The Devil's Apprentice

by Jan Siegel

  Of course, she didn’t believe in luck, or fate. She knew quite well these things were a matter of mathematical probabilities.

  ‘Does your nan really look like Beyoncé?’ she asked irrelevantly.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Felinacious rubbed his vast body against Gavin’s leg, purring like a small earthquake.

  ‘He’s after the Hobnobs,’ Pen explained.

  ‘He’s the fattest cat I’ve ever seen,’ Gavin said. ‘You ought to take better care of him. Shouldn’t he be fed cat food – fish – something healthy?’

  ‘It’s probably too late,’ said Pen. ‘He’s used to Hobnobs. He’s not my cat, anyway. He belonged to Mr Pyewackett, who owned this house until... until recently.’

  ‘I know,’ Gavin said. ‘It’s in his Will. I read a copy when I was looking for Bartlemy Goodman. That’s how I knew where to come. But Pyewackett died seven years ago – that’s hardly recent. Goodman does own the house next door, doesn’t he?’

  ‘In a way,’ Pen said. ‘If you’ve read the Will you know who I am, anyhow. I’m the executor – Penelope Tudor.’

  ‘But...’ Gavin looked blank. ‘Seven years ago you’d have been... what? Four? Five?’

  ‘Six. Don’t bother about that now. The point is, Bartlemy Goodman hasn’t turned up, so I’m looking after the place.’

  ‘Since you were six?’

  ‘No. Just a few days, actually. Andrew Pyewackett... left on Tuesday.’

  ‘But he’s dead!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pen. ‘He was. But he said he couldn’t move on till there was someone to watch over the house. Quorum’s the butler, but he doesn’t count. It had to be me.’

  ‘You’re saying,’ Gavin paused, thought, started again, ‘you’re saying a dead man lived... stayed here, for seven years, dead, until you came along to take over?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like... a zombie?’

  ‘I asked him that,’ said Pen. ‘He told me he didn’t have any truck with voodoo.’

  ‘You’re taking the pants.’

  ‘Pants?’

  ‘Sorry. Mumspeak. I’ve got to hand it to you, you’ve got the best face I’ve ever seen for spinning a line, really deadpan, but–’

  ‘There’s a velociraptor in the broom cupboard,’ Pen reminded him.

  There was a long silence. The sound of munching Hobnob came at either end, with a frozen pause in the middle.

  ‘After seven years,’ Gavin said, ‘a corpse would be–’

  ‘He wasn’t in great shape,’ Pen said. ‘But I think Quorum’s managed to hoover up most of the flaky bits by now.’

  More pause. More Hobnob.

  ‘I know you’re not six any more, but... aren’t you rather young to be someone’s executor? I thought that was a job for lawyers.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Pen. ‘Anyway, I am a lawyer. At least, I’m going to be. I decided that years ago. This is my first legal job. I don’t suppose you’ll understand, but–’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Gavin said, ‘I do. I’ve always been sure what I was going to be, too.’ He looked at her with an expression on his face which she recognised though she hadn’t seen it before. It was the expression she herself wore whenever she talked about her ambitions.

  In that moment, they bonded, in a way they hadn’t bonded over the dinosaur.

  ‘What are you going to be?’ Pen asked.

  ‘A chef.’

  ‘Like Jamie Oliver? On TV and everything?’

  ‘I don’t care about TV. I just want to be the best. It shouldn’t be about churning out books and being a celeb – all I want is to make food taste brilliant. That’s why I’m looking for Bartlemy Goodman.’

  ‘He can’t be a chef,’ Pen said. ‘He’s meant to be... someone who takes care of things. Problems. Like the house next door.’

  ‘He may not be a chef, exactly,’ Gavin admitted. ‘But he knows about cooking. He must do. He comes from this family – they go back forever – I’ve traced them myself. They’re not famous or anything, but they’re always there, behind the famous people, mentioned in passing – an acknowledgement – a footnote – a name in the margin. Always the same name, though sometimes in different languages. I don’t know why they’ve changed nationalities, but it can’t be a coincidence – it can’t be. I’ve been reading up on the great chefs of the past, you see. I want to get back to their ideals, kind of sweep away all the superficial glamour that goes with cooking nowadays. Nigella pouting – Jamie Oliver being laddish – Gordon Ramsay bullying people – that isn’t what it should be about. It should just be about the food. Anyway, I’m sure Bartlemy Goodman can help. He’ll know things – lost secrets...’

  ‘Are you sure this is the right Bartlemy Goodman?’ Pen said doubtfully.

  ‘There aren’t any others,’ Gavin said simply. ‘So... yes, it must be. He was living in a village in the country, a place called Eade, but he left about a year ago.’

  ‘How did you–’

  ‘I found his address in a book. It was the Goodman family home. I went down there to see if anyone knew where he’d gone, but they didn’t. He gave the house to this woman who’s supposed to be his niece, only she isn’t, and she’s put it up for sale. I spoke to her – she was really nice – but she had no idea where he’d gone.’

  ‘A year ago,’ Pen echoed thoughtfully. ‘And the people at Whitbread Hayle –’ she dropped the Tudor ‘– couldn’t find him for seven years. They obviously weren’t looking very hard.’

  ‘Then I checked out your law firm,’ Gavin went on, ‘and I got this address, so I came here. And now you tell me he’s disappeared again.’

  ‘He didn’t disappear,’ Pen said scrupulously, ‘because he never actually appeared.’

  ‘Anyway, what do you mean he takes care of things? What do you know about him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Pen said. ‘I didn’t know anything about the cooking. All I do know is Mr Pyewackett didn’t have any family left, so he bequeathed Number 7 to Bartlemy Goodman, because he said he was capable of looking after it. I don’t even know how Mr Pyewackett got to hear of him. He would dodge questions he didn’t want to answer – especially if I forgot to ask.’

  Gavin said: ‘What was he like, your Mr Pyewackett?’

  ‘Like a very old corpse, with big starey eyes, sitting up in bed switching the TV on and off with a long bamboo cane because he didn’t know about remotes and eating Hobnobs. That’s why I don’t fancy them any more. If you’d ever seen a dead person eating Hobnobs, you’d understand.’

  If Gavin had harboured any lingering doubts about Pen’s story, that was when they vanished. The mental picture, with Hobnobs, and her reaction to it, was eerily convincing. He said: ‘About Number 7 then – what exactly is going on there?’

  ‘It’s something called a space/time prism,’ Pen said. ‘I don’t know what that is, but all the doors open on different bits of the past, or magical dimensions, and if you go through you’ll get lost, sort of absorbed into history. Like, if you’re in the eighteenth century, that’s where you think you belong. It stops people going around changing the course of events.’

  ‘So knowing all that,’ Gavin said, ‘you went in, and opened the broom cupboard. Frocking hell.’

  ‘What would you have done?’

  He thought for a minute. ‘The same, I suppose. Only...’

  But at that moment they heard Quorum coming back, and further discussion had to be postponed. Pen introduced Gavin as one of her friends, demanding sotto voce: ‘What’s your surname?’

  ‘Lester. Gavin Lester.’

  Quorum cooked lunch for them, and Gavin left afterwards with a murmur of: ‘I’ll phone you. Don’t do anything without me.’

  While Pen saw no reason to pay attention to that, it was something to feel she had an ally.

  PEN DIDN’T LIKE hiding things from her grandmother. There were the usual omissions in whatever she chose to repeat, mostly to do with the behaviour of her friends, or the
boys who picked on her at school, calling her a swot, and other things still more impolite – but these were minor matters, too unimportant to signify. A rampant velociraptor escaping from the broom cupboard was something else. Increasingly, despite trying to cling to the letter of the truth, Pen knew she was crossing the boundary from omission into concealment. A dinosaur was too huge to be merely omitted; it had to be covered up, tucked out of sight, a guilty object thrust under a cushion on the entrance of a suspicious adult. Pen had always made a point of being Not Guilty: it was part of her creed. And now here she was, being sucked inexorably into a quagmire of deceit...

  ‘It’s client confidentiality,’ she reassured herself. ‘Mr Pyewackett was the client, and everything he told me was confidential.’

  But he hadn’t told her about the velociraptor. He had told her not to open the doors.

  When Eve Harkness returned Pen gave a selective account of her day, explaining about Gavin and his search for Bartlemy Goodman, and how Goodman was supposed to be this amazing cook, and how she and Gavin had bonded over their separate ambitions.

  ‘Are you going to see this boy again?’ her grandmother inquired. And: ‘We don’t know anything about him.’

  Yes we do, thought Pen. We know he’s brave enough to zap a velociraptor with a stun-gun.

  Aloud she said: ‘He told me lots of things. Not just about the cooking. He... he’s got a grandmother who thinks she looks like Beyoncé.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Harkness, unexpectedly diverted, ‘I’ve been told I look like Meryl Streep, but I can’t see it myself.’

  Pen was about to say Nor can I, and then opted for diplomacy.

  ‘You do a bit.’

  One lie leads to another, she reflected uncomfortably.

  Maybe this was growing up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Tale of Two Cobblers

  London, twenty-first century

  MAGIC IS A force, like electricity. Nowadays, students of the subject like to discuss it in terms of thaumonuclear physics, and insist it is both a wave and particle – and, on occasion, a very big bang – none of which is particularly instructive. Our world has a low level of natural magic (except, of course, around portals and space/time prisms). Our native werecreatures are mostly tiny and virtually powerless, microsprites who are drawn to acts of sorcery and can infect susceptible minds, behaving more like airborne diseases than perilous entities. Only the Old Spirits are of any importance – beings which have been around since creation, worshipped as primitive gods, often sidelined by the march of progress, some hibernating, some withering, others gradually outwearing their taste for immortality and power, until they lapse into the everlasting slumber of Limbo. Few have survived into the present day – the Hag, the Child, the Hunter – but the Devil, Oldest of all, remains the strongest, adapting to the modern world, battening on mankind, the great User who has taken his image from our secret fears and made it real.

  There was no magical strain in mortals until the time of Atlantis, when something called the Lodestone appeared, generating a magnetic field so strong that people in its vicinity were permanently affected. The Stone is now thought to have been the condensed matter of an entire galaxy, or more than one, from a universe with high levels of magic, pitchforked somehow across the barrier between the worlds. It produced a mutant gene which was passed on long after the Stone was destroyed and Atlantis fell, known as the gene for witchcraft, or the Gift – a Gift which can, if used to its full potential, totally corrupt its possessor. There is no such thing as a really good witch. Those with a minor variant of the gene can be endowed with psychological insight, the personality of a Svengali, a flair for telepathy, the Gift of the gab. Those who are truly Gifted tend to be mad, psychotic, or, in a few exceptional cases, superbly self-controlled.

  The gene also attracts Luck.

  Luck, as everyone knows, is one of the lesser magics, erratic, unpredictable, and quirky. The witchcraft faculty, in its weakest form, may still engender an affinity for good luck – or bad. Thus some people – like Gavin Lester – are bounced happily through life, while others are dogged by disaster, constantly shipwrecked, struck by lightning, shaken by earthquake or financial meltdown. The point about your luck tendency is that, unlike other genetic factors, it can be changed – if a person has great strength of will, or stubbornness, or the ability to go against Fate. Or – well – luck. Luck changes itself. That is its nature. You can break an apparently endless run of bad luck – but you can break a run of good luck, too.

  A week after his visit to Temporal Crescent, Gavin Lester got together with his ex, Josabeth Collins. Josabeth wore a pink skirt and pink ear-rings and pink streaks in her crinkly black hair. She looked like a candidate for a girl band. Over skinny latte in Caffé Nero she talked about her career ambitions – model, actress, singer – and didn’t he think she was pretty enough? Gavin said yes, of course, and thought about a pale-faced redhead who wasn’t girl-band pretty, with a dinosaur in her broom cupboard. Something he called instinct told him to stick with Josabeth, to play safe, stay in the world he knew. But Gavin wanted to find Bartlemy Goodman, and learn the Secrets of Eternal Cooking, and see what else came out of Number 7. When Josabeth was in the loo, he sent a text.

  Some people stretch their luck too far – until it snaps.

  Beyond the Doors

  London, seventeenth century

  IN THE CITY, it was beginning to be spring. The weather grew warmer, and the refuse in the gutters and alleyways grew smellier, and the rats and the roaches grew fatter and more numerous. In the leftover patches of countryside that clung to the riverbanks or were preserved as private parks, leaves uncurled and shy flowers nuzzled sunward. The citizens, too, unfurled spring leaves: those who could afford it peacocked along Paul’s Walk in new clothes and freshly styled wigs, those who couldn’t followed them, light-fingered and quick-footed, relieving them of whatever remained in their purses when they had paid for their finery. Business flourished, both legitimate and illegitimate: traders short-changed, merchants overcharged, courtiers bribed. Lower down the social scale, beggars and brawlers, doxies and dossers made a dishonest living, or fought for scraps to survive. The Lost Boys slipped through the crowds and shinned up the buildings like monkeys in their own jungle, thriving on the earnings of their fellows.

  But Ghost had other interests. When not stealing or dodging pursuit, he or another member of the gang would lurk in the vicinity of the bawdy house, watching for Big Belinda, learning her habits and her hangouts. The dressmakers she patronised, the confectioners who sold her favourite sweetmeats, the perfumiers who helped to cover – or complement – the many odours of her unwashed body. Those gentlemen whose houses she visited after the show, with a few special girls under her wing. The two hirelings were always with her. Their names were Mullen and Cullen; one had a face scarred by disease, the other from a knife-fight, but in the dark of the alleyways it was hard to tell the difference.

  That spring, Big Belinda bought a new dress of crimson satin and new hair-pieces as big as wedding bouquets, great bunches of curls said to have been shorn from the head of a child whose mother needed the money for gin. The ringlets were baby-soft and silken-smooth and pale as flax, and she wore them as a warrior wears the pelt of a slain animal, tossing them with pride.

  ‘She knows you’re watching,’ Mags told Ghost. ‘She knows you won’t give up. They’re saying in the Reaper the hirelings have a job for life.’

  But one evening when the twins were on watch, she emerged from the rear gate without them. They saw her back view disappearing down Running Lane, unmistakable in a vast skirt of coquelicot stripes, her curls, yellow this time, twirling from under the sweeping brim of an overplumed hat. Ratface, who was the dominant twin, ordered his brother to follow her while he went in search of Ghost. They had already evolved a system to cover this eventuality: Pockface carried a stick of charcoal, and was to draw an arrow on the wall at every street corner, to indicate where he was going.
Once Ratface had found Ghost, it was easy for them to pick up the trail.

  Pockface was waiting in the backyard behind the house of Wily Jake the fence, also known as Jewish Jake, because of his hook nose and black hair. In fact, he was reputed to be Welsh, but he cultivated the Jewishness since he said it was good for business. Jews were known to be canny and cunning in financial matters, and Wily Jake did his best to maintain the standards of his adopted race. He was said to be as straight as a corkscrew, as honest as the day is short, and as kind-hearted as a crocodile, but he had his own honour – thieves’ honour – and he was reliable, provided you were clear on which of his dubious qualities you wished to rely. There were, however, few reasons for Big Belinda to do business with him. She didn’t handle stolen goods, only stolen bodies, and bartered lives.

  ‘Wait till she comes out,’ Ratface said, but Ghost shook his head.

  ‘You wait,’ he said, and climbed up to the first floor, entering through a window. No one expects an intruder to come from upstairs, when there are windows and doors enough on the ground floor, and Ghost always made a point of being unexpected. As he crept downstairs he heard voices talking softly in the parlour, men’s voices, no sound of Big Belinda. He drew nearer, testing every board before he set his weight on it, his ears straining to discern the words.