“And what did you think of it, Tom Titmarsh?”
“Like you said, Miss Sparrow, it was fruits of the Tree.”
She frowned as if not entirely satisfied by the apprentice’s answer. She sensed an evasion. She helped herself to one of his apricots.
“Well, then, which part did you like best?”
He’d dreaded such a question. He’d hated the book and never wanted to talk about it again. He didn’t answer her and, most unwisely, tried to avoid her eye. Instantly she flounced round to confront him.
“You didn’t understand one bloody word of it!” she cried angrily. “You’re a fool, boy! An ignorant fool what’s not worth bothering with!”
She threw her half-eaten apricot on the floor and left the shop like a whirlwind.
Dully Tom Titmarsh watched her pass by the shop window with her black hair tossing. He felt a pang of bitterness and jealousy for Mr. Match and his devilish book, and he wished the pair of them had never seen the light of day. Unhappily, he’d been no match for Mr. Match, who’d plainly stolen Miss Sparrow’s heart and head away.
He picked up Thine Is the Kingdom again, not with any intention of rereading it, but because it was the key to something that quite suddenly he wanted very much. More than anything in his present world, he wanted to win the approval of the devil from Angel’s Court. . . .
“I want to see your master! At once! At once!”
Titmarsh dropped the book in fright. The Bishop of Southwark had come into the shop and was standing in front of him. He was white with anger.
“I—I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Crowder is out. Can I—?”
“This—this book!” said the bishop, holding out Thine Is the Kingdom with a shaking hand. “It’s nothing more than blasphemous, godless rubbish! I don’t know what Crowder was thinking of to have it in his shop! You may tell him from me that he hasn’t heard the last of it. I’ll see to it that it’s burned by the public hangman! And I’ll have its miserable author put in the pillory! I forbid you to sell so much as a single copy of this—this monstrosity! I forbid it!”
Titmarsh had never seen anyone so angry before. His Grace, who was ordinarily a calm gentleman, had been quite transformed. Mr. Match had indeed set him on fire, although perhaps not in the way he’d intended.
When Mr. Crowder came back, Titmarsh, trembling with fright over the whole affair, told him of the bishop’s visit. Mr. Crowder listened very seriously. Although privately he resented the bishop’s high-handed attitude and the fact that he’d plainly distressed the gentle apprentice, he could not afford to offend so valuable a customer. He told Titmarsh to put Mr. Match’s work in a dark corner, out of everyone’s way, until the case should be decided.
Titmarsh did as he was told, but couldn’t help thinking all the while of Miss Sparrow and what she would say if she knew how he was treating the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge—no matter how sour they’d turned out to be. He pushed them behind a pile of the bishop’s sermons . . . and then he found himself thinking about the pinched, starved-looking Mr. Match, whose very book looked poor and thin beside the good fat leather of the sermons. He thought about the luckless Mr. Match, bruised and bloody in the pillory . . . and he thought again about Miss Sparrow and what she would say and feel. He thought a good deal more, in fact, about Mr. Match than he did about his book; and he thought a good deal more about Miss Sparrow than he did about either.
“You’re looking very pale, my boy,” said Mr. Crowder in the middle of the afternoon. “Forget about His Grace and take a stroll round Covent Garden. Here, buy yourself a peach.”
With tears in his eyes, Tom Titmarsh thanked his master, but at the same time he felt horribly guilty because he knew he intended to deceive him.
He took the money Mr. Crowder gave him and ran, not to Covent Garden, but to Drury Lane, where Mr. Match lived above a pawnbroker’s. He was going to warn him of the bishop’s violent intentions and beg him to escape. This was the least he could do, and he hoped it would reinstate him in Miss Sparrow’s eyes. But Mr. Match wasn’t there. He had not been back for days.
Sick at heart, Titmarsh began to make his way towards the market, where the last of the day’s fruit was going cheap. Clutching his master’s money, he stepped carefully, as the cobbles were treacherous and slippery from squashed apples and plums, while the air was thick and heavy with the sweet smell of rotting.
He looked everywhere to find some peaches, but they were all gone, so he had to make do with a pound of black cherries from a barrow woman who was sitting on the arm of her barrow in a narrow alley. She’d pulled open her bodice to feed her filthy baby and told Titmarsh to help himself, as her free hand was engaged in dismissing the flies that competed with her child for milk at her breast.
Titmarsh left the market and began to make his way back to the shop. He passed the entrance to Angel’s Court, and there was Miss Sparrow, coming out of Gardiner’s. Her hair was wild and her face was newly inked. She was whistling.
He shouted to her eagerly. She turned and saw him, and shook her head.
“Can’t stop now, boy!” she called back. “Proofs to deliver.”
He ran after her, pushing aside all who stood in his way. Foolishly he held out the bag of cherries.
“What do you want, boy?”
Breathlessly he told her of the bishop’s anger and honourably blamed himself for everything, as he’d urged the bishop to read the fatal book.
“You recommended it?” she said with interest.
“Yes, miss.”
Miss Sparrow took a cherry from his bag, and Titmarsh understood he’d been partly forgiven. His heart beat rapidly, and he went on to tell her that he’d been to Drury Lane in the hope of warning Mr. Match. . . .
Miss Sparrow took another cherry and squeezed Titmarsh’s hand, so that he knew he’d been forgiven altogether.
“What’s to be done now, miss?”
“Can’t do nothing about the books,” said Miss Sparrow mournfully.
“But him? Mr. Match?”
“I’ll tell him. Don’t you worry.”
“Do you know him then?”
Miss Sparrow took a whole handful of cherries and grinned her grimiest.
“Course I know him! His name ain’t Match. It’s Sparrow. He’s me pa, Tom Titmarsh. He’s me pa!”
As he walked back to Crabtree Orchard, people turned and stared at him. He stumbled into obstructions as if he didn’t see them or feel the pain they must have inflicted. His eyes were full of tears and his face was as white as a bone.
She’d deceived him right from the beginning! All the interest and concern he thought she’d had for him had been for her accursed father! Everything had been for her father, and she’d had no more care for Titmarsh than she’d had for the birds of the air.
A dark hatred rose up in his heart for Miss Sparrow and her devious ways. He hated her for entrapping him into reading her father’s nightmare of a book. He hated her for filling his head with her own blackness as well as her father’s. Everywhere he looked inside his mind, he saw her blackened face, and his hand prickled and burned from the last pressure of her night fingers.
From now on, he would never be able to sleep without the most horrible dreams; he would not be able to talk without stammering and being afraid the wrong words would come; he would not be able to be alone without the constant dread of being spied upon. He knew that nevermore could he meet his master’s eye without a morbid terror that Mr. Crowder could see what was in his mind.
“Yes! She’s destroyed me!” mourned the bookseller’s apprentice. “I never ought to have listened to her. Never, never, never!”
On the afternoon of July 13, Mr. Crowder came into the shop and told his apprentice that Thine Is the Kingdom had been prohibited from further sale and that first thing in the morning the public hangman would be calling to collect the entire stock for burning. The Bishop of Southwark, using all his considerable influence, had struck like a thunderbolt.
Eagerly Tom Titmarsh dragge
d the volumes out of their dark corner to make the hangman’s task easier. Such was the bitterness he still harboured against Miss Sparrow and her father that he could scarcely wait for the morning and the fire.
He rose early the next morning and paced the shop, going frequently to the door to look outside. He’d never to his knowledge seen a hangman before, and he pictured someone stern and brutish, with a face of implacable stone. Although he shrank from the very idea of such a personage, he couldn’t help feeling a gruesome fascination at the thought of such a man’s hands.
At about half-past six o’clock, there came a grumble of wheels turning into Crabtree Orchard, and Titmarsh unfastened the door. A moment later a youth, not much older than Titmarsh himself, came into view, dragging a black-painted cart. The hangman had sent his apprentice.
The youth, seeing Titmarsh’s strained white face, halted.
“This ’ere Crowder’s place?”
Titmarsh, suddenly unable to speak, pointed up to the shop sign.
“Well? Is it or ain’t it?” inquired the youth, grinning amiably. “You’ll ’ave to come out with it an’ tell us. I can’t read.”
Titmarsh stared at the hangman’s apprentice. His face was simple rather than brutish; his eyes were lustreless and his mouth was large and loose. He might almost have been a baby, stretched out to fill his coarse brown clothes.
“This is Mr. Crowder’s,” whispered Titmarsh.
“Thank Gawd! I come fer some books!”
Suddenly Titmarsh began to feel sick, not because the youth was so horrible, but because he was not. One might have passed him in the street without knowing; one might have shaken him by the hand without suspecting. Titmarsh stared at his hands. They were strong and firm and freckled by the sun, for his was open-air work. There was a puckered scar on one of his wrists. . . .
“I got that on me first day,” said the hangman’s apprentice, observing Titmarsh’s look. “I was jus’ steadyin’ ’im fer the drop, when ’e turned an’ bit me like I was a pie or summ’at. Christ, but I yelped! Since then, I’ve learned to be a bit smarter, I can tell yer!”
Titmarsh trembled but could not tear his eyes away from the youth’s hands, which were so ordinary, in spite of what they had done.
“Them books, mate. Show us where they are.”
Titmarsh pointed to the corner at the back of the shop.
“Don’t s’pose you’d lend a ’and?”
Titmarsh did not answer, and the hangman’s apprentice grinned good-naturedly. His was a lonely trade and he was used to it. He clumped past Titmarsh and presently returned with a stack of books that obscured all but his ragged hair and his full, dull eyes.
“These the ones, mate?”
“Thine Is the Kingdom,” whispered Titmarsh, all bitterness and anger leaving him as he contemplated the youth’s stubby fingers, which might have been a sailor’s, so naturally did they curl, as if about a rope.
“That’ll be the day!” chuckled the hangman’s apprentice, unloading his burden and going back for more.
“Comin’ along to watch?” he asked, when he’d finished and all the books were on the black cart. “Outside Newgit. Debtor’s Gate. Nine o’clock. Be ’appy to see yer, mate.”
He glanced at Titmarsh half shyly, and the bookseller’s apprentice perceived the appalling loneliness of the hangman’s apprentice. He nodded, and the other looked as pleased as Punch.
“Will you—will you read it before you burn it?” muttered Titmarsh as the youth raised the arms of the cart.
“Told yer, mate; can’t read.”
“But your master?”
“Can’t read neither. Don’t ’ave to in our line. Were it a good book, then?”
“Oh, yes. Very, very good.”
It was with some reluctance that Mr. Crowder gave his apprentice permission to watch the public burning. He was surprised, and said so, that such an occasion should attract a gentle soul like Titmarsh.
“But if you should see our Mr. Match there,” he added as Titmarsh was leaving the shop, “tell him I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want him to think that I was to blame.”
Although the sun was as bright as blazes and cold pies were on sale, there wasn’t much of a crowd outside Debtor’s Gate. Perhaps fifty people had gathered to see Mr. Sparrow’s heart and soul out of the world and give the hangman his customary cheer.
The books had been torn into fragments for easy burning; in his mind’s eye Titmarsh saw the stubby fingers hard at work. They’d been stuffed into an iron cage that was suspended from the gallows’ bar, and a gaoler stood on each side of the platform, as if to prevent any last minute attempt to rescue the condemned print.
Titmarsh, his heart thundering with apprehension, pushed his way through the meagre crowd. He had seen Miss Sparrow.
She’d washed her face again and tied up her hair with black ribbon, as if in mourning for Thine Is the Kingdom. She was crying, and Titmarsh would have given anything to make her smile. He reached her side.
“I—I’ve got some plums here, miss. Will you have one?”
She looked at him in silent misery, and shrank away.
Now the hangman, a square-built man with silvery hair and light-blue eyes, came out of the prison gate and everyone cheered and called to him by various familiar names. He smiled and waved and rubbed his hands, and Titmarsh found himself thinking, with a thrill of horror, that he was the living image of the Bishop of Southwark.
“Go on, miss,” urged Titmarsh, holding out a plum to the sobbing devil by his side. “It’ll do you good.”
“Christ!” she said. “Don’t you care what they’re doin’ down there?”
The magistrate’s clerk, all in Sunday black, came out and read the order, condemning Thine Is the Kingdom to be burned to the public shame.
“They’re ripe and sweet, miss,” said Titmarsh; Miss Sparrow turned and spat in his eye.
At last the hangman’s apprentice came out holding a blazing faggot, and everyone cheered again. He handed the faggot to the hangman, then, seeing Titmarsh, grinned and waved. Titmarsh waved back, and Miss Sparrow, with all her strength, stamped on his foot.
Then the hangman, who was so like the bishop that Titmarsh could hardly believe that it wasn’t the same man, and shuddered accordingly, pushed the faggot between the bars of the cage. For a moment it seemed that the fire had gone out, but this was because of the strength of the sunshine. In moments the fire blazed up and a great black column of smoke waved up to the blue sky. The bars grew red hot and all manner of castles and figures appeared in the heart of the flames.
“Thine Is the Kingdom!” wailed Miss Sparrow as the flames slowly died in the cage and the paper within shrivelled to a cobwebby nothingness. “For never and never, Amen!”
Then she broke down and cried so passionately, and with so little restraint, that she didn’t care who led her away from the pie-strewn, ash-infested place where her beloved pa had gone up in smoke.
“Come back to the shop, miss. Rest awhile and I’m sure you’ll be better for it.”
She looked up at Titmarsh, whose arm was about her shoulders. Her face, in the sunshine, blazed with tears.
“That book. It were all the world to us. All the world, Tom Titmarsh. We’d talked about it . . . and—and dreamed about it. It were everything we felt about things. And now—and now—?”
“Yes, miss. I know. But you’ll feel better when you’ve had a rest and something to eat.”
“Christ!” said Miss Sparrow. “I don’t know why I bother with you!”
They came to Crabtree Orchard, and Tom Titmarsh went into the shop while Miss Sparrow waited round the corner. Mr. Crowder, seeing something like a smile on his apprentice’s face, raised his eyebrows.
“Well?”
“All burned,” said Titmarsh, and Mr. Crowder, with a vague air of disappointment, left the shop.
Titmarsh who had recently learned guile, listened carefully, then, assured that his master was not coming back, poked his
head outside the door and whistled. A moment later, a tearful and bedraggled Miss Sparrow crept in.
“Printer’s,” she wept, from force of habit, and just in case the bookseller should return.
Gently Titmarsh led the unhappy devil to his sanctuary and sat her down.
“I think,” she said, “I’ll have a plum now.”
“Here, miss,” said Titmarsh, lifting a book from a pile on the floor and handing it to her. “Fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. It’ll do you more good.
She gazed at him with eyes that seemed to have swallowed up her face. She opened the book, and Titmarsh felt she was opening his heart. Slowly her eyes moved across the page, then they stopped. Her hands began to shake so much that the print must have danced.
‘But—but it’s his!” she whispered, peering about her as if she feared that stern gaolers would come and tear the book away. “It’s the book! It’s Thine Is the Kingdom!”
“Yes, miss. Like I said, it’s fruits of the Tree of Knowledge.”
“But I thought. . . . I saw . . . I watched it being burned!”
“No, miss.”
“What—what was it then? What was it, all torn and hanging in the iron cage on the gallows?”
“Very sad thing, miss. Unfortunate mistake. The hangman’s apprentice—him I waved to—couldn’t read. So he took—”
“What did he take, Tom Titmarsh?”
“He took the Bishop of Southwark’s sermons, miss. All the presentation copies, signed with his own name, and half the new printing besides.”
“And—and the hangman burned them?”
“Every last word. Burned in public by the hangman at Debtor’s Gate. Religious works like that. Shocking.”
The printer’s devil drew in her breath and stared.
“Oh, Tom Titmarsh, Tom Titmarsh! You ain’t no tomtit at all. You’re an eagle, that’s what! A bleedin’ eagle!”
Then, as the full enormity of what had happened, and whose soul had gone up in smoke, came home to her, she began to laugh and laugh till her eyes streamed, and Titmarsh had to support her, as she was in danger of falling off her perch.
“But why—why did you do it? You never liked pa’s book . . . so why, why?”
The Apprentices Page 24
