come to kill them. That’s what happens when you go down the wrong path, you see. You start to look at everyone with power as either someone to take advantage of, or as an enemy.”
It flashed into her head that this was exactly how Dick viewed the world. Everyone he met was either to be used, done away with, or, if they were too strong, placated until he could find a way to get things out of them.
“So, your best defense is not to be seen. Let’s go down to the garden room, I’ll show you how to see Fire Magic, you might be able to see Air as well, and then we’ll show you how to make something out of your magic that will protect you and keep you from being seen.” Jack set aside his cup, stood up, and gestured to her to go along ahead of him.
The rest of the morning was spent in that surprisingly pleasant task. When Lionel described what this magical energy was supposed to look like, she had another revelation.
“It’s a sort of shimmer around everything alive, isn’t it?” she exclaimed. “And drifts of faint color in the air, like oil on water!”
Jack and Lionel exchanged a look. “You’ve seen this before?” Lionel asked.
“All the time when I was a child. I suppose I just stopped looking for it when we got into towns; it’s harder to see there. It’s hard to see anyway; easier to not look when it doesn’t really mean or do anything.” She sucked on her lower lip, furrowed her brows, and looked for the shimmer without being asked to. It felt for a moment as if something was fighting her, as if she was trying to open eyes that had been stuck shut, but then there was a sense of something unfolding—and she could see it again!
Jack smiled. “I can tell by your face you’ve got the trick again,” he said. “Now that you can see it, we can show you how to use it.”
He showed her how to gather it—to her disappointment, she could only see the red mist of Fire energy clearly—she could only manage a faint blue hint of Air, and nothing at all of Water and Earth. He showed her how to move it about, how to concentrate it, and just the beginnings of how to shape it. Two salamanders watched with silent interest, but neither moved nor interfered.
That was when Lionel decreed that they would break for luncheon and a rest; it was only when he did that Katie realized she was as tired as if she had been rehearsing all morning.
Luncheon had been set up on the sideboard, and rather than being the large, hot meal Lionel usually served, this
was a buffet of cold foods. She was grateful for that. She felt . . . oddly warm. Oddly, because she wasn’t uncomfortable, and it was a peculiar sort of warmth, not like a fever exactly, but as if she herself were containing fire.
And that wasn’t uncomfortable, either. Just . . . different.
After luncheon, Lionel decreed a rest, which relieved her. She wasn’t at all sure she could go back to work right away. As Lionel and Jack settled into their favorite chairs for a read—and probably, she thought shrewdly, a surreptitious nap—she went out into the overgrown garden with a pillow and a rug.
Throwing the rug down over the thick grass gave her a surprisingly comfortable place to lie down. She did so, and closed her eyes, relaxing and concentrating at the same time as Jack had shown her, trying to “see” what it was that was making her feel so odd. Eventually she drifted into a state of half-asleep, half-awake.
Drifting in a state that was not quite dreaming, slowly, a picture built up in her mind. Her veins, running with fire. Her body, every bit of it hazed with fire. It was as if there were two of her, both contained in her skin, one of flesh and one of fire.
It was . . . fascinating.
It was beautiful.
She could scarcely believe it was her, and yet, in this half-dreaming state, she understood that not only was it her, she was going to have to do something to dampen it all down again. She wasn’t uncomfortable now, but before too very long she would be. Then it would be painful. Then . . .
And yet she wasn’t frightened, because she understood that this was a consequence of handling all the energy all this morning. Somehow she had been accumulating some of it. So all she needed to do now was . . . let it go.
She did, and “watched” it wisp away from her, trailing off like the silk ribbon she danced with in a wind.
And that was when the salamanders reappeared, four of them this time, eagerly leaping to take bites of the power she was letting loose. Eating it!
Well, if they wanted to eat it—she used the tools that Jack had been teaching her to control the stream, shape it and slow it down, making a little pool of the Fire-energy so that they could gather around it and lap it up like cats. The more they drank, the brighter they got, until, by the time she was feeling comfortable in her skin again, they were as bright as red-hot coals.
They turned eyes on her that brimmed with gratitude—then they were gone, and she turned on her side and drifted into a nap of true sleep.
It didn’t last long, but it refreshed her tremendously. When she woke perhaps a half an hour later, and took the rug and pillow back into the house, Jack and Lionel were just rousing from their own rest, and looking ready to resume the lessons.
Before they could suggest a start, however, she sat down with them and described what she had felt and done. She couldn’t help but notice while she did so, that Lionel kept fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan, but Jack appeared—and she felt—perfectly comfortable.
Lionel listened attentively, but shook his head when she looked to him for an answer or approval. “Air magic doesn’t work that way,” he said. “It’s the hardest to hold of the four. It sounds to me as if you did the right thing—Jack?”
Jack took a moment in replying, his eyes thoughtful.
“Not what I would have done, but my father always said that if it works right, you can feel it,” Jack replied at last, and rewarded her with another of his slow smiles. “Clearly, this felt right to you. So I would say, well done, Miss Kate. I think it was right of you to feed the salamanders with the Fire Magic, too. It shows you are generous, and it shows you can be depended upon to give without asking anything in return. It will make them more generous with you, and more likely to trust you.”
“Do as you would be done by,” Lionel suggested. “It’s important for the Elemental creatures to be able to trust us. Us trusting them—well, you have know which can be trusted, first—but with Fire, that’s generally pretty obvious.”
Jack made a face. “The only bad ones I’ve ever seen were the ones that were under the control of a bad magician. But then I don’t think that Fire Elementals that had gone to the bad would go after a trained Fire Magician. You don’t attack what’s strongest against you, you attack the weak.”
Lionel nodded sagely; Katie bit her lip a little. So that was what they did? Go after the weak? Children . . . she thought of how as a child she had simply delighted in the pretty things around her that she now knew were Elementals. She would have been easy prey. Is that what happens, sometimes, when children sicken and die for no reason anyone can think of?
But Lionel didn’t elaborate, and neither did Jack. “Let’s see what happens when you continue to work with the Fire Magic, Kate,” Lionel said. “Jack will know if you are dangerously overburdening yourself, and we can stop and you can let it drain off from you before we go on.”
So, back to work they went. Now the men both taught her how to take that Fire energy, shape it further, and make it into a kind of shell that would both hide her from another magician and protect her from attack. They told her to imagine blowing a bubble out of it, then think of the bubble as becoming as hard as iron, and it worked! Jack even did some light “attacks” on it, and mostly it held! It was exciting to learn—and it was like dancing all three of her dances back-to-back, twice. By the time she had mastered it, she was ready to drop.
And she must have looked it, for Lionel ordered a halt.
“That’s enough for one day,” he declared. “Jack will help you practice these things for the rest of the week. You know how it is, you need to be sure of your first tools before you can move on to the more complicated actions. So before we go further, I want you to have mastered these things.”
“Yes, Lionel,” she said obediently, well aware, from her dancing, that she was just at the stage where she had worked out the steps, but she hadn’t gotten them sure in her memory, nor was she doing them at anything like full speed.
The sun was westering now. Not that it was really possible to tell that from this house so much—just that everything was shadowed, and the air here was fractionally cooler as the house moved completely into the protection of the shadows of those around it. The birds in the backyard woke up and got a bit livelier, splashing about in the birdbath. “I,” Lionel then proclaimed, “am going to my library to see if there is anything in my books about Fire Magic. It’s mostly tomes about Air, but one never knows.”
Lionel got to his feet and retreated into the depths of his house, making scarcely a sound—Katie had noticed before this that he walked so lightly it was easy for him to slip up on a person even when he wasn’t trying to be secretive. She had no idea where his library could be; so far all she had seen of the house were the garden room, the drawing room, the dining room and the hall. She marveled a little at one person having all this space to himself—after living in a caravan with two other people most of her life, even her little room in the boarding house felt huge. What did one person do with all this room?
Well, collect things in it, obviously. Like books. . . .
But his leaving left her alone with Jack . . .
There was silence between them, and she wondered what he was going to say. She didn’t think she was misreading him. He found her interesting, and not in a sisterly way. And . . . he was so completely unlike Dick, that sort of regard didn’t bother her. In fact . . . in fact she liked it. And she rather thought she’d like to have more of it. He fidgeted in his chair. Finally, he spoke. “Miss Kate—”
She interrupted him. “You were calling me just plain ‘Kate.’ I’d rather you did that, or Katie.” She smiled encouragingly at him. “After all, I thought we were at least friends.” She hoped she wasn’t being too forward. Traveler girls didn’t flirt about with boys; a boy might fancy her, but he’d never come to her directly, he’d go his Da, then the two Das would get together and maybe a wedding
would be arranged. That was why she hadn’t really fought what Andy Ball wanted for her—he was the nearest thing to a father she had at that point, and what other choice did she have, unprotected by family, and more importantly, her real father? She could have lost her good name without even doing anything, and then what would become of her?
Country girls weren’t like that—to Travelers, anyone who wasn’t a Traveler was “country” or sometimes “house folk.” Country girls flirted with boys; she’d seen them, partly envious and partly aghast, until after being in the circus she had more or less gotten used to how country people were, and how some of them didn’t seem to care about their good names. So maybe he was used to that? If anything, the music hall, the chorus girls, and even some of the acts were more casual about going together than the circus folks.
But she didn’t want casual; she wanted something better. How did you manage that?
He had the most peculiar expression on his face, but it wasn’t negative—it was as if a thousand thoughts were going through his head at once, and he was rapidly making up his mind about something.
“Katie, I have something to confess to you,” he said, after a long pause, a pause during which her heart began to pound, fearing he was going to say something that would dry up all her budding hopes. “Miss Peggy told Lionel all about your . . . situation . . . after you asked her advice. After all, you didn’t ask her to keep it secret, and she thought we should know about it. We’d been putting our heads together, trying to work out how to get you more work and more money, when this Russian dancer affair dropped in everyone’s lap.”
Now it was her turn to have a thousand thoughts rushing through her mind. She was a little—only a little—angry at Miss Peggy for running off to Lionel. But Jack was right, she hadn’t sworn Miss Peggy to secrecy. Lionel was her employer, and Miss Peggy might well have thought he had every right to know. Especially if by some horrific chance Dick actually turned up. . . .
The mere idea made her throat grow tight and her heart pound harder than before.
Steadfast Page 20
