Reserved for the Cat (33 page)

“Now,” Ninette continued thoughtfully, “it
might
barely be possible that this is someone of great importance masquerading behind an unknown name.”

“What?” Ailse gasped. “The Prince? Prince Edward? But—”

“But I think it highly unlikely.” Ninette serenely counted off the reasons on her fingers. “First, the royal yacht is nowhere to be seen, nor the royal car on the rails here. Second, Prince Edward was reported by the papers yesterday to be in Monte Carlo. Thirdly, should the prince seek to hide behind an unknown name it would be the name of one of his gentlemen, and he would
not
send a plain-jacketed manservant with dusty shoes to deliver the note. And what is more, anyone he sent would stay for an answer, because as royalty knows, the answer might be ‘no,’ and it would not do for a Prince to be loitering even in a private room of a common chophouse.”

Ailse breathed a sigh, half of relief, half of regret.

“And I do not intend to answer the invitation of someone who clearly regards himself as no less than royalty who is, in fact
not
royalty.” She turned to the dressing room mirror. “Particularly not when we have so much work to do. If this man had even the faintest idea of what my life is like, he would issue an invitation for a late supper, after the performance, not an afternoon tea. Toss it away, Ailse.”

“We are shooting today, Mademoiselle,” Ailse said firmly.

“I know. Nigel is sending his automobile in an hour. And in the meanwhile, I intend to practice the solo from
Giselle
.” Monsieur Ciccolini had the choreography from that ballet memorized so well that he probably could have taught it had he been blinded, and although Ninette was hardly performing the classical repertoire anymore, she intended to continue to learn it. One never knew. Perhaps, one day, if only to indulge her, Nigel would stage a real ballet. She felt faintly guilty about claiming to be a ballerina, and yet never actually doing real ballet.

With Ailse keeping careful track of time, she had just enough time to leave the studio garbed in a most peculiar costume and jump into the back of the auto before the driver became impatient.

“Hoy!” Jonathon said, looking at her in astonishment. “I thought I was taking Mademoiselle Ninette to shoot!”

“So you are,” Ninette replied, pushing back the boy’s cap on her head. “And this is a much more practical costume for shooting than any gown I own.”

She had put her hair up in the ballerina’s bun, and clapped a tweed cap, purchased from a shop that sold boy’s hats, over the top of it. She wore a shirt, rather than a blouse, of very severe cut; this had been purchased from a shop that sold the sort of things that ladies who typed wore to their offices. There were no lace cuffs or frou-frous to get in the way. On her legs, Ninette wore the contraption known as a “bloomer skirt”; admittedly, she could have gotten the sort of divided skirt some ladies wore to ride or play tennis in, but from what she understood, there was going to be a great deal of clambering over rocks, and she wanted her legs as free of encumbrance as she could manage. “I wish I could have gotten boy’s trousers or even knickers to fit me,” she said wistfully. “But on such short notice, it wasn’t possible.”

She was scarcely embarrassed, seeing as she had worn far, far less onstage for a very long time now. Jonathon’s lips quirked in a ghost of a smile.

“Allow me to congratulate you on your good sense, mademoiselle,” he said. “There are females who would have expected me to carry them to where we are going to go.”

Ninette sniffed scornfully. “Then you are accustomed to dealing with females who are fools,” she said. “Nigel said it would be a wild part of the coast; I took him at his word, and I dressed to suit. You and Ailse are doing me the favor of teaching me this. It would be sad if I were to play the fainting maiden now.”

Jonathon chuckled, then turned his attention to putting the automobile in motion and sending it down the street.

The auto trundled its way parallel to the ocean, passing the boardwalk, the beaches with their holiday families and bathing machines, all the little businesses that catered to the enterprise of sea-bathing and beach-picnicking. It was a rare day, without a cloud in the sky and without any prospect of rain. The famous electric lights that had made Blackpool a household name at the turn of the century were festooned everywhere. They passed the famous Tower, and Ninette made a private vow that when this was over, she was going to see all of these things she was missing. The Tower, the Winter Gardens, the boardwalk, the illuminations, the Opera House and all of the other theaters that Nigel competed with. The road narrowed and became more primitive, the ride a bit rougher as the macadam turned to gravel, and the beach on their left turned to rock flats.

Finally, at a place where the worn grass showed that other people had left vehicles, Jonathon turned the auto off the track and parked it, nose facing the sea. “Here we are,” he announced.

“So it seems. Why here?” Ninette asked.

“Chiefly because this is where a good many people already come to practice shooting,” Jonathon said. “The local folk know this, and stay well away to avoid the odd stray bullet by a beginning marksman. This is far enough away that the sound of gunshots will not excite any interest in the holiday makers, nor is there anything of interest here for the hiker or the sea-bather. We shall be quite alone.”

“Good!” Ninette applauded. “I should not like to be responsible for shooting someone’s ear off by accident.”

She hopped down out of the car without waiting for Jonathon’s aid, and walked as far as the edge of the grassy area. Looking down, she saw why the local folk came here to shoot. Nature had provided a kind of perfect target range; there was just enough of a drop-off down to a beach of pebbles and a mud-flat that it was unlikely stray shots would go anywhere other than into the earth or out to sea. The beach was not the sort to invite bathers, even though it was secluded. And the scramble down and back up again could only be attempted by the athletic.

Of course, all of them were athletic, and as she was completely unhindered by skirts, Ninette scampered down the crude path as nimbly as a monkey.

The end of the beach, most often used for targets, was a stack of flat-topped boulders, thoroughly pock-marked and decorated with splashes of lead. Glass shards and pottery fragments showed what figured most often as the targets, although three or four bullet-ridden, rusted tin cans showed that there were others who preferred targets that did not break when your bullets struck them.

Jonathon had come prepared with a sort of easel and some sturdy pasteboards with the crude outline of a man on them. These he proceeded to set up without a word, then came to join the two women at the opposite end of the “shooting gallery.”

He carefully explained the peculiarities of this pistol, then left it up to Ailse to get down to the particulars. Since there was no further call on his services, he turned his attention and his mind back to the question of just who Ninette’s enemy might be.

Thus far, they’d had a singular lack of success in finding an Earth Master. The few that he or Nigel had found were all too old to come live in a theater in Blackpool, and even if they were so inclined, they couldn’t have borne the psychic stench of the city for very long.

He expected Ninette to be fearful, and she certainly screwed up her face and jumped the first few times that Ailse fired the gun. But then she stepped bravely up, took the pistol in steady hands, and patiently let Ailse position her and show her how to squeeze off shots.

They went wide of the mark, of course. That was what he had expected. But what he had not expected was how quickly she began to sight in on the target. By the time they were halfway through the box of cartridges, she was hitting the target more often than not. By the time the box was empty, she was confidently firing and hitting almost every time.

Jonathon was honestly astonished. “You’re certain you’ve never done anything like this before—” he ventured.

Ninette looked at him with a twist of her lips. “I think that if I had, I would surely remember,” she said wryly. “But recall what I am. Dancers must have very good control of their bodies. Well, stand up—”

He did so, wondering what on earth she could be thinking. She stood quite close to him for a moment, measuring him with her eyes. It was a very calculating look, and he couldn’t imagine what she was going to do. That she
was
about to do something, he had no doubt. He had seen that look in her eyes before.

She settled her feet in their stout little walking shoes a moment, and then, like lightning, she made a tremendous jump and high kick, higher than he had ever seen her make before. The sole of her foot flashed within a hair of his nose, and hit the brim of his hat, knocking it cleanly off his head.

He stared at her. She shrugged. “A cabaret trick,” she said calmly. “The can-can dancers and washerwomen at the Moulin Rouge do it all the time. Usually when the gentleman is drunk; the gentleman gets a look up her skirts and she keeps his hat until he ransoms it back. But be sure, if I had wanted to kick your nose and not the brim of your hat, I could have.”

He looked at her soberly, without anger. “Better still?” he suggested, “Aim for the chin. You could break a man’s neck that way. At the worst, you would knock him flat.”

She blinked.
“Mais oui?
That is something to remember, then.”

He licked his lips, considering. “Practice it,” he suggested. “It’s better than the pistol. We can’t explain away a bullet, we can explain away an unfortunate fall.”

She nodded, and for a moment, the sun seemed to fade. Then they all shook off the mood, and scrambled back up the rocks to the auto.

This time, Ninette sat up front with him as he drove back to the theater. “I am thinking you like me a little better now,” she said, over the noise of the motor.

“I was disposed to be very angry with you when you told us how you had lied to us,” Jonathon replied, after a long moment of thought.

“But?” she persisted.

He answered honestly, but reluctantly. “Well. You
are
a good dancer, a very good dancer. There is no doubt that you are very popular with the audiences. And there is also no doubt that you work as hard as any of us. I don’t think anyone gives a hang whether you’re Russian or Red Indian, the point is you give them good entertainment. But still, you lied to us . . . I don’t like being lied to.”

“Mais ouis.
But . . .” She looked out the windscreen, her mouth in a small pout of melancholy. “Would any of you have listened to me, let me audition for you, if I had not come with this story, this lie?”

Jonathon grimaced. “To be honest, no.”

“Then I should have starved. Or jumped into the river. Or gone into many men’s beds.” The matter of fact way she said it made him flush uncomfortably. “I did not want to do any of these things. And actually, I think I really did not know I wanted so badly to dance, either, until the people began to pay attention to me.”

“It’s a drug,” he said quietly. “That admiration. It’s a drug like any other, as bad as absinthe. You want it. You can’t do without it. And once you’ve had it, you’d rather die than give it up. At least—” he added honestly “—it’s that way for some.”

“It could be for me, I think,” she admitted. “I am taking care, I hope. You understand me? I am trying not to believe that I am so wonderful. But I feel something, out there—”

He debated a moment. “It’s magic. You have a touch of it,” he told her, deciding to make a clean breast of it. “You’re not like me, or even Arthur—you’re more like Wolf. You’ll never have more than that touch of it, never work spells, but this much is yours. When you dance, when you give yourself to the audience, when you forget about everything and try to please them, you feed them. You make them happy. Your magic makes them forget that the tinsel isn’t gold, that the props and scenery are only painted canvas and wood. And when you feed them, they feed you. Don’t you always feel stronger and better when you come off stage?”

“Oui!”
she exclaimed. “And I could not understand it! I never used to feel this way when I danced! I was exhausted! And then, after a while, here, I began to feel so full of energy when I came off the stage! Sometimes I need to settle and quiet myself, for otherwise I could not sleep! And you say this is my magic?”

He nodded. “It’s you feeding them, feeding them something to take their minds out of themselves for a little while, and then they feed you. It wouldn’t be enough to keep you going for hours and hours,” he warned. “But I think that all the dancing that Nigel has planned for you in his big production will ultimately be no problem for you.”

But with that, she laughed. “Poo! You have not seen a great ballet, then! The prima is onstage for almost all of it!
Swan Lake
,
sacre bleu,
nearly every scene! It would have been no problem without this magic . . .”

But then she smiled. “Still!” she added cheerfully, “With it, things will be very good indeed.”

But as he wound his way through the streets to the theater, something occurred to him. What if
this
was what her unknown enemy wanted, this rare “performance” magic?

The attacks, then, would not be so much directed at her, as they would be to take what she had away.

Well, it looked as if he had some research ahead of him. It was going to be a long night. But, he hoped, a fruitful one.