The Apprentices (7 page)

He kicked the sidewalk and said nothing.

“I fought Giovanna for you!” she said. “Don’t waste it!”

Raffaello looked up. “You really think I might get a part?”

Janie was losing patience. “I don’t know!” she said. “But you won’t get one if you don’t
go.
”

He yawned self-consciously, in that way boys did when they felt embarrassed and uncertain, and finally shouldered his knapsack and set off.

Alone in the living room upstairs, Janie got out Benjamin’s
letters, the only hard evidence she had that he existed. She looked at the familiar handwriting, trying to see something she hadn’t seen before. She had studied the postmarks a hundred times, and they all seemed deliberately blurred in the same way. She rubbed the paper with her thumb and guessed that Benjamin had treated the paper with something that resisted the postmark’s ink, so it wouldn’t take.

She took out the first letter again and unfolded it. It had arrived in London about two months after Benjamin first sent her diary back. The letter said:

Parts of the letter were clear. The
x
was a kiss, which had made her knees go weak the first time she read it. “Figment” was her father’s joking name for Benjamin; it came from “figment of your imagination.” Her parents had invented a whole aristocratic English family called the Figments, fourteenth cousins to the Queen. Benjamin was supposed to be the son and heir. They thought the whole thing was hilarious. At the time, Janie had thought it was annoying. Now
their dumb joke made her smile. But then she remembered that she needed to tell them that she’d been kicked out of Grayson—or tell them
something,
and soon. So she tried to think of a place where there might be industrial nastiness and easily offended locals. It seemed like that could describe most places in the world.

She’d received the next note about three months later:

That message had puzzled her at first, because she didn’t think Benjamin had an uncle. But then she remembered the day they had followed a well-dressed man to the Connaught Hotel, trying to discover who he was. Benjamin had told the desk clerk that the man with the blackthorn walking stick was his uncle. So maybe the “batty old uncle” was Vili, the Hungarian count. But the only part of the letter that made sense was the instruction to leave a forwarding address, which Janie had done.

The third letter had arrived just before she left London, in September. It said:

November 2 had passed, so the “trial” must be over. “His Excellency” would be Count Vili. But the rest of it was just confusing. Janie laid the three letters out next to one another. There was something odd about all of them. Benjamin was offhand and direct, and his way of talking was one of the first memories she’d recovered. The letters were strange and formal and sometimes stilted, as if he were writing a telegram and could only afford a certain number of words. She read each one again, and decided that it was only the
first
part of each letter that sounded strange. The last sentences sounded more like Benjamin, and convinced her that he was really the one writing them.

So maybe the false sound was deliberate. Benjamin didn’t do things accidentally. Had he been trying to tell her something, with his strange stiltedness? He had once wanted to become a spy, not an apothecary. So maybe there was a code. Janie got out a piece of paper and wrote out the awkward words at the beginning of the first letter:

It wasn’t Benjamin’s voice. And it didn’t contain information that did her any good. So what was it? It had to be a message that he was hiding from other people—people who wouldn’t know that the words didn’t sound like him or mean anything to her. He was describing an industrial city of some kind…

She let her eyes go out of focus over the piece of paper, and then suddenly she saw it. She picked up her pencil again, her hand shaking with excitement, and took the first letter of each word:

H a R b i n h C h i n a

She tumbled off the couch and ran to the apartment’s small bookcase, hoping to find an atlas. There was a section for Raffaello’s old schoolbooks, alongside Bruno’s cookbooks and Giovanna’s Italian romance novels, and he had a slim paperback
Atlas of the World.
She pulled it off the shelf, trying to keep her fingers steady as she thumbed through the index.

There it was:

Harbin, China………22, B-12

She looked back at her transcription. There was no
h
at the end of Harbin. What did the
h
stand for? She looked at the sentences she’d written out. Really beastly industrial nastiness,
here.
Here, where he was. Harbin,
here,
China. That was the message. She could barely breathe. She flipped to
page 22
and found the city. Harbin was in the far northeast part of the country, near the Russian border. They could easily have been there.

She picked up the next letter and read the first two sentences. “Might eventually return to England. Regardless, this lasts until Xmas. Even my batty old uncle recommends going.” She fought to keep her pencil steady as she wrote out the first letters of each word:

M e r t E R t l u X e m b o u r g

She grabbed the atlas again and found the entry in the index:

Mertert, Luxembourg………10, E-5

She was right! Count Vili was Hungarian, but he’d been living in the tiny country of Luxembourg, in the middle of Europe, before they met him. And he had money, and presumably a big house there. Benjamin and his father must have gone to stay with Count Vili!

Then the most recent message. “Experience says patience is required. I’m to undertake some asinine new trial on 2
November. Even with His Excellency’s brilliance, really I don’t expect success.” She wrote out the first letters, her hand flying across the page. It read:

E s p i r I t u s a n t o 2 N E w h e b r I d e s

She looked it up in the atlas index. There was an Espírito Santo in Brazil, but that wasn’t right, so she tried just looking up “New Hebrides.”

New Hebrides………25, C-7

She flipped to the map on
page 25
and saw the tiny islands, northeast of Australia, between New Guinea and Fiji. Espíritu Santo was one of them.

Janie had two conflicting feelings, with attendant questions, both equally strong. The first was: Why hadn’t she figured out the code before? And the second: How had he expected her to figure it out? It wasn’t a difficult code, once she was looking for it, but she hadn’t been looking. Obviously, Benjamin had made it not too difficult so that she could find it without being given the key.

But she had to be looking.
That
was the key. And she hadn’t looked, hadn’t even thought to look, until now. Benjamin had given her a way to find out where he was
if she needed him.
And now she did need him. But the last letter had been sent months before. It had gone all the way to England before reaching her. There was no telling where he was now.

T
he mailroom at Grayson was smallish, lined with racks of wooden pigeonholes, each with a student’s name printed below. It was an annex of the cafeteria, and it always smelled like chicken soup, no matter what was for lunch.

Janie slipped in under the hum and buzz of lunchtime, and went to her pigeonhole:
SCOTT, J.
There was nothing inside the pigeonhole except a letter addressed to Miles Scouter, whose box was next to hers. Janie stuck the envelope in the
SCOUTER
box and went to the attendant’s desk.

“Hi,” she said. “I wonder if there’s any mail for me?”

The woman looked up from sorting envelopes. She had dyed black hair, tortoiseshell glasses on a chain, and a sour expression. She had worked at Grayson for as long as anyone knew. Mrs. Andrews? Mrs. Anthony? “All the mail is in the pigeonholes,” she said.

Janie looked at the pile still unsorted on the desk. “I just—”
she began. “It’s just that I have to leave Grayson for a while, and I wanted to pick up anything that’s here before I go.”

The woman peered at her. “What’s your name?”

“Janie Scott. Or Jane.”

“Jane Scott,” the woman said. “Right. I’m supposed to forward your mail to someplace—Minnesota?” She picked up a small bundle of envelopes and tilted her head back to look through her glasses at the note on top. “No. Michigan.”

“Yes!” Janie said, reaching. “Michigan. That’s me. I can just take them.”

The woman pulled them away. “I have my instructions.”

“But they might get lost in the mail.”

“The United States Postal Service is very reliable.”

“But I’m
here.
”

The woman peered over her glasses. “Do you have any identification?”

“Of course not! I’m sixteen!” Janie’s patience with all things Grayson was wearing thin. “I don’t need identification when I take the mail from my pigeonhole.”

“That’s different,” the woman said.

“Why?”

“Because then it’s in the pigeonhole.”

Janie closed her eyes for a moment. “Could you just—could you put it in the pigeonhole, like normal, just this one last time, and then I’ll take it? The usual way?”

“Why are you leaving in the middle of term?”

“Because—” Janie began. “Because I’ve been expelled.”

The woman pursed her lips. “I think I should call Mr. Willingham.”

Mrs. Adelaide. Janie was 90 percent sure that was her name. “
Please,
Mrs. Adelaide,” she said.

The woman looked up as if Janie had spoken a magical incantation, a secret password.

“My parents are coming to pick me up,” Janie said. “And I’m trying to leave Grayson. I just want to make sure I have everything before I go. So that I can stay on top of all my responsibilities. You understand, Mrs. Adelaide.”

The woman hesitated, looking at Janie’s little stack of mail in her hand. Then she held it out. “Just this once,” she said. “This is highly irregular.”

“I really appreciate it,” Janie said, taking hold of the stack.

It didn’t budge. Mrs. Adelaide wasn’t letting go.

“
Thank
you, Mrs. Adelaide,” Janie said, saying the magic words again. She tugged harder, and finally the letters were hers. She took a step backward to catch herself.

“Don’t thank me,” Mrs. Adelaide said, sighing. “Just go.”

Janie stood outside the mailroom, on the edge of the cafeteria, amid the din of cheerful voices and clanking silverware. She shuffled through the stack, her hands trembling. An advertisement from the local department store. An announcement of a school poetry contest. A printed postcard from the Grayson Academy Social Committee, inviting her to the “Winter Wonderland” dance.

And there it was.

A letter addressed in Benjamin’s handwriting. She felt as if she was awash in warm sunlight. “Thank you, Mrs. Adelaide!” she sang out.

The woman gave her a suspicious look.

Janie tucked the other letters into her peacoat pocket and studied Benjamin’s envelope as she walked outside. It had a blurred postmark, as usual. She rubbed the envelope to see if it felt slick or waterproof, but it seemed like ordinary paper. She ran straight into someone standing in her path, scrambled back, and got ready to run.

“Easy there,” Tadpole Porter said.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. She stuffed the envelope in her pocket.

“You jumped about three feet in the air,” he said.

“You surprised me,” she said, trying to figure out how to get past him. He made a sizable figure in his wool coat.

“Who’s your letter from?”

“What?”

“You were about to open a letter.”

“Oh,” she said. “A friend. In England.”

Tadpole brightened. “Is she cute?”

Janie almost corrected him—then said, “Yes. Very cute.”

“Blonde?”

“Kind of sandy-colored hair.”

Tadpole’s glasses had fogged in the cold and he took them off. His eyes looked naked in his plump face, without protection. “I hear English girls don’t mind if you’re endomorphic,” he said hopefully, wiping his glasses. “Maybe because they had rationing for so long. So being well-fed just means you have resources, you know?” He put the glasses back on.