Free Reserved for the Cat by Mercedes Lackey Page A

all right. The story of the wreck and its lovely survivor had spread rapidly thanks to the telegraph and the telephone. Everyone wanted to hear the story first hand. Nigel and Arthur had concocted something that they thought would suit—be romantic enough and plausible enough to pass muster. Because certainly they couldn’t tell the truth. . . .
    Instead, the cat, Thomas, had been, much to his disgust, imbued with all the qualities of the most devoted of dogs. Some of the reporters were even considering having their papers give him a lifesaving medal. At least one probably would.
    Now the story ran that the cat had run up to them as they paused the auto for a moment near the piers to wait for someone to cross the street. Never mind that their real route would have taken them nowhere near the piers; Nigel had conveniently not mentioned why they were out at that hour in the first place. The cat supposedly had jumped onto the hood of the motor, and when Nigel had gotten out to chase him off, had jumped down and grabbed Nigel’s trouser-leg in his teeth. Then, doglike, he had tugged until Nigel followed them, leading them to the girl. No, the cat hadn’t then been the girl’s pet—all of them had reckoned that having a cat swim to shore from a sinking yacht would be rather too much to be believed. Yes, she was adopting her savior—that was to forestall any newspaper scheme of having the cat adopted by a reader lottery. Yes, he was watching over her now, it was immensely touching—that, of course, was to strike the proper note of sentiment. Yes, they intended to offer Miss Tchereslavsky their hospitality until she was well enough to decide what she wanted to do—true enough on all counts.
    Finally when he thought they had all heard enough, he ushered the reporters out with orders to his butler to make sure they all got a good brandy before they left “to ward off the cold.”
    Only then did he return to his sitting room where Arthur and Wolf were waiting for him.
    “Did it pass muster?” Arthur asked anxiously, as he closed the door behind him.
    “No reason why it shouldn’t,” Nigel replied, settling into his favorite armchair and propping his feet on the fire grate. He accepted a brandy from Arthur with a sigh of satisfaction. “Good gad, old man, Americans couldn’t have manufactured something this sensational! Wolf, do you think you can write music for a dancer instead of a singer?”
    The parrot snorted, and took a dainty bite out of a hothouse grape. “At least it will be slightly more of a challenge than writing music to fit: “ Charlie, my Charlie, oh do tell me true / Am I still your sweetheart, your dear Alice Blue? / Will you take me to church, will you take me to town / In my dear little Alice-blue, Alice-blue gown?”
    “That was a hit!” Nigel reminded him, and the parrot groaned. “The costermongers and newsboys were whistling it in the street!” he continued. “You must have sold thousands of copies of the sheet music!”
    “A bit, a bit,” Arthur said complacently. “Kept you in fresh peas, Wolf.”
    But already nebulous plans were unfolding in Nigel’s fertile imagination. He remembered a production of Shakespeare— The Tempest it was—and the sensational effects managed on the stage as the curtain rose. He could do that. They could do that. “We’ll have to manage to get a shipwreck into the plot,” Nigel said aloud, causing both of them to stare at him.
    “Whyever for?” Arthur said after a moment. “That would be a dreadfully expensive set to create.”
    “Because we’re going to have the dancer that was saved from a shipwreck as our star turn!” Nigel shook his head at their surprise. Couldn’t they see it? It was a fine thing to capitalize on saving her in the first place, but better to remind the public of the great story in two or three months and capitalize on it all over again. “Half of our publicity is already done for us, and the locals and the holiday people