Steadfast

by Mercedes Lackey

  . . . .for Jack . . .

  But she shuddered to think what would happen if Jack ever came here. He’d die, of course. He’d die, because how could a one-legged man stand up against Dick—an able-bodied, normal man couldn’t stand up against Dick, and yet she knew he would try to defend her and take her away. She couldn’t allow him to do that, even though it would free her from Dick. . . .

  She’d be free, because Dick would be slapped in gaol and hung.

  This wouldn’t be the sort of thing where it was just one Traveler killing another, or one lowly circus tramp murdering another of his kind. Dick was nothing more than a circus strongman, and Jack was a respectable man with a respectable job. If it came to killing, the constables wouldn’t just ignore it the way they did Traveler killings, and Dick would hang for murder.

  Dick might be cunning, but he was under the impression that he could do anything he liked to keep her, even murder, because she was his property. Before Katie had met Lionel and Jack, she had thought the same. After all, the constables didn’t care when lowly sorts like circus folks did each other in. So far as they were concerned, one bit of trash had got rid of another bit of trash, which was one bit of trash less to watch out for.

  Now she knew what Dick did not—that if he did harm Jack over her, it wouldn’t matter to respectable society that he’d done it to keep her. Respectable society would howl for his blood, and get it.

  But Jack would still be dead, so what would it matter that she was free?

  Her only hope lay in keeping him happy—manage to keep him too drunk to get into a rage and beat her, if possible—and endure. Just as she would not soil the innocence of her Fire Elementals by letting them defend her, she would not let Jack be killed by letting him defend her. The two were more nearly the same thing than she had realized before this moment.

  She loved them both. She would not let either of them sacrifice themselves for her.

  And so, for their sake, she would only concentrate on keeping Dick happy, and bend all the magic she knew to one single wish, a wish that applied to Elementals and Jack alike.

  Stay away . . . stay away . . . stay away.

  • • •

  Jack was sitting at the dining table, looking like hell, and no longer staring into a candle. “Did you learn anything?” Lionel asked.

  Jack shook his head. “They can’t get near her, she’s keeping them away, to protect them I assume, and I’m too angry to scry.” He didn’t have to say who “they” were; the Fire Elementals, of course. So Katie was keeping the Elementals from coming to her aid by keeping them away from her.

  As for Jack, he was far more than just angry, of course, but Lionel let that pass. “I have a bit of good news. The blackguard can be moved by money, and presumably, by what he regards as a life of luxury as supplied by the money Katie earns. He’s cunning enough to have discovered what she does. He’s already worked out that he doesn’t need to lift a finger, and can live off her. So he’s not at all eager for Katie to lose her positions at the hall. I’ve made it very clear that if she doesn’t turn up on time, I’ll see she’s sacked immediately, and he has no idea that Charlie would move heaven and earth to keep her dancing act. She’ll be at rehearsal in the morning at the usual time.”

  Jack’s expression eased the least little bit. “That’s something, anyway,” he murmured.

  “It’s more than something. It’s suggested a way to handle him,” Lionel replied. The idea had come to him as soon as he realized how fundamentally lazy and greedy the circus strongman was. “But that will depend on us finding one of the nobby Masters who’s deep enough in clover that buying the wretch off for the sake of gaining a Fire Mage is worth the expense.” It had happened before that one of the elite had “rescued” someone from a dismal life—although it had generally been someone that one of the Masters had sent off to university, or taken out of an orphanage, or something of the sort. He’d never heard of any case like this one. Nevertheless . . . what was the harm in asking? The worst that would happen would be that his plea would be politely ignored. That was how the toffs were. If they didn’t like something you’d asked, they’d pretend you never asked it. “It’d have to be a right royal buy-off too; enough to ship him off to the colonies, or some such, besides setting the swine up for life. That won’t come cheap.”

  “Still . . . it’s a good option.” Jack drummed his fingers on the table. “I might know one who’d take an interest. And it might be worth me writing to Almsley directly. I’ve worked with him, and he was less . . . stuffy than most of the upper crust.”

  “Hmm. And we could remind him of what might happen if the girl gets desperate enough and does unleash her Elementals.” Lionel sighed at that. He trusted Katie. He knew she was a good girl. But how much torture could you expect someone to endure before their resolve broke and they called in everything they could think of to save them from an intolerable situation? “It’s damned hot enough, and the buildings hereabouts are tinder-dry . . .”

  Jack shuddered. He didn’t have to hear anything else to know what could happen. As they had both taken great pains to drill into her, Fire was the most emotional of Elements, was the most prone to losing control, and the most prone to allowing emotion to take it over.

  “I’ll write to Lord Almsley,” he said. “You write Alderscroft. But meanwhile—”

  “I thought of another thing we might do, but it’s risky,” Lionel warned. “The man’s already a drunkard. We could make sure he stays that way.” This, too, had occurred to him once he was out of Dick Langford’s presence. There was some danger in this, for Katie. It would depend on what kind of a drunk the strongman was. If he was an angry drunk, it would make things worse for her, unless she could get him to the point where he was an unconscious drunk, and quickly.

  “It might not work,” Jack warned him. “I knew men who you couldn’t tell from sober when they were dead drunk. They get used to it. The only difference between them drunk and sober was that sober they were nastier and meaner than drunk.” He stroked his moustache thoughtfully. “I’ve heard of men that were nicer sober than drunk, too. If he’s a mean drunk, that would be bad for Katie.”

  It seemed they were both thinking the same way.

  Lionel shrugged. “I think it’s worth trying. We can arrange for deliveries of Blue Ruin to the door. He might drink himself to death and save us all a great deal of expense and worry.” Gin was the curse of the lower classes as well as the tipple of choice (with tonic) for the upper. Cheap gin got you drunk faster and for less money than almost anything other than home-brewed beer. Cheap gin was also frequently adulterated, or distilled in apparatus that used lead pipes. It was hard to drink so much beer that it sent a man into a sodden coma; it was easy to do so with cheap gin. So cheap gin could, and frequently did, kill.

  “He might well cooperate by drinking himself to death, and gin is the way to do it, if it can be done.” Jack nodded.

  They both stared at each other. “I can’t think of anything else at the moment,” Lionel confessed, after a long pause.

  Jack sighed. “All right, then. We’ll write our letters. I’ll tell you where to find the worst gut-rotting gin in Brighton, and you arrange for a jeroboam of it to turn up at Katie’s every couple of days. If he doesn’t drink himself to death, maybe he’ll be poisoned by it.”

  “Keep at your Elementals,” Lionel urged. “They might still be of some use.” He already knew his would not; although the sylphs made excellent spies when they chose to do so, they flatly refused to go near the strongman. Dick Langford evidently frightened them as much as he terrorized his wife.

  He’s so foul he frightens creatures he can’t even see . . .

  He wondered if there was anything that could be made of that.

  Probably not. Except that it would make an excellent line in that letter to Lord Alderscroft.


  He went to the desk and brought back pens, ink, and paper for the both of them. “Soon begun, soonest done,” he said, and set to work.

  • • •

  Dick woke, splashed some water over himself, drank the entire pot of strong tea Katie had made for him, ate the fried ham and the tinned mushy peas she’d made for him—then went to the carpetbag he’d brought with him and left in the corner of the cottage, a bag she had not dared to touch. He stripped down naked as she averted her eyes, oiled his hair with his favorite violet oil, and began to put on his “best” clothing.

  If he hadn’t been so big and muscled, he would have looked ridiculous in it. Blue trousers, green shirt, red braces, a bright red scarf around his neck—he was inordinately fond of the peacock outfit, and anyone else wearing it would have found himself the butt of jokes and mockery.

  But of course, no one was going to laugh at anyone the size and strength of Dick Langford.

  Or if they did, they were soon going to regret it. He’d broken plenty of noses over this clothing, and blacked plenty of eyes. No one had ever laughed at him for wearing this twice.

  “Oi’m goin’ out,” he announced, scooping some of the money from the dresser into his pocket. “Yer stayin’ ’ere, yeah?”

  “Yes Dick,” she whispered, even though somewhere inside her a little voice was screaming, Now’s your chance! Run!

  But she knew what would happen if she did. Dick was not threatening idly to break Lionel’s back.

  There were stories all over Andy Ball’s circus of how Dick had broken necks, backs and even killed men who’d offended him, but had been so clever about it he was never brought before the law. Plenty of those men had been in rival shows, or shows Andy had wanted to buy out.

  But others had been troublemakers or local bullies among the country-folk; bullies who’d taken one look at Dick and decided to challenge him in some way or other.

  This hadn’t troubled the circus folk of Andy Ball’s establishment; they’d rather taken it as a mark of pride, that Dick would, in a way, avenge them for the often shabby treatment they got at the hands of country-folk, who treated them only slightly better than they treated Travelers. Katie didn’t doubt that at least some of the stories were true, because there were villages that the circus would go right around and never stop, and why would Andy Ball ever do that, foregoing a chance at a profit, unless there was a very good reason for it?

  So no. She dared not run. For the same reason that she would not allow Jack to come here and challenge Dick, she would not run and put Lionel, Suzie, and who knew who else at risk. Even though Dick would be caught and hang for it and she would be free. She dared only bend her head and whisper, meekly, “Yes, Dick.”

  “Oi’m gonna hev mesel’ a good toime, yeah?” He sneered at her. “None o’ yer tea an’ cakes. Oi want that Blue Ruin on the table waitin’, an’ food fit fer a man. An’ you be up i’ that loft th’ minute ye hears me, an’ not a peep outa ye. Oi’ll be beck i’ an hour. Mebbe less.”

  She almost gaped at him. He couldn’t possibly mean what she thought he meant. Surely what he intended was to go find someone to bring back to drink with?

  But as the church clock struck nine, and she put the cold ham, cheese, bread and gin on the table, she heard him at the door. And the unmistakable giggles of not one, but two women.

  She had thought her humiliation was at its nadir. As she scuttled up the ladder and hid in the loft, and Dick led two of the cheapest floozies she had ever seen into the little cottage she had once considered her shelter, she discovered that, when it came to Dick, once again she was wrong.

  14

  THIS might be the most important letter he had ever written in his life, and Jack had written and torn up a dozen different versions. He was sweating and swearing with the effort, had to stop himself a dozen times from chewing on the end of Lionel’s expensive patent pen, and even got up to pace the floor once or twice. Strong tea didn’t help. Tea heavy with milk didn’t help. Green tea didn’t help, and that was his court of last resort for thinking. Finally, though, he thought he had one that would pass muster, and silently handed it over to Lionel to read when they had finished supper—a supper neither of them had much appetite for.

  He waited with his heart in his mouth. Lionel was much better educated than he was. Lionel had even gone to public school before throwing over the life of a private secretary to apprentice himself to an illusionist—fortunately both of his masters, the one he discarded and the one he chose, were also Elemental Mages, so they were far more understanding than “ordinary” men would have been. But he hadn’t lost his love for letters, nor his knack with words when he traded the one master for another.

  Lionel’s eyebrow rose once or twice, but he handed it back to Jack without commenting during the reading of it.

  “Well?” Jack demanded, completely unsure whether this meant Lionel approved of the letter or hated it.

  A cat fight under one of the windows barely got Jack’s attention, he was so focused on Lionel.

  “I’m not Lord Almsley, but that letter would probably move me,” the magician said. He pulled at his lower lip a little. “You’re taking a risk admitting you are in love with the girl, though. Some men might see that as a suspect motive. They might wonder how much of the story of the brutish husband was truth and how much was you trying to come up with an excuse to get her away.”

  “My father worked more than once with the current Lord’s father,” Jack explained. “I was in my teens and I met the current and previous Lord Almsley, though young Peter was barely out of the nursery at the time. The previous Lord not only did not criticize my father for marrying a girl with no magic, he said it was a healthy thing, and that all that mattered was that they were happy. If the son is anything like the father, and I think he is, that’s not a risk, it’s a point in my favor.”

  “I defer to your judgment,” Lionel told him. He carefully folded the sheets, and got up and obtained two envelopes. He wrote something on both—the second address was longer than the first one. He put Jack’s letter in the first envelope, sealed it, then put his letter and Jack’s in the second. “I’ll post these in the morning; I’ll enclose yours in mine and ask Alderscroft to send it on.” He glanced at the clock on the mantle. “Will you need something to help you sleep?”

  “Brandy will probably—” before he could protest, Lionel had gone to the sideboard, poured him a double, and taken one himself. The magician brought both glasses back to the table and shoved one across to Jack. “For God’s sake, Lionel, I have my own!”

  “And it’s nothing like as good as mine,” Lionel sniffed his own drink. “If you are going to be unhappy, never drink anything but the best. At least you’ll be unhappy with style. Besides, if you leave right after you finish it, this won’t hit you till you’re on your own doorstep, and then if you find you still can’t sleep, you can try a second dose of your own tipple.”

  Jack had to acknowledge the truth of that. He drank Lionel’s excellent brandy with gloomy appreciation, took his leave of his friend, and Lionel escorted him as far as the door before retreating into his own house for the night.

  There was one distinct advantage to being just a trifle tipsy on the walk home; his damned stump didn’t hurt as badly as it usually did. And he was no more unsteady than usual. Walking on stone, like the cobbled pavement, was hard. If he wasn’t careful, and sometimes if he was, the peg leg slipped off the slightly domed surface of the cobblestone he set it on and slid into the join with the next stone, setting him off-balance and jarring his whole body.

  It was quiet around his flat when he got there, which was good. He lived in a neighborhood that seemed to have a lot of young bachelors in it, and they were not always the industrious, ambitious clerks he would have preferred as neighbors, the sort of young men who wanted to rise in their firms and went to bed at a sober hour. In fact,
for a few of them, he suspected “sober” was a condition they were altogether unfamiliar with.

  But he still wasn’t able to sleep. He lay there in the dark with the window open to the night air and his thoughts running around in circles, his muscles tense with anxiety, and his mind always coming back to the same place he had left.

  His Katie was in danger. At this very moment, she was definitely frightened, and possibly hurt. And yet there was nothing he could do at this moment to help her.

  He had to get her away from that brute. He had to, in the same way that he had to eat, had to breathe.

  But that brute had every right under the law to do what he wanted to with her. He could beat her, starve her, scream at her, steal her money, even make her work as a whore if he chose. The only thing he couldn’t do was kill her. That brute had every right under the law, because under the law she was his property. And there was nothing Jack could do about that.

  Finally as he thought, angrily, for the hundredth time, the law is an ass, something unexpected occurred to him.

  Suddenly, now he saw what the Suffragettes were on about.

  He’d never been particularly in sympathy with the Suffragettes—he’d always considered they were making a great deal of fuss over nothing—until now.

  Couldn’t women already do pretty much what they wanted to? That was the irritated thought that had always crossed his mind when he was encountering one of their marches. Why should they be making such a lot of fuss? Why, look at women like Peggy! They had the best of it. So he had thought, anyway, until Peggy had told him of the three husbands she’d chucked over at immense expense and difficulty—the drunkard, the libertine and the brute. But still, she had gotten rid of them, right?

  But now . . . now his Katie was in the hands of a brute, and she couldn’t be rid of him, because she hadn’t put her money where he couldn’t get at it, and he’d threatened her friends if she tried to chuck him. And the law was going to let him do that. Because even if she reported the threat to the police, all he had to do was laugh and say something like “There, you see, women can’t take a joke,” and it would all be brushed under the carpet—and probably Katie would get a lecture about making false claims to the police.