Pickpocket's Apprentice (5 page)

“I wish I’d never given you that stupid book,” she complained. “You never spend any time with me at all.”

He looked up at her, blinking in surprise. “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“I daresay you didn’t, for you are a great stupid,” she informed him. She darted to the top of the stairs, then turned and looked down at him. “Well? Are you coming or not?”

Seeing he would have no peace until he let her have her way, Pickett sighed and closed the book, then followed her up the stairs and (with some misgivings) through the great front door. She led him to a cozy parlour at the back of the house, where a small marquetry table stood before the fire. The tabletop was inlaid with a pattern of alternating squares in light and dark woods, and carefully positioned on these squares were an assortment of carved figures in ivory and ebony. Pickett had no attention to spare for these, however, for his eyes were fixed on the fire. His tiny basement room had no grate, and was always cold. He crossed the parlour as one drawn by a magnet, and stood before the hearth with his hands held out toward the warmth within.

“If it means that much to you, I’ll let you have the chair nearest the fire,” Sophy promised him. “Just take care you don’t scorch the seat of your breeches.”

He started a bit guiltily, having almost forgotten she was there, and found her waiting with thinly veiled impatience beside the table. Now, at last, he noticed the pieces arranged upon it, and looked questioningly up at her.

“Chess,” she explained. “It’s a game. I’m going to teach you to play.”

She settled herself in the chair before the white pieces, leaving him to take the black. There followed a long and bewildering explanation of the various pieces: what they were called, where they were located on the board, and how they were allowed to move.

“I should warn you that I am a very good chess player,” she cautioned him with smug satisfaction. “When I play with Papa, I almost always win.”

It soon became clear to Pickett that Mr. Granger must be a very poor player. Sophy certainly knew how the pieces should move, but she had no head for strategy, and could not anticipate even the most obvious responses on his part to her simplest moves. They played three games and, in spite of his lack of prior experience, he won them all in short order.

“How did you do that?” she demanded, torn between annoyance and admiration as she surrendered both bishop and queen in quick succession. “Are you sure you’ve never played before?”

“No, never.” In fact, he had not known such a game existed until she had introduced him to it.

“Then either you are quite brilliant, or else I am a very good teacher. And since you have never shown the slightest sign of brilliance before, I suppose I must be a good teacher,” she deduced, unencumbered by false modesty. “I wonder if you can win against Papa, too? How cross he would be if he were to lose to his apprentice!”

She clapped her hands in glee at this delightful prospect, then leaped up from the table, calling for her father. Pickett thought it was not at all wise to set up his master’s back—and over a game, no less—but Sophy in full flow was a force of nature. She hurried from the room, and returned a moment later dragging her indulgent parent by the hand.

“Papa, your apprentice is being quite hateful to me,” she announced blithely. “I taught him to play chess, and he is so disobliging as to keep winning! I am counting on you to defeat him and uphold the family honour.”

She pulled him down onto the chair she had vacated, and began to set up the pieces.

“It’s kind of you, John, to take the trouble of amusing my little girl,” said Mr. Granger, smiling at him.

“I don’t mind, sir. I didn’t really have anything else to do.” Realizing this assertion was hardly flattering to his master’s daughter, he added hastily, “What I mean is—”

“Badgered you into it, did she? Well, never mind. You’re welcome to play any time you wish, so long as your work is done.”

The merchant commenced play by moving one of his pawns forward, and Sophy hung over her father’s shoulder, eager to watch the coming destruction. Alas, Pickett was too inexperienced at the game to know how to lose on purpose, and too unsophisticated to realize that it might be in his best interests to do so. The battle was much longer than his competitions with Sophy had been, and Pickett, barely rescuing his rook from a relentless attack, realized for the first time that Mr. Granger must have made a habit of allowing his daughter to win—and wondered if it would be a wise move on his part to follow his master’s example. Alas, there were only half a dozen pieces left on the board, and as four of these were his own, it would have been difficult (if not impossible) to lose at this point without his intentions being obvious.

There was nothing for it, then, but to make as short a work of the contest as possible. He defeated his master in three quick moves, and began to stammer something about beginner’s luck.

“Nonsense!” Far from being cross, Mr. Granger regarded his young apprentice with something approaching awe. “You are the very devil of a chess player, my boy! Are you sure you’ve never played before—with Patrick Colquhoun, maybe?”

“No, sir,” Pickett said, taken aback by the suggestion that a magistrate should wish to play chess with a pickpocket.

“Well, well!” exclaimed Mr. Granger, while his daughter preened herself on her own cleverness in arranging such a match. “I hope you will favour me with another game next Sunday.”

“I—I would be glad to,” Pickett stammered.

Sophy looked a little less pleased at this turn of events, but after her father had quitted the room, she spoke challengingly to Pickett. “Now, aren’t you glad I taught you to play chess?”

“Very much. Thank you. And thank you for the book, and the sandwiches, too. In fact,” he added sheepishly, “I have a lot of things to thank you for.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Sophy muttered to his retreating back, as he bobbed an awkward little bow in her direction and returned to the basement and his proper sphere.

In Which John Pickett Faces Temptation

of Quite a Different Sort

August 1800

London

Mr. Colquhoun strode up the front steps of Elias Granger’s Cecil Street residence and rapped on the front door, entirely unrepentant of the unsubtle hints that had won for him an invitation to dine on this Saturday evening with the coal merchant and his family. Almost two years had passed since he had placed John Pickett with Mr. Granger as an apprentice, and while Mr. Colquhoun occasionally saw the young man when he made his regular deliveries of coal to the Bow Street Public Office, these encounters were less frequent during the summer months, and usually punctuated by frequent admonitions by young Pickett’s seniors to “get the lead out of your arse.” Having no desire to be the cause of strife between the boy and his superiors, Mr. Colquhoun made a point not to delay him in conversation; as a result, he was unable to follow the young man’s progress as closely as he might wish. He did recall, however, that Pickett was permitted to eat at his master’s table every Saturday evening; hence his own desire to dine with the family on that particular night.

“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Colquhoun,” boomed Mr. Granger, when the magistrate was shown into the drawing room. “That boy of yours will be along any minute—ah, here he is now!”

Mr. Colquhoun blinked as he turned in the direction of Granger’s gaze, for there was little resemblance between collier’s apprentice who made deliveries to Bow Street and the stranger entering the room at that moment. Now sixteen years old, John Pickett had grown taller; one might say he was finally growing into his oversized feet. His hair was longer, too, and was bound at the nape of his neck with a leather thong. While the boy would never be stout, two years of regular meals had filled him out somewhat, and manual labour had given definition to his muscles. Mr. Colquhoun suspected that if, God forbid, Mr. Foote should be obliged to arrest him again, the outcome of that confrontation would be very different than it had been two years earlier.

But all these changes had been visible even in the collier’s apprentice who made his deliveries to Bow Street. There was no trace of coal dust on him now, however—Mr. Colquhoun could only assume that he had outgrown his youthful aversion to soap and water—and the magistrate was taken aback to discover that beneath the grimy layer of black dust there lurked a surprisingly good-looking young man. One glance at the predatory gleam in the eye of Miss Sophy Granger as Pickett entered the room was enough to inform Mr. Colquhoun that he was not the first to make this observation, and he frowned thoughtfully. It would not do for young Pickett to entertain ideas above his station or, worse, to make advances toward his master’s daughter, no matter how willing that damsel might be to receive them. If the evening should happen to provide him with the opportunity for a word alone with his protégé, he would be sure to drop a word of warning in the lad’s ear.

The numbers at the table were uneven, as Miss Granger had succeeded in routing yet another governess, the latest in a long line of that sorority to meet a similar fate. Mr. Granger, of course, sat at the head of the table while his wife occupied the foot. Mr. Colquhoun sat at his hostess’s right, facing the two young people opposite; Mr. Colquhoun would have laid any odds that they were holding hands underneath the table.

In fact, he was quite mistaken in this assumption, although this was certainly through no fault of Miss Sophy Granger. In all other areas of his life, Pickett had no reason to be displeased. It was true that the work was dirty and hard, but in two years he had grown accustomed to both the physical labor and the ubiquitous black film of coal dust that covered him from Monday through Saturday. While he received compensation in the form of room and board rather than regular wages, he had accumulated a modest store of coins courtesy of the magistrate, who never failed to reward his deliveries to Bow Street with a penny or, on the occasion of his sixteenth birthday, a silver shilling. His reflection in the cracked and spotted mirror hanging over the washstand in his room was particularly gratifying, too: in recent months his upper lip had acquired a faint shadow of fine dark hair, of which he was inordinately proud.

There remained only the utterly bewildering behavior of Miss Sophy Granger to cut up his peace. It was true that she still supplied him with sandwiches and occasionally cakes from the tea tray, as well as books from her father’s library; true, too, that they still played chess every Sunday afternoon and, to her credit, she never bore him any grudge when she lost (as she always did), but took an almost proprietary pride in his skill, confident in the belief that it was a credit to her teaching ability. But while her attitude toward him had always held a hint of mockery, there were times of late when she had seemed genuinely annoyed with him for reasons he could not begin to fathom. For instance, only a week earlier he had paid her what he thought was the compliment of telling her that she was his best friend—indeed, his
only
friend—in Cecil Street. Instead of being gratified by this revelation, she had swept her arm across the chess board and then flounced out of the room, leaving him to pick up the chessmen she’d scattered all over the carpet.

Now, seated next to her at the table, he was so careful to give her no cause for offense (thus disgracing himself not only before her, but her parents and his mentor as well) that he quite failed to notice Mr. Colquhoun’s attempts to catch his eye. The magistrate, then, was obliged to take his leave after dinner, having failed to procure the
tête-à-tête
for which he had hoped. While Mr. and Mrs. Granger escorted their guest to the door, Pickett leaned back in his chair and stroked his fledgling facial hair lovingly, just to make sure Sophy had noticed it.

Her reaction was disappointing, to say the least.

“I don’t see how girls can bear to kiss men with moustaches,” she said, wrinkling her pert nose in distaste. “It would be like kissing a bottle brush.”

“Who said anything about kissing?” retorted Pickett, goaded by the implied insult to his masculinity.

“Not I,” Sophy said, tossing her hair. “I was talking about moustaches.”

“If you dislike them so much, I guess it’s a good thing you can’t grow one.” Pickett pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’m going downstairs to bed. Tell your da I’ll see him tomorrow.”

He stalked off without a backward glance.

But by the time he joined the family the next morning for the walk to church, his embryonic moustache had disappeared, as had the footman’s razor.

* * *

Sophy made no mention of the cross words they had exchanged the previous evening, nor did she acknowledge with so much as a glance Pickett’s clean-shaven lip. But after they had returned home from church, when Pickett returned to his room to hang his good coat from its peg on the wall, he was interrupted by a light scratching at the door. It opened to admit Sophy, who slipped into the room and closed the door softly behind her, then leaned back against it, regarding him steadily as she twirled a lock of dark hair around her finger.

“You can kiss me if you want to,” she said, her voice low and husky.

Pickett stared at her. Was
this
what it was all about, her provocative smiles, her inexplicable bursts of temper, her sudden interest in the condition of his upper lip? Had she wanted him to kiss her all this time, and he’d never known?

“I—I—I—” he stammered.

“But only if you want to,” she added with a coy smile.

He quit trying to form a coherent sentence; besides being a singularly hopeless endeavor, it appeared there were better uses to which he could be putting his mouth. With heart pounding, he set his hands on her shoulders and lowered his mouth to hers.

Or such was his intention. Unfortunately, his nose smashed into hers before their lips ever met.