Reserved for the Cat

She hesitated, then sighed. “You will think very badly of me, I suppose,” she said, slowly, as if the words were being drawn from her reluctantly. “And I feel very badly for poor Nikolas. But I did not know him perhaps as well as you presume I knew him. He was an admirer, yes. And he wished to be more, yes. But many gentlemen are my admirers, and many wish to be more. I have not had—” she hesitated “—I have not had a particular friend for many months now. I wished to go to England, where the winters are not so cold as Russia, and not France, where there are dancers in plenty, nor Italy, where the audiences prefer opera. I said as much where several of my admirers would hear me, and Nikolas had his new yacht, and I allowed him to persuade me to let him take me here. But I did not allow him to persuade me to do anything else. I wished to see if his company would be something other than tedious.” She sighed, and looked down at her hands, and stole directly from La Augustine. “I am an artist. My friends are artists. When they gather in my salon, the talk is not of stocks and bonds and commodities. I have had my fill of particular friends who cannot or will not understand this talk, and demand that I give up my friends and my gatherings because such talk makes them feel stupid. I did not know that poor Nikolas was such a man. I did not know that he was not one. So taking this journey in his company was to discover if he was or was not, because I would be overjoyed never to face another angry confrontation with a man who could not see the value in things he himself did not appreciate.” She made the corners of her mouth turn down. “For many of my admirers I am exactly like a painting. If it is famous, and if others will admire it, and admire the owner for having it, then it is worth collecting. But they do not think that I am not like a painting, that I have a mind, and friends, and I do not particularly wish to be collected and put on display to excite envy in others.”

She looked up, with a melancholy little smile. “I hope that does not make me less in your eyes.”

The illusionist was unfazed. “Well, Mademoiselle, it does puzzle me that you should come from this wreck des—”

“Destitute?” She gave a bitter little laugh. “Monsieur Illusionist, you will think me foolish perhaps, but one does not trust Russian banks if one can help it. All my life I have kept my fortune with me, in the form of jewels and gold. I take it with me wherever I go. And now it has all sunk down to the bottom of the sea.”

The cat had been drilling her in this role until there were times when she wasn’t sure which of her was the real one, Nina or Ninette. She sometimes wondered if he was putting memories into her head the way he was putting languages, because she could swear she had mental images of buildings in Russia, the Imperial Palace, Theater Street, the stage of the Imperial Ballet . . . she had never even, to her knowledge, seen a sketch or a photograph of these places, and yet they were as real to her as the Eiffel Tower and the Paris Opera.

For that matter, was he slipping Russian language into her mind too? Only today, she had mis-stepped in practice and nearly twisted her ankle, and had sworn, not sacre bleu! as she had thought she would, but blin!

At any rate, with these things, these images and thoughts at the front of her mind, it was a great deal easier to “be” Nina.

The illusionist shook his head. “Tell me that you will not be doing that anymore,” he half-scolded. “It was only a matter of time before something or someone robbed you of your fortune.”

She hesitated. “It was not . . . a very big fortune,” she said after a moment, and laughed ruefully. “I am too fond of pretty gowns, jewelry, champagne, and caviar, and I am not so very famous that merchants will give these things to me in hopes that I will tell others where I got such-and-so. It is bad of me, I know but . . .”

“But there will always be another particular friend, who will buy you these things, hmm?” The illusionist raised an eyebrow and she flushed, but raised her chin defiantly. It was Nina and Ninette together who answered him.

“And who does that harm?” she asked rhetorically, speaking of her imagined old man in a fur coat. “I make my friends happy, they make me happy. I deceive no one and no one is deceived by me. I do not pretend to love, monsieur. Love is not for my kind, and I make sure my friends understand this.”

The illusionist unexpectedly softened his voice, and a hint of understanding, faintly shadowed with cynicism, colored his words. “Then you are wise beyond your years, mademoiselle, and I am glad to hear your honesty. I believe you. So. Have you any notion just who or what your father sought to protect you from by giving you this guardian?” He nodded at the cat.