The Devil's Apprentice Read online

  ‘The thing is,’ Pen said, accepting a chair from the butler, who was evidently Quorum, ‘I thought dead people were more... dead. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them staying around to watch television.’

  ‘I’m as dead as you can get,’ snapped Mr Pyewackett. ‘This body won’t last much longer, believe me. I’m only trying to sort things out. Television passes the time while you lawyers are meant to be finding Goodman. Sure you won’t have a Hobnob?’

  Pen eyed the flaking fingers clutching the packet of biscuits. ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘They go straight through me but I still get the taste.’

  ‘Are you a zombie?’ Pen asked, glad to think she had no imagination, and was therefore unable to speculate about the voyage of the Hobnob.

  ‘No idea. Thought they were from the tropics – voodoo or something. Don’t have any truck with all that. It’s mostly a load of hocus-pocus, anyway. You don’t want to get mixed up with magic, whatever you do.’

  ‘I don’t believe in magic,’ Pen said, hanging onto that thought.

  ‘Good girl. Good girl.’ Mr Pyewackett tried to switch off the television with the bamboo pole, and inadvertently turned up the sound instead. Pen got up and pressed the appropriate button herself. ‘Chip off the old block. Sharp as a thorn, dry as a thistle. That’s the Tudors. Where were we?’

  ‘Maybe you should tell me what you want me to do,’ Pen suggested, taking out her notebook and felt-tip.

  Okay, so he was dead. The situation was... unusual. But at least it wasn’t like some stupid fantasy novel with wizards and flying carpets and talking cats and all that sort of nonsense.

  ‘Will’s pretty straightforward,’ said Mr Pyewackett. ‘A few conditions but no individual bequests. Everything to Goodman. Have you seen it?’

  ‘They gave me a copy yesterday,’ Pen said. ‘I read it through last night.’

  ‘There you are then. Quorum stays on here, wages all arranged. And the cat, of course.’

  ‘What... cat?’

  ‘That cat.’

  The biggest cat Pen had ever seen heaved itself out of the shadows and thumped ponderously onto the bed. It was not only enormously fat but its long hair, brindled black, brown and orange, made it appear even larger, with the size and energy levels of a sloth. Cats shouldn’t waddle but it waddled across the coverlet, helped itself to the last Hobnob, and slumped down at its master’s side with its tail twitching like a monstrous caterpillar.

  ‘His name’s Felinacious,’ Mr Pyewackett volunteered.

  ‘Does he talk?’ Pen asked before she could stop herself.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. Never said anything to me. How old are you? Thirteen? Should have outgrown all that talking cat stuff. Thought you didn’t believe in that sort of thing.’

  ‘No, but...’

  ‘Quorum’ll show you the ropes. Better move in as soon I’m gone. He’ll look after you.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Told young Petal, I can’t wait around any more. Been dead seven years now and m’ body’s pretty well had it. Got to be going soon. You’re the main executor: up to you to take care of things until Goodman shows up. Can’t leave Number 7 without someone to keep an eye on it. Much too dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ Pen echoed. It had never occurred to her that her chosen profession might be dangerous, especially not this early on.

  ‘That’s what I said. Don’t want people trying to get in – or out, for that matter. Your job is to stay here, watch over the place, find Goodman – or wait till he finds you. You’re a Tudor: you can do it. Always trusted the Tudors.’

  ‘My grandmother will never allow it,’ Pen said, blenching slightly. ‘She won’t let me just go off and live on my own – even with a butler.’

  Mr Pyewackett shot her a glare from his pop eyes which would have been terrifying if she hadn’t gone beyond noticing such things.

  ‘Turning yellow, are we? Showing the white feather? Bleating of grandmothers and other excuses? Not what I expect from a descendant of Bluff King Hal.’

  ‘He wasn’t bluff,’ Pen said tartly. ‘He was a serial killer with syphilis who created the ultimate religion of convenience – and I’m not sure about being descended from him, that’s probably just family legend. What’s more, I can’t be both white and yellow. Make up your mind.’

  ‘Aha! Sharp as a thorn –’

  ‘I meant what I said. I have to ask my grandmother. I’m a minor, and that’s the law. I know about the law.’

  ‘Running out on your first job! What kind of a lawyer are you?’

  ‘A legal one,’ Pen said. ‘What’s dangerous about Number 7?’

  But that was the moment when Quorum came in with the tea – good butlers always have a sense of dramatic timing – and Mr Pyewackett turned to The Weakest Link and declared the subject closed for the day.

  Beyond the Doors

  London, seventeenth century

  ONLY A FEW streets away from the Grim Reaper the city changed. The patchwork walls and flaking tiles of the slums piled into the houses of the rich as if on a collision course, backyards abutting on courtyards, alleyways intersecting with avenues, ratholes and refuse-gullies threading between. Hovels rubbed shoulders with hotels; coffee houses, eating houses and bawdy houses were heaped together close to the mansions of merchants and the townhouses of the aristocracy; church towers poked skywards from huddles of crooked roofs. Here and there, unexpected gaps of green opened up, bits of leftover countryside or the gardens of the wealthy. Running Lane, Groper’s Alley and Beggar’s Corner were intertwined with Porkpie Street and Mincemeat Way, Queen’s Square and King’s Place and Viscount Terrace. High society mingled with low to watch bull-baiting and bear-baiting, cockfights, dogfights, bare-knuckle bouts – to drink and gamble and buy sex – to have their pockets picked and their purses cut – to catch crabs and scabs and the pox. Scavengers thrived. There were laws, but no one to enforce them. The thieves and the pimps and the rats and the worms lived off the underbelly of the city, though only the rats and worms grew fat.

  There were many gangs. Without Mr Sheen to protect them, the boys thought they would never survive – the other gangs were run by adults, or boys big enough and strong enough to bully their way to the top of the heap. But Ghost said: ‘We’ll do,’ and they squashed their private doubts, because Ghost was smarter than the others, because he was as pale as an angel, because his little knife came out so fast, so fast, and the blade was always bright and shiny no matter how much blood it shed. He fought off takeover attempts three times in the first week, including one by Dutch Harry, the son of a pirate who ran the toughest of the riverside gangs. He had an eye-patch, though he didn’t always wear it on the same eye, and it was said he was so strong he could lift a horse, or at least a donkey, but he was clumsy and slow, and Ghost’s little blade carved him up so well he was laid up for a month. It was beginning to have a reputation, that knife – nobody else had a knife which flicked out like that – and it could do a lot of damage for its size. When the fences heard about it they agreed to do business with its owner, though he was so thin and so young, because of the aura rumour gave him.

  ‘We’ll call ourselves the Lost Boys,’ he told the gang. They thought it was a strange name, not tough or mean enough, but he said it came from a story, though he couldn’t remember which. It was about a boy who never grew up, and sometimes he wondered if he was that boy, trapped in the city, condemned to stay thirteen forever. He wasn’t trapped, he knew that – he could leave when he wished – but something inside held him there, instinct or need. Whenever he thought of going he knew, somehow, he could not.

  He didn’t get on with Big Belinda. She wanted him to find the young girls who arrived from the country, and bring them to her – ‘So’s I can give the poor things a mother’s care and a chance for a better life’ – but he didn’t, no matter what the fee, though he knew they usually came to her in the end. They said it was more fun being a dancer than a domestic drudge, s
couring pans and emptying chamberpots, but they drank too much of the geneva liquor, as strong as poison and as cheap as paint, and when their looks ran out the dancing stopped for good. Sometimes Big Belinda wanted boys too, the lucky ones she said, whom she would send to the Duke’s house to sing like angels and eat to their heart’s content, only no one knew what came to them, for they never returned.

  Ghost had seen the Duke several times, at dogfights and bull-baiting: he was always the one backing the most vicious mastiff, or sending more challengers against the bull to be tossed and gored. He was a big man, fat but not flabby, his bloated face marked with so many vices there was barely room for them all, not just the standard seven sins but others too obscure or too cruel for even the church to have names for them. He always wore red, purpley-red or browney-red or dried-blood-red, with lacy ruffles sprouting at throat and wrist, and his chestnut wig cascading over his shoulders in rolls of fat sausage curls. His podgy hands were very white and soft, bedizened with rings – rings valuable enough to feed half the city, if anyone had been able to steal them, but no one ever made the attempt. A black slave followed him everywhere, a gigantic mute with muscles that bulged through his clothes, and it was said that the Duke himself was quick and strong despite his bulk, and could use the sword he wore with deadly skill. Maggot told how one of his boys had run away when his voice broke, babbling of how he had been whipped for his lost high notes, but nobody would take him in, because the Duke was so powerful, and two days later he was found in the creek, though whether he drowned himself or someone did it for him was never clear.

  ‘There was marks on him most h’awful to see,’ said Maggot. ‘Like whipmarks, but with razor-blades sewn into the leather, so he was all over cuts and blood. They say as how the Duke does it himself. He likes to hurt people. He likes to hurt people weaker’n him.’

  The boys duly shivered, except for Cherub, who sat frozen still. He was afraid Big Belinda might try to take him for the Duke, because of his choirboy looks and his singing voice.

  ‘Your voice ain’t nothing special,’ said One-Ear. ‘Fat Sally at the theatre sings better’n you, any day.’

  But Cherub had no ear for music, and he wasn’t reassured.

  ‘I won’t let her take you,’ said Ghost. ‘No one takes any of my gang.’

  ‘All talk,’ said Mags, who was one of the girls. ‘I ain’t never seen any man outface Big Bel. One o’ the gents tried it, a few months back – she grabbed him by the danglies and squeezed till he squealed like a piglet. Lawks! how we laughed!’

  ‘I’ll know what to watch out for,’ said Ghost. ‘Thanks.’

  Mags laughed again, but not unkindly. ‘Ain’t you the clever one?’ she said. Ghost thought she was about fifteen, but the liquor was already beginning to spoil her looks. They all drank it except him, because he said it addled his brains, and he knew that to survive in the city – to look after the others – he needed to stay sharp. He had drunk alcohol in the Home when someone smuggled it in, and lain down with his head spinning, and thrown up on the quiet while his room-mates slept, but he wasn’t stupid enough to touch the firewater they drank here. It was another thing that made him strange, that set him apart from the rest.

  A couple of days after that he was coming home late down Running Lane when he saw the Duke’s bodyguard standing by the backyard gate at Big Belinda’s. He shinned up the wall, silent as the ghost they called him, and lay down on a roof to watch. And there was the Duke emerging into the yard with Big Belinda, and a boy in between them, small enough for eight though he might well have been ten, a stray from somewhere or nowhere gazing up at the Duke with big, sad eyes. The Duke touched his face with those soft white fingers, all sparkly with rubies and diamonds, and tweaked a ringlet, just hard enough to make the boy cry out, a startled cry on a high pure note that was almost musical. And Big Belinda cackled soundlessly, so all her yellow curls jiggled and danced and her bosom wobbled like twin blancmanges. She wore yellow curls some days, and some days black, but always great bunches of them, stuck with ribbons and jewels, though Mags said the jewels were paste. Ghost loathed her instinctively, the way you loathe any foul and festering thing, but not as much as he loathed the Duke. Big Belinda could be frightening – she had arms like a waggoner and her temper was legendary – but the Duke was evil, the evil hung around him like a miasma, and Ghost’s skin crawled just from the nearness of him.

  They haggled a little over the price – at least, Big Belinda haggled, the Duke merely paid what he had decided to pay. Then the woman bent over the child.

  ‘You go with the nice gentleman and sing for him,’ she said. ‘He’s a real gent, he is.’ She wobbled again, as if at some private joke. ‘You’ll live in a big house, and have lots to eat. Say thank you, Belinda.’

  ‘’nkyou, B’linda,’ the boy whispered. He might be hungry but Ghost thought he too could feel the evil, in the soft touch of the Duke’s hands.

  The Duke nudged him through the gate, and strode off down Running Lane with the boy and the mute at his heels, towards a closed carriage waiting in Porkpie Street. Ghost felt himself go hot all over with fury, and then cold again, cold as ice, but there was nothing he could do.

  One day, he told himself, I’ll get the Duke. I’ll sell his rings to Wily Jake in Cripplegate and see his fat body floating in the creek with the rubbish. I swear it.

  He went back to the loft on the quiet, turning and turning the thoughts in his head.

  THAT NIGHT, HE had the dream again. The same dream which he had dreamed regularly ever since he got to the city. It wasn’t a nightmare but it always scared him, though he didn’t know why.

  He was trying to get into a house with no door.

  Like all dreams, it had no logic, just the need of the moment. He’d climbed over the wall into the garden – it was a very high wall, with sharpened stones on the top, but he’d stood on a bin and jumped up and cut his hands on the stones. They bled, but he didn’t care. He had to get into the house. Curiosity or compulsion pulled him on, like a thread tugging at his soul. He walked all round it, but there was no door, the lower windows were barred and curtained against the light, the upper ones chintz-veiled or sealed with internal shutters. But there were creepers growing up the house, and a drainpipe, and narrow ledges, toe-holds and fingertip-holds, and he went up the wall like a lizard, hauling himself onto the ledge outside an unshuttered window on the first floor. He cut out a pane of glass, and picked at the lock with a bit of wire which he always carried for the purpose, and reached in to open the catch. Then he slid through the gap into the house.

  Ghost told himself he had come to steal something, because there must be something worth stealing in a house with no door, but he wasn’t in a hurry. It was quiet, and cleaner than any house he’d ever seen, with white walls and expensive rugs and a smell that was hard to describe. Not like the chemical smells of the Home, or the human smells of the city. It was more like the moon would smell on a still night, or the smell of a wind blowing from eternity – if he had ever thought in such terms. The smell of Forever. He stood for a minute or more just breathing, like someone who is taken by surprise, though there was nothing to surprise him.

  He was on what must be the first floor landing, with stairs going down to the ground floor and up to the second, and corridors stretching to right and left – corridors which seemed rather too long for the size of the building he had seen from outside. But it was a large house, and he couldn’t be sure. The corridors were lined with doors, and the doors were all shut, and somehow they looked as if no one had opened them for many years. In another house he would have looked inside, quick and curious, eager to find whatever there was to be found, but here he hesitated, touched a handle, drew back. He didn’t fear discovery: the place was completely empty, he was certain. He could feel the emptiness all around him, long undisturbed, still but not tranquil, somewhere on the wrong side of peace. It unsettled him, the vacancy, and the forever-smell, and the doors that were so very shut. />
  He went down to the ground floor. There was a large entrance hall, with more doors – one looked like the front door, in the teeth of external evidence – and passages opening off it, but everywhere the same stillness, a hush on the edge of expectancy. He went to the nearest door, determined that this time he would see what was beyond, turned the handle, pushed it open a little way. Then stopped. He was staring into a room, with a fire crackling on the hearth, and the light flickering over old-fashioned furniture, and high shelves packed with books. A girl with her back to him was holding a spill to a table-lamp, a girl in a long dress with a waist laced small and a very full skirt. The curtains were drawn over the windows, but beyond them it was night.

  He closed the door hastily, trembling. He was still standing in the hall, and it was daylight. But in the room – in the room it had been dark...

  Ghost waited till he was calm again, then he went to another door. There was a long moment while he laid his hand on the knob, turning it but not pushing, holding his breath. It never occurred to him to leave the way he came, with every door unopened. The same compulsion still drew him, though he no longer felt its pull: it had become too much a part of him for that. Very cautiously, he nudged the door open a crack – just a crack...

  On the other side, someone yanked it back. He was gripping the handle too tight, and it tugged him off balance. He pitched forward, into the room –

  – and woke up.

  He was in the loft, with the Lost Boys all around him making various whiffling snorey noises, and the safe familiar smells, and a pillow of rags for his head. Somewhere nearby there was a scream, indicating that the city went about its business as usual. He lay down, his shudders slowly subsiding, but he did not sleep again that night.

  London, twenty-first century

  PEN WAS BY nature a very truthful girl. As she always did her homework on schedule, invariably got top marks, and was not much given to the usual teenage indulgences of smoking, drinking, drug-taking and underage sex, it could be argued that she had rarely felt any need to lie. At least until now. But she was a lawyer, if only a fledgling one, and she understood from case studies that there was a basic difference between the letter of the truth and the spirit of the truth. When she described what had happened in Temporal Crescent, she stuck faithfully to the former, without an untrue word, while knowing that her account, with its inevitable omissions, did not subscribe to the latter. She was rather shocked to find how good at it she was, and felt both guilty and uncomfortable, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell her grandmother that she had had tea with a man who’d been dead for seven years, who wanted her to come and look after a house no one lived in, in case it did something dangerous.