The Thief's Apprentice Read online

  I had no inkling of how many rungs there were to this ladder, and soon I couldn’t even see the ones in front of my eyes. I remembered a story Father had once told Mother over dinner to scare her, something he liked to do. The story was about a fellow by the name of Mr. William Walker, who spent his days adding concrete to the foundations of Winchester Cathedral to stop it from falling down. But thick, muddy water surrounded the foundations, so Mr. William Walker had to put on diving gear and go about shoring up the foundations in complete darkness, underwater. One day he would finish the task, but he had been at it for years now, with no end in sight. He spent every day in that terrible void—deaf, blind, and alone. If Mr. Walker could hold his nerve through that, I ought be able endure this. This made me feel a little braver, until I remembered my descent was probably going to be the easiest part of the undertaking.

  Eventually, my foot touched solid ground and I gratefully stepped down. A rush of air passed my face, which suggested Mr. Scant had let himself drop. A second later, I felt his hands grip my shoulder. Then came his voice: “Absolute silence from now on.”

  In the darkness, my footfalls sounded louder than a whole army on the march, while Mr. Scant may as well have been floating. Occasionally he would pull me one way or another, presumably to get around an obstacle I couldn’t see, until finally I noticed a sliver of light ahead. As we approached, I could discern another ladder. This time, we climbed, and I followed after Mr. Scant. Before I was halfway to the top, he had pushed open the hatch overhead, and when I reached the final rung, he pulled me out of the earth and back into the night.

  We were in a small courtyard. To our left stood a little black doorway. Mr. Scant ushered me toward it and then nodded downward. There, behind the boot-scraper, I saw a tiny little grate with a ceramic covering, which Mr. Scant stooped to prize away. The hole was hardly big enough for a shoe box; knowing what Mr. Scant intended, I started to shake my head.

  “Arms in first, Master Oliver. When your shoulders are through, the rest is simple. When you’re inside, quietly unlock the door.”

  “Don’t tell me this is the only reason you brought me! For this!” I hissed.

  “Of course not, Master Oliver. This way is simply the quickest way and least destructive, and I would have you remember your promise.”

  I did as I was told. Maneuvering around the boot-scraper proved as difficult as expected: I had to lie flat on my back and be pushed through the hole by Mr. Scant. But he hadn’t been wrong—once I wriggled my shoulders through, pulling myself inside was easy. And just like that, I had broken into my first building.

  The first storage alcove of my first building, anyway. All around stood buckets and brooms—and a couple of greatcoats hung from pegs. At the sight of those, I nearly dove back through the hole, until I realized they were empty. With only a plank of wood barring the door from the inside, I soon had it open.

  “Good lad,” whispered Mr. Scant, stepping inside and crossing straight to the inner door. It was unlocked, so we continued through a service corridor, soon coming to another, much larger door, distinguished by more ostentatious brickwork—the entrance to the museum proper. Mr. Scant knelt to peer through the keyhole, then drew back.

  “One man,” he whispered. “Seated. Bored and inattentive. Here.” The fingers of Mr. Scant’s clawless hand pressed a stone into my palm, and I could feel the boniness of his fingers through his glove. “Aim for the little hole over the door. When I say so, throw the stone through. No need to aim for anything in particular, but be sure it goes through. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Stand close so you can be sure.”

  “I’m a good thrower,” I said. “I’m nearly the best bowler in our form.”

  Mr. Scant patted me on the back, then turned his attention back to the keyhole. With one of his claws in the top part and a thin piece of metal at the bottom, he began to pick the lock, in silence as usual. Seconds later, he looked back to me and mouthed, “Now.”

  I tossed the pebble through the little hole. My aim was perfect, and I couldn’t help a small feeling of jubilation. A second later, Mr. Scant shoved his way through the door. The guard had seen the stone drop and reached for his lamp, getting as far as “What the bl—?” before Mr. Scant was upon him.

  Mr. Scant did not stab the man, as I feared he might, but what ensued was almost as distressing. With his clawed hand, Mr. Scant covered the guard’s mouth, then wrapped his other arm around the man’s neck to stop his breathing. Minutes must have passed before the guard stopped stamping his foot and finally went limp, and then even longer before Mr. Scant let him breathe again. “It takes longer than you might think,” he whispered. “There is always the chance, when they first go still, that they are just pretending. Strangulation has its risks, but a blow to the head will too often kill a man. That is something I want to avoid where possible. Let’s hope tonight it will not be necessary.”

  Stepping over the guard’s prone figure, I was struck anew by the fact that this was no dream, and certainly no game. I had no reason to trust Mr. Scant, and no sane reason to be here with him. And yet in truth I had been oddly eager to accompany the madman, in hopes of learning more about why he had done all that he had done. Was mere curiosity really a good enough reason to risk my life?

  I didn’t have an answer, but it was too late to run away now.

  Pressing on through the shadows, we soon came upon guards on patrol, each with a little electric torch of his own. Following Mr. Scant’s signals, slipping by them was simple. I could see that none of them had been expecting an intruder, not really. Some five minutes into our infiltration, Mr. Scant stopped to listen, then pushed me toward a large alcove, helping me to climb up before following. We hid behind a statue as two guards passed us by, chattering about their darts club. Mr. Scant had been right: they had not even thought to look upwards.

  As we pressed on through the galleries, stern-faced monarchs and ministers of the past watched us from their places on the walls. Many of the paintings were so large I felt glad the stolen one was small enough to carry. To reach the spot where the painting had originally hung, we had to pass through a large archway in the center of one of the larger galleries. Predictably, more guards were stationed in that archway than anywhere else. Mr. Scant paused at the doorway to the large gallery, then silently climbed all the way up to the picture rail before making his way, spider-like, to the arch. There, he could peer in from above, right over the heads of the guards.

  “Too many,” he whispered when he came back. “We’ll need a distraction. A lot of noise. It’s important that you stay here—go behind that bust. Even when you hear the noise, stay put, understand? When you see me go in, wait until you’re sure I have their attention, then run in fast as you can and hide under the benches in the middle. You will see a piece of rope. Pull it, hard as you can. Do we have an understanding?”

  “Pull the rope. Yes.”

  After he nodded and disappeared into the darkness, I took my position behind the bust of some lord or admiral or Lord High Admiral. For a few long minutes, I was alone. But then the noise began. I heard crashes and bangs, distant at first. Then came the yells. As they grew louder, one of the guards inside the room ordered some others to go and investigate, and I peered around the Lord High Admiral’s ear to see three or four men leave the gallery. More shouts came, followed by two very loud crashes from two different directions at once—and then Mr. Scant landed right beside me.

  “Be ready,” growled the old man. “Head to the archway now.”

  When I looked back to nod, Mr. Scant was gone. After a moment to ready myself, I dashed over to the gallery entrance, just in time to hear a cry from inside. Reaching the archway, I saw Mr. Scant running along the walls, high up above the guards, holding onto the picture rail with his gloved left hand. Something he had dropped began filling the air with smoke, and Mr. Scant was cutting down pictures as he made his way around the room, putting the guards in disarray. Taking
my chance, I ran inside—to see one particularly hirsute guard bellowing in outrage and producing a revolver. Mr. Scant spotted him and leapt down, drawing away the cloth that had covered the painting and wrapping it around the man’s arm—then shoulder, then head. That made it easy for Mr. Scant to trip the man, who crashed to the ground before he could so much as cock the hammer of his gun.

  I slid under the circle of benches in the middle of the room. All around, the confused guards were yelling. One lunged for Mr. Scant, but he jumped back and, in a flash, had climbed back up to the picture rail. Another two guards were hurrying to untangle the bearded man—presumably the one in charge—but Mr. Scant ignored them, instead making his way to where two empty picture hooks hung from the rail at the end of long wires. With the precision of a watchmaker placing cogs, he held the painting at the end of his claws and restored it to its place. From my hiding place, all I could do was gape.

  I had expected the stolen painting to be a well-known masterpiece, but I had never seen this picture before. Rather than depicting some great king or famous explorer, it portrayed a rather wimpy-looking man. He was bald but for the very back of his head, where his hair was long and straggly, and he wore a suit of armor that had clearly never seen combat. He looked so ridiculous that I almost laughed. Then Mr. Scant roared, “The rope!” and I remembered myself.

  Casting about in the darkness, I found the rope and pulled with all my strength. It went taut for a moment, and after a little popping sound, more smoke began to appear. Then the rope was wrested from my grip, and seeing two men fall, I realized Mr. Scant had arranged this trap not only to release more smoke but to act as a tripwire. A kind of wildness came over me: if Mr. Scant wanted people tripped, I could do it again. But before I could pull the rope tight again, a large, hairy hand came out of the smoke, grabbing my ankle.

  Mr. Scant appeared over my head, precipitating himself toward the owner of the hand, and I saw a flash of metal. How strange for the awful sight of the claw to be a comfort now. From inside the circle of benches, I was unable to follow everything, but a moment later came a sound like someone beating a carpet very, very hard, and the hand gripping me went limp. I barely had time to rub the sore spot on my ankle before Mr. Scant’s claw dipped down to pluck me by the collar. As if his claw were the beak of a mother bird, Mr. Scant lifted me into the air and placed me on his back.

  I was on the small side for my age—not the smallest in my form, mind—but the ease with which the old man could run while bearing my weight still surprised me. Mr. Scant was wiry, but he felt solid as iron.

  The bearded man was barking orders like a mad dog, but Mr. Scant dashed away so fast that the distance between us and the guards already seemed insurmountable. Nonetheless, I thought it would be wise to cover my face with my hands and peer out between my fingers, to protect my identity. The bearded man had lost his revolver but he brandished a little cosh in his fist, waving it in the air as he yelled, “Close every exit! He won’t get away!”

  Mr. Scant ran on, showing no sign of fatigue, and every time we encountered somebody, or even a group of somebodies, he had an answer. Some he knocked down. Some were so startled as to fall over on their own. Once, he cut a length of rope with his claw, which dropped wooden chairs on a group waiting for us, another trap I could hardly believe he had prepared in the few minutes we had been separated. He cut not a single person with the claw, but relied on speed—and sometimes elbows or fists.

  Eventually, we stopped under a large balcony. Mr. Scant looked all around, and concluding we were alone, whispered, “Hold on tight.” As he raised his claw, a mechanism within whirred, and with a jolt, the tip of one claw flew upwards. A cord trailed behind the blade, about as thick as a bootlace, and when the blade fixed on something above us, Mr. Scant cut the line with another of his claws. And then he began to climb the slender cord. I was still on his back, yet we ascended at a speed that would have impressed even our school’s games master Mr. Prigg, who loved climbing ropes almost as much as he loved watching children fail to do so. The cord looked far too thin, and I was terrified the claw would slice right through it, but in moments we were up on the balcony, and Mr. Scant was winding the cord in again.

  The sounds of the search continued below us. “We disappeared upwards,” I whispered, delighted, but Mr. Scant shot me such a terrifying look that I bowed my head. The claw tip he’d launched had opened up like a parasol, six small metal hooks pointing outward, and anchored itself behind a baluster. Mr. Scant collapsed the hooks before reattaching the claw with a click.

  When all was quiet, Mr. Scant led me to a window. Upon opening it and peering down at the road below, he once again seized me and hefted me onto his shoulder.

  “Some warning would be—” I began, but that was as far as I got before he mounted the windowsill and then took to the night air. All breath left me when he jumped. I fancied that I caught a glimpse of Nelson’s column, with a poacher’s moon hanging in the sky behind it, before we plummeted. But it may have been a chimney stack.

  I had fallen before—from trees, from my bed. I even fell off the stage once, in the Nativity Play Incident of 1903 of which we do not speak. But this was the first time I felt the suffocation of true falling, when the stomach decides to investigate what interesting things happen in the skull.

  We landed on something soft, and after checking that my limbs were still attached, I looked around to see the canvas roof of the old growler carriage that had brought us to London, now quite crumpled beneath us. The driver with the scarred face regarded us, wholly unimpressed. Mr. Scant went to speak a few words to him while I sat in the indentation we had made on the roof. Then, as simply as that, and quite before I was ready, we were on the move.

  Mr. Scant helped me clamber off the roof and into the carriage, and then weathered the assault of my words, which I simply couldn’t stop. “What was that? We jumped off the roof! How can we . . . What was the . . . ? That was the most terrifying thing I’ve done in my whole life!” There was no helping it; a dam had burst. “And we disappeared upwards, just like you said! We did! And then downwards! Oh, if Father could only have seen! That man had a revolver! What if he had shot us?”

  “That bulldog? Only for show, I assure you, Master Oliver,” said Mr. Scant, impossibly calm. “Putting a hole through one of the paintings is not something one in that man’s position would risk. The directors of the National Portrait Gallery are notoriously more concerned about their floors than their patrons. He would not have dared shoot us, I think, without a mop nearby for our blood.”

  “Urgh,” I said. But the chilling thought didn’t keep me quiet for long. “You really put the painting back, though! So, what, is this what you do? You return stolen things to their owners, like a—”

  “Enough, Master Oliver. There will be time for talk later. You must sleep. There will not be much opportunity for it once we are home.”

  “I couldn’t possibly sleep after—”

  “You can, and you will.”

  Cold-eyed, Mr. Scant opened the carriage door and swung himself out to sit with the scarred man in the driving seat. I was left alone with the strange sight of the severely dented roof—and with my thoughts. The last one I had before I fell asleep concerned how entirely impossible it would be for me to sleep.

  V

  A Day without Ice

  he first thing I registered when Mr. Scant woke me was the biting cold. With its roof damaged, the growler wasn’t keeping the night air out, so the chill had crept into my bones while I slept. I looked out of the window to see we’d reached Father’s driveway, and all at once I remembered everything I had just lived through. Even so, I no longer felt sleep was impossible. In fact, I wanted little else.

  “We must be silent,” said Mr. Scant, who carried a small sack over his shoulder, presumably with the claw inside. I nodded.

  Crossing the lawn to avoid the gravel path, we entered through the kitchens. It was the first time I had ever seen them so still: they
were never quiet for a moment while Mrs. George was awake. Mr. Scant escorted me through the house and up to my room, where my bedclothes were still laid out. I yawned as I picked them up, and Mr. Scant bowed. “Well, then, Master Oliver,” he said, which was his way of saying goodnight.

  “Mr. Scant?” I said.

  “Master Oliver?”

  “I’m sorry I forgot to pull the rope.”

  “One small element of a successful operation.”

  “I should have felt awful if I made a mess of the whole thing,” I admitted, struggling to unbutton my jacket with fingers that seemed twice as large as usual. I wanted a nice long bath, but not nearly as much as I wanted a nice long sleep.

  “That was never a possibility,” Mr. Scant said.

  “Funny that your . . . rivals chose that painting out of all the masterpieces they could have taken. I thought it would be a painting of Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Purcell, someone like that. Not that funny little bald man. Who was he?”

  “The painting is quite valuable; it was painted by Sir Anthony van Dyck, of whom I am sure you are aware. The subject was one Sir Kenelm Digby. He was the son of one of the conspirators in the Guy Fawkes plot, as well as an eminent scientist and, for a time, a pirate of sorts.”

  “Really? That funny little chap?”

  “Perhaps that will show you not to judge by appearances. Yes, that funny little chap. My . . . adversaries stole the portrait not for Sir Digby’s fame, though it was great in his day, but for his reputation as a worker of magic. He was said to have the power to take a blade that injured a man, and upon applying a few grains of a magic powder to the weapon, heal the wounded party.”