The Apprentices

by Leon Garfield

  He has fallen into a newly dug grave. Terrible thoughts suddenly visit him, of heedless gravediggers crashing a black coffin down on his upturned face and filling him in. He shouts and begins to struggle up . . . when a strange blue flame comes dancing towards him and hovers round the edge of the grave.

  It is a linkboy with a brimstone torch. Searching for midnight fern seed, he has heard the despairing cry. Now, looking down, he sees Parrot’s flour-white face and his clawing, grave-filthy hands.

  “You’re dead,” he pronounces, and the dripping blue flame gives his face the aspect of a goblin judging the damned. “’Ave you woke up to get wed under the porch, mister?”

  Parrot’s brain, shaken by his fall, cannot comprehend the ambiguity of his situation. He groans.

  “They’ll be comin’ to wed yer,” says the blue goblin, looking about him with relish and then bending low so that the shadows stretch his eyes and nose unnaturally upwards. “All in their windin’ sheets!”

  Parrot struggles and falls, then struggles again, and by means of clawing at projecting roots, emerges from the grave, in which, contrary to popular supposition, he has found no rest.

  “Look! Look!” howls the goblin, between terror and delight. “You got three of ’em, mister!”

  Parrot turns. In spite of the protection hanging on the lych gate, the three furies are now standing on the other side of the grave.

  “E’s dead—’e’s dead!” screams the goblin malignantly as Parrot runs for his life. “I see’d ’im come out o’ the grahnd! Catch ’im! Catch ’im afore ’e goes back into ’is grave!”

  It is when he hears this terrible cry—this pronouncement that he is dead—that Parrot loses his only hope. He knows, too well, that to be diagnosed as dead is dead; he himself would not have given half a drachm of limewater for anyone after such a diagnosis.

  “Catch him! Catch him! Catch him!”

  Now all the Midsummer madmen and fools in the churchyard, the gatherers under the porch and the dancers round the fire, take up the linkboy’s cry. They scream with laughter and try to prevent Parrot’s escape, and Parrot knows, in his heart of hearts—which does not figure in Human Anatomy—that he has emptied the last vial of wrath upon his own head.

  Hands clutch at him, feet interpose themselves between his racing legs. Fools, fools! They don’t know that the three furies in their winding sheets really mean to tear him to pieces before their very eyes! Fools, fools! They have been playing at magic without realizing the terrible fact of it!

  At last Parrot, by violence and desperation, manages to flee the burying ground and escape into White Hart Yard. From thence he rushes across Drury Lane and is quickly swallowed up in the odorous gloom of Clare Market, where the stink of butchers’ meat serves only to sharpen his expectation of dismemberment.

  He runs and staggers round the confines of the market, vainly seeking a way out. He is weeping now because his head aches, his bruised shoulder aches, and the palms of his hands are grazed and bleeding from his struggle in the grave.

  Never has there been such a martyrdom as Parrot’s on Midsummer Eve, and the worst of it is that he no longer can be sure whether he’s being martyred for the truth or the lack of it.

  Suddenly he becomes aware that he is surrounded by stillness. Black pools of blood and gnawed bones glimmer among the cobbles, as if other furies had found other victims and then passed on. Parrot peers at the melancholy spectacle in pity and awe; then he begins to regain command of himself as he realizes that he has outdistanced his pursuers. He wipes his eyes on his sleeve and, with a sense of unutterable relief, makes his way cautiously to Portugal Street.

  He reaches Mr. Chambers’ shop and, still unable to believe his good fortune, lets himself in. He rests for a moment against the door and then, hearing nothing from the street outside, goes into the dispensary and lights a candle. It’s over! He’s escaped—

  “Shop!”

  “W-who’s there?”

  “Shop—shop!”

  With a sudden palsy that Mr. Chambers himself might have envied, Parrot goes to the herb drawers and takes out a Garlic Root and a Sprig of Rue. He has no idea whether they are the best herbs for his particular situation, but surely they are better than none? He tucks them inside his shirt, next to his icy skin, and goes to see who has summoned him.

  A wraith, a phantom, a white-gowned omen of disaster, stands in the darkness before him. He clutches at the herbs and raises his candle. His customer is Betty Martin.

  She stares at him, not uttering a word. Her eyes, in the quailing light, seem to be trying to swallow him up.

  “You’re shaking,” she says at length. “Like a blooming leaf!”

  “It—it’s me spleen,” mumbles Parrot, thrusting out his lower lip. “It’s playin’ me up again.”

  “Ain’t there something you can take for it?”

  “I—I s’pose so. Camomile in White Wine. That’s the thing. I’ll go and take an ounce right away.”

  He goes back into the dispensary, and Betty Martin follows him.

  “I’ll pour it out for you,” she offers. “Your hands are shaking fit to spill the lot. Here, let me do it!”

  Helplessly Parrot slumps into his seat and secretly touches his herbs, while Betty Martin, rustling in her crisp shift, dispenses.

  “Drink it up,” she says softly, handing him a beaker. “Every last drop!”

  She perches herself on the high stool in front of the chemical scales, so that her shadow stretches up the wall and looms over him from the ceiling like a menacing cloud.

  He drinks.

  “W-what is it? What have you given me? You—you’ve poisoned me! What did you put in me drink?”

  Betty Martin smiles demonically, and Parrot’s blood congeals. He knows now that he has chosen the wrong herbs, and Betty Martin knows it, too. She fixes him with her enormous eyes.

  “W-what did you give me to drink?”

  “Don’t you know? It was Syrup of Spearmint and Orchis in Wine, of course!”

  She slips from the stool and moves closer and closer till her wild hair and brooding face fills Parrot’s world. He drops the beaker. . . .

  “Ssh!”

  “I feel sick. . . .”

  “That’s it!” murmurs Betty Martin triumphantly. “It’s working! It’s love—”

  “No!”

  “Oh, yes. It’s the potion.”

  “But—but why me?” says Parrot, thinking of the pawnbroker’s boy from Drury Lane, who, surely, had been the intended victim.

  “Because it’s Midsummer Eve, and it was you I saw on the stair. We made the dumb cake and it just had to be—like this. What would have become of me else? I’d have been left on the shelf. I’d have been an old maid. We all agreed it had to be. Kitty couldn’t have you . . . and Sally didn’t want you. But I do, Johnny Parrot, I do! Why did you run away?”

  “MARTIN, Betty,” thinks Parrot, dazedly. “See the Author . . . oh, just see the author now!”

  Upstairs in his bed, Mr. Chambers snores gently with his fat arms going almost half way round his portly wife; his coloured fingers peep at her waist like posies of flowers. There is a serene smile on his puffing lips as he dreams of children—countless little Chamberses—and the great calf-bound, gold-lettered volume of his Life.

  “Parrot will publish,” he mumbles in his sleep. “No doubt about that.” And he lapses into the silence of divine content.

  Downstairs in the dispensary, the candle has gone out. There are sundry strange noises, as of Midsummer goblins laughing and tinkling the chemical scales; then there is an almighty thump, as of Human Anatomy falling to the floor and The Chemistry of Thought being slammed shut. There is more soft laughter and an anxious murmuring.

  “Ssh!”

  “Why? It’s not still the dumb cake, is it?”

  “Ssh! Or you’ll break the spell!”

  “What spell?”

  “Don’t you know? Don’t you know?”

  “Tell me . .
.”

  “Hemp seed I’ve sown,

  Now the crop’s to be mown!

  “But dumb . . . dumb . . . dumb . . .”

  “Yes,” says Parrot after a little while. “I think I see. There was silence in heaven about the space of ’alf an hour.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Revelations,” says Parrot mysteriously. “And his name was John, too.”

  TOM TITMARSH’S DEVIL

  MISS SPARROW WAS a printer’s devil—and Tom Titmarsh’s, too. She taunted him and haunted him and, in the end, tempted him into eating of the forbidden fruit.

  “Yes!” mourned the bookseller’s apprentice, one morning in July. “She’s destroyed me! I never ought to have listened to her. Never, never, never!”

  Miss Sparrow’s complexion was of a streaky, Satanic black, like an old boot or a burnt tree. This was as much from trade as from nature; she was so liberally daubed with printer’s ink that if you’d put her in a press, you might have had fifty clear impressions without the need for re-inking her once.

  She’d got it on her nose, her cheeks, her brow, her small, firm chin, and even in her ears; her hands were ten thin slices of the night, and the glimpses she permitted of her flying ankles showed them to be pitch black, too—although, in fairness, this might have been due to stockings.

  She flew importantly about the town in a filthy brown apron and an old green dress, carrying proofs for correcting to booksellers and authors, whom she held in equal contempt: the former for selling rubbish, and the latter for writing it. She was as critical as the Father of Lies himself.

  Tom Titmarsh had not been two months into his apprenticeship when he came across her for the first time. His master, Mr. Crowder of Crabtree Orchard, had just stepped out and left him to mind the shop.

  The new apprentice, immensely proud of this trust, tiptoed up and down and along the avenues of shelves, soothing the books with a duster that would scarcely have awakened a fly.

  Crowder’s was a quiet brown world of infinite retirement, monkish in its peace and scented with leather, glue, and a touch of good quality snuff. From time to time, the whisper of a page being turned, somewhere out of sight, increased rather than broke the silence; and through the latticed window, the noiseless vision of the street, gesturing and arguing and hastening on its ceaseless way, charmed the reflective mind without disturbing it.

  Then, at half-past eleven, in burst Miss Sparrow like a bat out of hell! She gave a wild screech of “Printer’s!” and flushed out all the moths and browsers from where they’d been slumbering, mind out of time. Books were dropped, faces raised, and a sound like many serpents filled the air.

  “Ssh!”

  Tom Titmarsh, when he’d got over his shock, raised a finger to his lips and glided to his private nook at the back of the shop, where he slept, ate, and learned the trade. Miss Sparrow clattered in his wake.

  “Proofs of the pudden’, boy!” she said, slapping down her smeary sheets on his one o’clock pork and pickles. “And if I was you I’d eat ’em. I never read sich rubbish in all me born days!”

  “I don’t think that’s your place to say, miss,” murmured Tom Titmarsh, looking uncomfortably into the body of the shop. He had been brought up as cautiously as truth from a well, and he shrank involuntarily from the shiny blackness of the printer’s devil.

  Miss Sparrow stared at him with a mixture of incredulity and contempt.

  “Oh, my!” she said at length. “I’ll bet you piss rose water!”

  She laughed shrilly and left him, with a red face and shaking the crumbs off the proofs and apologizing to Mr. Crowder for the pickle stains.

  Luckily Tom Titmarsh’s master was a sensible, fatherly man who took his duties towards his apprentice seriously, and was prepared to stand in the place of a parent. He advised Titmarsh to have as little as possible to do with Miss Sparrow. Tom Titmarsh was only too happy to agree, and did his best to wipe the she-devil out of his thoughts, where she seemed to have settled like a blot of ink. Somehow, he really couldn’t get her out of his mind’s eye, or, rather, the corner of it, so that she was always lurking somewhere.

  For instance, he found out without trying that she worked for Gardiner’s of Angel Court, which was nearby; and when she came back during the following week for the corrected proofs, he heard himself neglecting Mr. Crowder’s advice to the extent of making a little joke about a devil working in such company.

  At once she looked at him sharply and made him feel uncomfortable.

  “Now, don’t you go forgetting, boy,” she said, “that it’s the devil what keeps all the angels in business. So I’m bleedin’ well entitled to a share in their profits, ain’t I?”

  She grinned, and before he could move, she’d tapped him on the forehead with the rolled-up proofs and clattered noisily out of the shop.

  Titmarsh rubbed his forehead and stared at the still shaking door. The remark about sharing in the profits of the angels had really disturbed him, so that he wished he’d taken his master’s advice and had nothing to do with the printer’s devil.

  Mr. Crowder said she was born to be hanged and he couldn’t understand why a respectable house like Gardiner’s kept her on; Titmarsh couldn’t understand it either, and he tried so hard to rub her out of his mind that he almost wore a hole in it.

  Miss Sparrow—Cleopatra to her friends, of whom, temporarily, she had none—was a bewildering mixture of impudence, ink, and information. The impudence was her own property; the ink and information she got from Gardiner’s.

  Sparrow by name and sparrow by nature, she picked up every crumb of the trade that fell her way. She’d stand over the compositor, breathing down his red and bristly neck, and try to make out the print backwards as he laid it in his stick; then she’d fret the pressman by risking her nose and fingers in her efforts to read the printed pages as they flowed from the press.

  “Take ’em to so-and-so’s,” she’d be told, and off she’d go like a streak of blackening to the nearest alehouse, where she’d finish her reading over a glass of gin and water.

  With furrowed brow and grubby finger, she’d trace her way through every scrap of print she could lay her hands on, though God knew what she made of it all! If the curl of her lip while she was reading was anything to go by, she made rather less than its author might have hoped for, but every once in a while she’d come across a piece of writing that would cause her to wriggle her toes and exclaim aloud, “Now that weren’t half bad! You can take me word on it. Truly!”

  But more often than not, she’d just look up and say, with an inky smile, that she’d seen paper put to better use in a bog house.

  “It’s a wonder you don’t need spectacles, miss,” said Tom Titmarsh, forgetting his master’s advice yet again in his awe at the extent of Miss Sparrow’s reading.

  It was a fine day, but the summer sun, never very strong in Crabtree Orchard, seemed in need of spectacles itself as it came in hazily through the window. The shop was deserted save for a tall thin gentleman in black who kept looking up and round as if a shadow had tapped him on the shoulder. He was waiting to see Mr. Crowder and would not confide in the apprentice.

  “It comes to me from me pa,” said Miss Sparrow confidentially. She perched herself on a stack of sermons by the Bishop of Southwark that were newly in from the binders. “Me wild, consumin’ passion for readin’, I mean; not me good looks.”

  She began swinging her legs and glancing inquisitively at the stranger, who looked away with some embarrassment. Miss Sparrow’s gaze was both shameless and penetrating.

  “Me pa’s a schoolmaster down Eastcheap way, and he’s that fond of books that when me ma ran off with a tinker, I don’t think he noticed for a week. Every night he used to stuff me pillow with pages what had come loose, and when me bed broke, he propped it up with old books. There was books everywhere, like mice, and whenever I put out me hand for a bun or a penny to buy one with, he’d put a book in it and say, ‘Fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, mi
ss. It’ll do you more good!’”

  She paused and helped herself to a piece of Titmarsh’s pie.

  “He always used to say,” she went on, speaking with her mouth full besides dropping crumbs everywhere, “that the Bible was all wrong about Eve and the serpent and the Tree of Knowledge. It never was the serpent what tempted Eve; it was the other way round. She tempted him. If she hadn’t been so bloody ignorant and ripe for spoiling, it wouldn’t have happened. . . . I mean, death, disease, and the poor and all that sort of thing.”

  She was talking quite loudly and Tom Titmarsh noticed that the stranger was listening. He had a smile on his face that was more like a snarl, and he kept feeling in his pocket. Titmarsh wondered uneasily if he’d been stealing books while Miss Sparrow had been chattering.

  He really ought to have kept the printer’s devil at a proper distance instead of encouraging her to make herself at home. After all, it wasn’t as if she fascinated him; nobody in their right mind could have considered Miss Sparrow to be fascinating. It was just that, in the strangest way, Titmarsh got the impression that he fascinated her.

  She was always calling in with excuses that plainly she didn’t expect to be believed, and engaging the bookseller’s apprentice in conversation. She was definitely interested in him. She asked him about his schooling and what subjects he’d liked best. She wanted to know what line his pa was in, and why he’d put Titmarsh into bookselling. Had he shown a particular genius for it?

  Undeniably flattered by such interest, Titmarsh told her that his pa was a master joiner in Hackney who made bookshelves, so it had seemed a natural step to take.

  Miss Sparrow nodded; Gardiner’s had printed a book about joinery, so she knew a great deal about it. In fact, she knew a great deal about everything and kept tantalizing Titmarsh with amazing scraps of knowledge, which she kept stored in her head like apples in an attic. Once she started to tell him the History of the World, but Mr. Crowder came back and Miss Sparrow scampered off in a hurry.