The Apprentices Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  A Note About Apprenticeships

  The Lamplighter’s Funeral

  Mirror, Mirror

  Moss and Blister

  The Cloak

  The Valentine

  Labour-In-Vain

  The Fool

  Rosy Starling

  The Dumb Cake

  Tom Titmarsh’s Devil

  The Filthy Beast

  The Enemy

  About the Author

  Also by Leon Garfield

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Life in eighteenth-century London was hard and especially so for the city’s apprentices. For seven long years they struggled for their livelihoods among the fetid houses and sinister quays of old London. But despite their hardships there was hope and even fun.

  This compelling story-cycle follows them round the year, through the dark, cold winter nights to midsummer in the city. The lamplighter, the pawnbroker, the midwife or the clockmaker, their stories interweave delightfully to paint a colourful picture of life in London 200 years ago.

  A Note About Apprenticeships

  In the year 1764, a London evening newspaper reported the case of a Cheapside haberdasher’s apprentice—a sober, industrious youth, always polite and quietly dressed—who had embezzled ten thousand pounds (a prodigious sum, equal, perhaps, to half a million dollars) of his master’s money. The apprentice had not gambled with it; he had not spent it wildly; he had invested it in sound stock with the worthy idea of setting up in trade on his own when his seven years’ apprenticeship should be out.

  Seven years is a long time. Apprenticeships were always for seven years; seven years to the trade of surgery, seven years to the trade of rowing a boat. It made no difference. (Except to the apprentice.) Depending on the trade, a child’s parents paid a sum of money to a master, who thereafter gave board, lodging, and tuition in exchange for hard, menial work. He also paid a small wage—little more than pocket money. For seven years.

  At the end of his time the apprentice became a journeyman—that is to say, he was able to work in the trade for day wages. His only chance of setting up on his own was either by marrying the master’s daughter, and inheriting the business, or the master’s widow, should matters fall out conveniently. Otherwise he had nothing to look forward to but a life of hard and ill-paid work. The sum of money needed to set up on his own was a dream beyond his reach.

  The Cheapside haberdasher’s apprentice, however, was plainly no dreamer but a sternly practical soul. He was transported to His Majesty’s Colonies in America where, it is to be supposed, his genius prospered, most likely in the banking line. But those who stayed behind, some marrying their masters’ daughters, some not, still contrived to live with hope and some content.

  THE LAMPLIGHTER’S FUNERAL

  AT HALF AFTER eleven o’clock (by The Great Bell of Bow) of a cold, dark October night, a coffin came out of Trump Alley with six figures in white to shoulder it and a river of fire to light it on its way. Smoke pouring upwards heaved and loitered between the second- and first-floor windows of the narrow tenements, so that those looking down saw, as it were, a thick, fallen sky dimly pierced by a moving crowd of flames.

  “It’s heathen,” said one soul whose parlour had filled up with smoke. “Why can’t they go by daylight, like decent Christians?”

  Slowly, and with much jolting (the bearers were of unequal height), the coffin turned right and lumbered down St. Lawrence Lane in the wake of the marching fire.

  “I wish you long life,” said an old Jew to a coffin bearer he knew by sight; and a little crowd on the corner of Cheapside uncovered as fifty lamplighters, all in white jackets and black cocked hats, filed across the road and turned into Queen Street with torches blazing and stinking the night out with fumes of melting pitch.

  In accordance with old custom, they were burying one of their number, whose light had been eternally put out two days before in consequence of an inflammation of the lungs. One Sam Bold, lamplighter of Cripplegate Ward, having providently joined the burial club and paid his dues, was now being conducted with flaming pomp to his last snuffing place in St. Martin’s Churchyard. Although he had been a solitary man, such was the brotherhood of the lamplighters that any death among them made more than a small hole in the night; their yellowed faces were dull and sad. . . .

  One in particular looked sadder than all the rest, not from any extreme of grief, but because, having a chill himself and thinking too much of the fate of Sam Bold, he had taken a good quantity of gin to keep out the murderous cold air. The night had hit him hard, and he felt dizzy. Already the cobbles of Cheapside had almost overturned him; as he got into Queen Street, he caught his foot against a rift in the pavement and went down in a shower of sparks and blazing pitch, like a comet of doom.

  A crowd of street urchins who had been following Sam Bold’s fiery progress to the grave screamed with unseemly excitement, while the lamplighters tramped grimly on. Then one child—more eager than the rest—darted forward and picked up the still-burning torch. A slender, skinny-fingered child with eyes as round as hot pennies . . .

  The torchlight lit his face, so that it seemed transparent with fire and floating in the smoke. The fallen lamplighter gazed vacantly at the apparition; then, overcome with shame at his fall, tried to explain.

  “Issa f-funeral . . . muss go on. Respect . . . feel awful. . . .”

  The child stared down.

  “I’ll go. . . .”

  “No . . . no. ’S not proper. Wouldn’t be ’spectful. . . . Oh I feel awful. . . .”

  “I’ll be respectful . . . reely.”

  “You sure?”

  “Cross me heart.”

  “Take me—me jacket, then. Muss wear the p-proper jacket. It’s the rule. And me ’at. Proper f-funeral ’at. Give ’em back later. . . .”

  The dazed lamplighter struggled out of his jacket; his hat lay in the street beside him.

  “’Ere! P-put ’em on. Muss be ’spectful. Issa f-funeral . . .”

  The white jacket engulfed the child and the hat finished him off, so that the lamplighter had the weird feeling he had attired a ghost that had just departed, leaving the empty clothes standing, stiff with terror. A sleeve reached out and took up the torch again.

  “I’ll be respectful,” said the invisible child, and tipped back the hat sufficiently to uncover the seeing portion of his eerily solemn face.

  The coffin had already passed on, and the deputy lamplighter had to scamper and run, with flame streaming, till he caught up with the funeral by St. Thomas the Apostle and took his place among the marchers.

  At last Sam Bold was laid to rest in St. Martin’s Churchyard, and the deputy lamplighter acquitted himself with dignity and respect. He stood stock-still amid the great crescent of fire that lit up the open grave and, with due solemnity after the black earth had thumped down, quenched his torch in the bucket provided—as did all the other brethren of the lamp—with the honourable words: “A light has gone out.”

  In the oppressive darkness that followed this general putting out, the company of mourners fumbled their way down Church Lane to where a funeral feast was awaiting them at the Eagle and Child. This was the custom; each man paid towards the coffin, and what was left over provided for meat, cakes, and ale.

  The Eagle and Child was an elderly inn that hung over the river like the glimmering poop of a ship that had taken a wrong turn and sailed among houses. . . . One by one the mourners climbed up the wooden steps that led to the overhanging bay where the feast was laid out. Last of all came the deputy, not wanting to disgrace the occasion by hanging back.

  The president of
the burial club, who collected shillings at the door, held out his hand. For a moment there was a stillness in nature, for to him who expected there was nothing given; the deputy did not possess a shilling. The president frowned, then observing the white jacket and cocked hat, took the occupant of them for Sam Bold’s son. The dead man having been of Cripplegate Ward and he of Bishopsgate, they had not been personally known to each other. For all the president knew, Sam Bold had a dozen sons, and this before him was the representative of them all. He withdrew his expectant hand and gestured the orphan through the door. One didn’t demand a shilling off a bereaved child.

  Inside the parlour, the talk was generally what it always is after a funeral: quiet, with a discreet cheerfulness breaking in; not everyone can be struck to the heart by one man’s death. As the ale went down, spirits went up, and there was singing, of a gentle sort . . . nothing rowdy or quick; such songs as “Sally in Our Alley,” and “Over the Hills and Far Away.”

  After a little while, the deputy lamplighter joined in, not wanting to be conspicuous by keeping silent; his voice was high and singularly sweet. Several of the older brethren quietly shed tears, thinking, like the president, that here was Sam Bold’s orphan, bearing up wonderfully. None liked to ask where his mother was, for fear of opening old wounds if, as was likely, she turned out to be dead.

  At half past midnight there was a commotion on the steps outside, as of many feet struggling against incomprehensible odds. The president went to open the door, and the lamplighter who’d fallen in Queen Street appeared in a dusty and confused condition. After greeting the company, he searched out his deputy and recovered his jacket and hat.

  “’Ad a good feed, lad?” he inquired, gesturing towards the remains of the feast.

  The lad, thin and bitterly ragged, looked up and shook his head.

  “Not so much as a drop or a crumb,” said someone, not understanding the deputizing arrangement and still taking the child to be an orphaned Bold. “It’s only to be expected,” he went on. “No appetite. Next of kin, you know . . .”

  The new arrival—whose name was Pallcat—looked muddled. The child plucked him aside.

  “I didn’t like to say . . . I didn’t have no shilling. . . . And it was only till you came. . . . I’ll go now—”

  Pallcat, not yet his usual miserly self, felt in his pockets for a coin.

  “I don’t want nothing,” murmured the child awkwardly. “Reely.”

  Instantly Pallcat took his hands out of his pockets.

  “Wodger do it for then?”

  “I was sorry for you. . . .”

  Pallcat stared down in disbelief.

  “What’s yer name?”

  “Possul.”

  “Possul? That ain’t a name,” said Pallcat.

  “’S after St. Thomas the Apostle, where I does odd jobs.”

  Totally mystified, Pallcat scratched his greasy head, which reeked of the fish oil that supplied the lamps.

  “’Ave a cake,” he said at length. “’Ave a piece of pie and a thimble of ale. ’S all right, I paid me dues . . . and I ain’t up to eating meself.”

  Possul gravely thanked his benefactor and drank and ate. Then there were more songs, and Possul obliged the company with “While shepherds watched,” sung solo until he got to “and glory shone around,” when the company softly joined in, as became a congregation of lamplighters.

  At half past one, the last of the candles supplied by the landlord of the Eagle and Child went out, and the funeral party departed into the moonless night, pausing at the foot of the steps to shake one another by the hand and get their hazy bearings from the watermen’s lights that still flickered and danced on the black river.

  “Where d’you live, Possul?”

  “Over Shoreditch way.”

  “With yer ma and pa?”

  Possul shook his head vigorously, and Pallcat fancied he’d half smiled. (Queer, that, thought Pallcat for a moment.)

  “I got rooms in Three Kings Court,” he said, blinking to clear his brain. “Just back of Covent Garden.”

  Possul gazed at him in admiration.

  “Two rooms,” went on Pallcat, moved to a foolish boasting. “You can come back with me if you like—”

  The invitation just slipped out. Pallcat’s heart sank as he heard his own voice oozing hospitality. He could have bitten off his tongue. He hoped Possul hadn’t heard him. . . .

  “Don’t want to be a trouble to you.”

  “No trouble,” snarled Pallcat. “’S a pleasure.”

  The journey back to Three Kings Court was full of corners and carpings, as Pallcat roundly cursed the lamplighters of those wards and parishes who’d been too dishonest to fill their lamps to last out the night.

  “Issa sacred dooty,” he kept saying as blackness engulfed them. “Issa Christian office to lighten our darkness. And it’s a wicked ’eathen thing to give short measures and sell the oil what’s left.”

  Pallcat’s drunkenness kept coming over him in waves; and whenever it went away he felt very cold and couldn’t keep his eyes off skinny Possul, to whom he’d offered a bed for the night.

  Why, in the name of all the saints, had he done such a thing? It wasn’t like him. What if Possul had helped him out and said nothing to the lamplighters about the shameful circumstance that had made it necessary? He, Pallcat, had fed him for his trouble. Surely that was enough? He glared at Possul, whose face was bright with expectation. You ought to be on your knees and thanking me, thought Pallcat irritably.

  The smell of ancient cabbage and trodden oranges stole upon the air as they neared Covent Garden. Pallcat had always lived alone and had steadily improved himself by having no other soul to provide for. He worked hard, lighting his lamps at sunset and, thereafter, offering himself out as a linkman to light those who paid him the way home.

  Such earning a living by shedding light in darkness gave him notions of great importance about himself; it was hard for him not to think of himself as some kind of judge, dividing light from dark—and choosing where and when to shine.

  This, combined with a natural meanness, made men say of him that, when his link went out, he charged for the moonlight—if there happened to be any about.

  “Second floor back,” said Pallcat as they came to the lofty tenement in Three Kings Court where he lodged.

  His room stank so much of fish oil that the smell seemed to come out and hit the visitor like an invisible fist. Within there was a sense of bulk and confusion that resolved itself, when he turned up a lamp, into all the wild and tattered furnishings he’d bought between the setting and the rising of the sun. Tables, chairs, chests, commodes, pots and jugs, together with a quantity of glass cases containing stuffed birds and cats, were collected in meaningless heaps like the parts needed for the first five days of creation. There was also dust in plenty; it was not hard to believe that Pallcat himself had been formed out of it.

  “’Ome!” said Pallcat, and taking a taper from the lamp, lit another. The oil-stained walls appeared—between obstructions. Possul gazed at them in wonderment. Framed texts hung everywhere; some were burned into wooden panels, some were crudely stitched onto linen, as if by Pallcat himself.

  I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, said one; HE THAT FOLLOWETH ME SHALL NOT WALK IN DARKNESS.

  THE TRUE LIGHT WHICH LIGHTETH EVERY MAN, proclaimed another.

  GOD SAID, LET THERE BE LIGHT, hung over the foot of Pallcat’s bed; AND THERE WAS LIGHT, hung over the head.

  HE WAS A BURNING AND A SHINING LIGHT, was propped above the fireplace; and LIFT UP THE LIGHT OF THY COUNTENANCE, was nailed over a mirror that was tarnished like a disease.

  “There’s a couch in t’other room,” said Pallcat. “You can sleep there.”

  They slept away what was left of the night; they slept on through the grey and rowdy morning. Pallcat awoke sometime after noon. Confused memories kept coming back to him, and he closed his eyes against the daylight that contrived to be as soiled as the windows. He recol
lected that he had company. Possul’s weirdly transparent face, floating in smoke as when he’d first seen it, appeared before his inner eye. Then he remembered that Possul had carried the funeral light when he’d fallen by the wayside; that made some sort of bond between them.

  He opened his eyes and gazed at his stuffed beasts, which had been arranged so they might look back at him and reflect himself in their glass eyes. “All is vanity and vexation of the spirit,” he mumbled, and pricked up his ears.

  The rooms were still. The thought struck him that Possul had already gone and, possibly, robbed him into the bargain. He crawled from the chaos of his bed and poked his head into the next room. Possul lay on the couch, breathing regularly. Being a child, he took sleep in greater quantities than a grown man.

  Pallcat felt vaguely displeased; then he felt vaguely disappointed. He’d caught himself hoping that Possul, moved by the kindness and hospitality shown him, would have cleaned the room and prepared a meal while he, Pallcat, slept. But no such thing. The boy was ungrateful, like all boys. His angelic countenance and soft manners were things he’d picked up in the church where he’d worked; they were no more part of his deep nature than would have been a wig or a new hat.

  He went out to get some food, determined to make the boy ashamed of himself for allowing a grown man to wait on him. When he came back, the boy was still asleep. Pallcat stared long and hard at his small pale face, and had thoughts about shaking him till his teeth flew out; instead, however, he went into the next room and made a great deal of noise preparing to go out on his duties. He kicked against his oil can, dropped his wick trimmers, and flung the lock and chain that secured his ladder to a banister rail with a heavy crash onto the floor. In spite of this, Possul did not wake up. Pallcat wondered if he was ill. He went back and laid an oily hand on the boy’s forehead, and then touched his own; there was no great difference in heat. He bent down and blew gently on the child’s face. Possul frowned, stirred, and turned over with a sigh. Pallcat snarled and departed on his sunset task.

  His lamps were in the Strand, stretching on either side from Charing Cross to St. Mary’s; also there were three each in Bedford and Southampton streets, making four and twenty in all. High on his ladder, Pallcat tended them, filling the tins with oil, trimming the wicks, kindling them, and giving the thick glass panes a dirty wipe before descending and passing on to the next. From each lamp he took the greasy, burnt remainder and afterwards sold it to the bootboys for blacking hats, boots, and iron stoves. In this way he extended his dominion; he gave light by night and black by day.