The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  JANIE IN GRAVE DANGER. ITALIAN

  RESTAURANT, GRAYSON, NEW HAMPSHIRE,

  USA. CAN’T GET THERE.

  CAN YOU? —BB

  Pip dropped his feet to the floor and read the telegram again. What kind of danger was Janie in? It had to be important. Benjamin hadn’t written in all this time. And Pip owed Benjamin and Janie. Meeting them in a juvenile lockup had gotten him his television job, which had gotten him everything: the new house for his family, the new life as a celebrity, even the beautiful Sarah Pennington on his arm—for a while.

  The thought of Sarah Pennington gave Pip a pang. She had dropped him on some flimsy excuse, saying he had changed. Well, of course he had changed! That was the whole point! Who wanted to be a cockney pickpocket forever? And how could he be a cockney pickpocket, when his true love was Sarah Pennington, whose father was going to be an earl, if a third cousin ever died? Pip didn’t know how healthy the third cousin might be. But the point was that Pip had changed for Sarah, and she had thrown him over. It was heart-stabbingly unfair.

  But back to Benjamin’s telegram. Pip’s mind got off track easily these days, circling back to the pain Sarah had caused him, finding ingenious routes to get there. He had left St. Beden’s so that he wouldn’t come round the corner to find that dazzling crown of blond hair in front of him, those blue eyes assessing him coldly. But he couldn’t stop his brain from poking at the memory of her like a bruise. He tortured himself with thoughts of where she might be now. Was she with someone else?

  Sometimes he had found himself wishing for more of the apothecary’s forgetting wine, to erase all trace of her. He wished he had kept the dregs of the bottle. He had been furious at the apothecary at the time, for stealing his memories, but it would be so sweet to drink the wine now and feel these painful thoughts melt away.

  But the telegram. Janie needed him. Could he go to America? Robin Hood wouldn’t start again for another month. He wasn’t in school. But to get to America cost a packet, and his salary only went so far, with a whole family living on it.

  He had a sudden sharp awareness, a sort of extra sense that he’d had in his pickpocketing days. The sense had grown fuzzy from disuse, but it told him now to go to the front door.

  He pulled on the cheap doorknob and immediately ducked the thing that flew at his head. A mud clod burst open on the clean, new wall behind him with a spray of dirt and pebbles. The delivery boy was crouched and scowling by the gate, ready to fling another.

  “Listen,” Pip said. “I’m sorry about before. I was in a bit of a mood, that’s all. If you take a message back, there’s an autographed picture for your sister in it.”

  The wary boy considered the offer.

  Pip held out his hand. “C’mon,” he said. “Friends?”

  CHAPTER 20

  Theft

  Janie stood in the steam at the sink at Bruno’s restaurant, grateful for the absorbing task of the dishes. After spying on Magnusson, she had taken the powder at midnight to try to reach Benjamin, but it only made her throw up. The noise woke Giovanna, who made her lie down with a wet washcloth on her head. The next morning she had finally written to her parents, a complicated letter full of bland statements that were true, and omissions of everything else: The weather is freezing. The Grayson basketball team seems good this year. The Winter Wonderland dance is coming up. She had also spent two days making sure she was never alone with Raffaello, who looked increasingly hurt. But she hadn’t sorted anything out in her mind yet. She liked Raffaello, and she needed him. Both her liking and her need were very clear to her. He was her only friend in a place where people were against her, and he was the only reason she had a roof over her head.

  She also liked and needed Benjamin. Her idea of herself for the past year had been of someone who was in love with a boy named Benjamin Burrows. She missed him. She longed for him.

  But if questioned under oath, by some hard-nosed prosecutor in her brain, she would have to admit that Benjamin Burrows was a boy she had known for three weeks, two years earlier, when she was fourteen. Three weeks! After that, she’d spent almost a year not knowing that he existed. And she hadn’t seen him since. The sensible sixteen-year-old she had become couldn’t call that “being in love.” And the hard-nosed prosecutor in her brain would point out that the last time she’d seen him, he had drugged and abandoned her, destroying the links between two train cars to leave her behind.

  And now she had the very vivid memory of Raffaello kissing her in the darkened auditorium. She had known Raffaello liked her. She wasn’t stupid. But she’d thought he liked her as the household’s new pet. Amusing and diverting, but not someone to kiss.

  So she had pushed him away. She had done it instinctively, without thought—which must indicate something about how she felt about him. Right? It seemed an exhausting way to discover what you felt, to have to wait and see what you did about it. But it also seemed like a true measurement. In the actual moment, she had pushed him away. That was undeniable. But if she was honest with herself, she also remembered liking the kiss. A lot.

  She blushed as she scrubbed out a pot. The noise of the kitchen went on around her, and she hoped no one could see her turning red. But maybe they would think it was just the steam and the hot water, the exertion of scrubbing.

  Then, oddly, the noise subsided. The kitchen, which was never quiet, grew so silent that she heard a single clang of a pot on the stove, and then nothing. She turned, hands dripping, and saw Mr. Magnusson in the doorway. Everyone in the kitchen was staring at him. He was really an enormous man—Janie noticed it now that she saw him standing near the small Italian cooks in their trim white aprons. He was tall and broad-shouldered and ruddy-faced.

  “So this is where it all happens!” he said in a booming, jolly voice, in the pin-drop silence. “My compliments to the chef! You’ve outdone yourselves.”

  Janie turned back to the sink so Magnusson wouldn’t notice her, but the kitchen staff was frozen, and the movement caught his eye. She could feel his curiosity.

  “Is that Janie?” he asked.

  She didn’t want to look up.

  “I’d recognize that head of hair anywhere! What are you doing here?”

  “Working,” she said in a small voice, against her will.

  “But what about your schoolwork?” He looked around, as if one of the staring cooks might have an answer. “Is money a problem? Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “I’m not at Grayson anymore,” she said, squeezing her fingernails into her palms so she wouldn’t fly at him, pound his chest, and demand her equipment back.

  Again he looked astonished. “Not at Grayson? What about your experiment? What about your brilliant scientific career?”

  “They kicked me out.”

  “You? But that’s outrageous. I’ll speak to someone about it.”

  Janie was confused. Was this an act? Wasn’t he behind it all?

  “I have some influence at the school, you know,” Mr. Magnusson said.

  “Yes, I got that sense.”

  “Listen, give me your telephone number,” he said.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Then I’ll give you mine.” He grabbed a slip of paper from the little table by the kitchen coatrack and scribbled a number. “Call me in the morning,” he said. “We’ll sort this out. Does this mean you’re not living with Opal anymore?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “Maybe she thought you knew?”

  “But how would I know such a thing?”

  “From…Mr. Willingham?” Janie ventured.

  Mr. Magnusson’s bushy white-blond eyebrows knit together. Then he roared with laughter, showing the pink inside of his mouth and startling the pastry chef, who jumped. “What—you think we have tea together? Your headmaster and me?” He roared again and wiped tears from his eyes, which had vanished into the folds of his red face.

  Janie looked for a break in his act, trying
to rethink everything. If Mr. Magnusson didn’t know about the stolen equipment, then was the headmaster acting on his own? But Janie had spied on Mr. Magnusson, and he had talked about a plan! Was that just a coincidence?

  Whatever it was, it was making the kitchen staff uncomfortable.

  “Ah…ho…You aren’t laughing,” Mr. Magnusson said finally, recovering.

  “I’ve been kicked out of school,” Janie said quietly. “I don’t find it very funny. And I’ve lost all my equipment, all my materials.” She watched him.

  He grew serious. “The school can’t keep your experiment from you,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I’m going to call that Wellington—Windermere—first thing in the morning,” he said. “We’ll get it back for you. You call me, all right?”

  “All right. And it’s Willingham.”

  “Willingham. Good to see you.” He came forward and pumped her hand in farewell. And then he was gone, and everyone in the kitchen stared at Janie.

  Bruno clapped his hands and said, “All right! Back to work!” in his usual kitchen voice, which was much too loud, without the usual kitchen noise beneath it.

  Janie returned to the sink, trying to think. Could Mr. Magnusson really help her? Had she gotten everything wrong, and was he on her side? She allowed herself a little feeling of rising hope.

  The dinner service ended, and she finished the mountain of dishes, and then closed out the till for Giovanna. At the end of the evening, she took her peacoat from the kitchen coatrack and put it on, automatically feeling in the pocket for her little red notebook. But she felt only the smooth, satiny lining. She tried the other pockets—nothing. She froze, disbelieving. She was standing exactly where Magnusson had been.

  She pushed aside the other coats and searched the floor in case the notebook had fallen out, but it wasn’t there. He had known where she was living and working, and he knew the coat she always wore, and he had come to the kitchen for the one thing he hadn’t already stolen: her notes. She realized with hot shame that she had tucked Benjamin’s letters inside the notebook, too, to keep them safe. Magnusson had taken it all, while everyone in the kitchen stared at him. But when had he done it—when he first came in? While he fumbled for a slip of paper from the little table? Before he left the kitchen? Had he been a pickpocket before he became an industrialist?

  But it hardly mattered when Magnusson had taken the notebook; he had done it. He had everything now.

  PART THREE

  Conjunction

  1. the act of joining or the condition of being joined

  2. (astronomy & astrology) an alignment of two planets or celestial objects in the sky

  3. (alchemy) the turning point in the alchemical process

  CHAPTER 21

  The United States

  Pip booked a cheap, last-minute, tourist-class cabin on the United States, the fastest ocean liner in the world. It would get him to New York in five days. A friend who had worked as a musician on the ship had told him what to do next.

  The ship, Pip’s friend explained, wasn’t as glamorous as the Queen Mary or the Queen Elizabeth, but it wanted to be—bless the Yanks and their ambition. Most tables in the first-class dining room harbored a bored American teenage daughter, and there were never enough dancing partners. But the girls would report back to their friends about what sort of time they’d had on the United States. So the company needed boys to dance with the girls: glamorous boys, if they could get them.

  That was a problem Pip felt he could solve.

  The girls on board the ship in November would be slightly older than Pip, his musician friend told him. They would have finished Miss Porter’s School or Spence. Girls usually liked older boys, but they would make an exception for a sixteen-year-old television star.

  On boarding the United States, Pip made sure the steward had recognized him from the telly. They chatted in a friendly way about Robin Hood. There were two narrow bunks in the cabin. His cabinmate, a stranger, hadn’t yet arrived, so Pip opened his single suitcase and tossed a dinner jacket and patent leather shoes on the bunk. It was the first dinner jacket in the history of his family, but he didn’t let that show. He pretended that it was something he wore all the time, and had always worn. He noted that the steward had seen the dinner jacket, and then he said he thought he’d go out on deck, have a look round.

  The tourist-class deck was crowded with men traveling alone, but Pip could see, above him, the first-class deck. A few young ladies were leaning over the rail up there, ribbons from their hats blowing in the breeze. That was where Pip wanted to be. He paced on deck as well as he could amid the crush, thinking about Benjamin’s telegram, and then he went back inside.

  There was a note on his narrow bunk saying that Pip had been moved to another cabin, which the purser hoped would be acceptable, and asking if he would care to dine in the first-class dining room at 8 p.m. Pip did a little jig of triumph. The dinner jacket had worked!

  The steward had to lead him and his luggage to his new cabin, on the other side of the complicated architectural divisions between first and tourist class. The new cabin had a single bunk and a tiny bath and must have been the smallest first-class cabin on the ship, but it had access to that deck with the young ladies with the ribbons in their hats—that was what was important.

  That evening, Pip went to the ballroom before dinner, resplendent in his dinner jacket, with freshly combed hair, and surveyed the people having drinks at the tables near the dance floor. He moved toward a girl in a lavender gown sitting with her father. Both of them welcomed Pip with smiles. The girl’s name was Angelica Lowell, and she had eyes the color of slate. Her mother wasn’t mentioned, but it was clear that Mr. Lowell’s goal in life was to make his daughter happy. Pip regaled them with stories of life on the Robin Hood set and then asked Angelica to dance. She was warm and flexible in his arms, and they danced until it was time to go in to dinner. “I hope you’re at our table,” Angelica said.

  But he wasn’t. The maître d’ steered him away, and Pip was placed with a family from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The eldest daughter was named Deborah, and she wore pale face powder and a blood-red dress, with her dark hair pulled severely back. She had an odd, portentous voice when she ordered the Dover sole for dinner, as if she were announcing the future. Her tanned and lighthearted family seemed not to know what to do with her. She told Pip she was interested in astrology. The Dover sole arrived, as predicted.

  Deborah didn’t dance, but asked Pip if he’d walk on deck after dinner. They passed the Lowells’ table and Angelica glared at them. Pip smiled apprehensively. He hadn’t meant to get in trouble so soon.

  It was cold on deck, but Deborah wore a black cashmere wrap and didn’t seem to feel the North Atlantic wind. In his dinner jacket, Pip was freezing. In a pocket of calm at the stern, Deborah leaned on the rail and looked up at the dark sky with its scattering of stars. “Do you believe in fate?” she asked, in her fortune-teller’s voice.

  “Depends on what you mean,” Pip said, pulling his jacket tighter.

  “Do you believe things happen for a reason?”

  “I believe you can make ’em happen,” he said.

  “Do you believe the alignment of the stars at the moment of your birth determines what kind of person you’ll be for the rest of your life?”

  “No,” Pip said through chattering teeth. “I don’t believe that.” Every bone in his body seemed to be vibrating with cold.

  “I do,” Deborah said, her eyes burning with meaning. “I believe the stars align when two people meet who are meant to be together forever.”

  Pip guessed that meant she wanted him to kiss her, but he was shivering too violently to do anything about it. He might bite her nose off by mistake. “I th-think I have to go b-back ins-side,” he said.

  On his way back to his room, he stopped for a hot lemon and honey.

  “You look frozen,” the bartender said. “Romantic
walk on deck?”

  Pip nodded miserably, but the hot drink helped, and he woke the next morning without a cold. He had bacon and fried tomatoes for breakfast in his cabin. In the afternoon, in the card room, he found a man with long white mustaches willing to play chess for money, and he made a nice little bundle. He didn’t see Deborah anywhere. He went down to the pool, deep amidships, and found slate-eyed Angelica in a violet bathing suit. She kicked her legs in the shallow end and laughed while Pip tried to do handstands, the water sloshing against the tile sides of the pool as the ship rolled.

  That night in the ballroom, an assistant purser steered him toward a waif from Connecticut named Clara, with colorless hair and a whispery, ghostly voice. He asked her to dance, and she felt like a wisp of smoke. He was seized with the conviction that she actually was a ghost, that he had been set up to entertain a dead girl, and that her family was watching closely to see how he behaved. But then Angelica entered the ballroom and gave him a betrayed look. And if Angelica could see her, then Clara couldn’t be a ghost—could she? He thought she probably couldn’t.

  When Clara claimed exhaustion and spilled herself into a chair, Pip turned to see Angelica waiting behind him. The next song began, and she stepped into his arms.

  “Why were you dancing with her?” Angelica asked.

  “To be friendly.”

  “She has some terrible disease. She’ll be dead within the year.”

  “Oh?” Pip said.

  “Consumption,” Angelica said. “Or pneumonia. Whatever Keats had.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “I can tell just by looking at her. It might be catching. I’d keep your distance.”

  “Hm,” he said.

  “What will you do in New York?” she asked.

  “Oh, have a look round.”

  “I wish it were summer. We have a yacht, and a plane, and a beach house in Maine.”

  “That rhymes,” Pip said.

  “I meant you could come with us.”