She took the opportunity of his distraction to give him a once-over. She decided his good looks only made him more annoying. In her anger, she started to turn the crank of the wrenching instrument, possibly a little more vigorously than usual.
At least if he’d been a poor creature that Lord White had taken pity on, all brains but hopeless in society, she could’ve felt bad for him. But this guy with the fancy accent and perfectly square jaw, dark hair that fell just so over his forehead as he pried the lid of the crate up, in a suit clearly made on Savile Row . . . , well, it was obvious he’d never wanted for anything. He didn’t need such an incredible opportunity as being Lord White’s assistant.
There was nothing to feel for such a person but contempt.
With a final grunt from him, the lid of the crate popped off its nails and landed to the side in a loud crash. The young man looked at her with a victorious grin.
“I’m Andrew Harris, by the way,” he said, as if the grand accomplishment of opening a box was worthy of adding his signature to.
Cora raised an eyebrow and stopped turning the crank on the wrenching instrument. Then, without breaking eye contact with those stupidly clear blue eyes of his, she slid the now-charged flat piece of metal under the lid of her crate. The lid exploded off the box almost instantly, flew high, and landed several feet away in two pieces.
Andrew Harris’s mouth fell open.
“Cora Bell,” she said. “And you’ve stolen my job.”
4
Nellie Harrison
AND THEN THERE was an explosion.
“Bloody hell!” Nellie jumped back and started to laugh as the room filled with smoke. “Ha! That was . . . perfect . . .” Trying to find the window by sweeping her arms through the thick haze, she made her way to the far wall. She fell against the frame and pushed hard on the dusty surface. The smoke quickly vanished through the open window and into the sky above the bustling square.
Nellie sighed in relief and leaned back against the wall. She stared at the small tin on the floor before her, its innards black as pitch.
That’d never happened before.
“Did you see that flash, Sherry?” She grinned at the parrot, who was sitting in her cage looking annoyed. “Don’t give me that look. I just thought . . .”
She’d just thought that maybe she’d give extra flash to the flashcube, and it had worked, too! Wait till they did it at the show tonight. But obviously, in this small space things got a little smoky. Though there was something to that . . . so much smoke in a small place could be a perfect screen for something.
“Bloody hell!” squawked the parrot.
“Oh, come on.” Nellie crossed the room and freed the bird, who flew instantly to her shoulder and gave her ear an affectionate nip. Nellie laughed again. “You should try holdin’ a grudge a wee bit longer. You don’t fool anyone.” She scratched under the parrot’s chin, and the bird purred like a cat.
“Pretty Polly,” said Nellie softly with a grin. Scheherazade was a gorgeous creature with her red, yellow, and blue feathers, and also incredibly bright. She’d learned the cat-purring trick when they’d been shopping and Nellie had stopped to scratch a stray. All it took was one meeting and Scheherazade could imitate anyone or anything. And she always seemed to use her tricks at exactly the right moment. In fact, the timing of her outbursts was so often precisely appropriate that Nellie was pretty sure the bird knew what she was doing.
If anyone understood Scheherazade, it was Nellie. Yes, it had been the Magician who had rescued the bird from a traveling circus in his homeland and brought her to London with him. But when, several weeks later, he rescued Nellie as well, the bird and the blonde had taken an instant liking to each other. Possibly because they’d gone through a lot of the same troubles. Possibly because they were both gorgeous and knew it. Whatever the reason, the two of them just had this instant bond.
“We’d better clear up before Raheem sees.” She wasn’t supposed to be playing around with the flashcubes. She was supposed to be gathering all the props together for the show tonight and choosing which outfit to wear.
Nellie packed the flashcube back in its case with the others and grabbed the bottomless table and the large cage holding Arsalan and Esta—two of the most stuck-up rabbits she’d ever met. If they’d been back in Ireland, they’d be dinner, not celebrities.
After she’d placed everything in a pile by the door, Nellie walked over to her costume trunk and opened it. She took a moment to gaze at its contents. She really did have some beautiful outfits. And why shouldn’t she? Wasn’t that why the Magician hired her in the first place? To dazzle? Okay, yes, like Scheherazade, there was more to her than just her “feathers.” The Magician had taught her how to escape any bond, how to work every trick, how to bend into impossible shapes inside tiny boxes. But really, Nellie knew that her biggest selling point was her looks.
Men came to the shows to see the Great Raheem, of course, but they also came to see her: the hot young blond assistant who sparkled in the footlights. She knew it because they told her as much. They also gave her presents. That was the good part. The bad part was they’d get grabby. That part was disgusting.
Not that she hadn’t encouraged male attention in the past, flirted her way to the position of top performer back at the burlesque house at such a young age (okay, she was only sixteen and a bit now, still fifteen felt so long ago to her). But she was also damn proud that she’d never done more than flirt. So many of the other girls had. She didn’t blame them—some weren’t quite as good as she was at making the older men think that, in time, they’d be rewarded for being nice to her. And then never actually rewarding them.
A tease. That was her reputation. But she couldn’t help how she looked, could she? That was her ma and da’s fault. Two good-looking people who never should have hooked up in the first place, hooking up. “I’d wanted to get rid of you,” her ma had told her when she was six. “But yer da, God bless ’im, thought you’d be the prettiest babe, and so here ya are. And there he went. And yer the prettiest burden there ever was.”
A pretty burden.
She’d tried to be less of one by making herself as helpful as possible. Getting top billing at the burlesque house was just part of showing that she could be useful, earn her keep. Pay the doctors when her ma took ill. She’d passed on before Nellie started making any real money, though, before the Magician had come into the picture a year later. Probably for the best, really. Ma had never trusted anyone from the “dark races.”
Which Nellie found a little funny to think of now, as the Magician had been the kindest man she’d ever known.
Wow, talk about a trip down memory lane. Nellie let her mind return to the task at hand and reached into the trunk. She pulled out her pink and green outfits and laid them out on the bed.
“Which one for tonight, Sherry?”
Scheherazade ruffled her feathers at the question, so Nellie decided to be more specific. “Pink?” She pointed to the first outfit. “Or green?”
Scheherazade thought about this, examined both outfits carefully, and then finally, with a squawk, said, “Green!”
Nellie nodded. “I agree. Thanks, Sherry.”
She put the pink costume back in the trunk and gathered the accessories to her green one, including the fabulous peacock feather she wore in her hair. She carefully packed it all into the other trunk with the props and sighed contentedly. Then, with Scheherazade still on her shoulder, she went to find the Magician.
5
And Introducing the Great Raheem
“I THINK THAT’S Lord White just stepping out of the Red Veil.”
Nellie noticed the silhouetted figure of the Magician standing over at his window as she entered the room.
“What?” Nellie skipped across the room and was at the Magician’s side in less than a moment, Scheherazade flying to the top of one of the bedposts. Nellie peered through the dusty window at the overcrowded square below. “Look at that. So it is! Ha!
” She turned and looked wide-eyed at the Magician, who shook his head at her with a slight smile. Nellie rolled her eyes. “You pretend I’m the one who gets all bothered by gossip, but aren’t you the one who called me over?”
“Are you calling me a hypocrite?” asked the Magician. His low, resonant voice was tinged with humor, as well as his usual light accent. So light he probably could have gotten rid of it, but Nellie was pretty sure he kept it in order to maintain his whole exotic-persona thing. Hey, it’d worked on her, that’s for sure.
“’Course I am.” She grinned, flattening her tongue between her teeth as she always did when she was feeling a bit playful.
“Well, you would be correct.” His smile grew and he turned back to the window. “How fascinating. I never would have thought it of him.”
“It’s them quiet types that you’ve got to watch out for. Look at him. He’s in a bad way.”
“Or a very, very good way.” The Magician glanced at Nellie out of the corner of his eye, and she returned the look. Then they both started laughing.
“Come, we’ll go over the checklist,” said the Magician, turning from the window and crossing the room toward his desk. Nellie glanced one last time at Lord White. He and the girl who was propping him up had managed to make their way out beyond the low arch that led toward the high street, where she assumed they’d hail a cab. Looking at how well they were dressed, she imagined it might even be one of those new expensive steam cabs. Nellie sighed wistfully.
“Are you sighing wistfully?” asked the Magician. He was seated now, looking over some papers. With a flick of his wrist, the sleeve of his intricately embroidered robe slid down his arm, and he picked up a pen.
“I’d love to ride in a steam cab,” replied Nellie, crossing to the front of his bed and sitting at the foot.
“We don’t need a steam cab; we have our wagon. A cab could never handle all the equipment.”
“I know.”
The Magician glanced up at her. “I had no idea.”
“It don’t matter much.”
“I’ll tell you what: Tonight, after the performance, you shall return home in a cab.”
“Don’t be silly . . . ,” Nellie said with a laugh.
“No arguments. It’s done. Now, have you collected everything? The ordeal over choosing what to wear is over?”
Nellie nodded. She stood up and walked over to where he was sitting. Then she bent over and grabbed him in a big bear hug.
“It’s just a cab,” he wheezed as the air was squashed out of him.
“Thank you all the same,” she replied.
He waved off her gratitude as he always did, and as they started going through the checklist, she returned to the bed, which was a much fancier version of the one she slept in.
Everything about the Magician’s room was, in general, a fancier version of hers. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to help decorate her room. He’d given her some silks from his native Persia to use, and she had tried her best, hanging them from the ceiling and tacking them up to the wall, creating a sort of swath across the room. But she had none of his wall hangings, his rugs from India, his ornamental lamps from the Far East. Nor did she have the atmospheric haze that always lingered in the air of his room.
The Magician had exotic tastes and exquisite style, and the means to support both, which made it all the more surprising to some that he and Nellie lived in the rough part of the city that they did. But it made sense, once you got to know him. Part of the reason was that the square was near the docks, where the Magician could pick up his shipments, which arrived weekly. It also kept them pretty well hidden from any of the Magician’s competitors.
But Nellie knew the biggest reason they lived there was that the Magician had a fantastic relationship with his fellow immigrants in the neighborhood and felt a huge sense of responsibility to them. Nellie didn’t know why, but shortly after they’d moved in, the people from the area had begun coming to him with issues that needed to be resolved. He’d become like a judge to them, listening to debates and helping resolve disputes between neighbors. He’d also become the man to go to when you needed something a little unusual. Like maybe if you were looking for some infinity vines from Patagonia, or jewel-encrusted cockroaches from Tanzania, he could get them for you. And he never asked for anything in return. He was marvelous like that.
He really just wanted to help. This was his little kingdom, and he was determined to protect it. Nellie thought it was awfully sweet of him.
At last, they were done with the checklist. As usual she hadn’t forgotten a thing.
She thought back to the first time the Magician had complimented her on the quality of her mind. The first man, like ever, to have done that. It had been after one of their first rehearsals. She’d been utterly terrified. After all, this dark older man had approached her, offering her a job, and she’d accepted, just like that, not knowing exactly what he expected of her. She’d seen his magic show, sure. Everyone had. He’d been the act-one closer at the burlesque house for a week at that point. A prized position. Almost as important as her act-two closer.
But she’d never seen the inside of the tricks before. The first time he showed her how the “sawing the lady in half” trick really worked, she’d been kind of disappointed. It was so straightforward, no magic at all. Just a girl bent up in a box and a pair of fake legs sticking out. And yet there was still something mystical about Raheem, even though he was always so unpretentious, never claiming he was anything other than an illusionist. Maybe it was how he looked. Maybe it was how he spoke. Maybe back in Persia, where everyone looked like that, he was nothing special and he was only something unique here in London.
Still.
So he’d shown her a card trick, and she’d pointed out that it was impossible for him to be holding the seven of clubs because she’d seen it fly by. He asked her what else she’d seen, and she counted off all the cards back to him. This is what led him to create the memory trick that she performed. Quite the crowd-pleaser. Especially as it meant that one of the men from the audience got to come up onstage and interact with her.
Of course, there was a downside to having the mind she did. It meant, first of all, that she remembered everything. And if people weren’t accurate in recalling a story or something, it would seriously irk her. It also meant that the Magician had to do his hypnotizing trick on someone else. Most of what they did was just pretend, but he actually could mesmerize people. He’d tried to do it to Nellie, but he needed a mind that was willing, open. Not already full of facts and figures.
Yeah, her head was a very busy place.
Her brain could also distract her from what was going on around her—like now for example. The Magician had left and she was alone in his room.
Shite.
She crossed the hall to her room, where she saw him picking up cases to put into the wagon.
“No, let me!” she insisted.
She knew the Magician always hated when she insisted, but she wouldn’t stop. Even though he’d just turned forty, he was still very strong. He kept fit through a strange set of exercises he called “yoga,” during the performance of which he’d bend himself into weird shapes. Nellie had tried it a few times, but she just couldn’t get into it. She was lucky that she was naturally flexible. After all, some of the positions she had to assume in the boxes, especially for the “sawing the girl in half” trick, were pretty twisty.
But Nellie didn’t care how strong he was. She was constantly trying to prove he’d made the right choice in choosing her as his assistant. She would not be a pretty burden, even if that meant lugging around trunks twice her size.
“Okay,” she said, when it was clear the Magician was not about to let her haul everything down to their wagon on her own. “How about I help you?”
She was awfully helpful.
6
An Unexpected Guest
THEY ALWAYS HAD dinner together. It was very civilized, sitting at the small table in th
e kitchen, a full place setting for each of them. The Magician had insisted on this from the start. It was how he always ate, even if he was alone. Dining was as much of an art as anything else. And it needed to be appreciated like anything else.
The Magician was what Nellie called totally obsessed with art. He collected everything. Paintings, sculptures, books. They went to plays all the time. Concerts. Even lectures, which bored Nellie out of her mind. He always forced her to come along to these events, saying, “You will learn to appreciate these things.”
Not likely . . . how was she supposed to find some fat guy singing with a superhigh voice romantic? He looked ridiculous.
On top of everything else, the Magician was an amazing chef. This was a good thing, because Nellie stank at cooking.
The Magician could do anything, it seemed to her. How this was possible she wasn’t exactly sure. She knew a bit of his history, but he always left stuff out when he spoke of it. Even when she pointed out that he had left stuff out. She knew he’d been poor. It was something he’d told her so that she could relate to him.
At first, they’d seemed so different from each other. She didn’t know what to say to him, how to speak to him. Finally, he started to share his stories from back in Persia: how he grew up with nothing, but had been taught that hard work would get him where he wanted to go; how he’d watched his first magic show; how he’d spent many long hours teaching himself the tricks.
He hadn’t been the Great Raheem in his homeland. He was just a young man performing little shows on street corners. One day, he volunteered to perform outside the tent of a passing circus, and it was there that he’d been spotted by the princess who had come to see the show. Nellie always thought a great love affair had happened then, but the Magician never said anything about that. Only that he was hired as a kind of court jester, a court illusionist, she supposed, performing his magic at royal balls and banquets. . . .
The Friday Society Page 3
