This story, in contrast, is set in a world essentially England in the late 1800, early 1900s, in any case after the Boer War, a war between the Dutch and the British, fought in their colonies in Africa. The war comes into the story only tangentially—one of the gentlemen is a veteran of the Boer War.
The world of the book is even a little more complicated, because—there is magic. Some people have magic, and some people don't. Those who do have magic, have little fairies floating around them. Only those who have magic can see them, and only if their magic is strong enough! There are sylphs, fire spirits, nymphs, salamanders, those sorts of magical beings, called elementals.
There are four sorts of magic: fire magic, air magic, water magic, and earth magic. Each kind has different elementals: fire spirits, salamanders, etc are fire elementals; sylphs are air elementals; water nymphs are water elementals, and so on.
The main character is Katie. She was a dancer in a circus. One day, there is a huge fire in the caravan of her family, and her parents are burned to death. The circus boss quickly advises Katie to marry the Strongman. He's abusive, and a drunk, and after a few months of this, Katie escapes into the woods, and finds herself among people called Travelers, who are essentially gypsies, who take her in, give her a home, and talk her down from her paralyzing fear and anxiety. Finally, they encourage her to head out to a nearby town called Brighton, a seaside resort.
In a music hall in Brighton, there are two guys: the doorman Jack, who has lost a leg in the Boer War, and is a fire magician; and Lionel, the music hall 'Magician,' who performs magic tricks, helped in a minor way by his air elementals; yes, he's an air mage.
When Katie stumbles into the music hall looking for work, and stammers that she can dance, Jack sees that she's surrounded by several fire elementals!
Katie is hired as the Magician's assistant (which involves a little dancing), and slowly builds up her confidence. It is difficult for Jack and Lionel to break it to her that she's a magician; in fact, that magic is real. But it happens one evening, and Katie has a difficult time believing the whole thing. But finally, she does.
After a lot of interesting developments, Katie's fearsome husband shows up, gives her a painful beating, moves into her house, and blackmails her into supporting him, giving him her entire paycheck, and cooking for him, because he says that he'll break the back of the crippled doorman, who he knows is her friend. Katie knows that her husband is a murderer, and is petrified with fear.
There are lots of fascinating people in the story, all of them essential to the plot, in one way or another. There's a lot of historical detail; it makes the story fascinating. In the Enola Holmes stories (written by a completely different person, but it's roughly the same historical period) the details are a lot more harrowing, but equally fascinating. It seems very much as though writers of that time were determined to delineate the social abuses of that time. No doubt fiction set in these times, written a century or so in the future, will describe the horrors of these decades in gruesome detail.
I think this is one of Mercedes Lackey's best stories.
Kay
