The Apprentices (14 page)

“I’m not at Grayson anymore,” she said, squeezing her fingernails into her palms so she wouldn’t fly at him, pound his chest, and demand her equipment back.

Again he looked astonished. “Not at Grayson? What
about your experiment? What about your brilliant scientific career?”

“They kicked me out.”

“You? But that’s outrageous. I’ll speak to someone about it.”

Janie was confused. Was this an act? Wasn’t he behind it all?

“I have some influence at the school, you know,” Mr. Magnusson said.

“Yes, I got that sense.”

“Listen, give me your telephone number,” he said.

“I don’t have one.”

“Then I’ll give you mine.” He grabbed a slip of paper from the little table by the kitchen coatrack and scribbled a number. “Call me in the morning,” he said. “We’ll sort this out. Does this mean you’re not living with Opal anymore?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Maybe she thought you knew?”

“But how would I know such a thing?”

“From…Mr. Willingham?” Janie ventured.

Mr. Magnusson’s bushy white-blond eyebrows knit together. Then he roared with laughter, showing the pink inside of his mouth and startling the pastry chef, who jumped. “What—you think we have tea together? Your headmaster and me?” He roared again and wiped tears from his eyes, which had vanished into the folds of his red face.

Janie looked for a break in his act, trying to rethink everything. If Mr. Magnusson didn’t know about the stolen equipment, then was the headmaster acting on his own? But Janie
had spied on Mr. Magnusson, and he had talked about a plan! Was that just a coincidence?

Whatever it was, it was making the kitchen staff uncomfortable.

“Ah…ho…You aren’t laughing,” Mr. Magnusson said finally, recovering.

“I’ve been kicked out of school,” Janie said quietly. “I don’t find it very funny. And I’ve lost all my equipment, all my materials.” She watched him.

He grew serious. “The school can’t keep your experiment from you,” he said. “It’s yours.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I’m going to call that Wellington—Windermere—first thing in the morning,” he said. “We’ll get it back for you. You call me, all right?”

“All right. And it’s Willingham.”

“Willingham. Good to see you.” He came forward and pumped her hand in farewell. And then he was gone, and everyone in the kitchen stared at Janie.

Bruno clapped his hands and said, “All right! Back to work!” in his usual kitchen voice, which was much too loud, without the usual kitchen noise beneath it.

Janie returned to the sink, trying to think. Could Mr. Magnusson really help her? Had she gotten everything wrong, and was he on her side? She allowed herself a little feeling of rising hope.

The dinner service ended, and she finished the mountain of
dishes, and then closed out the till for Giovanna. At the end of the evening, she took her peacoat from the kitchen coatrack and put it on, automatically feeling in the pocket for her little red notebook. But she felt only the smooth, satiny lining. She tried the other pockets—nothing. She froze, disbelieving. She was standing exactly where Magnusson had been.

She pushed aside the other coats and searched the floor in case the notebook had fallen out, but it wasn’t there. He had known where she was living and working, and he knew the coat she always wore, and he had come to the kitchen for the one thing he hadn’t already stolen: her notes. She realized with hot shame that she had tucked Benjamin’s letters inside the notebook, too, to keep them safe. Magnusson had taken it all, while everyone in the kitchen stared at him. But when had he done it—when he first came in? While he fumbled for a slip of paper from the little table? Before he left the kitchen? Had he been a pickpocket before he became an industrialist?

But it hardly mattered
when
Magnusson had taken the notebook; he had done it. He had everything now.

P
ip booked a cheap, last-minute, tourist-class cabin on the
United States,
the fastest ocean liner in the world. It would get him to New York in five days. A friend who had worked as a musician on the ship had told him what to do next.

The ship, Pip’s friend explained, wasn’t as glamorous as the
Queen Mary
or the
Queen Elizabeth,
but it wanted to be—bless the Yanks and their ambition. Most tables in the first-class dining room harbored a bored American teenage daughter, and there were never enough dancing partners. But the girls would report back to their friends about what sort of time they’d had on the
United States.
So the company needed boys to dance with the girls: glamorous boys, if they could get them.

That was a problem Pip felt he could solve.

The girls on board the ship in November would be slightly older than Pip, his musician friend told him. They would have finished Miss Porter’s School or Spence. Girls usually liked older boys, but they would make an exception for a sixteen-year-old television star.

On boarding the
United States,
Pip made sure the steward had recognized him from the telly. They chatted in a friendly way about
Robin Hood.
There were two narrow bunks in the cabin. His cabinmate, a stranger, hadn’t yet arrived, so Pip opened his single suitcase and tossed a dinner jacket and patent leather shoes on the bunk. It was the first dinner jacket in the history of his family, but he didn’t let that show. He pretended that it was something he wore all the time, and had always worn. He noted that the steward had seen the dinner jacket, and then he said he thought he’d go out on deck, have a look round.

The tourist-class deck was crowded with men traveling alone, but Pip could see, above him, the first-class deck. A few young ladies were leaning over the rail up there, ribbons from their hats blowing in the breeze.
That
was where Pip wanted to be. He paced on deck as well as he could amid the crush, thinking about Benjamin’s telegram, and then he went back inside.

There was a note on his narrow bunk saying that Pip had been moved to another cabin, which the purser hoped would be acceptable, and asking if he would care to dine in the first-class dining room at 8 p.m. Pip did a little jig of triumph. The dinner jacket had worked!

The steward had to lead him and his luggage to his new cabin, on the other side of the complicated architectural divisions between first and tourist class. The new cabin had a single bunk and a tiny bath and must have been the smallest first-class cabin on the ship, but it had access to that deck
with the young ladies with the ribbons in their hats—
that
was what was important.

That evening, Pip went to the ballroom before dinner, resplendent in his dinner jacket, with freshly combed hair, and surveyed the people having drinks at the tables near the dance floor. He moved toward a girl in a lavender gown sitting with her father. Both of them welcomed Pip with smiles. The girl’s name was Angelica Lowell, and she had eyes the color of slate. Her mother wasn’t mentioned, but it was clear that Mr. Lowell’s goal in life was to make his daughter happy. Pip regaled them with stories of life on the
Robin Hood
set and then asked Angelica to dance. She was warm and flexible in his arms, and they danced until it was time to go in to dinner. “I hope you’re at our table,” Angelica said.

But he wasn’t. The maître d’ steered him away, and Pip was placed with a family from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The eldest daughter was named Deborah, and she wore pale face powder and a blood-red dress, with her dark hair pulled severely back. She had an odd, portentous voice when she ordered the Dover sole for dinner, as if she were announcing the future. Her tanned and lighthearted family seemed not to know what to do with her. She told Pip she was interested in astrology. The Dover sole arrived, as predicted.

Deborah didn’t dance, but asked Pip if he’d walk on deck after dinner. They passed the Lowells’ table and Angelica glared at them. Pip smiled apprehensively. He hadn’t meant to get in trouble so soon.

It was cold on deck, but Deborah wore a black cashmere wrap and didn’t seem to feel the North Atlantic wind. In his dinner jacket, Pip was freezing. In a pocket of calm at the stern, Deborah leaned on the rail and looked up at the dark sky with its scattering of stars. “Do you believe in fate?” she asked, in her fortune-teller’s voice.

“Depends on what you mean,” Pip said, pulling his jacket tighter.

“Do you believe things happen for a reason?”

“I believe you can make ’em happen,” he said.

“Do you believe the alignment of the stars at the moment of your birth determines what kind of person you’ll be for the rest of your life?”

“No,” Pip said through chattering teeth. “I don’t believe that.” Every bone in his body seemed to be vibrating with cold.

“I do,” Deborah said, her eyes burning with meaning. “I believe the stars align when two people meet who are meant to be together
forever.
”

Pip guessed that meant she wanted him to kiss her, but he was shivering too violently to do anything about it. He might bite her nose off by mistake. “I th-think I have to go b-back ins-side,” he said.

On his way back to his room, he stopped for a hot lemon and honey.

“You look frozen,” the bartender said. “Romantic walk on deck?”

Pip nodded miserably, but the hot drink helped, and he woke the next morning without a cold. He had bacon and
fried tomatoes for breakfast in his cabin. In the afternoon, in the card room, he found a man with long white mustaches willing to play chess for money, and he made a nice little bundle. He didn’t see Deborah anywhere. He went down to the pool, deep amidships, and found slate-eyed Angelica in a violet bathing suit. She kicked her legs in the shallow end and laughed while Pip tried to do handstands, the water sloshing against the tile sides of the pool as the ship rolled.

That night in the ballroom, an assistant purser steered him toward a waif from Connecticut named Clara, with colorless hair and a whispery, ghostly voice. He asked her to dance, and she felt like a wisp of smoke. He was seized with the conviction that she actually
was
a ghost, that he had been set up to entertain a dead girl, and that her family was watching closely to see how he behaved. But then Angelica entered the ballroom and gave him a betrayed look. And if Angelica could see her, then Clara couldn’t be a ghost—could she? He thought she probably couldn’t.

When Clara claimed exhaustion and spilled herself into a chair, Pip turned to see Angelica waiting behind him. The next song began, and she stepped into his arms.

“Why were you dancing with her?” Angelica asked.

“To be friendly.”

“She has some terrible disease. She’ll be dead within the year.”

“Oh?” Pip said.

“Consumption,” Angelica said. “Or pneumonia. Whatever Keats had.”

“Do you know her?”

“I can tell just by looking at her. It might be catching. I’d keep your distance.”

“Hm,” he said.

“What will you do in New York?” she asked.

“Oh, have a look round.”

“I wish it were summer. We have a yacht, and a plane, and a beach house in Maine.”

“That rhymes,” Pip said.

“I meant you could come with us.”

“Might be a little cold.”

“Maybe next summer,” Angelica said, and Pip started to feel trapped by her small hand on his shoulder, and her other hand gripping his.

The next night in the ballroom, he met two cheerful girls in pretty frocks, Barbara and Maisie. They’d become friends on the crossing, and their families were dining together, and they were happy to share Pip with each other on the dance floor. Angelica was less happy, and she shot him a stormy look when he made the mistake of catching her eye over Barbara’s or Maisie’s smooth round shoulder.

She cornered him at the bar, where he was ordering lemonades. “Why are you dancing with them?” she hissed.

“They’re nice girls,” he said.

“They’re awful!” Angelica said. “They cluck together like chickens!”

“Oh, they’re all right,” Pip said.

“I thought you had taste and discrimination!” Angelica said.

He watched her long blue gown swish away, and then he turned back to Barbara or Maisie, whichever it was, who came smiling to take the lemonade from his hand.

* * *

Pip wasn’t used to his shiny black shoes, and had never danced so much in his life. He winced as he sat on his bed and peeled off his socks. The next morning, the steward brought him sticking plasters for the blisters.

“I’ve seen worse,” the steward said. “One of my young men came back every night with his feet bleeding. Like a cursed prince in a fairy tale.”

“Did he survive?” Pip asked.

“They all survive.”

“None of them jumped into the sea?”