Steadfast Read Online Free PDF Page B

began to notice people hawking
     food and drink at the windows of each car. She gazed wistfully at the bottles of lemonade
     and burdock, but contented herself with a paper cup of water to drink with her bread
     and cheese. She kept her eyes on her own food as the party around her bought ham sandwiches
     and lemonades and chattered on, oblivious to her presence. Or, perhaps, politely ignoring
     her, so she wouldn’t feel her poverty too much.
    If the latter, well . . . that was kind of them.
    It was early evening before the train pulled into Brighton at last. She had gathered
     up her bundle and was about to leave the compartment, when one of the old women that
     had shared it with her turned back.
    “Go here, ducky,” she said, with a kindly smile, pressing a little rectangle of cardboard
     into Katie’s hands. “Not to worry, it’s safe as houses.” Then she rejoined her party,
     as Katie paused to look at the little printed card.
    Mrs. Brown’s Boarding House for Working Girls,
it said, and listed the rates. Katie stepped down out of the carriage and onto the
     platform with a sinking heart. If this was how much it would cost to live here . . .
     her scant supply of money would not last three days.
    •   •   •
    One of the sylphs was hovering just over Lionel’s mirror. She looked like an Art Nouveau
     illustration, with her butterfly wings and her flowing hair and garment—such as it
     was—and she made Lionel smile a little. The sylphs came and went as they chose for
     the most part, only in the most extreme and emotional of occasions could a mere Elemental
     Magician actually
summon
one. But they liked Lionel, and they were positively addicted to performing and being
     onstage. In fact, he often had more of them volunteering to help than he actually
     needed! Not that he ever turned them down. It made more sense to take them all and
     let them sort themselves out than it did to turn some down and risk that they would
     never turn up again.
    “You look sad, magician,”
the creature whispered, curving her head on its long neck down to regard him solemnly.
    “Well . . . I’m in a bit of difficulty,” he confessed. Carefully, in simple terms,
     he explained that Suzie was leaving, as the other girls had left him, and that he
     had not found someone to replace her.
    Not that his advertisements hadn’t brought answers—but all of the girls that had turned
     up were utterly unsuitable. One had turned up this morning, in fact, with the torn-out
     advertisement in her hand. Even though she had only credentials as a dancer from the
     chorus of a review, in desperation, he had tried her out anyway, only to discover
     that there was no way she was going to fit inside the apparatus. She just wasn’t flexible
     enough in the right places.
    The sylph teased up the scrap of paper from where it had been left on the corner of
     his dressing table. Lionel was so dispirited he didn’t even object—not even when she
     whirled it around like an autumn leaf and then whisked out the window with it. Let
     the creature play with her toy; he’d learned he got better results from his sylphs
     when he indulged them. And it wasn’t as if he needed a torn-out copy of his own advertisement.
    With a sigh, he went back to cleaning and arranging the things on his table, a little
     ritual he liked to go through before he got ready for the performance. Some people
     sang little songs, some people tied a lucky charm somewhere about their person. Some
     played over a hand of solitaire. He liked to make his dressing table mathematically
     precise and neat as a good housewife’s.
    As he did so, he wondered why the sylph had been so intrigued with the bit of paper
     in the first place.
    •   •   •
    Katie had been wandering the seaside streets of Brighton for more than an hour, feeling
     entirely dazed. It was true that there was a dazzling array of entertainments here—
too
dazzling, really. It seemed that