Reserved for the Cat

“But we aren’t,” Arthur said firmly. “We don’t have a Royal Circle, we don’t have titles and famous writers and famous painters in our audiences. We’re nothing but entertainment for the masses. We have Bertie and Mary from Worcester, we have Sally and Tommy from Liverpool, on holiday, looking for a good time and getting it. They see the dancer up there and they know someone who’s good, even if they don’t know a jette from a plie. And if we throw Mademoiselle Ninette out on her ear, they’d be tearing the curtains down to hang us with them.” He looked from Nigel to Jonathon and back again. “I don’t see we have a choice. And I don’t see where anyone is being harmed by this. I say let the charade go on. Ninette isn’t taking a shilling out of Miss Tchereslavsky’s pay-packet, and no one east of London is ever going to know there’s two of them.”

Nigel grinned. “I’m glad to hear you say that, old lad, because I was going to propose the same thing. But tell me,” he continued, turning to Ninette, “How did you learn to speak Russian? For that matter, how did a poor little ballet girl from the Bohemian parts of Paris learn how to speak English?”

Oh, that was my doing, Thomas the cat said smugly. I just found a bannik in the bathhouse of one Alexei Balonovich that had come over with his master. He and I struck a bargain, and I got him to whisper Russian in her mind while she slept. You might be amazed at all the Russians who live here. Russia is not an hospitable place if you aren’t a friend of the Tsar. And as for the English, there are plenty of brownies in England to teach her English the same way.

Jonathon looked at the cat sharply. “That isn’t supposed to work unless you’ve got some magery in you.”

Well, she has. Her father was an Earth Master; that part is true enough. And she has a touch of it, enough for her to hear me, enough for her to learn languages. . . . The cat looked slyly at all of them. And enough to enchant an audience. And don’t tell me you haven’t seen her do it. Charm. Charisma. It’s magic, right enough, opens up a connection between her and them. It’s all there, what they used to call “the glamourie.” And that’s all of the magic there is in her.

“Huh,” said Arthur, and Wolf chortled. Nigel just shook his head.

“This still doesn’t tell us why there’s an Earth Master trying to kill her,” Jonathon said sharply. “We’re no closer to unraveling that particular riddle than we were before.”

But at least you won’t go barking up any Russian trees, the cat replied. Nor, I advise you, any Parisian ones either. La Augustine may be a witch, but she’s not the sort with magic, and so far as I know, there’s not a soul Ninette ever came across that has a jot of magic in him—or her—other than me. I won’t say that she never made an enemy, though I don’t know of any, but I do know that there was no one around her that I ever sensed that had magic enough to light a candle.

The men exchanged looks of resignation. Finally Nigel shook his head. “I’m curious about one thing, cat,” Nigel said slowly. “Why Blackpool? Why not—Bath, or Birmingham, or Plymouth? I can understand not wanting to try your trick in London, where someone might have seen the real Nina Tchereslavsky, and there are a lot of people there who know about the famous ballet dancers in the rest of the world, but why come all the way up into the North?”