The Thief's Apprentice Page 5

  “Was it true?”

  “I think not, Master Oliver, but the idea captivated a great many minds at the time—and captivates them still today. Now, I must begin my preparations for your father’s breakfast and morning ablutions. You must sleep.”

  With that, he gave his usual smart bow and withdrew. My plump collection of pillows had done without me all night long, and now it greeted me eagerly as I finished changing and hopped into bed. I allowed myself a chuckle as I settled in. Such incredible things I had seen! Nobody in my school could boast the same. Nobody I had ever met, most likely—save Mr. Scant himself.

  Of course, I still had an avalanche of questions. How did Mr. Scant know the painting was stolen, and who had done the deed, if not him? Was there another Claw, and who was the man he had been fighting on the fateful night of my discovery? But soon my thoughts were a blur of funny bald men making magical tinctures on pirate ships, and I dropped into a dream. And as is the usual way of dreams, mine had nothing to do with my exploits with Mr. Scant or with Sir Kenelm Digby. Rather, my dream concerned Peter Clephane trying to convince me to buy a new kind of apple—with wings, costing 2d.

  When Penny woke me, I felt restored, which came as quite a surprise. Apparently Mr. Scant had put it about that I had been ill and coughing in the night, and so Penny allowed me to sleep later than usual and even to miss breakfast. After washing, I dressed in the comfortable Saturday clothes Penny had laid out for me, including a navy blue neckerchief and matching long trousers. Until I finished prep school, I was condemned to wear short trousers on school days, and my Sunday best usually had to be breeches, so long trousers were something of a Saturday treat.

  I went downstairs in time to see Mr. Scant step out of the drawing room with the day’s paper on a tray, so hurried over to ask if there was anything in it of particular interest.

  “For you, I think not, Master Oliver,” said Mr. Scant. He was back to being deferential. I could hardly believe this was the same man who had jumped off a roof with me on his back only hours earlier. “This is the early edition, of course,” he added. “Your mother will be pleased to see you are in good health. She is in her rooms with Mrs. Winton at present, but asked to be told when you had risen. I will let her know you will wait for her in the music room. Or would you prefer the long gallery?”

  “Long gallery please, Mr. Scant,” I said, enjoying this game of pretense. I remained terrified of Mr. Scant and a long way from understanding the true nature of the Ruminating Claw, but when you have jumped out of a window with someone, a strange kind of camaraderie develops.

  “I am told no rain is expected after lunch. Your father is home all day but not to be disturbed, so perhaps you ought to play outside?”

  This was a very strange request to hear from him, but I understood. “I’ll tell Mother I might meet with my friends.”

  “A splendid idea.”

  Mother and I had a custom if she found me lying on the settee in the long gallery: she would gently lift my head and lay it on her lap. Then she would sing to herself as she played with my hair, or talk softly with her maid, Mrs. Winton. Having my head stroked made me feel a tad babyish, but it was a pleasant sensation—and if I avoided it, Mother would ask me why. So while I allowed her to part my hair this way and that, she asked the usual things: about my studies, if I still hoped to join the school rugby team, whether I’d learned any new Bible passages. It was easy to mention I might meet my friends later on, and she had no objections. Then something else crossed my mind.

  “Mother?” I said.

  “Mmm?”

  “Does Father think I’m a coward?”

  Mother didn’t take much time to think about this. “Of course not, my darling,” she cooed, which I was sure she would have said no matter what she really thought.

  I ended up dozing for a little while, there on her lap, which she seemed to enjoy. Afterward, wrapped up against the afternoon cold but not knowing what else to expect, I wandered into the garden. The grounds were modest. Only one-and-a-half acres, a lone flowerpot when compared with the family gardens of the likes of Skipper Percival, the rugby captain—his had stables and everything. Even so, we had trees to hide behind and bushes to slip between. Behind one tree I found Mr. Scant, and although I had been looking for him, his sudden appearance gave me a start.

  “Still afraid of me?” he asked, as I clutched a hand to my chest.

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Yes, I suppose I would. Now, I have somewhere we can talk. From this day forth, matters of importance are to be discussed there and only there. This way.”

  Taking care to keep out of sight of the house, Mr. Scant led me to the little grass bank behind the gardener’s shed.

  “The coal bunker?” I said.

  “The Ice House,” said Mr. Scant.

  “We don’t have an ice house,” I said, with a little laugh. The idea was silly. “Only big country estates have ice houses.”

  “And yet . . .” Mr. Scant said. He took out a long, silver key and, as if at random, pushed it into a patch of grass. Stranger still, he then grasped a thin iron ring I hadn’t been able to see and opened up the ground. The mound I had thought to be nothing but a pile of earth, designed to hide the coal bunker from the house, was in fact part of a solid structure, complete with a small wooden doorway. “A manor once stood on these grounds, and this was built for it many years ago,” said Mr. Scant. “It has since been forgotten, but the structure is easily found. With improvements to the brickwork, it became fit for my purposes.”

  “You have a secret lair,” I said. “I’m not quite sure I believe this.”

  “In you pop,” said Mr. Scant, his voice so flat that the whimsical choice of words did not seem peculiar.

  In I popped. A narrow passage inside led to a larger, decidedly chilly space. I heard a kind of mechanical roar, and then light began to fill the ice house. I had heard that sound before, in Father’s factories: Mr. Scant had an electric generator.

  More of a shock than the light was what it revealed: a cavernous space the shape of a vast bell. The lair of the Ruminating Claw. A number of wooden platforms lined its periphery, with a sturdy framework underneath supporting a long staircase. Each platform housed a little workshop of sorts: I saw various machines for cutting wood or sharpening metal, apparatus for mixing chemicals, and a desk half-buried beneath research materials.

  “Well then, Master Oliver,” Mr. Scant said. “Come in and settle down. There is a comfortable armchair and a stove for tea below. The burner will warm the place up a little.”

  “Only a little?” I said, letting my teeth chatter in a demonstrative sort of a way.

  “Only a little. I am not a man who much needs excess warmth.”

  “Surprising,” I said. “If ever they write about your exploits, I’ll be sure to make them include that revelation. Otherwise, people might assume you love coziness and sunshine.”

  “Say what you like here, Master Oliver, but please, no jokes about documenting my exploits. If anyone should ever write of my misdeeds, I would have your assurance that it will be without any assistance from you.”

  I had been forgetting myself after the night’s adventure, but seeing the severity of Mr. Scant’s expression, I remembered that he was not a man I ever ought to tease.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Your assurance.”

  “I swear I’ll never tell a soul. On the honor of my family.”

  “Splendid.” He had a way of speaking that joyful word that made it shrivel up into “vaguely acceptable.”

  At the bottom of all the rickety wooden stairs sat a rather battered armchair. I amused myself with the thought of Mr. Scant wrestling it down the steps of the lair, but didn’t dare let my amusement show on my face. Alongside the burner, Mr. Scant had installed an equally sorry-looking rocking chair, with its varnish peeling and most of the front of the left rocker missing. It was into this that Mr. Scant settled, then began to rock softly. The way he look
ed at me put me in mind of when I had seen a huge bear scratching his back on a tree at the zoo—his expression challenged me, dared me to laugh.

  I suspected that Mr. Scant was waiting for me to talk, so I cleared my throat. “So, ah . . . you never really explained about the painting. You . . . didn’t steal it?”

  “I was not the one who took it from the National Portrait Gallery, no.”

  “So . . . you’re not the master criminal, then.”

  “I am not responsible for the crimes pinned on the Ruminating Claw, as the press likes to call me. I have never engaged in the theft of an item that was not already stolen property.”

  “So who is the original thief?”

  “It will have been someone acting in collaboration with my brother.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Indeed. My younger brother, Reginald.”

  “Reginald Scant.” It struck me that I didn’t know Mr. Scant’s given name. “Reginald and . . . ?”

  Mr. Scant ignored me, rising to prepare some tea.

  “In fact, he goes by the legal name of Reginald Gaunt. While on the brink of bankruptcy, he didn’t want the family name to appear in reports that could be considered disgraceful, so he changed it. Later in life, he deemed it wise to keep the name, something that has made life easier for me.”

  “It sounds complicated.”

  “Reginald and I were very close when we were young,” said Mr. Scant, in a tone that suggested I should get comfortable because there was much to be said. “We were born into a family that, while not wealthy, was full of love and ambition. My father was a seafaring man. We saw little of him, but the times he came home were some of the happiest I have ever known. Our family trips to see the construction of the greatest ships of the age showed me the wondrous things that are possible when great minds work together.

  “As children, Reginald and I took interest in the sciences. I gravitated toward the mechanical, and he toward the chemical. We were eager to learn all we could, and my mother supported us in every way she knew. She sold her jewels and our grandmother’s silks for our books and rudimentary equipment. My father’s navy service gave us entry to a school that our station in life would not otherwise have allowed, and after our father died in battle, kind souls who felt a sense of obligation ensured Reginald and I stayed there until we were young men.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “You were expecting my parents to be alive and well?” Mr. Scant turned away, busying himself with the stove and kettle. “As Reginald and I sought to find our way in the world, science remained our shared passion. After a brief military service, I mostly worked in printing and photography, helping some very clever men improve the processes they had invented, while my brother pursued the refinement of combustible fuels. Well, he was the more successful of the two of us—he had rather a good idea for improving efficiency in the refinement of crude oil, and I helped him design a chamber to put his theory into practice. We never did anything so fine as when we worked together.”

  “You must have got on well. I’d like to have a brother like that myself.”

  “It was a happy time. But by this stage, Reggie had become quite the popular man about town, and the ability to keep secrets was a talent he never possessed, especially not after working a little too eagerly with his ethanol supply. Though the industrialists who had licensed Reginald’s machine already stood to make a considerable amount of money, they realized they would receive significantly more if his patents were transferred to the company. Though he was married by then, Reginald enjoyed boasting to women of everything he had achieved. One night, a young lady invited Reggie to join him for a ride in a hackney carriage. Once inside, he discovered some other passengers were also along for the ride. I don’t know what was said to him in that carriage, but he handed over his invention, his patents . . . soon, his home followed. He lost everything. Even the goodwill of our mother.”

  “Why?”

  “Ah, they were clever, the enemies he made, and numerous.”

  By then, the tea was ready. Mr. Scant brought over his tea set—a surprisingly dainty one, with a soft, bluebell design—and settled back into his rocking chair. He knew how I liked my tea—still with two sugars, despite Mother’s disapproval. Since Mr. Scant took no sugar, I wondered if he had brought some down especially for me. As I blew the tea to cool it down, Mr. Scant drank steadily from his cup, then went on.

  “There is a group of rich men and women called the Woodhouselee Society, named for a clever Scotsman who argued that no true democracy exists while leaders can be corrupted—that electing a leader means giving up freedom. This society seeks not to reform this system but to exploit it. The members believe that a corrupt democracy, run by the elite, is inevitable, and so they take pains to be that elite. They are more interested in political control than other, similar fraternities . . . and believe that with enough money and influence, they will be able to control the Empire no matter who governs.”

  “And they went after your brother?”

  “The industrialists who funded his research were Woodhouselee members. It was not hard for them to discover Reggie’s weakness for drink—almost everybody knew it at the time. Well, I say that, but while I knew it, Reggie’s wife, Winifred, knew it, and all of his enemies knew it—our mother did not. So when Reggie began to resist the advances of the Society, breaking his spirit was as simple as letting him slip into a drunken rage and then introducing our mother to the scene. She was a hard woman, our mother, as you might surmise. Not one to hide her disappointment. Reggie, for his part, was not quite sensible with so much drink in him, and the scar he gave his own mother, right across her mouth, made him a stranger to her to her deathbed. She called for him there, but by then, it was beyond my power to fetch him.”

  The best I could think of was, “That’s so sad.”

  Mr. Scant drank deeply from his cup. “Now, Reggie lost everything, but that was by no means the end of his suffering. People like the ones who have their talons in him, they don’t let go. His mind remained of use to them. They made sure he remained in their debt. Heavily in debt. Tens of thousands of pounds, if you can imagine it. Reggie had a wife to protect, and later a child, a beautiful little girl, Elspeth. This was before you were born—Ellie must be fifteen or sixteen years old now. And my brother had already been the Society’s puppet some ten years by the time she was born. All this time, Reggie has done the only thing he can: everything those villains demand. Little by little, he imagines, he will repay them.” Mr. Scant wiped a hand down his face, and though his eyes were dry, he looked for a moment like a much older man than he was.

  “How could he ever repay that much?”

  “How indeed? Years have passed since the society took his patents, with his debts barely reduced. But in recent months, things have changed. Reggie has been working like a slave, but there is only so much ingenuity in one man, and now he is old and slow. At some point in the last year or so, someone proposed a way to make better use of his talents.”

  “To do with the . . . thieving?”

  “Indeed. You see, as with most gatherings of rich, bored men and women, the Woodhouselee Society has a great interest in the mystical. Its members make a great study of alchemy and believe that certain figures belonged to a hidden order controlling the world—Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, to name a few. A common fancy amongst men with too much money but no real influence. Not only do they believe occult societies have occupied the position of power and influence they covet, they believe that if they do not have knowledge of magical objects, others who do will supplant them.”

  “So they believe in magic?”

  “Whether they believe in it is largely irrelevant. If there is any possibility at all they will lose power and influence because others have magic and they do not, why risk losing out? So the Society has recruited specialists in artworks connected to magic and alchemy, and at their recommendation, began to steal them. Of c
ourse, none of the items had any magical effects. At first, the Woodhouselee men meant to keep the stolen items as trophies, but they soon realized far more profit was to be made from selling them—to buyers in the far Orient, curious about the old magic of Europe. You see, a certain confidence trickster going by the name of Lord Boleskine has established a trade there in supposedly magical items.”

  “And your brother steals them?”

  “No. My brother would not be of any use to his captors in that regard. The two of us have lived very different lives. But he remains a highly gifted chemist. Some would call him a genius. The Society has enlisted that genius in the making of forgeries. Why sell one painting when you can sell three counterfeits, or thirty, with the pigments recreated to perfection? Why take a jewel and risk being hounded for the rest of your days when you can replace it with a copy so convincing that nobody ever investigates?”

  “So why not just make perfect copies and sell those, then say the one in the galleries is the fake?”

  “A salient question, Master Oliver. There are two reasons. Firstly, gifted as Reggie is, he almost always requires the original to make a convincing replica—a process that is not always an overnight affair. Secondly, the Woodhouselee Society would be challenged to convince its buyers a switch had been made in complete secrecy: reports of the thefts are useful for persuading buyers they are purchasing the true original. Reginald’s part in all this makes him worth keeping alive, and I am told his work is now making a genuine difference to his debts. But naturally, I will not allow it.”

  “Because in the end he’ll be caught?”

  “Not so much that as for my mother’s sake. She died still grieving that her son had fallen to a life of crime and violence: I will not allow that to become reality.”

  “So you became the criminal instead?”

  Mr. Scant gave me such a sharp look that for a moment I worried I had gone too far.

  “There are crimes and there are crimes. Trespass, yes. Offenses against the person . . . on occasion, though it’s not something I relish. Mother would have seen the necessity. It is another matter to provide direct support to criminals hoping to undermine the entire government. So I took the thieves’ idea of returning the items after they were stolen, but I ensure this happens before they can reach Reggie’s laboratory.”