The Devil's Apprentice Read online

  ‘Jan Siegel is probably the best British fantasy writer working today, and The Devil’s Apprentice is, true to form, a box of delights. It is entirely unmissable.’

  Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award-winning author

  ‘She writes in a quiet but uncommonly witty style that can soar into elegance or mute dread.’

  Publishers Weekly on The Witch Queen

  Other books by Jan Siegel

  Prospero’s Children

  The Dragon-Charmer

  Witch’s Honour

  First published 2013 by Ravenstone

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.ravenstone.com

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-630-5

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-631-2

  Copyright © 2013 Jan Siegel/Amanda Hemingway

  Cover art by Tom Percival

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  Here’s the house without a door

  Here’s the room without a floor

  Here’s the cat that chased the rat

  Here’s the rat that bit the cat

  Here’s the dog that didn’t bark

  Here’s the flame without a spark

  Here’s a candle to light the proud

  Here’s a spindle to spin your shroud

  Here’s a farewell where’er you roam

  Here’s a death knell to ring you home

  Here’s a church and there’s the steeple

  Open the doors and here are the people.

  Nursery Rhyme

  PROLOGUE

  Ghost

  Beyond the Doors

  London, seventeenth century

  THEY CALLED HIM Ghost, because of his colouring, and because he could come and go without a sound. After he had been in the city for a little while he almost forgot he had any other name.

  It was a big city – the biggest city in the world – he knew that because they told him so, though it didn’t seem especially big to him. The buildings were huddled into clusters or piled on top of each other, rickety structures of wood and pitch and tumbledown brick, with roofs that gaped between criss-crossed beams, and holes for windows, and doors that sagged from their hinges. Twisty stairs climbed up the walls, and broken ladders climbed down, and the streets and alleyways ran through the cracks in between. People and rats and cockroaches and pigeons all lived there like one big family, squabbling over every inch of space, every morsel they ate. When there was nothing else, they ate each other.

  When Ghost first arrived the thing he noticed most was the smells. He had grown up in a world of chemical smells – chemicals that smelt like flowers, and chemicals that smelt like fruit, and chemicals that smelt like chemicals – but here the smells were all human. Human sweat, human dirt, human waste. To begin with, he thought it would make him sick to breathe it in all the time, but he got used to it very quickly, and after a while he didn’t notice it any more.

  The boys lived in a kind of loft with a chimney running through it and a creek underneath, a narrow tongue of water that joined the main river several streets away. In flood, it spilled into the cellars; in drought, it shrank and stagnated. Everyone threw their rubbish into it, presumably out of optimism since it had no current worth speaking of and the rubbish simply stayed there, until the rats ate it or it had grown a crust. At the front of the building, or what passed for the front, was a tavern called the Grim Reaper, which added stale beer and vomit to the cocktail of odours. By night it was a gloomy place, with one lamp and few candles, where people could meet other people without revealing any giveaway details, like names or faces or the contents of their tankards. By day it was even gloomier, with no candles to enhance the murk, and the dancers from the theatre would come there, Big Belinda’s girls, drinking to forget their troubles, and laughing even when they had little to laugh at, and making lewd jokes about the men who crowded the stalls to ogle them. The theatres had reopened when the king returned, and now there were women on the stage, though respectable ladies looked down on them, saying they were no better than they should be. But the ladies would say that, since the dancers were pretty, at least to begin with.

  Mr Sheen knew them all. He knew the girls and Big Belinda and the faceless, nameless people of the night. He looked after the boys, or so he told them, disposing of the day’s takings and seeing the rent was paid and they got fed and clipping their ears when they spoke out of turn. He was thin and sallow and sinister, with old embroidery peeling from his coat like last month’s scabs and a wig that was too big for him, a monster of a wig that, according to One-Ear, housed mice and spiders and even a nest of small birds. He had a raven which sat on his shoulder picking insects out of the wig and squirting white excrement down the back of the coat; if the boys didn’t work hard and behave he said it would have their eyes. They were all afraid of the raven but Weasel, who was the youngest (or seemed to be), was even more afraid of the wig, and would wake from nightmares screaming: ‘The wig! The wig!’ and claiming it was chasing him. Of course, Snot was younger still, perhaps three or four years old, but he was too young to count, and Mr Sheen only allowed him to stay because his brother, Filcher, stole enough for two.

  Ghost was different from the others, right from the start. He could read and write and do sums. He knew how old he was – thirteen – while they could only guess. He stood a head taller than the tallest and although he was skinny he was strong, with arms like knotted wires. His skin was dead white and his hair was so fair it was almost white – even his eyelashes were white – but his eyes were dark and narrow, slots of agate in the pallor of his face. ‘It’s a shame he isn’t pretty,’ Big Belinda said. ‘He might have been an angel, all pale and perfect – only the God of Whores made him into a freak. Haha!’ Ghost knew he wasn’t pretty. His face was thin and pointy, his nose sharp, his ears pixy-tipped after a bully in the Home had called him a Vulcan and nicked them with a pair of scissors when he was eight. He had dealt with the bully a year later, feeding him rabbit-droppings covered in chocolate which he said were real sweets, and after that they’d left him alone. It had taken a long time, collecting the rabbit-droppings, and persuading the cook to teach him how to prepare them, and the children said he was cunning, and revengeful, and patient as the grave (in childhood, a year is an age), and he believed them.

  In the city, such qualities were the stuff of survival.

  The week he arrived he tried to wash, if he could find any clean water, but then he realised his fairness marked him out, and it was better to hide behind a layer or two of grime like the other boys. He had learned long ago how to fade into a crowd or slip into a shadow, and the city was full of crowds and shadows. On the first day, the boys had found him and claimed him as their own. In the Home, he had had enemies and allies but no friends; here, he had a family. He had Sly, Weasel, the twins, Ratface and Pockface, One-Ear, Maggot, Cherub, Filcher and Snot. There was another boy called Little Jimmy who hurt his foot and couldn’t run fast, so a fat shopkeeper caught him and beat him till he couldn’t walk, then the twins carried him back to the loft and Mr Sheen knocked him down. Two days later, he died. Bad things had happened in the Home, but no one had ever died, not even the bully who ate the rabbit-droppings. Ghost watched, and listened, and said nothing.

  ‘You’re a smart one,’ Mr Sheen told him. ‘I can
make something o’ you. You could be a highwayman like Daring Dick, with the gold chinking in your pocket, and the rich folk shrinking from the muzzle o’ your barker, and you can go up the stairway to heaven like a hero.’ And he cackled a croaking cackle, all brown teeth and bad breath, and the raven cawed an echo.

  Ghost stole an apple a day to keep his teeth clean, just thinking of Mr Sheen.

  He knew the stairway to heaven meant the gibbet, and Mr Sheen’s praise was more than half malice, but he said only: ‘I can’t ride.’

  The next market day, when they brought back their pickings, Ghost said: ‘That lot’s worth eight shillings at least.’ He’d already learned the currency of the city. He was a quick learner, especially when it came to money. ‘We worked hard for it. Harder ’n you. We want some.’

  ‘Greed,’ said Mr Sheen. ‘Avarice and greed. Two o’ the deadly sins, or so they say in church. I beat sin out o’ my boys.’

  He lashed out at Ghost, the way he had at Little Jimmy, but Ghost was faster and stronger. He blocked the blow and aimed a low punch with one knuckle crooked for maximum hurt, straight in the solar plexus. Mr Sheen didn’t know he had a solar plexus, his education hadn’t tended that way, but the punch knocked the breath out of him if not the stink, and he fell back with his wig all awry, and the raven flapped onto a beam, croaking a protest. The boys spread out in a circle to watch, terrified by Ghost’s boldness and what might come of it. Then Mr Sheen pulled the dagger out of his boot, a mean little dagger with a rusty blade, and lunged for Ghost, slow and clumsy from having his breath punched out. But Ghost found the knife he’d brought with him, all new and gleamy, and it snapped out of nowhere into his hand, quicker than an adder’s tongue, and Mr Sheen seemed to lunge himself straight onto it. His eyes opened wide in surprise, and he drew back swearing hoarsely, and there was a redness spreading on his clothes, bright as the paint Big Belinda’s girls used on their lips.

  ‘Help me,’ he said, but no one moved to help him. ‘Help me, you little buggers – you offspring o’ rats and roaches – you lice in the pubes o’ the city... As a father I’ve been to you, so I have, and now you turns on me. Help me... I’m dying.’

  ‘Go and die somewhere else,’ Ghost said, tossing him a rag to pad the wound.

  Mr Sheen clutched it to his side and gasped: ‘Peck out his glims!’ to the raven, but the bird only squawked, hopping back onto his shoulder and eying the blood like next night’s dinner. Then he stumbled out, cursing.

  The injury wasn’t serious but he took himself to a backstreet quack who stitched him with a grubby needle and cupped out the fever, and he was dead in a week.

  In the loft, the boys looked at Ghost.

  ‘What do we do now?’ they said. ‘He took care of us.’

  ‘We take care of ourselves,’ Ghost said. ‘We don’t need him.’

  So Ghost became their leader.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Habeas Corpus

  London, twenty-first century

  NOTHING EXCITING EVER happens in a lawyer’s office. Even criminal lawyers reserve their excitement for visiting their clients in gaol and moments of courtroom drama; in the office everything is staid, respectable, and essentially dull. If they are successful there will be an expensive desk, leather-bound lawbooks, discreet examples of modern technology like telephones and computers. If they are lower down the scale, the furniture will be second-hand shabby or mass-produced modern, with beige filing cabinets. Beige will feature somewhere, whatever their status. Beigeness and dullness are important hallmarks of legal premises, designed to assure the client that their chosen representative is someone who can use words like ‘heretofore’ and ‘howsoever’, when necessary in everyday conversation.

  These particular offices were exceptionally beige and dull, even by the standards of the profession. The desk was elderly without being precisely antique, the telephones dated from a previous century (the switchboard operator wasn’t sure which), the files were dog-eared, the lawbooks mouse-nibbled. This was an office where excitement had never intruded, crime had never been mentioned, divorce was another country. Its incumbent dealt exclusively with Wills, and Trusts, and property, which is about as unexciting as the law can get. His name was Jasveer Patel, newest member of Whitbread Tudor Hayle – a very old firm, which had long run out of both Whitbreads and Tudors and was down to its last Hayle. Jas Patel represented Progress, though he did his best to do it in an extremely dull (and beige) way. He was clever, earnest and bespectacled, his jacket blending with its background like camouflage colouring, his manner carefully cultivated to add a decade to his twenty-five years. However just now, despite his best efforts, he was gazing at his visitor in shock, and in consequence looked much younger. One of the things that had always contributed to the safe dullness of his job was that his clients were predominantly dead. He wasn’t used to seeing them in his office.

  Particularly when they had been dead for some time.

  ‘I simply can’t go on like this,’ Andrew Pyewackett was saying impatiently. ‘Flesh and blood won’t stand it. Let’s face it, they aren’t meant to. Look at me, I’m already falling to bits – every time I remove my socks several toes fall off. I need to get out of this body and move on. Arrangements will have to be made.’

  He wore a Savile Row suit some fifty years old – ‘I never put on an ounce after I was a hundred!’ – a jaunty little bow tie, and a very tall top hat pulled well down over his cranium. In the street, he had wrapped a silk scarf round much of his face and covered his eyes with tinted glasses, which was just as well, since although the lids had largely shrivelled away the eyeballs remained, round and staring and a-glow with unnatural life. He still wore his false teeth, which were aggressively new and shiny, though they fitted only loosely to his shrunken gums and were liable to become detached while he talked and clatter away by themselves. He had taken off his gloves and tapped with bony fingers on the desktop, shedding flakes of brownish skin like dandruff.

  Jas Patel said: ‘Er...’

  ‘Don’t you er me, young man,’ said his visitor. ‘I’m not having any of your ers and ums. I’ve had nothing but excuses from this firm since I died. It wasn’t like that in Graham Tudor’s day, I can tell you. What’s happened to young Bunny Hayle? Don’t tell me he’s running things now. Not much good at the business – always chasing the girls. That’s why we called him Bunny. At it like a rabbit, he was – up the skirt of any flapper he could find.’

  ‘He’s ninety-three,’ Jas said, desperately trying to summon up some legal nous.

  ‘Ninety-three? Huh! A spring chicken. I made it to a hundred and forty: porridge and treacle for breakfast and a glass of port every night. Died in December ’99. Really annoyed me, that did. I wanted to see in the new millennium. If you ask me, it was the quality of the port. Ran out of Graham’s Single-Quinta six months earlier, had to get some new-fangled stuff. Laid down in ’78 – just wasn’t mature. That’s what did for me, I’m sure of it. I’d have made it to the big 2000 if it wasn’t for that.’

  ‘Well,’ Jas swallowed, ‘you’re – you’re still here, aren’t you? In a way...’

  ‘I’m dead,’ Mr Pyewackett pointed out unnecessarily. ‘Trust me, it just isn’t the same. What’s more, I want to get on with it. Can’t hang around indefinitely with my bits dropping off. Fetch Bunny Hayle. He’s been dodging my phone calls but he can’t dodge me. Ninety-three indeed! Nothing but excuses.’

  ‘Mr Hayle’s retired,’ Jas said. ‘He only comes in occasionally to... to consult. I’ve been given some of his cases. The matter of your Will–’

  ‘It’s you, is it? What are you doing about it, hey? Seven years and you still haven’t found my successor! I can’t wait any longer. If you don’t find him within the month the estate will have to go into the hands of the executors. I’m not one to shelve my responsibilities but I’ve looked after the place for over a century, man and corpse, and it’s time for someone else to take on the job.’

  ‘I understa
nd the legatee is... is a Mr Bartlemy Goodman, of no fixed abode...’

  ‘You understand, do you? Glad to hear it. Understanding is a good start.’

  ‘Is he... is he a relative?’

  ‘Of course not!’ The dead man rolled his eyes until they spun in their sockets. ‘Ran out of relatives ages ago. Never married, no brats. Maud – m’ sister – had two boys, both killed in the Great War. One at Passchendaele, one on the Somme. Bad show. Broke her heart. M’ cousins went to the colonies – imbeciles, if you ask me. We sent our crooks to Australia and our religious crackpots to America. Who’d want to join ’em? No one left now – no one I can trust. Has to be Goodman. I’m told he’s just the chap.’

  ‘But s-surely,’ Jas stammered, ‘you know him?’

  ‘Never met him in my life,’ Mr Pyewackett said blithely. ‘Or since. Doesn’t matter. He’s the man. Got a reputation... in certain circles.’

  ‘A reputation–?’

  ‘For looking after things. That’s what we need. The house has to be looked after. Can’t have just anyone strolling in, wanting to buy the place, or sell it, or – God help them – trying to live in it. Could be a disaster.’

  ‘It seems to be a valuable property,’ Jas demurred. ‘Is it... is it in a very poor state of repair?’

  ‘No idea. Haven’t been inside for years. Don’t want people going inside, do we? Never you mind about value. Has to have a custodian to keep people out, for their own sake. Otherwise... it makes my blood run cold just thinking of the consequences.’

  ‘Does it?’ Jas asked, unable to refrain. He was beginning to get into the spirit of things.