Reserved for the Cat (10 page)

The parrot snorted, and took a dainty bite out of a hothouse grape. “At least it will be slightly more of a challenge than writing music to fit: “
Charlie, my Charlie, oh do tell me true / Am I still your sweetheart, your dear Alice Blue? / Will you take me to church, will you take me to town / In my dear little Alice-blue, Alice-blue gown?”

“That was a hit!” Nigel reminded him, and the parrot groaned. “The costermongers and newsboys were whistling it in the street!” he continued. “You must have sold thousands of copies of the sheet music!”

“A bit, a bit,” Arthur said complacently. “Kept you in fresh peas, Wolf.”

But already nebulous plans were unfolding in Nigel’s fertile imagination. He remembered a production of Shakespeare—
The Tempest
it was—and the sensational effects managed on the stage as the curtain rose. He could do that.
They
could do that. “We’ll have to manage to get a shipwreck into the plot,” Nigel said aloud, causing both of them to stare at him.

“Whyever for?” Arthur said after a moment. “That would be a dreadfully expensive set to create.”

“Because we’re going to have the dancer that was saved from a shipwreck as our star turn!” Nigel shook his head at their surprise. Couldn’t they see it? It was a fine thing to capitalize on saving her in the first place, but better to remind the public of the great story in two or three months and capitalize on it all over again. “Half of our publicity is already done for us, and the locals and the holiday people alike will fill the stalls to see the ‘shipwreck girl’ saved all over again.”

“You don’t even know that she’ll stay with us,” Arthur protested mildly. “Nor that she will be in the least interested in performing in a mere musical show.”

“This is a ballet dancer, Nigel,” the parrot said, drawing himself up with great dignity and looking down his beak at the music-hall entrepreneur. “And a prima donna to boot. An
artiste.
She’ll be looking for a ballet company, mark my words—”

“You mark mine. First, she’s indebted to us. Second, she’s the daughter of an Elemental Master—where else would she go for people who won’t think she’s balmy for talking to a cat? Third—” he grinned. “Ballet dancers like money too. Loie Fuller wasn’t too high-nosed to appear at the Moulin Rouge. She’ll make a lot more money with us than with some ballet company.” He stood up and began to pace. “Elemental Master—that gives me an idea. We need a story with magic in it. That way we can hire old Jonathon, who has the Kung Chow act—always good to have another of the company about—”

“Kung Chow?” Wolf said in dismay. “I am
not
going to substitute for one of his wretched doves again! Really, Nigel, this is going too far—”

“No one is asking you to substitute for a dove, Wolf,” Nigel said, pacing faster. “We should make this a real
Arabian Nights
story. Shipwreck our girl in Arabia, have her taken to a harem, that way we can bring in all the variety acts as things to entertain the sultan! And have an excuse to put her in as little as we can convince her to wear. And there are plenty of girls in our chorus who wouldn’t blanch at doing a harem dance. Have her escape with the Court Magician’s help—”

“Oh good lord, why don’t you just steal the plot and music from my
Abduction from the Seraglio
and have done with it?” Wolf said in disgust.

“Why don’t I—Wolf! That’s brilliant!” Nigel turned towards the parrot and conductor with a smile lighting up his face. “Perfect! You adapt the music for our show, we can tout it as ‘Based on
Abduction from the Seraglio
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.’ Make the print just large enough that the punters won’t notice and the high-minded will. The punters will get their nautch dances, and the high-toned will tell each other how fine it is to listen to classical music while they gawk at the nautch dances from behind their pince-nezes. It’s brilliant! I love you!” As Wolf growled in startlement, Nigel swooped him up, kissed his beak, and put him back down on his stand again.

“Brilliant! Brilliant! I’m going to go look up the libretto of this opera of yours and see what I can keep out of it. Arthur, help Wolf with some catchy lyrics. We’ll need at least one love song, of course, and one song about being homesick. And one from the sultan about making the beauty his slave for all time—” Nigel strode off, heading for the music library.

Behind him, Wolf sighed. “Well,” the parrot said in resignation. “At least I won’t have to make up any little tinkly tunes this time.”

N
INETTE sat up in the bed, curled her arms around her knees, and listened in astonishment to the cat. Thomas posed on the foot of the bed, looking precisely as if he had always belonged there. Somehow over the last few hours he had transformed without essentially changing, from the rakish alley-prowler to a creature of great elegance.

And he had been listening to her hosts while she had been sleeping, then come back to report to her what was transpiring. “They are planning the production around
me?
But—but—but they have not yet seen me dance!”

You have seen what passes for a dancer in these music halls,
the cat said, with a touch of arrogance.
Did you not say yourself that you would make the best of them look like a pony doing tricks?

“Well, yes, but—” But these girls weren’t dancers, not really. Oh, they might have taken some lessons, but they clearly had not been trained as Ninette had been trained. Ballroom dancers with a few tricks and high kicks, and one or two of them could teeter about on their toes, but they were not trained dancers as she knew training.

Ninette considered that. Yes, she did. The thirty-two
fouette
-pirouettes from the Black Swan pas de deux, Kitri’s exuberant solo, full of leaps where her heel touches the back of her head from
Don Quixote,
the mad scene from Giselle, the character solos from
Sleeping Beauty, Le Corsair, Swan Lake,
all of these things. She had rehearsed them over and over again, against the day when she might actually be called upon to dance them. These were the sorts of pieces that the great dancers dismissed as “tricks” or cursed the need to perform, but that audiences adored.

I very much doubt that they will have a choreographer as such. So you will be making up your own dances. I would advise you to make them as showy as possible and steal liberally from anyone you think audiences would like. Loie Fuller, for instance.
The cat sniffed derisively.
By now so many have stolen from her that one more will not matter, and everyone loves seeing yards of fabric being tossed about under colored lights.

And by now, everyone in the dance world knew how Fuller manipulated her lights and silks, despite her attempts to keep such thing secret. There was even a kind of name for it, the “serpentine dance,” or “skirt dance” by which such things were advertised on playbills. That gave Ninette some ideas . . . the best thing she could do, if she was going to have a show built around her, would be to manage pieces that looked very impressive but involved short passages of flashy footwork interspersed with a great deal of stage effects. A skirt-dance would certainly fit that bill. Now, she had seen some Swiss and Finnish girls in France performing a kind of dancing-gymnastics with long ribbons, balls, hoops and clubs. She could certainly do a piece with a ribbon, and perhaps another with a hoop or a ball.

The rest she could certainly lift whole from the ballets she had learned. “If they are going to create a show around me—” she began eagerly.

Stop right there,
the cat commanded, fixing her with his gaze.
You are doing precisely the wrong thing. You must not be the eager one. Think of La Augustine! Would she fling herself at someone who was creating a show around her? Of course not. She would be amused. Perhaps condescending—this is only music hall, after all. Then, perhaps, she would allow herself to be interested. She would let herself be coaxed and courted and only gradually would she be persuaded. Once persuaded, of course, she would fling herself into it. La Augustine is nothing if not a professional. But she would never give the impression that it was she who was the eager one.

Ninette nodded, slowly. The cat was right, of course. As long as they believed she was what she said she was—and there was no reason not to—the coaxing should come from them. She shivered a little; this was heady stuff, and she was not at all sure she was going to be able to deal with it.

That is why you have me.
The cat curled the tip of his tail around his feet and looked smug.
I shall be your impresario. I brought you this far, did I not?

That was certainly true. And “this far” was impressive indeed. She thought about her last few hours since waking after a refreshing sleep. First there had been the long hot bath, attended by a maid who washed, dried, and put up her hair for her, before tucking her attentively back into bed. Now she looked about herself, at the opulently appointed guestroom, at finest bed she had ever seen, at the gorgeous embroidered and rib-boned and laced nightdress that the maid had helped her into, at the remains of the wonderful breakfast on the tray beside the bed. Three kinds of eggs, ham, sausage, grilled tomatoes, beans, toast, oatmeal . . . enough for three people. She had left a great deal of it, though it troubled her to do so. She hoped it wouldn’t go to waste.

“All right, then I should be—”

That wouldn’t be difficult. They
were
kind and she
was
all alone except for the cat.

She frowned a little at that, because she rather thought she would not need the cat to put words in her mouth, but let it pass. So for right now, she should simply lie back and be pampered. That would not be bad. She thought fleetingly of her belongings at the boarding house, inventoried them in her mind, and reluctantly, decided they were not worth going back for. Though poor Madame would wonder what had become of her . . .

I will get your keepsakes,
the cat promised. She nodded. That would do. There wasn’t a great deal she wanted; a little left of her mother’s “jewelry” consisting of a jet rosary, a jet bangle, and a silver locket, a few letters and her mother’s marriage license.

That was easy enough; it would be even easier once she had a private place of her own, but for now, thanks to any number of overheard conversations and the plots of any number of sensational operas and plays. “I will ask for a Bible and paste the papers inside the cover,” she said. The jewelry would probably escape notice. The marriage license, however, would give her age away. Fortunately dancers tended to look ageless so long as they did not put on weight. She should be able to pass, easily, for being ten years older than her real age. Old enough to be the real Russian dancer.

“How did you manage to talk to these men?” she asked, finally. “I thought you could only talk to me.”

The cat grew tense.
That . . . is an excellent question.

She waited, but the cat remained silent. “Well you ought to answer it then,” she said impatiently.

I am thinking.
The cat washed an ear with one paw.
You believe in magic by now. Yes?

It was her turn to hesitate. Did she? Real magic, not stage magic? The thing of fairy tales? How else could she be talking to a cat?

“I . . . suppose . . .”

She stared at the cat, who began washing his other ear. “But I’m not a magician!” she protested. “Am I?”