Reserved for the Cat

He realized with a start that the song-and-dance turn was over, and the dumb-show comic was running through his paces. The man himself was affable enough, but Jonathon didn’t much care for that style of comedy. Shoving his hands into his trouser pockets, he went off to the stage door, thinking vaguely of some fresh air.

There was an odd sort of fellow, lurking there. Not the sort one found at a stage door; desperately middle-class and trying not to look it. Cambridge tie, but one of the more obscure new colleges; one of those that, the fellows at Trinity would say, looking down their long noses, “Oh, they’re open to anybody.” As if that were a sort of veiled insult. Egalitarian, they were not. Jonathon, who had, in fact, gone to Trinity, and could, if he chose, hold his own with the best and worst of the blue-bloods, found himself both exasperated and in agreement with the attitude.

Because often enough the “anybody” was someone like this chap, who had not gotten a good education because he hadn’t gone to Cambridge to get one. He’d gone to get affectations, and social connections, and to collect reflected glory because for whatever reason, he failed to produce any himself.

“Hoi,” he said, as the fellow mopped his face with a handkerchief, “anything I can help you with?”

The fellow started, and turned piggy eyes on him. “Ah, er, not really,” he said, turning the good and useful word into “rahlly” as he aped the upper-class drawl. “Just curious, don’cha know? Stage door, is this?”

Jonathon knew very well that no one outside the company would recognize him for the sinister magician of his act, so he slouched a bit and leaned up against the wall. “ ’Tis,” he said, hands deep into his pockets, as he felt for his matches. “This here’s a musical variety hall. Very posh, popular with the toffs.”

The stage-door porter, who guarded the door like a mastiff, looked as if he was going to laugh at Jonathon’s “act.”

“So,” Jonathon continued, guessing shrewdly what had brought the man here. “I ourta warn you, there’s no messin’ about with our star-ladies, if that’s what o-casioned you to be here. In-vee-tation only, that’s the word. We don’t allow no loiterin’ about in the halls, in ’opes of getting into the dressing room, neither. This is a respectable house. You go on down t’ Shipley’s, if that’s your game.”

The fellow perspired more. “No! No!” he stammered. “Just passing by! Just curious! No harm meant!”

And with that, he fled the scene.

The porter looked after him, mouth a little open in surprise. “Wot th’ hell was he on about?” the man finally gasped.

Jonathon shook his head. “Probably thinking he’d wait until one of the girl-acts came out, and see what he could get. I can’t think of any other reason for someone like him to turn up here. His sort generally don’t take holidays at Blackpool, and they don’t go wandering inquisitively down alleyways to see what’s at the back of the buildings. He knew what this was, and he had something planned when he got here.”

The porter turned red-face. “A masher!” he said wrathfully. “Bloody ’ell! If he cooms here agin, I’ll send ’im packin’, see if I don’t!”

Jonathon chuckled. “You might just have a word with the Reicher brothers instead,” he suggested, naming the “strong-man” act that used their two sisters as their “props.” It made for a very interesting and surprisingly graceful act, actually. The young ladies took beautiful poses, poised on tiptoe in the palm of one brother’s hand. Then they would collapse bonelessly into his arms to be tossed to the other like a ball. “You might let it be known that the fellow was asking after their sisters.”

The porter looked at him sideways, then broke out into an enormous grin.

Jonathon strolled away, whistling.

Nigel had not mentioned that the Water Master in question was one of the youngest Masters in the country. It usually took an Elemental Master decades to come into his full power; Alan Grainger had done so before his twenty-first birthday.

Now, partly that was because Alan had applied himself to the study of his Element and its magic with the devotion of any artist to the art that consumes him, whether that be music, painting, or the crafting of words. Part of that was because he came early into his power, calling and playing with Undines before he could actually talk, swimming before he could walk. And part of that was to his teachers’ credit; his parents were great Water Masters in their own right, and two of the best teachers Nigel had ever heard of.

Alan was the rarest sort of bird there was; raised by kind, clever people, he was kind and clever himself. Having seen that there were powers he would never command, he was modest. The pliant nature of water was his; flowing around obstacles whenever possible, but implacable in force when there was no other way.

He was also astonishingly good looking. Had he not been so modest, Nigel often thought, he could have made a fortune on the stage. But as self-effacing as he was, nothing would induce him to, as he would say, “make a guy of himself in public.”

It was a very good thing that he was clever, but not brilliantly so. He did modestly well in school, then at university. Then again, he didn’t need to be a brilliant scholar. His family owned a fine whiskey distillery in Scotland. He would, in due course, run it. He enjoyed the work, understood it, and would be happy in it, and his studies in history were something he had undertaken because he enjoyed history, not because he expected to have to make a living as a teacher or a scholar.

It was the “astonishingly good-looking” part that caused Nigel the most amusement. He expected that Ninette would find him attractive. He also expected that something would then occur with regards to Jonathon. Either he would take the same interest as any friend would—and if he had any sense, and the attraction was mutual, he would urge Ninette to pursue that attraction—or he would react with jealousy. In either case, this would be good for Jonathon. All this restless vacillation was distracting everyone at a time when they needed to be anything but distracted.

As for the little dancer, well, there was no telling what the girl would do—except that Nigel was fairly certain she wasn’t the sort to deliberately break a fellow’s heart and lead him on. Plus, she was French, and French women, in his experience—if they were the good-hearted sort—were honest in their affaires de couer. Mind, he didn’t think that she actually knew what she wanted yet. She had plenty of life experience in seeing amour as a business transaction, but was pretty heart-whole in that department herself.

Women tended to be fascinated by Jonathon, the wretched dog. It was the stage persona partially. Women were attracted to dangerous men, and even though Jonathon was no more dangerous than any other confirmed bachelor, and rather less dangerous than confirmed womanizers, he appeared dangerous. Partly it was the challenge; here was a personable man, well- educated, well-spoken, at the top of his trade, who could not possibly care less about women. Several of his assistants had, over the years, fallen into an infatuation with him. Always he revealed something to them that made them decide that there were better prospects elsewhere.

On the other hand, he’d been treating Ninette in a way he had never treated another woman before. He gave her more respect than any Nigel had seen with him before. Alan’s mere presence might wake him up to the fact that here was a rival that could compete with him on his own ground.

If there was a fault that this paragon had, it was that Alan was, well, mild. He never became passionate about much of anything. That might have been his youth, but Nigel suspected it was his nature. This was no bad thing in a Water Master, though Nigel sincerely hoped that one day he would find something he cared deeply about, be it a cause or another person. Nevertheless, this was what they needed right now. Alan would not get upset or agitated; he would simply apply his mind to the problem at hand and keep at it until they had solved it.

Furthermore, Alan had the luxury of being able to devote his entire mind to the problem. He did not have tricks to work out, choreography to create, dances and acts to practice, a theater to run, or an orchestra to keep under control.

Last of all, he had the advantage of coming to it with a fresh set of eyes and thoughts.

A tap at Nigel’s office door caused him to look up and smile broadly. “Alan, my boy, good to see you!” There was the young man himself: lean and fit, a good six feet tall. He had a chiseled face with handsome, angular features, frank blue eyes, and hair just a little untidy.

“Sir, if I may interrupt your work—” Alan began in that Scots burr tamed and softened by his terms at university.