Steadfast (4 page)

One of the sylphs was hovering just over Lionel’s mirror. She looked like an Art Nouveau
illustration, with her butterfly wings and her flowing hair and garment—such as it
was—and she made Lionel smile a little. The sylphs came and went as they chose for
the most part, only in the most extreme and emotional of occasions could a mere Elemental
Magician actually
summon
one. But they liked Lionel, and they were positively addicted to performing and being
onstage. In fact, he often had more of them volunteering to help than he actually
needed! Not that he ever turned them down. It made more sense to take them all and
let them sort themselves out than it did to turn some down and risk that they would
never turn up again.

“You look sad, magician,”
the creature whispered, curving her head on its long neck down to regard him solemnly.

“Well . . . I’m in a bit of difficulty,” he confessed. Carefully, in simple terms,
he explained that Suzie was leaving, as the other girls had left him, and that he
had not found someone to replace her.

Not that his advertisements hadn’t brought answers—but all of the girls that had turned
up were utterly unsuitable. One had turned up this morning, in fact, with the torn-out
advertisement in her hand. Even though she had only credentials as a dancer from the
chorus of a review, in desperation, he had tried her out anyway, only to discover
that there was no way she was going to fit inside the apparatus. She just wasn’t flexible
enough in the right places.

The sylph teased up the scrap of paper from where it had been left on the corner of
his dressing table. Lionel was so dispirited he didn’t even object—not even when she
whirled it around like an autumn leaf and then whisked out the window with it. Let
the creature play with her toy; he’d learned he got better results from his sylphs
when he indulged them. And it wasn’t as if he needed a torn-out copy of his own advertisement.

With a sigh, he went back to cleaning and arranging the things on his table, a little
ritual he liked to go through before he got ready for the performance. Some people
sang little songs, some people tied a lucky charm somewhere about their person. Some
played over a hand of solitaire. He liked to make his dressing table mathematically
precise and neat as a good housewife’s.

As he did so, he wondered why the sylph had been so intrigued with the bit of paper
in the first place.

•   •   •

Katie had been wandering the seaside streets of Brighton for more than an hour, feeling
entirely dazed. It was true that there was a dazzling array of entertainments here—
too
dazzling, really. It seemed that every time you turned, there was someone else clamoring
for your money. And to Katie’s weary eyes and increasingly depressed heart, they all
seemed far more sophisticated than anything she had done in the circus.

Certainly they were all dressed better than the shabby little gauze costume and tights
she had in her bundle of belongings. How could plain white gauze, which looked fine
and bright in the light of the circus tent, compete with spangles and glitter, artificial
jewels and tinsel? It seemed impossible that she would make any money at all, displaying
her tricks by herself out on the Boardwalk. She didn’t think she could dance out here
either, although the Gitano dances she had learned might have done well; she needed
music to dance to.

It seemed equally impossible that she would find a job among the dancers she saw here.
They all had dance routines that were nothing like the circus ballet performed. All
bounces and kicks and tossing of petticoats—she could probably
learn
such things quickly, but these people wouldn’t want someone who needed to learn,
they would want someone who already had mastered such steps.

She turned a corner to find herself staring at the back of a huge, muscled man—and
froze in panic for a moment.
He’s found me! He tracked me here and he found me!
she thought, before the man turned around—and it wasn’t Dick at all. It
was
someone who was almost certainly a strongman in a show, but he had a sweet face,
with puppy-like eyes. She flattened herself against the wall of the building anyway
as he passed, her bundle clutched to her chest, and felt too limp to move for many
minutes when he had gone.

It was going to be suppertime soon, as her stomach reminded her. She wondered where
she could possibly find the cheapest food here. Concern knotted her stomach as much
as hunger.
Maybe if I followed some of the performers—

Her thoughts were interrupted by a scrap of paper—

It caught her eye as it danced toward her like a butterfly, and then suddenly lodged
itself in the cleavage of her gown. Annoyed, she fished it out and was about to throw
it away, when she realized it was an advertisement torn from a newspaper. Curious
now, she read it, excitement growing with every word.

Wanted: Female Dancer or Acrobat. Position open as assistant to stage magician. Must
be slender, limber, and fearless, prepared to work hard, eager to learn. Apply to
Lionel Hawkins, Palace Music Hall.

She could hardly believe it. This seemed like a miracle—too good to be true—

But what did she have to lose by answering it? The worst that would happen would be
that the position had been filled, and she could ask at the music hall about cheap
lodgings and food. At least she knew there
was
an opening, or had been when this advertisement had been torn from the paper!

Bit of newsprint clutched in her hand, she slipped in among the crowds, looking for
someone who could direct her to the theater, hope rising in her that Mary Small might
have sent her to the right place after all.

•   •   •

The girl in the alley caught Jack’s attention mostly because she wasn’t the usual
sort to be lingering at a stage door. She was small, lithe, and dark—Gypsy, he’d have
said, or part-Gypsy. She was dressed neatly, and was very clean, but her clothing
had seen a lot of use and wear. She peered at the open door with a hesitant look on
her face, and he stumped out to where she could see him.

“Something I can do for you, miss?” he called. He half expected her to bolt, but instead,
she looked a little relieved, and hurried toward him.

“I was told to come to this door—” she said, holding out a scrap of newspaper. “—there
is a position open?”

He recognized it at a glance for what it was—Lionel’s advertisement. When he looked
back up at her, her little face shaded with hunger and apprehension, she continued.
“I am a dancer and an acrobat,” she said, in a hushed voice with an inflection of
doubt, as if she was afraid he wouldn’t believe her.

But he hadn’t been the doorman of this theater this long without knowing how to judge
who was a performer and who was not.

“The show’s on now,” he said, in as kindly a voice as he could manage. “But the position
is still open, and it’s getting a bit urgent to fill it. Here—” he handed her a ticket
for the gallery. “Why don’t you run along to the front, watch the show and rest your
feet, and come back here after? I’ll make sure Lionel sees you, and you’ll make a
better impression if you’re rested.”

For a moment he thought that she might take that as rejection, but after a moment
of hesitation, she accepted the ticket and squared her shoulders. “Thank you,” she
said. “I will come after the show.”

And with that she turned and went back into the oven-hot alley.

•   •   •

For one moment, seeing the doorman in his respectable suit, Katie had been tempted
to flee. But then she had seen that his eyes were kind, but pain-shadowed, and that
he had only the one leg, and felt a stirring of pity for him.

He hadn’t been haughty with her either, and took her statement for what she was at
face value. When he offered her the ticket, though, she almost refused. She was getting
quite hungry now, and she would gladly have traded that ticket for a penny bun—

But she didn’t know where to get one here. And at least she would be able to sit down
and rest.

And . . . she had never actually
been
in a theater before.

She thanked him, and went around to the front, presenting her ticket at the booth.
Already she was feeling very much out of her depth. She was not used to buildings
this tall, and they were all around her, towering over her like mountains. The Andy
Ball Circus confined itself to entertaining villages and small towns; the tallest
building she had ever seen, an old Tudor inn of the sort built in a square around
a courtyard, was only two stories tall. This theater was four!

Once inside, she wasn’t allowed to linger in the lobby, but ushers directed her to
a set of stairs, and then up and up to the highest floor. She came out at the back
of the top gallery, a full four stories above the stage, where she gasped and put
her back tight to the wall. It was so high she felt dizzy for a moment, the bright
lights on the stage dazzled her, and it seemed too warm and stuffy. She was afraid
to move for a moment, until the usher, getting impatient, hissed at her to “just sit
anywhere.”

Moving gingerly, she shuffled sideways along the wall until she came to the corner.
She could see that the chair in front of her was empty, so she groped for the back
of it, and took it.

Only then did she really look at the stage, and felt dizziness come over her again.
She had never, in all of her life, been so far from the ground.

It took her a good three acts to recover, as she clutched her bundle on her lap and
peered shakily at the performers below her.

It was the acrobats, and the dancers that followed them, that finally shook her out
of her nerves. The acrobats were not as good as she was—the dancers were doing the
same bouncy-kick, skirt-tossing routines as she had seen out on the Boardwalk, but
when you managed to look past the tinsel and glitter, their costumes were a bit . . .
tat. They certainly wouldn’t bear close inspection—unlike those of the boardwalk dancers,
who looked gaudy, these costumes seemed nearly worn out. And when she watched more
closely—well, as “close” as this lofty perch allowed—she could see the little tricks
both the dancers and acrobats were using to make it look as if they weren’t taking
shortcuts. If this was what the magician was looking for, well . . . she could do
this! She could do better than this!

She relaxed a bit after that, though the smell of food and beer from the tables down
on the main floor made her hungrier. Next, there was a man who appeared to be drunk,
and his antics on stage made even her laugh, and then the curtain opened on the magician
himself.

He was
nothing
like tat. Not the least bit shabby. In fact, he was a little terrifying. If she hadn’t
known his Christian name, and been well acquainted with stage makeup, she’d have been
perfectly ready to believe he was a genuine Turk. He looked powerful and fierce and
quite prepared to cut his pretty assistant into any number of bits on the least provocation.

And he did just that—he seemingly ran swords into her, sawed her in half, chopped
her into six pieces, sent her from one cabinet to another across the stage, and finally,
made her climb a rope he managed to levitate right up into the air, from which precarious
position she waved at the crowd and vanished from full view, leaving the Turk to roar
with impotent anger and rush off stage, presumably to search for her. It was quite
the performance. Katie was captivated. But part of her had been paying attention to
every little move that the assistant had made, and she had no doubt, no doubt at all,
that she could duplicate what the other girl had done.

Then came a lady dressed up as a man who sang some sentimental ballads, and the dancers
came on again, then two performing dogs, a lady comic singer, a dancing couple, a
clown, the dancers, and finally a man who led the entire theater in singing popular
songs, then everyone came out, took bows, and the curtain came down. Katie waited
for everyone to clear out of the gallery so she wouldn’t attract anyone’s notice by
pushing in among them; as she stood, once again with her back to the wall, she realized
once the magician had come on, she had quite forgotten that she was hungry. Now her
stomach contracted painfully.

Well, she had gone without food for longer than this before. There had been times,
before her family joined the circus, that had been quite lean indeed, and those suppers
gleaned from the woods had been all that stood between them and starvation. Sternly,
she told her stomach to behave itself, and edged along the wall to the exit.

She made her way carefully and quietly down the stairs, trying to keep from drawing
attention to herself. It wasn’t hard; the people leaving were all happy, having had
a grand time, and some were even singing scraps of the songs that the last performer
had led them in.

It had been near sunset when she first entered the theater; now it was full dark.
The lobby was brightly lit with gas lamps, but outside the doors, there was nothing
but dark and shadows. She got outside, waited a little more for the crowd to thin,
then hurried back down the street to what she had been told was the “stage door.”
She was a little nervous about entering a dark alley all alone, but as she turned
the corner, she realized she need not have been. There was a bright gas light at the
stage door, and the alley itself was actually crowded; a laughing group of women was
just leaving, all in a surge of skirts and feathered hats, and it appeared there had
been at least one young man—sometimes two or three—waiting for each of them. She flattened
herself against the wall of the theater to let them pass, and made her way toward
the door, where the one-legged man was waiting, peering anxiously into the darkness.

His face cleared when he saw her, and he smiled. “Ah, well done! I was afraid you
might have had second thoughts about the job. Lionel is fearfully anxious to audition
you, would you feel prepared to perform for him right now?”