The Thief's Apprentice

  Text copyright © 2016 by Bryan Methods

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book 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 written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Carolrhoda Books

  A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

  For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.

  Additional image: © iStockphoto.com/Roberto A Sanchez (paper background).

  Main body text set in Bembo Std regular 12.5/17.

  Typeface provided by Monotype Typography.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Methods, Bryan, author.

  Title: The thief’s apprentice / by Bryan Methods.

  Description: Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Books, [2016] | Summary: Oliver, the neurotic son of a wealthy British industrialist, discovers his family butler, Mr. Scant, is a notorious thief who soon takes on Oliver to become an apprentice vigilante.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015036023| ISBN 9781512405798 (lb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781512408911 (eb pdf)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Robbers and outlaws—Fiction. | Apprentices—Fiction. | Vigilantes—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M49 Th 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036023

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1-39234-21111-3/30/2016

  I

  The Silent Battle

  remember the precise moment. The moment I learned a secret that had eluded the finest detectives of Scotland Yard—a secret the newspapers kept demanding to know yet nobody could tell them.

  For months, a master thief had left the curators of museums up and down the country waking in cold sweats. Not a soul in England knew his identity, they said, and until that fateful moment, they were probably right. But no longer.

  They called him the Ruminating Claw, this virtuoso of burglary. The razor-sharp talons he wore on one hand swiped away masterpiece after masterpiece, but all were returned mere days later. That made him a true criminal, according to the papers: he stole for the thrill of it, rather than to hoard his treasures or to sell them on. It seemed a mere game to him, dancing around the guards of London’s finest museums and leaving the police looking like fools. The spokesman from Scotland Yard liked to say they were hot on his trail, but everyone knew there was no trail to follow. Nobody knew why he wore a sinister-looking metal claw on his right hand, but all agreed it made him dangerous.

  But now I knew the truth, even if I could hardly believe it. The true identity of this fearsome Claw was Mr. Scant—my father’s valet and our household butler. The tall, silver-haired old man who had to pick up my jacket if I dropped it, who was usually found standing respectfully just behind Father. My father being Mr. Sandleforth Diplexito, of Diplexito Engineering and Combustibles Ltd., Tunbridge Wells.

  Perhaps, had I been clever enough, I could have guessed at the truth much earlier. But until the moment of realization came, I had thought Mr. Scant was nothing more than a particularly boring part of my endlessly boring life. He had always been a little frightening, with his sour looks and pointy eyebrows. His tone of voice always hinted he knew more than he let on. But if all gloomy old men with pointy eyebrows were to be marked as dangerous criminals, half my teachers and most of the congregation at church would have to be locked up. Then there was the fact that every report on the Ruminating Claw spoke of his remarkable agility and stealth, when Mr. Scant was positively ancient—at least sixty-five years old.

  The moment I found out the truth came on a cold November night. I had crept out of bed to see if I could find where Mother had hidden my Christmas presents. Not something I would normally do, but this year, she had mentioned that, since I was now twelve and making my own way to school, a bicycle might be prudent. A bicycle wasn’t an easy thing to hide, and even if she’d wrapped it up, it would have been easy to find. I had been jealously watching schoolmates send up clouds of dust with their skids and race each other down hills for months, so I decided to go for a late-night sneak.

  After creeping to the long gallery, I saw something so bewilderingly unlikely, I wondered if I was actually still asleep. There, in the dead of night, was Mr. Scant. And there, on his right hand, was the famous claw, larger and even more vicious than it had looked in the newspaper. Instinct made me scurry behind the chaise longue, praying I hadn’t been spotted. Only then did I begin to grasp what I had seen. And Mr. Scant had not been alone. Peering out from my hiding place, I saw that a man dressed all in black stood before him, brandishing a short, curved sword and wearing a cloth mask that hid all but his eyes. Mr. Scant faced him calmly, the golden claw raised at his opponent. On the tip of each finger was a long blade like a thin kitchen knife, with a complex arrangement of brass hinges and pistons running over the back of his hand.

  The one and only photograph of the Claw—the halftone of him up on the pediment of the Fitzwilliam Museum—depicted him standing with the tips of the blades touching at his chin. The pose had given him his popular name, but entirely failed to capture the strange and evil look of the contraption itself, its eagerness to bite into the flesh of an enemy and stain itself red.

  Such an enemy had clearly emerged. As I watched, the man in black surged forward, his blade catching the dim light from the streetlamp outside the window—but Mr. Scant reached out and grabbed the blade, stopping it dead. The claw had closed around the sword like the mandibles of some terrible insect, yet the loudest sound to be heard was the grunt from the man as he pulled his weapon loose. This was the strangest part of all: the fight had been almost completely silent, as though the claw could cut the very sound from the air. Nothing was any louder than somebody setting down a knife and fork at the dinner table, even though at night, the tiniest sounds usually boom like church bells.

  Mr. Scant looked almost lazy as he leaned away from vicious cuts at his throat, but the claw’s blades flashed out, forcing the other man to leap back. They had an odd brightness to them: the curved sword gleamed, while the claw danced with soft luminescence.

  As Mr. Scant danced around his opponent, I remembered Mother’s remark that when going about his butler’s duties, Mr. Scant crossed the house silently as a cat. She had once gone so far as to scold him for creeping up on her—which was the talk of the household for days afterwards. Then there was the time when the farm boy almost dropped one of the big pails of milk, only for Mr. Scant to rush down the steps to catch it without spilling a drop. At the time, I reasoned it was a case of being in the right place at the right time, but in truth, Mr. Scant had moved like a viper. Could I have guessed at his secret from that? It would have taken greater detective skills than mine. And I would say my detective skills are roughly average for a boy of twelve.

  The masked man began to grow desperate. He aimed blow after blow at Mr. Scant’s head, but the claw caught every one, making no more than a soft scraping sound. When the stranger leapt at him, Mr. Scant dodged the thrust of his sword, then grabbed the man with his left hand and flipped him over his shoulder onto the old sofa. I feared my own breathing would betray me, that my heart pounded so loudly the sound was pouring from my ears. But at the same time, I was mesmerized.

  With an abruptness that made me feel sick, the fight ended. The man must have decided the best way to upset Mr. Scant would be to make a lot of noise. But the moment he took a deep breath, Mr. Scant was upon him. When t
he blades flashed and plunged into the soft part beneath the man’s ribs, I was afraid his opponent had drawn his last breath. But Mr. Scant had curled the claw into a fist and punched all the air out of the man before he could make a sound.

  Like a puppet with its strings cut, the man slumped over Mr. Scant’s shoulder. Silent as ever, the old man stood and quickly made for the main staircase.

  What the Ruminating Claw planned to do with his victim, I had no way to know. Nor did I dare risk following him to find out. I felt almost as though I had been the one who’d been punched and sat with my back to the chaise longue trying to catch my breath. I tried to think, but my head was the net of a fishing boat, dropped onto the deck. The day’s catch had spilled everywhere.

  A dangerous criminal lived here, in my home—a criminal with the keys to every room, whose proper place was within stabbing distance of Father’s back. And what I could do, now that I knew this secret, I had not the faintest idea.

  II

  No Liar

  he next day passed slowly. Excruciatingly slowly. I couldn’t sleep at all, and when Penny the maid came to rouse me in the morning, I felt as though someone had pushed cotton wool behind my eyeballs. The feeling didn’t go away at school, either. My arms and legs seemed to crackle with a kind of electric power, only instead of energizing me, each spark added to the fear of what was waiting for me at home.

  Though I had first wanted to share my discovery, I decided not to tell anybody at school. They would only laugh at me, or demand proof, and nobody would believe me, except Bert Simmons. He believed anything anybody said as long as they nodded as they spoke. And even if one of my friends would accept the truth, what would that mean for my family?

  I couldn’t risk getting the wrong person involved. For all I knew, the old monster had allies everywhere. One time, Mr. Beards, of Beards and Binns Financial Services and Dirigibles Ltd., had called for dinner with his family, and his daughter Gerty said she saw a monstrous face in the window. When she fainted, Mr. Scant had been there in an instant to steady her. I remembered the moment well, because Father had given Mr. Scant a slap on the back and a quiet, “Good show,” which was more praise than he had ever given me. Nobody had believed Gerty had really seen anything; after all, Gerty was a bit of an “odd duck,” as Mrs. George put it, and never chewed with her mouth closed no matter how much her mother whispered to her. But what if Gerty had been right, and some nasty little criminal accomplice had been perched outside, trying to get his master’s attention?

  By lunchtime, I imagined everybody to be a potential enemy. Mr. Scant was always the first in the household to rise and the last to sleep, so who knew how many people he could meet with while we slept? Did that “Ganymede Club for Gentlemen’s Gentlemen” he went to really exist? Maybe he was in league with that nasty-looking brother of Peter Clephane’s, or with Mr. Prigg, the games master—and if I told them, it would get back to Mr. Scant. Who knew what he would do to me then?

  So I kept my silence, but the effort meant I could think of nothing else. A dense fog had surrounded me, soaking into my woolly brain and weighing it down. If I had for brief, happy moments imagined being hailed as the hero of the day after telling a friendly policeman what I knew, I soon realized this outcome was impossible. The Ruminating Claw was uncatchable, after all. He thought nothing of waltzing in and out of the Victoria and Albert, and considered the National Gallery his own property. He had flummoxed the famous guards of the Tower of London not once but twice, stealing and then later returning the Sword of Mercy from its place amongst the Crown Jewels. But that didn’t mean he was a phantom or could turn into mist—fine, upstanding policemen had been injured trying to catch him. Now I myself had seen how he could fight.

  What had become of the man he had bested? I kept returning to that question. Had the masked man met a terrible end and been dumped in the woods? The thought was absolutely the reason I fumbled the ball when Chudley passed it to me during games.

  Not long after I got home, I saw Mr. Scant again. Every Thursday after school, I had to endure a tutoring session with Mr. Ibberts in Father’s library. If concentrating in school had been a challenge, I had little hope of being able to listen to one of Mr. Ibberts’s rambling sentences through to the end. Every time I heard a door closing or a floorboard creak, I turned to check for a maniacal butler bursting into the room. Unfortunately, when I laid my head on my hands to watch the shadows under the door, Mr. Ibberts noticed.

  Without warning, he slammed his book onto the desk, making me sit up in alarm. “Am I keeping you awake, Master Oliver?”

  “No sir. Sorry, sir. Actually, I think this might be the most awake I’ve ever been in one of your lessons.”

  “Then perhaps you can remind me which young pretender to the throne I just described?”

  “I . . .” It was then I noticed that Mr. Ibberts’s book had stayed open on the page from which he had been reading. “Lambert . . . Simnel, I believe?” I chanced, reading from the title.

  Mr. Ibberts gave a strange kind of grunt as he snatched the book up.

  I tried to look contrite. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m just a little distracted.”

  “Whatever frivolity your little head is stuck in, I sincerely doubt it merits more interest than the history of our great isle.”

  “Well, sir, I think maybe your idea of what’s interesting is a bit different from mine.” I knew at once I had gone too far, because Mr. Ibberts’s ears went red. “Sorry, sir,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I just have a lot I have to think about.”

  “Kings and princes had whipping boys to take their punishments for them, but you have no such luxuries, Master Oliver, I warn you!”

  “I remember you saying so before, sir. Lots of times.”

  “I ought to . . . to . . .” Mr. Ibberts began.

  “Tell Father? Do you really think he’d care?” I sighed, laying my head down on my arms. “He’d just tell you it’s your job to deal with me.”

  At that moment, just as I let down my guard, the door opened behind me with a quiet click.

  “Please forgive my interruption.”

  I sat bolt upright but didn’t dare turn to look. Mr. Scant’s gravelly voice was unmistakable.

  “Not at all, not at all,” said Mr. Ibberts, obviously flustered at the thought of someone overhearing our exchange.

  The rumbling voice came again. “I was sent for a book. It will only take a moment to find.”

  “Please,” said Mr. Ibberts. “We were just having a brief, ah . . . break from the lesson. I was impressing on Master Oliver the importance of concentration.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Scant, coming around the desk to regard me with interest. “I’ve heard it said there are no dull lessons, only dull children. But you are not dull, are you, Master Oliver?”

  “I . . . No. No, Mr. Scant.”

  Mr. Scant gave a nod, then seemed to find the book he required without so much as a glance at the shelf. Mr. Ibberts looked very interested in how shaken I was, and I could already tell he hoped to use my fear of Mr. Scant against me in future lessons. Once Mr. Scant took his leave and we were alone again, Mr. Ibberts raised his textbook again with a smug flourish, and I made sure to stay obedient for the rest of the session.

  Afterwards, I went to check on Mother. I found her in the long gallery, reading the book Mr. Scant had fetched, with her elderly maid Mrs. Winton hovering behind her. The scoundrel himself was nowhere in sight.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Mother asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re surprised to see me?”

  “I’m not surprised to see you, Mother. Just . . . I’m happy you’re safe.”

  She peered at me over her spectacles. “Funny rabbit,” she remarked.

  “I’m not a rabbit.”

  Back in my room, I pondered what to do. If I said nothing to Mother and Father, and then Mr. Scant did something terrible when I could have warned them, how could I ever for
give myself? This was a situation that could not last. The best course of action would be to find evidence of Mr. Scant’s wrongdoings as quickly as possible. If I discovered something incriminating, Father might even be impressed by my initiative—though that didn’t sound very likely, even in my own head. Nevertheless, I decided to go on the hunt for any evidence of Mr. Scant’s secret identity.

  With Father busy at work, it was a good bet that Mr. Scant would head for the kitchens, where he could easily hear the bell if Mother wanted him. Heading in that direction, I found him sooner than I expected, catching sight of his rounded coattails as I made my way down the central staircase. Assuming that the rest of him was attached, I hurried to follow. He truly was quieter than any cat: I could only follow him by watching the swing of the doors he had gone through, and even then, Mr. Scant closed them without so much as a click.

  I reached the stone steps leading to the kitchens and staff quarters. As I made my way down, I could hear Mrs. George’s voice booming away. That was good—she would cover up the sound of my investigation. Stopping on the bottom step, I peered around the corner toward the kitchens and then paused. “If Mr. Scant is ahead of me,” I mumbled to myself, “why hasn’t Mrs. George said hello?”

  With grim inevitability, a gloved hand landed on my shoulder.

  Stopping myself from yelping only by shoving the greater part of my fist into my mouth, I whirled around. Mr. Scant, of course, had been in the other part of the basement corridor, the section leading to the staff quarters. His thin lips were pursed even tighter than usual—and those were lips framed by the wrinkles of a lifetime of pursing.

  “Master Oliver,” he intoned, one bushy eyebrow raising like a drawbridge.

  One of Mrs. George’s booming laughs from the kitchen gave the moment the feeling of a farce, but no part of this was funny. I had put myself in competition with a criminal renowned for his stealth and had unsurprisingly fallen short of the mark.