The Apprentices

by Leon Garfield

  “You look fair worn to the bone,” said the weasel with interest.

  “Stop gossiping and give him the mirror!” shouted the invisible one.

  “Ain’t gossiping. Just offerin’ comfort to a fellow ’prentice in distress. It’s Paris’s new one.”

  There came a thunder of large feet on bare boards and Mr. Greening himself issued from the cavernous depths of his shop. It was not to be wondered at that he kept in the shadows; he was extraordinarily ugly, with a monstrous nose that was afflicted with warts, like an old potato. He pushed his apprentice aside and laid his grey-and-silver-stained hands on the counter.

  “You always look as pale as a corpse, son?” he inquired, studying Mr. Paris’s new apprentice with small bright eyes that resembled chips of glass.

  “It must be the weather, sir,” said Nightingale with a pang of alarm.

  “How long have you been with Mr. Paris?”

  “Only a week, sir.”

  “God help us!”

  “I—I’m quite happy there, sir. . . .”

  “As the dying man said when the last drop of feeling left him,” remarked Mr. Greening. “Well, well, you’d best take the glass and be off.”

  Eager to escape. Nightingale took hold of the wrapped mirror.

  “Aren’t you going to check it?”

  Nightingale blushed and remembered the card. He produced it; Mr. Greening nodded approvingly, unwrapped the mirror, and obligingly held it up. Nightingale presented the card to the glass’s silver face. The black words leaped out at him:

  FOR NOW WE SEE THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY; BUT THEN FACE TO FACE: NOW I KNOW IN PART; BUT THEN SHALL I KNOW EVEN AS ALSO I AM KNOWN.

  Mr. Greening put the mirror down.

  “All right, son?”

  Nightingale nodded, but found himself staring into the air where the mirror had been. The words seemed to remain suspended in nothingness before him. He felt quite dizzy with trying to read them.

  “Here!” he heard Mr. Greening say. “Fetch him some brandy and water. And mind—I know just how much brandy’s left! Mirrors,” he went on kindly, reaching out a hand to guide Nightingale to a chair, “can sometimes unsettle the strongest stomachs.”

  Nightingale sat down. He couldn’t imagine what had come over him. He felt faint and sick. He put it down to the strong smell of polishing oil that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Gratefully he drank off the brandy and water—which contained less water than might have been expected, on account of the apprentice being generous with his master’s property—and rose to go. His legs had gone like water. . . .

  “Sit still for a while. Wouldn’t do to go dropping that mirror on your way back. Seven years’ bad luck, you know. . . .”

  Nightingale nodded and shuddered; he looked up at Mr. Greening, whose nose now seemed so enormous that it filled Nightingale’s world. The warts were like large bald mountains and the tufts of hair that sprouted from the nostrils were like the forests of the night. Way, way above this fleshy landscape gleamed Mr. Greening’s eyes, as distant as the stars. . . .

  “I’m going to be sick,” said Nightingale.

  “Got a bucket here,” said the weasel.

  “Broke a mirror,” confessed Nightingale after he’d brought up his breakfast, “on me first day. That’s what done it.”

  “That’s what done it.”

  “She threw it to me,” said Nightingale after a pause. “And that’s when it all started.”

  “What started?”

  “Things.”

  “What things?”

  “Mirrors . . . mirrors . . .”

  “He’s crying,” said the weasel brightly.

  “Mustn’t carry tales,” said Nightingale, and hiccupped.

  “Won’t tell a soul,” said Mr. Greening sombrely. “What about the mirrors?”

  “Everywhere. Even in the privy. And the one upstairs. That’s the worst. . . .”

  “Won’t tell a soul,” said Greening again. “Why is it worst?”

  So Nightingale told him. . . .

  What with the smoking of countless chimneys and, in particular, the dirty guffaws of the furnaces in Glass House Yard, the mist had condensed into a fog. Mr. Paris’s apprentice, emerging from Greening’s, had immediately been plunged into the November breath of the town, which smelled as if all the inhabitants had belched after partaking of the same bad dinner.

  He was carrying, in addition to the mirror he had been sent for, a wrapped box of about the same size as the mirror but some six inches deeper. It was heavy and seemed to grow the more so as he walked. But the weight of it under his arm was as nothing compared with the weight on his heart.

  He had betrayed his sacred trust. How he’d come to pour out all the details of his wretchedness to the ugly Mr. Greening, he would never know. He believed that, somehow, he’d dozed off and talked in his sleep. He looked back towards the strange shop as if for an answer, but the establishment was already lost in the fog. He had a sudden idea of throwing the heavy box away; he did not know what it contained and he was deeply afraid of it.

  “It’s a sort of mirror, you might say,” the weaselish apprentice had said, and grinned malevolently.

  Mr. Greening had warned him not to look in it himself. Under no circumstances was he to open it until she, and she alone, stood before it. He was to set it upon an easel, in a good light, and bid her look. The weasel had laughed aloud, and even Mr. Greening had smiled as if in terrible anticipation.

  “What is it? What will it do?” Nightingale had asked, trembling with shame over his betrayal and fear for the consequence of it.

  For answer, Mr. Greening had rubbed his grotesque nose and recalled the words on Nightingale’s card.

  “Then shall you know even as also you are known,” he’d said, and left it at that.

  If the early morning had been dreamlike, the day had now grown up into nightmare; Nightingale wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d awakened with a start to find himself under the counter in Mr. Paris’s shop. In the past he’d had dreams every scrap as convincing. . . .

  A fire came looping at him out of the thick air.

  “Light you home, mister?”

  The fog had brought out the linkboys with their torches like a plague of fireflies. Nightingale jumped, and stared at the thin, pale child who stood before him, holding aloft a flaming length of tow that really served no better purpose than to draw attention to the evil state of the weather. The light reached no farther than a yard before it came back off the fog and bathed the linkboy in its glow.

  “How much?” asked Nightingale.

  “’Pends how far,” said the linkboy, blinking away tears brought on by flaming pitch.

  “Friers Street. Mr. Paris’s shop.”

  “’S only round the corner. Off Shoemaker’s Row. Cost you a penny.”

  Nightingale closed with the offer and the linkboy set off, miraculously weaving his way through a nothing that hid countless bulky somethings. Dazedly Nightingale kept his eyes on the streaming fire that superfluously added its own smoke to the atmosphere. He wished he’d got rid of the box before the linkboy had appeared.

  “Nothing like a bit of fire for keeping out the cold,” said the linkboy, and offered Nightingale a warm.

  Although the torch shed no useful radiance in any particular direction, there was no doubt that Nightingale found its presence a comfort.

  “Friers Street,” said the linkboy suddenly, and waited while his customer searched and found a penny. Then, payment being made, he flickered off and was rapidly extinguished in the premature night.

  “And where have you been, Nightingale?” asks Mr. Paris severely.

  “I come over all queer at Mr. Greening’s,” says Nightingale humbly, and means it with all his heart. He has managed to deposit the mysterious box under the counter without being seen, before presenting himself to his master.

  Mr. Paris looks closely, then resumes his glazed smile. He believes his apprentice, having satisfied himself
that he certainly looks queer.

  “He was taken over queer at Greening’s,” he tells Mrs. Paris as they sit down to table.

  Nightingale looks up from his plate apologetically—and sees Miss Lucinda staring at him in triumph. He tries, with his eyes alone, to make some sort of approach to her, but without the smallest success.

  For the rest of the day he is given only light tasks; Mr. Paris is not an unkindly man when things are brought face to face with him; he is really concerned for his pale, listless-looking apprentice. He begins to wonder if he has been altogether wise in caging a country Nightingale. . . .

  Nightingale himself has similar thoughts; he dreads more than ever the coming of the night. Try as he might, he cannot imagine what terrible vengeance on his behalf has been concealed in the box. What if his master’s daughter should be killed by it? That would turn him into a murderer!

  The ugly Mr. Greening and his weaselish apprentice haunt his mind like a pair of malicibus spirits in a darkened room. He resolves he will do nothing with the box. He is quite set on that; he’ll not raise a finger to provide either the light or the easel. . . . Then, quite out of the blue, Mr. Paris bids him carry the easel from the workroom into the shop, ready to display Job’s frame, which will soon be finished.

  Nightingale’s heart falters as fate comes in on Mr. Greening’s side.

  “Candle in the window won’t do us much good on a night like this,” says Mr. Paris, looking out into the deplorable weather. He glances back at his distinctly frightened and ill-looking apprentice, and then at the gloomy counter under which he is to sleep. “But keep it going all the same. Leave the shutters down and let a little brightness inside for a change, Nightingale.”

  Thoughtfully he turns the looking-glasses in the window so that they face inwards and reflect the candle quite strongly upon the empty easel in the shop.

  Nightingale feels a sense of panic concerning the powers of Mr. Greening as he watches the father unknowingly arranging matters conveniently for the striking down of his own daughter.

  At last the apprentice is left alone. He fetches out the box, takes off its outer coverings, and places it on the easel. There is only a thin lid between him and whatever the box contains. He has determined that he will look in it himself. The candlelight, multiplied by the looking-glasses, dances and glitters on the box. Nightingale reaches out a hand, trembling in every limb at what he is about to behold. Mr. Greening and his apprentice rise up before his inner eye and scream warnings. . . .

  “Nightingale!”

  It is she. She has opened the door and stands just within the room. Her eyes fall upon the easel and the covered object upon it. She sees the apprentice standing before it, pale as death.

  “What have you got there?”

  Nightingale withdraws the hand that had been about to uncover Mr. Greening’s gift.

  “A—a sort of mirror, you might say,” he answers, helplessly repeating the words of the weaselish apprentice. To his horror, he hears, in his own voice, a reflection of the weasel’s mocking tone.

  Miss Lucinda hears it, too.

  “Let me see it,” she says, and pushes him to one side.

  He smiles in a dazed, glazed fashion, feeling that it is fate that has pushed him and not Miss Lucinda. She reaches out, but seeing his smile, hesitates.

  “You’ve arranged this, haven’t you?”

  He does not answer; he does not need to.

  “It’s your revenge, isn’t it?”

  “Not mine,” mutters Nightingale, thinking of the ugly Mr. Greening.

  “You’ve put something vile in there,” says Miss Lucinda, contemptuously, “some disgusting thing out of your own brain.”

  She lowers her hand, and Nightingale sighs with audible relief. She falls silent, and Nightingale hangs his head in an effort to avoid her brilliant and penetrating eyes. Then he looks up and sees that once more she has raised her hand and now rests it upon the thin lid of the box.

  “Your thoughts,” she says. “They’re here, aren’t they? What do they amount to? A toad? A piece of filth? Something dead and rotting? Something so foul and degrading that it’s best covered up? Let’s see, Nightingale, once and for all, how mean and depraved an apprentice’s mind and heart can be!”

  She laughs, and before Nightingale can stop her, she lifts up the lid. Light streams into the box, and the lid falls with a clatter from her hand. Nightingale turns away in terror. He waits for some shriek or sound of death, but there is only silence. Fearfully he looks back. She has not moved. A terrible pallor has spread over her face; even her lips, for all their redness, have gone a greyish white. What horrible, deadly thing did Mr. Greening hide in the box?

  She breathes deeply as if suffering from an intolerable constriction; and the something so degrading that it should have been covered up gazes back at her. Helplessly she looks, with pitiless clarity, upon—herself.

  Mr. Greening’s box contains no more than a perfect mirror. Neither ripple, tarnish, nor flaw interposes to alleviate the girl from the image that she herself has so monstrously described.

  Her expression, halted by shock, has remained unchanged from the look she’d worn before. Every mark of scorn, contempt, lamed ambition, and cruelty is bloodlessly plain. The very smile of deep pride—that had once lent her a sort of distinction—robbed of its color, has become a dull sneer. The eyes, fixed on the bland surface of the glass, have lost all brightness, all penetration, and become as glass, glass eyes in a glass head. . . .

  Filled with guilt and fear, Nightingale approaches to see what it is she has seen. As he moves, she gives a low and anguished cry, which resembles not so much a sound as a shudder made audible, for it is accompanied by a continuous, violent trembling.

  She is mortally afraid that he will see what she has seen, that he will see her as she now sees herself. His countenance joins her as she watches it, examines it minutely with ever-increasing agony.

  “But it’s only glass!” says Nightingale with gentle amazement.

  “Only glass,” she repeats, finding in the apprentice’s face nothing worse than relief and bewilderment. “Quicksilver, lead, and glass . . .”

  “That’s how they make mirrors, isn’t it?” says Nightingale, as if persuading a child out of too strong a dream.

  “They put lead, as thin as paper, on the glass and pour quicksilver over it,” she murmurs. “I’ve watched it being done. My father once took me. I’ll take you, if you like . . . some day . . . if you like . . .”

  Nightingale moves closer. He cannot really help himself. For a moment, their faces are reflected together; then their joined breath mists the glass, obscures them, and dissolves eyes, lips, cheeks, and tears into a strange, double countenance, seen, as it were, in a glass brightly.

  But the candlelight, reflecting busily off all the looking-glasses from the window, keeps catching at the corners of Nightingale’s eyes, so that he seems to be looking into the heart of a diamond.

  He blinks and turns away, glancing, as he does so, from mirror to mirror, in each of which he sees his master’s daughter. Sometimes he sees her in profile, sometimes just the coils of her golden hair, sometimes the curve of her cheek and the projecting edge of her lashes, and sometimes, as strange as the other side of the moon, her second profile. . . . He looks and looks, and as far as his eyes can see, his universe is filled with Lucindas. . . .

  And she, at last abandoning her reflection to the eyes of another, follows his example and roams the angled mirrors. Everywhere she sees him, but cannot, by reason of the confused architecture of light, make out for certain what it is he is gazing at. She looks and looks, and as far as her eyes can see, her universe is filled with Nightingales . . . and their song is suddenly sweet.

  Outside, the fog piles up and rolls comfortably past the window of Mr. Paris’s shop; from somewhere in the invisible street, a gentleman curses as he trips over a lamplighter’s ladder, and from every darkened corner come the linkboys’ eager cries.


  “Light you home, mister! Light you home, ma’am!”

  MOSS AND BLISTER

  THERE THEY GO, Moss and Blister, hurrying up Blackfriar’s Stairs and on through the dark streets, under a sky fairly peppered with stars as cold as frozen sparks. Up Coalman’s Alley, across Bristol Street . . .

  “’Appy Christmas, marm—and a nappy Christmas to you, miss!” bellowed a bellman, coming out of an alehouse and wagging his bell like a swollen brass finger.

  “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given!” He hiccupped, and drew out a little Christmas poem of his own composing, while Moss and Blister stood stock-still and listened. Then he held out his hand, and Moss put a sixpence in it, for it was Christmas Eve, and Moss, who was a midwife, felt holy and important.

  Ordinarily, Moss was brisk and businesslike to a degree, but on this one night of the year she was as soft as butter and gave her services for nothing. She lived in hopes of being summoned to a stable and delivering the Son of God.

  “It’s written down, Blister,” she said to her apprentice after the bellman had weaved away. “It’s all written down. Unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time.”

  Blister, a tall, thin girl with sticking-out ears and saucer eyes, who flapped and stalked after stubby Moss like a loose umbrella, said, “Yus’m!” and looked frightened to death. Blister also had her dream of Christmas Eve and a stable, but it was not quite the same as Moss’s. She dreamed that Moss would be delivering her of the marvelous Child.

  Naturally, she kept her ambition a deep secret from Moss, so that the dreamy frown that sometimes settled on her face led Moss to surmise that her apprentice was a deep one. . . . Mostly these frowns came in the springtime, for Moss knew it would take nine months . . . which was one less than the toes on both her feet. At the end of every March, she’d lie in her bed, waiting with ghostly urgency for Moss to appear beside her, for Moss had a gift like the angel of the annunciation. She could tell, long before it showed, if any female had a bun in the oven, a cargo in the hold, or a deposit in the vault—depending on the trade concerned.

  She’d stop dead in the street, fix her eye in a certain way upon some lightsome lass, dig Blister in the ribs, and follow the female to her home. Then she’d leave her card, and everyone in the neighborhood would know that a happy event was on the way. Truly, the sight of Moss, in her ancient cape that was green with rain and age, was as sure a sign of pregnancy as morning sickness or a passion for pickles.