Reserved for the Cat (17 page)

“Excellent, McKenzie,” Nigel said, when she had cleared the last of it away.

“Och, well, that would be due to our landlord, sir,” McKenzie replied. “’Twas he that brought it all up; I just needed to keep it warm for you.”

“Ah, now that reminds me,” Nigel said, and began explaining the various meal arrangements she could make. “It’s all because this is theatrical lodgings, you see,” he concluded. “Players eat at odd times, they generally don’t know enough about the matter to keep a good cook, and they don’t stay long. Not as a rule, anyway.”

Ninette shook her head. It all seemed so irregular to her. “We change programme,” she said, finally. “Not theater.”

“A more sensible way, to be sure.” Nigel nodded. “At any rate, if you want company, you can go down and dine with the others. If you don’t, they’ll send it up, or McKenzie there can arrange something. The meals will be plain and simple, so if you’re longing for beefsteak, or pheasant, or anything of that sort, you’ll have to send out for it.”

She nodded; it was definitely a sensible arrangement, if a trifle peculiar. But it made sense.

“I’ll leave you to settle in,” Nigel said genially. “You can skip practice for one afternoon, I should think?”

She nodded, and McKenzie showed him out.

Now the work began in earnest.

Ninette spent all of one afternoon, on a day when the theater had no matinee, showing Nigel, Arthur, Jonathon, and Wolf all of her little “tricks.” These were, of course, the sort of things that dancers like La Augustine despised—dancing with the ribbon-wand, the ball, and the hoop, skirt dancing with yards and yards and yards of the lightest silk fabric to make ever-moving curtains that light could be played against. And she showed her other tricks, the showpieces that dancers like La Augustine did
not
despise, although they might pretend to; the solos from
Swan Lake
and
Tales of Hoffman,
from
Bayadere
and
Giselle,
from
Don Quixote
and
Corsair.

All these things the men loved, and when she was done, exhausted and dripping with sweat, she looked out into the empty theater to see the four of them chattering away like so many rooks, planning what tricky bit should go where in their story.

Wolf was now supposed to write music—or at least adapt it—for all of this, but he seemed to be in a frenzy of delight, and no one ventured to trouble him or Arthur as they sat at the piano, Wolf dictating the music without a pause until they were both often found slumped over the keyboard, the parrot standing with one foot up and head hunched down, on the nape of Arthur’s neck.

Nor was Jonathon idle, concocting a tremendous stage-business for the Sultan’s burning palace, as well as adapting or reviving several more of his feats of illusion.

Nigel was busy filling in the spaces between Ninette’s performances and Jonathon’s with other acts. They had to be steady, reliable, and with a minimum of traits that might bring them into conflict with others. This would not be a case where in two weeks, each would go his separate ways. These people, like the theatrical and dance companies she knew, would stay together for months. Little irritations could escalate into harassment, into all-out feuds. It was Nigel’s job to see to it that the people he invited to this production were not the kind to escalate.

The plot was a simple one. In the Prologue, a ship would be caught in a storm; they had determined that only a segment of this ship would appear on stage, tossing on the artificial waves. There would be cries of “man overboard” and a dummy of her would be tossed down into the waves. This would not be the first nor the last appearance of the hapless dummy. . . .

She would do a skirt dance among the waves to make it appear that she was drowning, or at least, swimming for her life. She would clear the stage, and then the ship would sink.

In the first act, she would be lying on a “beach,” unconscious, and the Sultan’s men would find her. They would carry her off, and the curtain would rise on the Sultan’s palace. This gave the opportunity for several acts to come on stage to entertain the Sultan. Chief among them, of course, would be Jonathon. He would play the Sultan’s Vizier, who enforced the Sultan’s edicts with his magic. He would make some poor wretch turn into a chicken or some such thing—they hadn’t quite decided what animal they would use, perhaps even a dog—and then the new harem captives would be brought in. Nigel would have to hire dancers for this, but he had some experience with hiring actors and dancers for something called “the Panto,” so she expected he could manage that.

Then it would be her turn. Begging and pleading with the Sultan to send her back to her people, she would be refused, and ordered to dance. This is when she would do her hoop, ribbon, and ball dances.

There would be more entertainment for the Sultan, interspersed with a very clever idea on Nigel’s part. A scrim would drop down between the audience and the Sultan’s court, and everyone would freeze in place like a
tableaux vivant.
Then the lights would come down on the Sultan’s Court. Then two footlights would come up, one on a ballad singer, and one on her, apparently gazing out of a window. The ballad singer would perform a number about England or home, while she sighed in her captivity. Then the lights out front would come down, she and the singer would exit under cover of the darkness, and the lights would come back up on the Sultan’s Palace.

The Sultan would demand for her to dance again. This time it would be one of the ballet solos she knew so well. Then the Sultan would begin courting her.

“Now why,” Wolf had demanded, “is he going to
court
her when logic says he could simply
take
her?”

“Fairy tale logic, old bird,” Arthur had replied absently, “She’s a virtuous English girl and therefore the only thoughts that enter the Sultan’s head are those of honor and decency,” Then he had made that little exclamation that meant he had puzzled out what he was working on. “Try this out for your hoop-dance,” he had said, and began to play a melody. As she went through her planned choreography in her mind, everything else was forgotten.

After that, she would stand up to the evil Vizier, who would have a change of heart and agree to get her out. Nigel had the notion for her to do a “naturalistic” dance portraying Anger and Defiance at that point, in bare feet and legs and a little tunic, as Isadora Duncan did.

Next, she and the chorus dancers would do a nautch dance in the harem. She wasn’t at all sure about this, as she had never actually seen a nautch dance, but she supposed she could adopt one of Aspica’s solos from
The Pharoah’s Daughter.

Then back to the Sultan’s court, where, growing weary of her refusal, the Sultan would attempt to force himself on her.

“Finally!” Wolf had exclaimed at that point, making them all laugh.

She would break away and perform a skirt dance with red and yellow lights on her for fire. The Sultan would be frightened, call her an Efrit, and demand that the Vizier do something about her. The Vizier would make her vanish from an open platform.

The last scene she would be in would be where she said farewell on a beach to the Vizier, who would send her away in the custody of a dozen British tars, who would, of course, do a dance with her in the middle of them.

But the last scene would be all the Vizier’s, where he would be dragged up in front of the Sultan for helping her to escape, and he would bring the entire palace down in a barrage of fire and vanish out of the midst of it. Jonathon was quite excited about this, for it meant not only a spectacular illusion, but an escape from chains as well.

In general, in fact, everyone was enthused about the production.

It was at that moment that she had realized there were two things she needed. A choreographer was one. A teacher was another. Try as she might, she was unable to put together sequences of steps that seemed at all interesting. She understood this instinctively; something in her compared, say, the Petipa choreography from one of the
Sleeping Beauty
variations, which were by no means his most inspired, to what she was doing, and she fell far, far short. And as for a teacher, she understood that she needed correction, and also understood that she was not going to get that correction working on her own.

Finally she broached the subject to Nigel, whose brow furrowed at her request. “I’m not sure I understand correctly,” he said, finally. “I thought it would be no problem for you to put together your little numbers. And aren’t you beyond taking lessons?”

“A dancer is never beyond taking lessons,” she replied solemnly. “There is always something new to learn. It is hard to practice and look for faults at the same time.”

Nigel nodded at that. “Come to think of it, I’m going to require someone to teach all those chorus dancers their parts, and handle them as Arthur handles the orchestra.” He pondered this for a moment. “Let me see if the booking agents have anyone of this sort.”

Not three days later, he turned up again at her rehearsal studio, and with him was a man she did not recognize. “Mademoiselle Tchereslavsky, this is Monsieur Ciccolini. He will be your teacher, he’ll be doing the choreography, and he’ll be keeping the chorus under as much control as possible.”

“That will not be the easiest proposition,” the gentleman said with a smile. He was a tall, lean man, hair once black, now going gray, but continuing to be handsome in that ageless way that only Italians could manage. This was not the “Roman-Italian” whose statues adorned theaters and government buildings everywhere; he definitely had a dancer’s build and a dancer’s way of moving, but she could tell that his knees pained him. “Young ladies being what they are, I can only promise that they will turn up to rehearsals and performances on time, and come up to my standard, or they will find themselves replaced.” He bowed a little. “Mademoiselle, if I may be so bold as to come back with you to your rehearsal hall? I can then get some idea of what lessons you may need.”

She was only too happy to take him there, and was very glad that she was already warmed up. He took over the room as if he had been there all his life, addressing the pianist, and taking charge of it all. He instructed her to warm up anyway, which she did, while he scrutinized her. Then, as he set the tempo of the pianist, he called out steps for her to perform.

This was something she had sorely missed. It was one thing to dance a sequence from one of the many ballets that you had memorized, or a sequence that you tried to make up in your head to try and stretch your abilities and all the while watch yourself in the mirror for any flaws. It was quite another to dance a sequence as it was called out by the teacher, and to rely on the teacher to watch for flaws while you concentrated on the dancing.

He ran her through several such sequences, at varied tempi, his long face growing more and more thoughtful. Finally he waved her to the barre. “Mademoiselle,” he said heavily, “I am only an old man from Milano, with two bad knees and some ability to teach little English chorus girls to stagger about on their toes and not disgrace themselves. You are better than anyone I have ever taught. You are better than anyone I have ever danced with. You may be better than anyone I have ever seen. There is nothing I can teach you.”

Ninette listened to this with growing astonishment. True, in the past several weeks she had completely forgotten about captivating rich old men and had concentrated on her dancing as never before. But surely that had not made that much of an improvement! Surely he was mistaken. Or flattering her. Or—

Perhaps testing her. She raised her head. “Monsieur, whether or not any of that is true, a dancer never stops learning. You have learned at one school, I at another. Another technique is always worth learning. And you choreograph, which is something I have never done. True?”

“True,” he admitted.

She smiled. “Well then, pray help me with this first of my dances for this production, for I confess I can think of nothing to make it particularly interesting.” She fetched the hoop from the corner. “It is to combine ballet with the hoop-exercises of the Swiss girls—”

“Ah yes!” he exclaimed with recognition. “I saw them. Well, then, let us begin.”

By the end of the afternoon, he had turned a rather lackluster little piece into something amusing and interesting. It was true that he was no Petipa, but he had a good eye and a sound instinct. Being able to make clear improvements in her dance raised his spirits as well; by the end of the afternoon, he was issuing orders and tapping out the tempo with his instruction wand, and using it too, to reposition a foot or a knee—

He was one of those teachers who used a long wand, nearly as tall as he was, to point out problems with the feet and legs. She had only had one such teacher, at the Paris Opera, and he had been prone to using it to thwack little ballerinas across the back of the calf when he did not like what they were doing. Perhaps Ciccolini was naturally more gentle than that, or perhaps he simply deemed her too old for such correction—or maybe he feared that in a temper she would snatch his wand and break it over his head! At any rate, he did no such thing to her.