Deleted scene from My Father's Son
by Penny Freeman
Holborn, January, 1809
Accustomed to their drafty garrets and scanty meals, too little coal for their fires, too few hours in their days, the overworked, underpaid, unappreciated solicitor apprentices of ‘the pit’ gallery at Schoonover, Pensinger, Conroe & DuPre knew that despite the terms of their articles being fulfilled, they may spend years more as a ‘fledgling’, as pompous Pensinger delighted in calling them, and thus never questioned their fate.
Rather, they endured it for, after all, theirs were the oldest, most respected chambers in The Temple. To represent Schoonover even as a lackey afforded a man a certain measure of respect. The chamber’s portfolio of patrons was second to none and in such a situation, an alert, attentive apprentice could find his fortunes made.
Thus, they guarded their places of honor and subjugation, ‘the nest’, as Schoonover dubbed it long before the birth of any there. Flanked by the long row of windows which lit the room and guarded by an iron rail as solid as the firm, the nest sat situated atop the closet for the chamber’s most closely held documents. It overlooked the pit, a warehouse of clerks and attorneys perched atop their high stools, row upon row, scratching their lives into oblivion.
Their own desks too narrow and confined for the books and folios which overburdened them, each allowed far too little space in which to work, the fledgling solicitors performed their own tasks conscientiously. They toiled ever with an eye for appeasing Stickler, their master, for they knew him impossible to impress. A brittle old man of failing eyesight and short temper, with ears to compensate for one and exacerbate the other, he possessed not an humane bone in his body. Taut, sharp, and austere, they knew the ancient yet breathed for he was far too near to brook the expense of dying.
