Pickpocket's Apprentice (3 page)

John Pickett rose before dawn the next morning and dressed in the work clothes Mr. Granger had provided, pausing only long enough to transfer three of the purloined sandwiches into his pockets before heading to the kitchen for breakfast. He had no problem locating it, for a booming female voice acted as a beacon.

“Best lock up the silver, I say, and so I told the missus—”

The sudden silence that greeted his appearance left Pickett in no doubt as to the subject of the interrupted conversation; the beetroot-red face of the housekeeper similarly identified the speaker. Those members of the household staff already assembled around the table fixed their attention determinedly on the bowls of porridge before them.

Pickett drew himself up to his full height and addressed the company at large. “If I really wanted the silver, no lock would keep me out,” he announced, and quitted the room with as much dignity as was possible for one boasting a black eye and a broken nose.

The October morning was quite chilly, and as Pickett fished one of the sandwiches from his pocket, he could not quite suppress a pang of regret at the thought of the curls of steam rising invitingly from the hot bowls of porridge that should have constituted his breakfast. The cucumber sandwiches in his pocket were rather mushy by now, but Pickett reminded himself that a soggy sandwich was better than going hungry—and that even going hungry would have been better than sitting at the table with a pack of spiteful tongue-waggers who clearly expected him to rob his new master blind at the first opportunity.

He ate two of the sandwiches as he walked to the quay, forcing himself to save the third for later, for the day promised to be a long one. By the time he reached the wharf, the sun had risen, and he could see the three-masted ship
Newcastle
riding at anchor, having made the trip from Newcastle upon Tyne by canal, river, sea, and then river again, bringing as its cargo the coal that would heat the homes of London’s one million residents.

Or so Mr. Granger had said. At the moment, Pickett had no thought for London’s million residents, for he was tasked with finding only one—Mr. Granger’s foreman, to be exact, to whom he was to present himself. He scanned the wharf until he located the man who fit Mr. Granger’s description—a big, beefy fellow wearing an odd hat with a long leather flap in the back that hung down to his shoulder blades. He stood chatting idly with the driver of a high-sided two-wheeled wagon hitched to an enormous draft horse. Pickett wasn’t quite sure which was more terrifying—the man or the beast. He swallowed hard and, giving the horse a wide berth, approached the two men.

“Excuse me,” he addressed the man in the funny hat. “Are you Tom Taggart?”

The man spat on the ground. “And what if I am?”

Pickett took this as an affirmative. “Mr. Granger told me to find you. I’m to be—that is, Mr. Granger has taken me on as an apprentice.”

The other man, the driver, laughed. “Bit scrawny for this sort of work, aren’t you?”

Tom Taggart peered into Pickett’s bruised face. “Fighter, eh? Well, I’ll tell you to your face—such as it is—that I won’t put up with no brawling.”

“No, sir,” Pickett said hastily. “That is, it—it wasn’t really a fight.”

“Not much of one, anyways,” put in the grinning driver.

Pickett opened his mouth to protest, but realized that the truth—that he’d been beaten up in the process of being arrested for theft—would hardly improve his standing, and shut it again.

“Here she comes,” said the driver, and pointed his long whip toward the river. A small, flat-bottomed barge had disengaged from the side of the ship and was now heading in their direction, riding low in the water beneath its burden of coal.

Tom gave Pickett an appraising look. “Do you know what happens next, boy?”

“I think so,” Pickett said, recalling Mr. Granger’s description of his new job. “We’ll fill up the wagon with coal from that boat.”

“ ‘Boat,’ ” scoffed the driver. “You hear that, Tom? ‘Boat’!”

“I—I’m sorry,” stammered Pickett, aware of having committed some ghastly error. “It looked like a boat to me. I mean, it floats on the water and all.”

The driver guffawed, and Pickett bristled, having a very young man’s intrinsic dislike of being made a figure of fun.

Tom shook his head. “For God’s sake, Bob, leave the boy alone. Of course it’s a boat,” he added to Pickett, not unkindly. “But this particular kind of boat is called a lighter, and unless you want everyone on the river to know what a greenhorn you are, you’ll call it that.”

Pickett could not quite bring himself to thank Tom for enlightening his ignorance, but neither did he wish to put it on display through some further error. And so he lapsed into stiff and dignified (or so he hoped) silence as the boat—no, the
lighter
—approached and tied up alongside the quay. A board was thrown across the gap between gunwale and wharf to serve as a makeshift gangway, and the two men grabbed sacks and shovels and hurried aboard, unmindful of the bouncing of the board beneath their feet. Pickett followed their example, holding his breath lest a wrong step on the narrow gangway should lead to an accidental swim in the Thames. Having navigated the passage safely, he set to work with his shovel. For the next two hours, the trio filled the big sacks with coal, then slung them onto their backs, carried them back across the gangway (which sagged ominously beneath the added weight), and piled them into the wagon. By the time they had finished, Pickett’s arms and shoulders ached from the unaccustomed exercise, and he slumped against the side of the wagon.

“Whew!” He beat his hands together in a futile attempt to rid them of coal dust. “I’m glad that’s done.”

“Done?” echoed Tom incredulously. “Why, we’ve hardly begun, boy! This coal won’t deliver itself, aye, Bob?”

The driver, Bob, made a noise that apparently indicated agreement, then climbed onto his perch and put the whip to the horse’s flanks, clearing the way for another wagon and another team of coal-heavers to begin the task they had just completed. Pickett quickly discovered that the wagon was for cargo, not passengers; both he and Tom were expected to trudge alongside it as they made their deliveries.

Having grown up in the maze of narrow streets surrounding Covent Garden, Pickett had always flattered himself that he knew London as well as any man living; the morning’s work, however, showed him just how mistaken he was in this belief. Bob turned the wagon up street and down lane until Pickett had completely lost his bearings, and soon found himself in a world he had never known existed. Tall, narrow houses surrounded well-manicured squares where well-dressed ladies strolled, none of them deigning to notice so ignoble a vehicle as a coal-wagon, let alone the men whose labours would ensure that they had fires to heat their fine homes. Bob paid no more heed to the ladies than they did to him, but drew the wagon to a stop before one of the houses, whereupon Tom moved to the back and reached inside for one of the big sacks of coal.

“Open the eye, boy,” he commanded Pickett.

Pickett’s eyes had been open since before dawn, so he knew he was not being ordered to wake up. Seeing Tom heft the heavy sack onto his back, he could only assume the foreman expected him to open the door so that Tom might carry his burden inside. Recalling the confidence with which Mr. Colquhoun had approached the coal merchant’s door, Pickett took a deep breath, set his shoulders, and strode purposefully up the broad, shallow steps onto the portico.

“Whoa, boy, hold your horses!” exclaimed Bob, the driver, and even the great draft horse’s neigh sounded suspiciously like scornful laughter. “Where d’you think you’re going?”

“I—Tom—he told me to—”

“He told you to open the
eye
, you nodcock! That thing there.” He pointed with his whip to a small brass square set into the pavement. “Fine thing it would be, you barging in on my Lord Fieldhurst bold as brass,” he grumbled under his breath.

Pickett, hurrying to rectify his error, dropped to his knees on the pavement, inserted his fingers underneath the edge of the eye, and lifted it out. The sun was high enough by this time to penetrate the first few inches of what appeared to be a narrow chute. Pickett, curious, put his face to the pavement in an attempt to see where it led.

“Out of the way, boy,” grunted Tom, labouring beneath the weight of the sack on his back.

Pickett hardly had time to scuttle to one side before Tom dumped his load down the chute, sending up a cloud of black dust that set him coughing.

“Don’t just stand there,” Tom chided. “Grab another sack. There’s half a dozen of ‘em got to go down this hole.”

 By the time the last of the sacks was emptied down the chute, Pickett’s eyes were red and watering. Tom, on the other hand, was hardly coughing at all, long experience having taught him to keep his face well back from the cascade of coal pouring into the chute. Pickett made a mental note to emulate him, then, seeing the other men were waiting, quickly replaced the brass eye and scrambled to his feet just in time to fall into step beside the wagon, already on its way to the next stop.

By the time the sun reached its zenith and the bells of a nearby church (Pickett wasn’t sure which one, having long since lost all sense of direction) struck noon, his muscles were groaning in protest at the unfamiliar demands placed upon them, and his stomach growling insistently. He fished in his pocket for the last of the sandwiches, and pulled it out. It was grey with a thin film of coal dust, but it was food, and he had not the luxury of being particular. He dusted it off (a futile endeavor, as his hands were even dirtier than the sandwich) and took a bite.

“What have you got there?” asked Bob, looking down at him from the driver’s bench
.

“Cucumber sandwich,” said Pickett around a mouthful.

“Hoity-toity! D’you hear that, Tom? His lordship here is eating cucumber sandwiches! Next thing we know, he’ll be having dinner with the Lord Mayor.”

“They were left over from Mr. Granger’s tea yesterday,” said Pickett, feeling some explanation was called for. “His daughter gave them to me.”

“Yeah?” Bob’s eyebrows rose in interest. “What else did she give you?”

The leering look that accompanied this question gave Pickett to understand that Bob was not referring to sandwiches. “I don’t think you ought to be talking about Mr. Granger’s daughter that way,” he said stiffly.

“And who’s gonna tell him?” the driver retorted. “You?”

“The boy’s right, you know,” Tom acknowledged, smiling at Pickett. “You’d best keep a still tongue in your head where Granger’s little girl is concerned.”

Bob made no comment, which Pickett supposed indicated grudging agreement, and the rest of the afternoon passed without incident. It was almost seven o’clock by the time the last of the coal was delivered. By this time Pickett was so exhausted that it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. Tom, seeing this, called to the driver.

“Hold up, Bob. In you go, boy,” he told Pickett, jerking his head in the direction of the wagon, vacant now except for the empty sacks.

Pickett needed no urging. Summoning his last ounce of strength, he heaved himself over the side and sank down onto the pile of sacks. By the time the wagon reached the wharf and lurched to a stop, he was sound asleep.

Tom shook him by the shoulder. “You’d best go home, boy, unless you mean to stay here all night—which I don’t recommend, this not being what you’d call a healthful part of Town.”

Awakened from a sound sleep, Pickett slowly sat up, bewildered at first as to where he was and how he had come to be there, until the ache in his limbs brought it all back. He climbed wearily down from the wagon and set out for Mr. Granger’s house in Cecil Street, where he stopped in the kitchen just long enough to wolf down a bowl of some kind of stew before collapsing onto his narrow cot in a cloud of coal dust, his slumber disturbed only by the knowledge that he would have to get up at dawn the next morning and do it all again.

In Which John Pickett Faces Temptation

Pickett awoke the next morning while it was still dark, and sat up stiffly. Every muscle in his body throbbed; picking pockets in Covent Garden might be dangerous, but there was no denying it was a much easier way to earn one’s bread than hauling coal. The thought of bread propelled him from the cot. He rose and dressed as quickly as his aching arms would allow, filling his pockets with the bread he’d squirreled away following his dinner with the magistrate. It was growing somewhat stale by now, but Pickett had never been in a position to be fastidious about his food, and so he was untroubled by its lack of freshness. He did wonder, however, what he was to do the next day, and the day after that, when the last of the bread was gone.

The day’s coal deliveries followed the same routine as the day before, beginning at the quay with the loading of the wagon and continuing with the delivery of the coal into the underground vaults until the wagon was empty. So, too, did the behavior of his co-workers follow the same pattern established on his first day, from Bob’s mocking contempt to the rather patronizing kindness of Tom the foreman. After Pickett had eaten his dinner with the servants and headed to his own tiny room, however, the events of the day took an entirely unexpected turn.

“Pssst!” a voice hissed.

He turned toward the sound, and found Sophy Granger standing on the stairs that led up to the family’s rooms above. In her hands she cradled a small packet wrapped in cloth.

“I’ve been waiting for you, John,” she said. “I brought you something.”

She held out the package, and he took it.

“Sandwiches,” she explained. “Three cucumber sandwiches and a seed cake. They were left over from tea. I thought you might want them.”

“Thank you,” he said, taken aback by the surprising gesture even while he was grateful to have his dietary dilemma resolved.

She tossed her head. “They were only going to be thrown out anyway, so I thought they might as well go to you as to the rubbish bin.”