The Apprentices

by Leon Garfield

  The apprentice looked up and saw his master’s daughter sitting on her father’s right hand. With every intention of being agreeable, he began to study her features with admiration and zeal. A look of sharp spite rippled across her face as if it had been a reflection in water suddenly shuffled by a wind.

  At eight o’clock the old journeyman took his day’s wages and holding high his magnificent head, removed his fallen hip and swollen knees into the November dark. As he left, the old man asked the apprentice if he would care to join him for a glass of ale nearby. Reluctantly Nightingale declined; he was weary to the point of faintness from his sleepless night, and he ached for his bed.

  He stumbled through the evening meal in a dull silence and afterwards begged to be excused from sitting with the family in the parlour. He was given permission to retire but not without a warning that his candle was to last out the week.

  Thankfully he went into the shop and had scarcely taken off his coat when, as on the previous night, his door flew open.

  “Nightingale!”

  It was Miss Lucinda. Nightingale flinched in the expectation of something else being tossed for him to catch. This time, however, she had come on another errand.

  “I want you to come and look at a mirror of mine,” she said remotely. “It’s upstairs, in my parlour. Come and look at it.”

  The apprentice, swaying beside his bed as if he would fall asleep before falling down, said, “Yes, Miss Lucinda.”

  He believed that he must have made some inroads upon her affections and that this was her way of showing it. He followed her upstairs, hoisting himself by the banister rails and counting them to keep awake. She led him into her little room, where, in imitation of her father’s workroom, there was an easel on which stood a shrouded mirror.

  “I want you to look in the mirror, Nightingale, and tell me what you see.”

  He was to be tested again. He tried to think. What should he say this time? Should he praise the frame? Or, if she herself was reflected in the glass, should he praise her? What would please her most? Much depended on his words. . . .

  He stood before the mirror, preparing himself. . . .

  She snatched the cloth away. Nightingale shrieked aloud. A black-socketed skull grinned back at him! He trembled violently, believing, for a moment, that he’d seen an uncanny portent of his own doom. Then he perceived that he’d looked, not in a mirror, but through clear glass behind which had been arranged the death’s head.

  Miss Lucinda laughed—and he rushed from the room in terror. Downstairs he lay on his bed, sobbing bitterly on account of the fright he’d had, on account of being the object of a hatred he could not understand, and on account of being parted from those who loved him. He felt he could never sleep again. . . .

  Next morning he awoke suddenly. Someone wild and amazed was staring him in the face. He leaped from his bed—to discover that a mirror had been set to confront him. He fancied he heard a sound of laughter in the passage outside.

  He got through the day in a fog of bewilderment and unhappiness. The shop bell rang and rang; customers came and went; he bowed them in and bowed them out; he swept and tidied and stood stock still whenever Mr. Paris chose to unburden himself of more wisdom than Nightingale thought ever should have been contained in a mortal head; and whenever he was alone, he crouched down behind the counter, held his aching head in both hands, and wept like a child.

  “I saw you crying behind the counter,” said Miss Lucinda as she passed him in the passage. “And all the street saw you, too.”

  Filled with a new dismay, he ran back into the shop. High over the counter a mirror had been tilted so that everything was reflected outwards. He climbed up on a chair and took it down carefully, trying to avoid seeing the fear in his own face. After that, he was cautious about every expression and every action; he could never know for certain whether he was being reflected, and watched.

  Was it possible that the master knew what his daughter was doing? Perhaps he’d instructed her? Perhaps this was all his testing time? Perhaps it was like those ancient trials by fire and water to temper the spirit and make it worthy? Only his was a trial by mirrors? . . . “A craftsman must endure and endure . . .” he murmured to himself as he sat, absorbed in such fanciful reflections, in the little necessary-house at the end of the yard. He had gone there more to relieve his mind than his body; and indeed, as his thoughts drifted, he did come to a kind of melancholy peace.

  He raised his eyes as if to heaven; a shaft of light was shining through the ventilating aperture above the door. It fell upon a tilted square of silvered glass. Miss Lucinda’s face was gazing down with a look of disgust and contempt. He cried out—and she vanished. He heard her jump down from whatever she’d been standing on; then he heard her feet pattering away.

  He pulled up his breeches and hurried back into the workroom, feeling guilty and ashamed of being alive. He picked up a broom and began to sweep the shavings from round the feet of the ancient journeyman; then he went to fetch Job’s beer.

  The old man was working on a design of oak leaves and children’s faces; patiently he tapped away with his mallet so that the bent gouge he gripped inquired into the wood like another finger. From time to time he laid his tools aside and set the frame against the mirror it was being carved for . . . and his marvellous prophet’s head gazed back with a remote and dreamy rapture.

  “Your beer, Mr. Job, sir.”

  The journeyman nodded. “Lay it on the bench, Master Nightingale.”

  The apprentice obeyed and looked again over Job’s shoulder at the unfinished frame. The children’s faces were sharply defined and were all exactly alike. They were Miss Lucinda. . . .

  Nightingale wondered if he dared question the journeyman about their master’s daughter. He longed to ask the old man what he thought of her. Did she ever speak to him? Did she ever speak to anyone? Even her father and mother never seemed honoured with a word from her; nor, for that matter, did they speak much to her. Was she, perhaps, not their child? Or was she a mad child, suffered to roam the house and never checked for fear of provoking something worse than tricks with mirrors? Surely Job would know what she was.

  The journeyman, without taking his eyes from the mirror, reached for his beer.

  “Recognize ’em, Master Nightingale?”

  “They’re Miss Lucinda, ain’t they, Mr. Job, sir?”

  “And a good likeness, don’t you think? They was to have been angels. That’s what they are in the pattern book. But I thought Miss Lucinda would be a nice fancy. It’ll please the master. And that’s what you and me’s here for, Master Nightingale. Journeymen and apprentices alike must always please their master. Just as you aim to please your own pa at home.”

  So she’s an angel, thought Nightingale, and found himself left with no choice but to keep at his work and show, by all means in his power, that his chief aim in life was indeed to please his master.

  After all, when he came to think about it all carefully, he wasn’t so badly off. No one had clouted him; no one had injured him bodily. . . . “Country born and country bred,” he muttered with rueful philosophy. “Strong in the arm and weak in the head. And what’s wrong with that?” Well, not weak, exactly, but good and solid. Nothing too fanciful. When all’s said and done, there’s no sense in thinking and thinking about something a country body can’t hope to understand. And—and they say worse things happen at sea. So I ought to be thankful I’ve not been sent for a sailor! Besides, who knows but Miss Lucinda will come to respect me for holding my tongue about her tricks? Who knows but I’ll turn out the industrious apprentice yet and wed my master’s daughter? They say it does happen. . . .

  He pursued this line of comfort, with varying success, for the remainder of the day; whenever he passed Miss Lucinda he endeavoured to express in his smile forgiveness for her cruelty and admiration for her beauty at one and the same time. On such occasions, she did not seem to see him. Then—

  “Nightingale!”

/>   Once again she was at his door, demanding that he should come and look in her mirror. He sighed, and steeled himself for another look at the death’s head. As he followed her, he even prepared some sort of philosophical remark that he hoped would impress her with his worth.

  “Look at yourself, Nightingale,” she said. “Look at what you are.” She took away the cloth. A pig’s head, still bloody from the Butcher’s axe, peered back at the apprentice.

  He tried to laugh, but in truth he felt too sick and frightened to do more than imitate the grin of yesterday’s skull. He stumbled out of the room and made his way back to his bed.

  On the next day he came upon mirrors laid in different places: mirrors that caused him to fall headlong down a pair of steps outside the workroom, that led him to gash his forehead against an open door, that made him trip over a piece of wood that wasn’t there and so to break a costly jug.

  There was no mirror any more in the privy, nor was there one above the counter; but that didn’t help. He couldn’t be easy in his mind that they really weren’t there. Indeed, he could not be easy in his mind about anything. . . .

  He found himself walking about the ill-lit house like one newly blinded—with hands outstretched, never knowing whether he was coming to a reality or its reflection. His chief hope was for the night; it was only in darkness that he could feel secure and be able to distort his face with weeping and anguish without restraint. Until that blessed time, he did what he could to wear the glazed smile of his master, his mistress, and Job, the lame old prophet in the workroom.

  When night did come, he was too sick and giddy in his brain to do more than nod when Miss Lucinda, like a white spirit, came to summon him to her mirror again. Wearily he climbed the stairs to the pretty little parlour. A dead rat. He shrank away. Truly had the country Nightingale flown into a forest of glass and thorn.

  In the blackness of his bed he cried out against his father’s ambition that had sent him forth on so dreadful a journey.

  “I want you to be better than I am, Daniel,” he had said. “I want you to be something more than a humble joiner. You shall be a master carver, and, God willing, one day you will be carving cathedral pews and screens and all manner of beautiful things. That’s what I want for my son.”

  “And who knows,” said his mother musingly, “but that someday, like your father before you, you will wed your master’s daughter? It’s the dream of every apprentice, you know; and the reward for the industrious ones.”

  “We are making a great sacrifice,” said his father.

  “But no sacrifice can be too great,” said his mother, kissing him. “Always remember that.”

  Lying in a sea of tears, Nightingale remembered, and feeling his mother’s kiss, wondered whether he himself was the sacrifice that could not be too great.

  He knew there had been two other apprentices before him. Had they suffered as he was suffering? Had she hated them, too? This possibility gave him a crumb of comfort, and he fell to supposing they’d fled, no matter what the consequences, even though rebellion in an apprentice was reckoned a great sin. He tried to smile. Most likely they’d been town sparrows and knew better ways of the world than did a country Nightingale.

  “I think you should know, Nightingale,” said Mr. Paris, over the evening meal, “that we are pleased with you.” As usual, he smiled down the table at his smiling wife, while on his right hand sat Miss Lucinda, the devil-angel of the household. “I am writing to your father to tell him that we find you courteous and respectful.”

  Nightingale smiled fixedly down at his plate. A week had passed, and his spirit was broken as surely as the looking-glass he’d dropped on his first day.

  He longed to cry out, to protest against the monstrous injustice to which he was being subjected. Every shame, every piece of spiteful humiliation that could be inflicted by mirrors had been daily visited on him, and nightly he’d been condemned to go to bed with an image of himself in a mirror that was no mirror, as something hateful and beneath contempt.

  “Look at yourself! Look at yourself! Look at yourself!” Miss Lucinda commanded, standing in her pretty, blue-papered parlour, and uncovering, one after another, the framed sights of worms, a hanged man’s head, a broken piss pot with “Nightingale” scrawled on it in black. . . .

  “I can tell you now, Nightingale,” went on Mr. Paris, cheerfully, “that when I brought you out of Hertfordshire, I had my doubts about country lads. One hears such tales of boys new to the town running after-all manner of gaudy nonsense; worshipping the golden calf, one might say. An apprentice, my boy, must put his master above everything else. It’s the only way to get through his seven years with honour and profit.”

  Nightingale said, “Yes, sir,” and went out to fetch his master another jug of ale.

  “Look at yourself, Nightingale. Look in my mirror. See what you are tonight.”

  Miss Lucinda stood in her parlour, while the apprentice, already without his jacket—for she’d come to him late—swayed before the shrouded easel. Dully he’d been racking his brains to imagine what she’d concealed this time behind the false glass. What hideous object could she have scavenged this time to frighten him with and to show him what he was?

  “Look, Nightingale!”

  She took away the cloth. The apprentice felt his head spin and his ears roar. Framed in the glass that faced him was—nothingness. Blackness, a bottomless pit . . .

  The extreme shock of meeting with such utter emptiness overbalanced him. He felt himself begin to fall forwards, as if he were actually being sucked into the hole before his eyes. A black velvet bag had been placed behind the glass. . . .

  “Nothing,” she said. “That’s what you are now. Nothing . . . nothing.”

  What would he be tomorrow, he wondered, as he half fell down the stairs. What was there on the other side of nothing?

  It was a damp, misty morning with a cemetery chill on it; Job, who was afflicted with rheumatism in addition to his other bodily misfortunes, asked if the apprentice might be sent to Greening’s in Glass House Yard to fetch a mirror that was cut and waiting. It would have been a cruel torment if he’d had to walk there himself.

  “Nightingale?”

  “Yes, Mr. Paris, sir?”

  “Can you find your way to Greening’s in the Yard?”

  “Yes, sir. Directly, sir.”

  “Nightingale!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Check the glass carefully. They’ll pass off rubbish if they can. No flaws, mind; no cracks in the silver, no spots of tarnish round the edges.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How will you judge, Nightingale?”

  “I—I’ll look at it . . . all over.”

  “And what will you see, Nightingale? Yourself. Much good that will do us, eh, Job?”

  The old man rubbed his knees and sniggered.

  “The human countenance, Master Nightingale, is no yardstick for perfection, not even yours. Words, lad, that’s what’s needful. In the beginning was the Word, and all that. Here, take this—”

  He gave the abashed apprentice a card on which was printed, bold and black, something that might have been Hebrew for all Nightingale could tell.

  “Just you hold it up to the glass they give you and read the letters clean and clear. Then you’ll be able to see what’s what.”

  Nightingale put on his coat, took the card, and set off. The very idea of going out after his distressful week revived him considerably; he felt, as he shut the shop door behind him, that he was emerging from a peculiarly bad dream. Once outside, however, this comfortable sensation was reversed by the mistiness of the morning that had the effect of rendering the buildings and street indistinct and much more dreamlike than the house he’d just left. Consequently, he was quite unable to throw off the creeping uneasiness of what he might be shown that night in Miss Lucinda’s mirror. What was it that could lie on the farther side of nothing?

  He walked quickly, without particularly meaning to;
the chill in the air forced him to be brisk and vigorous, even though he felt, as they say, distinctly under the weather. He reached Glass House Yard and found Greening’s without difficulty.

  It turned out to be more of a warehouse than a shop, with tall racks in which white-covered mirrors were stacked like huge, wordless volumes in a library for giants. The air in the beamed and boarded interior was brooding and pensive. . . .

  “Mirror for Mr. Paris,” said Nightingale to a short, weaselish apprentice who appeared reluctantly from the obscure shadows at the back of the shop.

  “Mirror for Paris!” shouted out the weaselish one to the shadows he’d just left.

  “Third shelf along on the right. Got his name on it!” came a shout in reply.

  The mirror, wrapped in white muslin, was brought down and laid on the counter.

  “Sixpence on the clorf,” said the weasel hopefully.

  “I heard that!” came the shout from the back. “There’s nothing to pay and well you know it!”

  The weasel shrugged his thin shoulders.

  “Got to try and make ends meet,” he said amiably.

  Nightingale smiled. The apprentice’s attempt at sharp practice had been transparent enough even for Nightingale to see through. The other, not at all abashed, beamed over the counter.

  “Givin’ you a ’ard time, I see.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Nightingale uneasily.

  “Paris and that ’orrible bitch of a daughter of ’is.”

  “No such thing!” Nightingale shrank in terror from the temptation of pouring out his misery to a stranger. He smiled again, this time with the glazed smile that was the livery of his master’s house.