The Apprentices

by Leon Garfield

  Suddenly he stood up. A most curious phenomenon had disturbed him. There had appeared, against the dark canvas walls of the tent, several misty images of moving lights.

  Shag hastened outside. The lights were over by the sheep pens. Half a dozen linkboys, with torches burning low, were creeping about in search of dropped valuables. As they moved, they made little pools of colour . . . as if the great grey, empty Fair were remembering, in patches, its past madness and lost joy. Bright paintings of marvels and wonders came and went, and a flag flashed out in scarlet and gold. . . .

  Presently one of the boys halted, whistled softly, and waved his torch to his friends. He was under the archway that led into Cloth Fair. All the high brickwork moved and shook with the torch, and windows flashed and winked.

  Now the others joined him, and all the torches warmed and expanded the architecture of the night. The boys were looking down; they had found something.

  “What are they on to?” asked Shag.

  “Go see for yourself,” said the night.

  He stumped across the open space and strutted up to the congregation of lights. The linkboys had found Piper.

  The silk mercer’s apprentice lay huddled against the wall of the archway like one dead. Knocked senseless by his fall, he’d been carried outside, where he’d been set upon by the Bridewell boys. He’d been kicked, punched, stripped, and robbed and dragged through the filth of the slaughterhouses. It was not so much a miracle that he was still alive; it was, to Piper himself, a disaster.

  The linkboys stared down at him with repugnance.

  “Filthy beast!” said one.

  “Serves ’im right,” said Shag.

  “Friend of your’n?”

  “Garn!”

  “There ain’t no pickin’s ’ere,” said another boy, bending his torch low. “’E’s been done over by hexperts!”

  “Serves ’im right!” repeated Shag forcibly. “Serves ’im bleedin’ well right!”

  “Wotcher doin’ now?”

  Shag didn’t answer. It was perfectly plain what he was doing. He was bending down and heaving the dirty, stinking Piper onto his own broad shoulder. Anybody who couldn’t have seen that must have been blind.

  The linkboys watched Shag’s efforts and then wandered away, leaving only one of their number behind. This child, rendered almost transparent by the torch he was holding, continued to watch Shag’s efforts with a slight smile of remembrance.

  “Far to go?” he asked as Shag secured his miserable, moaning burden.

  “Amen Corner.”

  “Need any light?”

  “Shove off!” said Shag. “I got all the light I needs.”

  He carried Piper back to Amen Corner and propped him up against Martlet and Peabody’s side door in the alley. He knew that it would be opened at half past five. He looked Piper over for serious injuries but found nothing worse than bruises and scrapes. If anything had been broken, it certainly didn’t show.

  Shag stood up and vigorously scratched at his head, as if something were itching inside. He scowled and, reaching into his pocket, drew out his two gold pounds. He examined them carefully, as if for imperfections; then, apparently deciding that there was nothing to choose between them, he bent down and tucked one of them in Piper’s feeble hand.

  “That’s my boy,” said the moon.

  “Garn!” said Shag, his face all wreathed in a gargoyle smile.

  At seven o’clock Piper, or the ghost of him, took down the shutters and began to sweep the pavement with a broom that seemed made of lead. Dim memories of the night kept coming back to him, but he could make nothing of them. He had walked in the valley of the shadow—and come out of it with a bright gold pound. He looked up—and Shag looked down. Shag grinned and, taking careful aim, let fly with a brushful of paint.

  “Thou anointest my head with oil!” said Piper ruefully. “You filthy beast up there!”

  The gargoyle aloft hugged himself with glee and gave his well-known imitation of Shag, the house-painter’s apprentice and bane of everyone’s life.

  THE ENEMY

  HOBBY THE YOUNGER, son of Hobby the joiner and coffin-maker to Jessop & Pottersfield’s of Little Knightrider Street, was in love; he was in love with Miss Siskin, barmaid at the Golden Goose at the corner of Harp Court. So also was Larkins, of the cheesemonger’s, just opposite.

  Miss Siskin was a fair and friendly nineteen; Hobby and Larkins were a grubby twenty-one—between them. Hobby was ten and Larkins was rising eleven.

  Now Larkins, in addition to the advantage of a year in age, was able to make Miss Siskin modest gifts of Windsor, Cheddar, and Stilton, nicked from his father’s stock, whereas Hobby’s pa only had coffins, which were too heavy to nick and, in any event, would not have been welcome.

  So Larkins prospered in his love; which is to say that Miss Siskin patted him on the back, pecked his cheek, and accepted his gifts, while she told Hobby, with a charming smile, “Shove off, nipper, or you’ll get me hung!”

  Hobby grew gloomier and gloomier, contemplated all manner of terrible things, until one day, driven stark wild by his hopeless love and the crying need to tell of it, he fashioned a pair of turtle doves from mud in the street outside.

  They turned out so real that if he’d clapped his hands, they’d have flown away!

  Tremendously uplifted and excited by this sudden evidence of a gift, a talent, a divine spark, Hobby rushed to call witnesses: first, his ma, and then Miss Siskin, who, after all, was chiefly responsible.

  Unluckily, before anyone could come and see the wonderful birds, Larkins trod on them. Purposely. Such was the demonic nature of his love that he could brook no rival, especially that coffin nail, Hobby.

  Hobby was grief stricken; he was shocked and outraged. He vowed that somehow he’d destroy Larkins, who was two inches taller and wore boots like hammers. He wrote his name, in the blackest of black chalk, on a coffin lid, and waited.

  Larkins laughed his head off, and went to the side door of the Golden Goose with half a pound of double Gloucester. Miss Siskin pecked his cheek and said, “You naughty boy, you! You shouldn’t—you reely shouldn’t!”

  She took the cheese, and Larkins was in seventh heaven. Hobby, on the other hand, languished in hell.

  Being in hell, he had nowhere else to go but to the devil, and, acting on advice received, he began to make, out of mud, a very venomous likeness of Larkins. He laboured long and hard till the likeness was so close it almost spat. Then he punched it in the nose and squashed it flat.

  Sure enough, next day Larkins came out in tetters all over his face, and Hobby rejoiced and danced on the coffin from which he’d been told to scrub Larkins’ name.

  Although it was a well-known fact that Larkins often came out in tetters and black spots on the side of his nose and boils on the back of his neck, the coincidence this time was too great for Hobby not to feel that he had friends in dark places and that the devil, no less than God, moves in mysterious ways.

  After that, Hobby, enchanted with his new-found gift, made many more things, not out of mud, but from clay his pa dug up in the backyard. He made ducks and geese and owls that his ma arranged along the dresser, where they slowly dried out and crumbled into dust. But all who’d seen them agreed that the boy had a natural genius and that it would be flying in the face of Providence not to apprentice him to the modelling trade as soon as maybe.

  By this time Miss Siskin had faded from his heart (and the Golden Goose as well, with a sailor from Wapping and a dozen of the best-plated tankards, besides), but somewhere inside him there remained a misty, rosy dream of a lovely lady for whom he’d once made birds.

  When he was fourteen, he was taken along to Naked Boy Court and apprenticed, for the sum of twenty pounds, to Falconer’s Figurines (“Every Piece an Heirloom”), where they made pretty plaster chimney sweeps, cottagers, and beggar children that sold at upwards of a guinea a time.

  His ma blessed the gift that had elevated her son out of coffin
s and kissed him tenderly; his pa shook him by the hand, in a manly sort of way, and gave him a book, written by a Lord Mayor of London and containing all the good advice needful for an apprentice to make a success of his seven long years.

  There were Religion and Truthfulness, Discretion and Affability, Faithfulness and Industry, Caution and Friendship, Silence and Affection; and there were stern warnings against Quarrelling, Bad Company, Drunkenness, Boastfulness, Dancing Schools, and the Courting of Females, which, on an apprentice’s pay, was like calling a hawk without a lure.

  Hobby, recollecting Miss Siskin and Larkins with his advantageous cheese, nodded. You certainly needed a lure. He marked the passage in the book and then fell to wondering about Dancing Schools and how much they cost, for there was no virtue in resisting a temptation if you weren’t going to be exposed to it. But it turned out that so far as temptation was concerned, he was to have no need of Dancing Schools. . . .

  It happened on his very first Monday morning. It was half past six and he’d unbolted the shop door to take down the shutters. He stepped out into the bright sunshine of Naked Boy Court—and there she was! She was twirling round and round in the middle of the Court with her green and yellow spotted skirts flying out like a Christmas bell.

  It wasn’t Miss Siskin, but someone younger and immeasurably more beautiful. Hobby gazed at her, utterly entranced. Then, remembering Affection but forgetting Caution, he went right up to her and said, “I’m Hobby. You can call me Jack, if you like, for short.”

  He’d picked up his courting round the side door of the Golden Goose, where things were inclined to be brisk and businesslike.

  She stopped her twirling and down swung her skirts, giving off a faint perfume of cinnamon and burnt sugar.

  “Now that’s a queer name,” she said, climbing up onto a pedestal where once a carved boy had fed carved birds till more durable children of flesh and blood had done for the child of stone and left only one broken foot behind. “Hobby’s a very queer name!”

  “Oh, no, it ain’t!” he said, watching her two feet tread either side of the stone one and so make a kind of monster. “Everybody’s got a hobby!”

  She frowned in an effort to find a worthy reply.

  “All right, then. I’m Linnet, from Linnet’s Pies. You can call me Miss Linnet, for short.”

  “I didn’t suppose you was wed yet!”

  “And why ever not? Though I’m only a pie maker’s daughter, I’m wonderfully full of good things!”

  “But a bit on the underdone side!” came back Hobby, neatly avoiding Miss Linnet’s right hand. “See you tomorrow?” It was wonderful how he could sparkle when he was not in Larkins’ shade.

  “Oh, life’s much too serious for that sort of thing,” said the pie maker’s lovely daughter, bending down to scratch the stone toes that peeped from beneath her petticoat as if they were her own and itched. “Besides, I ain’t got the time to waste on a silly hobby!”

  She jumped down from the pedestal and skipped towards the pie shop, chanting as she went:

  “Sing a song of sixpence,

  Pocket full of rye.

  Four and twenty blackbirds

  Baked in a PIE!”

  Hobby, wild with joy over such a beginning to his seven years in Naked Boy Court, sang back:

  “When the pie was opened

  The birds began to sing.

  Now wasn’t that a dainty dish

  To set before a ’prentice king?”

  Miss Linnet paused in her doorway and gave Hobby the strangest look, with brows that frowned and eyes that smiled. Then she waved and vanished, and Hobby went into Falconer’s Figurines, where a million white sweeps and cottagers and beggar children turned to greet him with their plaster smiles.

  He embraced them all with a gesture that all but did for a shelf-ful. He was so happy that his heart was almost bursting. He longed to make something for the pie maker’s daughter. He wanted to make her the most beautiful thing in the world.

  He furrowed his brows and thought, and misty memories returned. He’d make her a bird, not an ordinary bird, but a bird that, once she set eyes on it, would sing for ever in her heart. It would sing such songs as the sun sings, in woods and gardens where the shadows play.

  The ghost of Miss Siskin sighed and withered quite away before this glorious blaze of the pie maker’s daughter. It was not love at first sight; it was sight at first love, so freshly did Hobby see the world!

  He simply had to confide all these fine feelings to Mr. Greylag, the journeyman, who came at seven and was so old and frail that Hobby couldn’t help wondering if he might not do a stroke of business on the side and get Mr. Greylag to bespeak a coffin from his pa while there was still time.

  Mr. Greylag put on his streaky canvas apron and said, “Ah. That chit from across the way.”

  Then he told Hobby to sweep the dust from the shop and Miss Linnet from his thoughts. Females were a snare and a delusion; they were the downfall of apprentices and in the gift of the devil.

  “And what shall it profit a man,” he croaked, sitting at the bench and beginning to open up Saturday’s moulds and take out the dead-white figurines, “if ’e gain the ’ole world and lose ’is own soul?”

  Hobby couldn’t honestly say. Mr. Greylag was very religious and earned a guinea a week with daily beer and pie, and so ought to know. He took up his broom and, as he swept, wondered if now was the time to talk of coffins, since Mr. Greylag’s mind was plainly on matters eternal.

  At eight o’clock sharp, for he was a punctual man, Mr. Falconer himself came down. He lived upstairs with Mrs. Falconer, who was always shouting for doors to be shut, as the drifting plaster dust made her sneeze.

  Mr. Falconer was a huge, quiet man, with small hands and small feet. It was his imagination that had bodied forth the chimney sweeps and cottagers and pretty beggar children, all of whom also had small hands and feet. He created them out of clay, and Mr. Greylag turned them into plaster and finished them off with a narrow-bladed knife and the edge of his little finger, worn as smooth as marble. Then Mr. Falconer scratched his name beneath, and they ended up on mantelpieces all over town.

  Soberly, for he was an abstemious man, he wished Hobby and Mr. Greylag good morning and, putting on his apron, began to show the new apprentice how to pummel and wedge up the wet clay and make it ready for working.

  Hobby stood behind his master and gave him half of his attention, for we cannot always, at the drop of a hat, oblige with the whole of it. He’d noticed, through the glass screen that divided the workroom from the shop, that the pie maker’s daughter was out in the Court again.

  She was perched on the pedestal and, with her gown flowing round her, was holding out a handful of pie crumbs to the sparrows that hopped on the cobbles. She was a lovely sight. . . .

  “Pay attention!” said Mr. Falconer sharply, for he was not a patient man.

  So Hobby paid attention, and whenever Mr. Falconer didn’t—which happened from time to time—he provided himself with enough clay to make Miss Linnet’s marvellous bird.

  He finished it that same day, and in spite of interruptions and having to push it into corners, it turned out so well that he couldn’t resist showing it to Mr. Greylag, of whom he was determined, remembering Friendship, to make a friend.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Greylag. “And what might that be?

  “Why, it’s a bird, of course! Can’t you see? There’s its head and beak, and—and here’s its wings!”

  “Ah. Well, now. So it’s a bird,” said Mr. Greylag, who was a solemn believer in learning to walk before you ran, let alone flew. “Now just let me tell you something, young feller-me-lad. In the beginning God created the ’eaven and earth. And the earth was without form. Even ’e didn’t start right off with birds!”

  Hobby, more used to praise than criticism, scowled and took his bird away.

  “Ah. Well, now,” said Mr. Greylag, relenting. “Now I comes to look at it in a better light, it ain’t all that
bad. In fact, considering your newness to the trade, I’d go further and say it ain’t half bad.”

  He’d really been quite touched by the apprentice’s trust in him, and he went on to say that if Hobby let the object dry out to a real leather hardness, he’d make a plaster of it for Hobby’s ma.

  “But not,” he added, taking off his apron, “for that chit across the way.”

  Hobby, remembering Discretion, but forgetting Honesty—for we cannot be thinking of everything at once—thanked Mr. Greylag kindly and wished him a respectful good night.

  Next morning, cradling his bird (which had been practising in his dreams for its forthcoming concert in Miss Linnet’s heart), Hobby unbolted the shop door and stepped out into the bright sunshine. He was brimming with pride and hope.

  At the same moment, Linnet’s Pies opened up and out stepped, not the pie maker’s daughter, but—LARKINS!

  Hobby nearly fainted. He stood stock-still, glaring wildly across the twenty cobbled yards. It wasn’t possible! It was the aberration of an overexcited brain. It was a delusion—a nightmare!

  While these explanations were going through Hobby’s mind, Larkins, with his sleeves rolled up and wearing a smart green apron, began taking down Linnet’s shutters as if he’d been doing it all his life.

  “Sing a song o’ sixpence,” he chanted melodiously, “Pocket full o’ rye. . . .”

  A window over the pie shop went up like a rocket and out leaned Miss Linnet, her brown hair flying.

  “He’s Larkins,” she said needlessly. “New apprentice. Come yesterday.”

  “Them’s lovely eyes you got, miss,” said Larkins, with all his old gallantry. “If I didn’t know they was your own, I’d swear you’d nicked ’em from the sky!”

  “Though I’m only a pie maker’s daughter,” said Miss Linnet to the new apprentice reprovingly, “I’m not to be buttered up.”

  Hobby, feeling suddenly like a blown-out candle beside Larkins’ bright sun, said nothing. Dazedly he set his bird on a projecting sill and began to take down Falconer’s shutters.