Mercedes Lackey: Reserved for the Cat

Except, somehow, she could understand them. Imperfectly, but . . . she could understand them.

She came a little more awake, clutched the bedclothes with her eyes still closed, and listened to the young women trudge up the stairs to their rooms and chatter about their shop-jobs, the horrid customers. By the voices, there were five, two of whom had French accents, and who seemed to be working for a perfumer and a milliner. How can I understand them? she thought, baffled.

And then she truly woke up. She was in a strange room, in a strange bed—a room and a bed much, much nicer than any she had ever had before. The smells were all wrong; pleasant, but wrong. There was the faint scent of lavender, the fainter scent of the sea, and just a hint of baking bread. The sounds were all wrong also; the staircase was solid, not creaky, the voices in the street outside were nothing like as loud as in Montmartre, and were neither raised in argument nor song. And it was raining. This was not France.

It had not been a fever dream. She was, truly was, in England. And how was it she could understand those young women?

Because I gave you the language.

The warm place at the small of her back moved, and the cat insinuated himself out from under the bedclothes and sat on the pillow, looking down at her.

“How?” she whispered haltingly.

I put it into your head by magic.

But she didn’t believe in—

You are speaking to a cat. If you do not believe this is magic, what do you think it is?

She blinked. And blinked again. She was awake, in England, possessed of two purses of money, and speaking to a cat. There really was no explanation other than madness, and if she was mad . . . then she wasn’t here at all, and it all certainly felt real.

But the whole situation was so . . . impossible. . . .

If you get up and get dressed, you will be able to get supper with the rest. Trust me. I know what I am doing. I will help you make your fortune.

Her stomach growled, and that decided for her. This might be madness, this might be impossible, but there was food down there, and she had missed too many meals already in her life. At the moment, she did not care about fortunes, she cared about a good dinner.

She spent a good long time brushing out her skirt and jacket, then washing up in the basin on the dresser and combing out her hair. Unlike some of the other ballet girls, her hair was not down to her waist; it was only just long enough to be put up into the proper, stiff little bun. She pinned it up tidily, donned her clothing, and when she heard a bell ring and the sounds of footsteps and voices in the hall and on the stairs, she joined the others.

The other young women glanced at her curiously, but all were clearly hungry and in a great hurry to get to the table. Nor did she blame them. The savory aromas nearly made her faint.

She followed the others to a dining room; in the manner of the rest of the house it was very clean, very neat, but nothing in it was new. A huge, plain table with a white tablecloth could easily seat ten. There were eight plain, ladder-backed chairs around it now. A little maidservant was bringing in the last of a set of platters, this one holding a loaf of bread already sliced. Gaslights illuminated the table in the growing dusk.

It was all she could do to remember her manners, remember that she was not supposed to be a starving little dancer, nor a Montmartre refugee, but a respectable girl visiting her married sister. She waited until the others were seated, then took the only vacant chair. She bowed her head over her clasped hands while Madame spoke a brief blessing. She looked up as Madame finished; despite longing to reach for the nearest plate, she kept her hands in her lap.

“This is Miss Ninette Dupond,” Madame said gravely. “She will be staying with us for a few days while she visits her sister, before returning to the Continent. I trust you will make her welcome.”

Madame had a very strong accent, but so far as Ninette could tell, her English was quite correct. The others murmured welcomes, and then the passing of dishes from hand to hand began.

The main course was a cassoulet of white beans, with pork and mutton and a bit of bacon. There was of course, far less pork and mutton than there were beans, but this was several steps above what Ninette had been eating of late, and there was plenty to go around. With this were plenty of boiled potatoes and cabbage, and that wonderful, big, crusty loaf of bread. Ninette ruled herself at that meal with a will of iron. She did not grab, she did not fill her dish to overflowing. She did not take the last of anything. She ate slowly, with small bites. She did not pour half the sugar in the bowl into her tea.

She knew, as she ate, that she could not possibly be mad. Not even in madness could she have imagined eating enough at a meal that she was actually full. Madame was not stingy with her guests, though it was very clear that she made the most economical meals possible. But she also made them well, and filling.

Mostly the other girls were involved in chatter about each other. Quiet, well-mannered chatter, but nonetheless, it was simple gossip. Madame did not join in, but neither did she make any gestures of disapproval. Now and again, one of the girls remembered her manners and thought to ask Ninette something about the supposed sister. The questions were infrequent enough that Ninette was able to concoct a plausible sounding story by the end of the meal. Her sister had met the man who was to be her husband when he traveled to Paris as a salesman of steel cutlery; she had been working in a shop at the time. They were married in Paris. On becoming a husband and father-to-be he had taken another job with his firm as a clerk, so that he did not have to travel. This was their first child. It had gone well, but Maria needed her sister’s company. The flat was too small for a visitor to stay in.

This was all accepted without anything other than a nod or two. Madame enquired as to whether she would be taking luncheon at the house. Ninette told her “yes.” “I do not want to be a burden on them,” she said, in her new, broken English. “They must watch their pennies.”

Madame nodded with approval and attention moved on to the new playbill at the Alhambra music hall, which seemed, from what Ninette could gather, to be pretty much like the old playbill. The comedian was said to be a little funnier, the magician not so good as the last. There were ragtime singers from America in place of Rose and Violet and Three Young Men. There were jugglers instead of acrobats, and dogs instead of the sketch comic. The young ladies voiced their discontent.

Ninette concentrated on her dinner. But it occurred to her at that moment that she might, just might, be able to leverage her cachet as a French dancer into a position at one of these music halls. Respectable shop girls and respectable boarding house owners went to these performances; while not the Paris Opera in terms of artistic quality, these places were at least attracting something other than the bohemians, the grisettes, the whores and apaches. They might even have their own versions of the old men in fur coats, who liked to make the lives of little ballet girls more comfortable.

She could not continue to live here, of course. She was rather sure that the salary of a dancer would not extend to a place like this, and even if it would, she doubted that Madame would permit someone like a dancer to live among her shop girls. But perhaps the cat could find her a place that catered to entertainers.

Not an impossible idea. . . .

Dinner ended with something that Madame called “treacle pudding,” which Ninette regarded with a dubious expression, and which was rather more sticky sweet than she was used to. Still, it was a luxury. The last day had been full of luxuries. She had actually had enough to eat for the first time in ... well, certainly since Maman had died. She had sat in a railway carriage and then in a ferry, she had slept in a bed between sheets that were not tearing apart with age and gray with washings, beneath warm, whole blankets. It was like a miracle.