Reserved for the Cat

Always the same. Broad expanses of glass on two walls—windows on one, mirrors on the opposite. Practice barre stretching out along the mirrored wall. Piano in one corner. Dust always hanging in the air, rosin dust, and dust shaken out of cracks in the wooden floor by the pounding of countless feet. Depending on the time of day, and whether or not it was raining again, sunlight might or not be streaming in through the window, filled with that dust, which would then sparkle like fairy dust.

Rehearsal pianists were always thin, always earnest, always homely, usually bespectacled. They always wore dusty black. This one was thin, earnest, homely, bespectacled, and female, her hair put up in a tight little arrangement of braids wrapped around her angular head. She also spoke French, an asset.

For the first time in her life, Ninette had a rehearsal room to herself. For the first time in her life, she was not being put through her drills by an instructor or a ballet master. She had to remember it all herself.

She punctuated her requests for tempi with s’il vous plais and merci. After all, rehearsal pianists might utterly forgettable and generally ignored as a kind of extension of the piano itself, but they were still human beings. But in between the please and thank you she concentrated on getting her body back into something capable of a performance.

Despite all the exercise of walking she had done, she had not been doing any dancing since she had left France, and her muscles told her so. Everything had to be taken slowly. Each group of muscles must be warmed up, stretched, and tested. Then the entire body had to go through the same procedure. Only then was she prepared to try a solo, and a not very demanding one, either.

She wished she had a partner. She wondered what the odds were of finding one.

“La Sylphide, first solo, merci,” she said, and proceeded to work through that first piece, where the mischievous Sylph first invades James’ home and finds him sleeping in front of the fire. She interrupted herself often, asking the patient pianist to repeat a phrase, drilling herself mercilessly until her forgetful body got it right again. Oddly enough, there was peace in this. She might have been in Paris; this might have been what she would have been doing had she been lifted to etoile status. Outside this room there were talking cats and men who claimed they were magicians, a stolen name, a life that was not hers, and a fabrication she had to maintain. In here, there was only the music, the relentless tyranny of the choreography, and the discipline of shaping a reluctant body into the graceful movements of the dance, without pause, without faltering.

How strange that the one thing that she had thought she would like to escape was the thing she now fled to for comfort.

“Nigel.”

Nigel looked up from his desk. This was the first day since they had rescued Nina that he had spent a normal morning, and there was a lot of work piled up at his desk here at the Imperial Music Hall. None of it was an emergency, or someone would have made sure a messenger got to him at his flat, but it took up all of his morning and looked as if it was going to stretch well into the afternoon.

He’d gotten so deep into it that he had lost all track of time until that familiar voice at his door took him out of his trance of work as he dealt with letters from booking agents, descriptions of acts, complaints from the stagehands, requests for materials . . .

He looked up, and blinked at Arthur. “Band-call over already?”

“Yes, and you should get some luncheon inside you,” the parrot said from his perch on Arthur’s shoulder. “We’ve made arrangements for Miss Tchereslavsky. We checked around at the performers’ lodgings and found a full flat open over at Breckenridge’s.”

Nigel brightened up at that. Alfie Breckenridge owed him a favor, and a big one. Nigel had loaned him the collateral to buy the set of lodgings in the first place, when Alfie had retired from the stage. His wife Sarah was a sharp one, and they wouldn’t give him the flat, but—

“What’s the terms?” he asked.

“They’ll let her have it—knowing it’s you that’s paying for it for now—at a quarter the going rate until the show is in production and she can pay for it herself.” Arthur looked understandably pleased at that. “Alfie told me it’s too dear for most of our performers anyway, and it went vacant half the time, so he won’t be losing that much by it. He was thinking of cutting it up into rooms, but if our scheme works, Nina will be there in permanent residence. Care to walk over and cast an eye on it after we eat?”

“Anything to get from behind this desk.” Nigel gratefully cleaned his pen and pushed his chair away. Arthur tucked Wolf away inside his coat with the parrot’s head sticking out under his chin, and off they went.