The Apprentices

by Leon Garfield

  Little by little, economies were forced upon the once well-to-do household: servants were let go, and Miss Jessop herself had to give up music, painting, needlework, and French. Then even the outside boy was discharged. Miss Jessop was deeply sorry to see him go. He promised to write to her, but he never did; instead he bequeathed her the odious tasks that had once been his. To her now fell the disagreeable lot of intruding on other folks’ grief in order to get their business.

  Dressed in her father’s solemn livery, she’d wait, day after day, outside houses where there was known to be sickness. Anxiously she’d watch the windows, waiting for the blinds to be drawn. But more often than not, she was too much of a lady to be in at the death, as they say, with the vulgar promptitude of a Hawkins. With an aching heart she heard, “I’m sorry, miss, but we’re already suited. Mr. Todds is looking after us.”

  “Pray—pray accept our sincere condolences,” she’d murmur with a rueful nod, indicating, perhaps, more sorrow for the family’s choice than for their loss. Then she’d hasten away to the sympathetic accompaniment of: “Lovely lass, that. What a pity she’s in the undertaking line!”

  Yes, she was only an undertaker’s daughter, but she wore her blacks with a difference. They became her like the night. Yet she was neither betrothed nor even courted. Hers was a trade in which she was fated to blush and bloom unseen. An undertaker’s circle of friends is sorely limited: a joiner or two, an unlucky physician, a sexton, and maybe a dusty old monumental mason; so the beautiful Miss Jessop walked alone and ate out her heart with tears and a strange, fantastic dream.

  “O death, where is thy sting?” she wept into her pillow each night. “O grave, where is thy victory?”

  Then she’d dry her eyes as her aching bosom made answer: “In St. Martin’s Churchyard. Under the elder tree.”

  She was in love with Orlando Brown, who had entered her father’s shop one February 13, and had gone out of it on St. Valentine’s Day, never to return.

  It had happened in the days of prosperity, long before the appearance of Hawkins, when Miss Jessop had been a tempestuous eleven, much given to moods, passionate affections, and violent disagreements with the household.

  It had been following one such disagreement, when she had been confined to her room without supper until she saw fit to beg her mother’s pardon, that she had grown so excessively hungry that she risked her father’s anger and crept forth to visit the solemn front parlour, which, ordinarily, she shunned like the plague.

  This parlour, with its mahogany side table, its massive candelabra, and its black velvet curtains, served as a Chapel of Rest for those who, for one reason or another, were not to be buried from their own homes. Often busy tradesmen did not care to keep a departed one on the premises with customers continually coming and going, so at night a long black cart (which Miss Jessop always remembered as having a disagreeable smell) called at the bereaved’s and returned to Jessop & Pottersfield’s.

  She knew there were often biscuits and wine in the parlour to sustain any mourners who called to make their last adieus. It was the thought of this that gave her the necessary courage.

  She stiffened her sinews, clenched her fists, and pushed open the door. Within, all was bright with candlelight. She saw, with pleasure and relief, that there were honey cakes in little black paper cups laid out on a pewter dish on the side table; but at the same time she saw that there was a coffin upon trestles in the middle of the room.

  The draught from the open door disturbed the candle flames, so that everything in the room seemed to be moving. Resolutely she averted her eyes from the coffin and fixed them on the side table. But it was no use; she couldn’t help seeing, out of the corner of her eye, that the coffin was open and that there was someone inside it.

  Seized with a wholly unreasonable fear, due, most likely, to her feelings of guilt, she paused. Then carefully marking the direction of the side table and honey cakes, she shut her eyes as tightly as she could and began to fumble her way across the room.

  Presently she felt the side table press up against her. She sighed with relief. She reached forward, stretching out her fingers to feel the cold edge of the pewter plate. Where had it gone? Slowly she lowered her hand. Ah! Something cold . . . something very cold.

  She opened her eyes; and try as she might, she could not shut them again.

  She was not leaning against the side table, nor was she touching the pewter plate. She was pressed against the coffin, and her hand was resting upon the waxy white fingers of Orlando Brown!

  The dancing candlelight played uncanny tricks with his quiet eyelids and his grey lips. He was smiling at her. . . .

  Miss Jessop screamed and snatched back her hand. She forgot the honey cakes, she forgot everything, and rushed from the parlour, consumed with sickness and dread.

  She reached her room and plunged into her bed, where she lay, entirely under the covers, as still as Orlando Brown himself. But it was no use; neither sheets nor blankets, had they been a mile thick, could have shut out the image of the dead youth’s face. Orlando Brown kept smiling at her from every corner in her head; he kept smiling gently, gravely. . . .

  “No—no—no! Go away from me!”

  Her fingers could still feel the icy touch of his; she rubbed them fiercely against the sheets. She began to imagine that he’d actually held her, that he’d been reluctant to let her go, and that she’d actually had to drag herself away from him!

  At last she fell asleep, and he followed her into the house of dreams. Only now he looked dreadfully sad, as if he were reproaching her for having fled from him and leaving him in so grim and lonely a place as a coffin.

  “No—no—no!” she wept. “Go away from me, please!”

  But he would not; he came to her each night, with his sad, grave smile and his pale hands extended as if for a grave embrace. So gentle did he seem that she lost all fear of him, and by the end of a week Miss Jessop was hopelessly, despairingly in love with Orlando Brown. Never was there a stranger love awakened in a young girl’s breast; it was a love that could neither live nor change nor die.

  On the first anniversary of his funeral, among the many tokens of loving remembrance that were laid upon the grave under the elder tree in St. Martin’s Churchyard, appeared a wreath of flowering ivy and wild garlic, bearing a black-edged card on which was written, rather badly—“Be my vallintyne.”

  By the second anniversary, however, both the writing and the spelling had improved, for Jessop & Pottersfield’s was still prosperous enough to afford a tutor for Miss Jessop.

  “Be my valentine,” pleaded the card in the ivy wreath to the youth who slumbered below.

  Then, that very year, Hawkins was taken on by Alfred Todds’s, and Jessop & Pottersfield’s fortunes began to decline.

  Mr. Jessop’s solemn countenance, long dignified by the custom of loss, became a little frayed at the edges by the loss of custom. He took to fault finding, particularly with his daughter, whose reluctance to enter wholeheartedly into the trade had not escaped him. But Miss Jessop, anxious to lay the blame where it really belonged, tossed her head and declared, “If only it had been that Hawkins who’d passed away instead of some others I could mention! That’s a funeral I’d have been happy to furnish, Pal Not that,” she went on, “we would have buried him! More a job for a gardener, I’d say!”

  “Go to your room, miss!”

  “I’m not a child, Pa. If I go to my room, it will be because I choose to.”

  She went; after all, there was always Orlando Brown. She was now fourteen and catching up with the dead youth fast. When first they’d met, so to speak, in the front parlour, he’d been a quiet and serious sixteen and she a timid, childish eleven. The gap between them had seemed enormous. But now it had narrowed and they were almost on a footing.

  This strange circumstance both frightened and fascinated her, and she couldn’t help wondering how she would feel when they were both the same age. Would her love suddenly become mature? There
was no doubt that, as time passed, she felt her affection growing deeper and more settled. He was such a comfort and he was always there, waiting for her. Everything else might change, but he was constant. Not so much as by the flicker of an eyelid did he alter from that first wild vision of him. He was . . . eternal.

  Which was more than could be said for Hawkins. When she, Miss Jessop, was fifteen and looking like a lily opening, Todds’s apprentice was already seventeen and ageing as noticeably as a leaf in autumn. Withering, one might almost say. In a year or two, he’d be an old man, while Orlando Brown would still be a smiling sixteen, smooth as candle wax!

  Sixteen! It seemed impossible, and yet it must come. How would she feel about Orlando Brown, who’d once seemed so unattainable?

  At last the miracle happened. She was sixteen, and he was sixteen—still. It was as if he’d paused to wait for her, had held back time itself. She imagined him to be standing at the end of a corridor of months and years, with his fine transparent hands outstretched, watching her through closed eyes and smiling his grave smile as she stumbled on towards him, forever catching her hastening feet against the sharp stones of childhood. She blushed as she remembered grubby bandages round barked shins and grazed knees. . . .

  “Be my valentine,” she inscribed with loving care on the back of one of her pa’s trade cards, and pinned it in the middle of the ivy wreath.

  On the bright cold morning of February 14, she hastened to St. Martin’s Churchyard with the strangest of forebodings. She knew that something must happen to her, but she could not say what. Although one part of her knew that her dream life was no more than an idle phantom, another, deeper part kept urging upon her a sense of terrified expectation. Was this day to be an end—or a beginning?

  Reason told her that Orlando Brown, waiting in the corridor of time, must inevitably dwindle into yesterday as she passed him by, but her heart cried out fiercely that this must not be so.

  As she entered the precincts of the cemetery, St. Valentine’s sun peered over the tops of the neighbouring roofs and strewed the grass with long shadows. All the headstones seemed to be wearing black streamers, as if a great concourse of mutes had laid their stone hats on the ground and gone off into the bushes and behind the yew trees for a quiet repast.

  Miss Jessop, deeply veiled in fresh black muslin, walked uncertainly across the grass towards the grave beneath the elder tree. Although she was alone in the churchyard, she felt that eyes were watching her from everywhere. The feeling was so strong that she had to pause and gather up her courage. It was, as nearly as she could remember, exactly the feeling she’d had as she’d pushed open the door of the front parlour at home, so long ago. Were the same eyes watching on this day of days?

  She reached the grave and looked up at the overhanging bough of the elder tree. Was there some mysterious emanation of him, drawn up by the tree’s roots and dwelling in the knotted wood itself?

  She knelt down and laid the wreath against the beloved stone.

  “Be my valentine!” she murmured to the grass. “Oh, my dearest darling, you’ve waited for me so long! Never let me pass you by . . . please!”

  Tears flooded her eyes as reason—hateful, horrible reason!—told her that she must go on and leave the youth behind. He was rooted to his place as surely as the elder tree was rooted in his heart. From this day forward, she could only look back and look back; and each time she turned, he would have dwindled a little more until at last he would have disappeared altogether.

  Then the winds would blow cold across her; they would shake her limbs and break her bloom till the sixteen-year-old Orlando Brown would never even have recognized her. . . .

  She stood up. She’d lingered long enough. She knew she must go back to Little Knightrider Street and to the quarrelsome misery of a home growing poorer by the week and day. Then she would have to go out again to Shoemaker’s Row, where old Mrs. Noades was dying. She would have to accost the physician, beg a word with the servants, watch with straining eyes for the drawing of a blind . . . and pray that Hawkins didn’t get there before her.

  If only one could leave a card without causing offence! But that was impossible. What a vile trade it was in which ordinary businesslike prudence—such as anyone might employ—earned you nothing but horror and contempt! A sweep—a common chimney sweep—might call upon a house in high summer and offer to sweep the chimneys before the winter’s need of fires. But should an undertaker knock at a house and offer his services, perhaps no more than a single day in advance, he’d be kicked down the stairs like a dog!

  She left the grave and drifted silently across the grass. She could still feel eyes upon her, eyes filled now with longing and regret. Even so, she must not look back; reason told her it would be madness. . . .

  She came to the lych gate. Surely, after all these years, she and he were entitled to one last look upon each other? Just one brief look?

  She turned. She saw the grave. Her heart leaped and danced! The wreath had gone!

  She shut her eyes tightly and turned away. She’d made a mistake, of course. The wreath must have been there—most likely it had slipped down onto the grass. That was it! Her eyes had deceived her.

  Reason bade her look again; but this time her heart was adamant. She could not bear to look again and destroy the sudden wild thought that somehow he had risen to claim his tribute.

  She returned home with scarcely an idea of how she had found her way. Her eyes were shining like stars. Mr. Jessop, however, was not disposed to take this into account when he berated his daughter for her absence.

  It seemed that old Mrs. Noades had passed away and Todds’s was furnishing. It was no trifling affair. The Noadeses were a large family with many friends. Was Miss Jessop aware that it meant half a gross of pairs of black shammy gloves, the same of mourning rings, white hatbands—to say nothing of crepe, silk, and best scarves and hoods at ninepence apiece?

  “Thanks to your dreamy negligence, miss, we have now lost upwards of three hundred pounds! I hope you are satisfied!”

  “You hate me! I know you hate me!” cried Miss Jessop, who could think of no other defence, and she rushed from the house in a storm of sobs and tears.

  “Everybody hates me!” she panted, whirling through the streets like a wind-blown black bloom. “Everybody except—him!”

  She rushed towards the churchyard. She had to go to him. She’d always known that this day would have to be fatal to one of them. Now she understood that he and she must be together for ever. The vanishing of her wreath had been a sign that he accepted her.

  But how was it to come about? Various fearful thoughts intruded upon her. She thought of the bough of the elder tree; then she thought of twisting up her veil into a thin black rope and hanging herself above his grave. They’d find her, swinging like a broken blossom, and then they’d be sorry!

  She reached the churchyard and gazed towards the grave that was so soon to be her own.

  “No—no!” she cried. “It cannot be!”

  The wreath was still there. Either her eyes had deceived her, or even he had turned away from her.

  With bowed head she trudged towards the grave, even though there seemed little point now in hanging herself over someone who had, after all, ignored her tribute.

  Mournfully she stared at the wreath propped up against the headstone. Her eyes widened and she caught in her breath. It was not the same wreath! In place of ivy and wild garlic was now an offering of dark holly, speckled with berries bright as blood!

  And the card? Even that was changed. Now it read: “I will be your valentine.”

  “Orlando—Orlando Brown!” she cried; tears rushed from her eyes and caught in her veil, where they sparkled like dew on a web. “I will be your valentine!”

  With shaking hands she took off her veil and began to twist it fiercely, pulling at it every now and then to make sure it would be strong enough to bear her weight.

  Now she stood on tiptoe and secured the black cord she’d m
ade to the bough of the elder tree. She dragged on it several times, and the whole tree shook with grief. She began to make a noose. . . .

  “Miss Jessop, Miss Jessop!”

  She released the cord and whirled round. Wild love and despair gave way to indignation and fury. Hawkins was standing there! Odious, horrible Hawkins, glossy as a slug in a new suit of blacks. Even his boots shone like coffin handles. He looked more got up to kill than to bury!

  What did he want? Sincerest condolences, miss, and might we have the honour of furnishing your funeral? Ugh! One couldn’t even hang oneself without. Hawkins getting the trade for Todds’s!

  “Wh-what are you doing here, Mr. Hawkins?”

  She could feel herself shaking all over with anger.

  “I—er—was just visiting, Miss Jessop.”

  The smartly dressed undertaker’s apprentice was quite taken aback by Miss Jessop’s annoyance. If there’d been words on the tip of his tongue, he seemed unable to shake them free. He looked unprofessionally dismayed. . . .

  Miss Jessop, seeing this, pushed home her advantage by declaring that it was a pity he was just visiting and hadn’t come to stay. She made her meaning as plain as she could by glancing across the sunswept garden of graves and scraping the grass with her own neat black shoe.

  For a moment Hawkins’ dreamy eyes flickered angrily; then he compressed his lips and sighed. The undertaker’s apprentice and the undertaker’s daughter stood silently, breathing deeply.

  “I’m sure, Miss Jessop,” said Hawkins, relaxing into a rueful smile, “that were I to come here to stay, your pa—Mr. Jessop—would furnish the occasion ’andsomely.”

  “Nothing would give us greater pleasure, Mr. Hawkins.”

  “Likewise for you, Miss Jessop. We—Todds’s—would leave no stone unturned to inter you like a queen. White ’atbands and shammy gloves all round. Though in honest truth, I’d sooner such a piece of business went to your house before ever coming to ours.”

  Miss Jessop scowled as she unravelled Hawkins’ gallantry, which had been delivered with solemn charm.