Steadfast (37 page)

“I had to threaten to call the constables,” said the prizefighter’s patron. “He was
claiming we cheated, making all sorts of ridiculous accusations, then threatening
us
that he was going to get even. As soon as I sent someone for police, though, he stumbled
off, blind drunk and raging.”

Then it was Katie’s turn. She sat in the witness box, quiet, pale, wearing a black
gown she had borrowed from Suzie. The Coroner strode up and down in front of her for
a moment, then turned on her, and barked out his first question.

“You perform at the Palace Music Hall, is that true?” he said, as if it were a sort
of attack. Well, perhaps it was. The jury for the inquest was, of course, composed
of very sober tradesmen and businessmen. They would scarcely approve of a woman who
exposed herself on a stage to the eyes of strangers. Strange men. . . .

“Yes, sir,” Katie replied quietly.

“And you are billed as Natalya Bayonova, the Russian Ballerina!” he crowed, and pointed
a long, accusing finger at her. “Yet you are not Russian, you are not a ballerina,
and your name is Katherine Langford!” Jack could see what he was doing. Already Katie
had a mark against her for being a music hall performer. Now the man was making her
out to be a liar.

“The playbills were already printed when Miss Bayonova canceled, sir.” Katie was not
in the least rattled by the man’s belligerence, and Jack marveled at her composure.
Then again . . . she’d had plenty of practice in dealing with worse bullies, thanks
to her husband. At least the Coroner was not going to beat her into submission. “There
was no time to print up more. Mr. Charles Mayhew asked if any of us dancers had an
act that could replace her, and I did.”

“You’ve been performing under this . . . pseudonym . . . for the past four weeks.
That’s plenty of time to print new bills, don’t you think?” The Coroner wasn’t going
to give up this particular bone without a fight.

“I’m just a dancer, sir. I don’t know nothing about the business and all. My job is
to do my acts, and do them well, and that is the end of it. No boss likes having a
girl stick her nose into his business, and it wouldn’t be my place to do that. You’d
have to ask Mr. Mayhew about all that.” She kept her voice steady and didn’t flinch
as he got right up into her face.

Disgruntled by the fact that he hadn’t shaken her, the Coroner stalked away, then
turned. “And why were you here in Brighton all alone, taking on jobs, when you should
have been with your husband, Richard Langford?” he snapped.

“The circus wasn’t doing well, sir,” she said, steadily. “Dick and me agreed I was
the weaker act for a circus. I reckoned I should go look for work here, where there
were lots of places where I could get honest work. That way I could save up money.”
She shrugged. “I never reckoned on being a headline act. I was just right glad when
Mr. Hawkins took me on as his assistant. When Mr. Mayhew give me the headline job,
I reckoned I’d fallen in the cream.”

Oh, well done.
Every word rang true, because it was true. It just wasn’t
all
the truth.

“So . . . did you inform your husband of your sudden increase in good fortune?” the
Coroner sneered, knowing she hadn’t.

But she gave him a long and pitying look, the sort of look you give a child who has
given you an answer so completely wrong that you know he didn’t bother to even think
about it. “How could I,” she asked him, “When not even Mr. Andy Ball, the circus owner,
knows for sure what the next stop will be? I do be a dancer, sir, not a fortune-teller.”

That got a snicker out of the jury, and it sounded sympathetic to Jack.

The Coroner glared at her. “And did your husband tell you
why
he suddenly turned up?”

“I always expected him, sir,” she said. Jack clamped his lips tight to keep from smirking.
Another truth. “But he didn’t tell me why he come when he did.” Then she sighed sadly
and dropped her eyes. “It didn’t take long to guess, sir. It had to be the drinking.”

That answer took the Coroner completely by surprise; clearly it was not something
he had anticipated her saying. “What do you mean?” he asked, startled.

“He weren’t the man I married,” she said, still staring at her hands. “The man I married
never touched nothing stronger than cider. The man what turned up at my door was drinking
a bottle of gin a day. Two, if he could get it.”

It was one thing for the other witnesses to have said that the strongman was drunk.
It was quite another for Katie to state, matter-of-factly, the sheer
quantity
of alcohol Dick Langford was consuming. There were a couple of incredulous gasps
from the jury box.

And Jack knew they would be making up a story to match those facts in their own minds.
Langford turning to drink and being tossed out of the circus. Langford coming to Brighton
and discovering that his wife was making far more money than either of them had dreamed
she could.

Langford, now the slave of gin, falling completely into debauchery. One of the first
witnesses that the solicitor had brought in had been the whore Langford had beaten
and thrown out—though, of course, she had made no mention of
why
he had brought her to the cottage, nor that she had been trying to steal. Her story
had been that “the gemmun offered her a drink, an’ ’e beat ’er when she tol’ ’im no
t’ ’is improper advances, an’ she didn’ know ’e was married.”

This was a comfortable story for these jurors, made familiar by dozens of “improving”
plays and redemption novels. Jack could almost
see
their thoughts falling into those familiar pathways, and saw their glances as they
looked over at Katie soften. She might dance on a stage, but it was “ballet,” which
was marginally respectable, and she fit the role of “long-suffering wife” a great
deal better than “vicious man-killer.”

The Coroner saw it too; he had lost them, and he sensed it. From fierce, he turned
to crestfallen; his shoulders sagged, and the energy just drained out of him. “Tell
us in your own words what happened the night of the fire,” he demanded, but he had
given up, and his words held no more accusation and no force.

“I had left out dinner for Dick, as he asked me to do,” she said. “He said he was
going out and would not be back until late. I was having a bit of a lie-down up in
the loft, where it was cooler, waiting for him.”

The only lie there was that the loft was cooler than the rest of the cottage, but
not one of these people would know that.

“I heard him at the door, and he was terribly drunk, the worst he had ever been, and
I could tell that even before he got the door open,” she continued. She stared down
at hands that were clenched tightly in her lap, and her voice trembled as she retold
and relived that night. It was not feigned emotion, but it would not be possible for
the jurors to tell that it was fear, not grief, that made her shake.

“When he got the door open, he began blundering about, cursing and shouting. He broke
the paraffin lamp that was right by the door, and spilled the paraffin all over everything.
When I looked down out of the loft, I could tell he’d just ruined his shirt and trousers
with it. He was throwing things about and breaking them, and I ducked out of the way
to keep from being hit. Then I heard more breaking glass, and there was a huge
whoosh,
and one wall went right up in flames—and screaming, horrible screaming. He was all
on fire and running around the room, and setting fire to everything else!”

Now her voice broke on a sob, and there were murmurs of sympathy from the jury.

“He fell down across the back door,” she continued. “The front door was already on
fire from the paraffin. Then Mr. Prescott broke through the door.”

Now she looked up, straight at the jury. “He’s a war hero, and a hero twice over to
me,” she said, her voice ringing with sincerity and admiration. “He charged that fire
like the enemy, even though he’s only got one leg left from the war. He got me down
out of that loft—but by the time he did, we couldn’t get out. I remembered there was
a cellar, and we got down into it, because going down there was better odds than staying
where we were or trying to get out. And that’s all.”

She dropped her eyes to her hands, but suddenly Jack found himself the center of attention.
He looked back at them stoically, and whatever they saw in his expression seemed to
satisfy them.

When the jurors finally looked back at Katie, she was sitting there shaking visibly,
and it was clear from the looks on their faces that she had gone from Whore of Babylon
to Suffering Martyr. The Coroner saw it too, and clearly gave up on any notion of
getting her brought up on the charge of murder. He dismissed her, and with a long
face, called up Jack.

Jack took his time limping his way to the box with the aid of a crutch. He needed
the damned crutch, his hip
still
hurt like fury—but it was a very effective sight, and the Coroner knew it. If he’d
gotten the notion that he might cobble up some doubts about why Jack and Lionel had
turned up so aptly in the nick of time, he lost them on that long walk to the box.

Jack repeated Lionel’s story, that Katie had forgotten her pay packet and that they
were afraid her husband would think she—or Lionel—was up to some sort of mischief,
and would cause her trouble.

Lionel had already made a very convincing “boss,” who was already irritated at having
lost his last assistant to marriage, and was even more irritated at the notion that
his new one would be too battered to perform the next day. “I’m no gull,” Lionel had
said, gruffly. “I saw bruises on her, covered up by stage paint. I don’t care what
a man does with his wife in their own home, but if she’s my assistant, he’d better
leave her fit to work.”

Jack backed that up, saying that she was known to be a hard worker, that the Palace
needed
her as the headliner if they were all going to continue to take home pay packets,
and that he saw it as his duty to back Lionel up in case Dick Langford got belligerent.

“I’m the doorman,” he said. “I’m expected to keep order there, and missing a leg or
no, I’m used to a bit of rough and tumble at need. So I came with him and we told
the cabby to rush it up. The sooner we got there, the more likely we’d get the blighter
calmed down before he did something. But when we pulled up, there the place was, on
fire.” He straightened his back. “I’m a soldier. I know my duty when I see it. I broke
down the door, got in, got the girl down, and by then we couldn’t get out again. She
thought of the cellar, I thought, well, fire burns
up,
so we might have a chance, so down we went. And that’s that.” He nodded forthrightly.

And indeed, that was that. The Coroner, deprived of a murder charge, made no further
effort at all. The jury declared it a “death by misadventure.”

Jack would have liked nothing better than to rush to Katie and embrace her, but instead,
he turned his back on her and limped painfully out of the inquest room. Nor did he
wait for her to come out; Lionel and the solicitor had been adamant that he must have
no contact with her until they were all well clear of the area of the court.

So he took a cab with Lionel back to Lionel’s house, which was where he was staying
while his hip healed, at both Lionel’s and Mrs. Buckthorn’s insistence. Katie was
going back to Mrs. Baird’s with Suzie and a couple of the chorus girls, where they
would all have a celebratory tea.

He’d have very much liked to be part of that group . . . but instead, he and Lionel
shared a celebratory brandy.

And waited.

And finally, after dinner, after sunset, there came, at last, the sound of a cab pulling
up in front of the house, and the sound of Katie’s happy voice greeting Mrs. Buckthorn.

She was preceded and accompanied by a veritable horde of salamanders, Fire sprites,
and firebirds, who swarmed around her and lit up the room. But nothing lit up the
room like her smile.

And then, at long, long last, she was in his arms, as the Elementals wreathed around
them both, and all the world was right, as it would be right, from this moment on.