The Lamplighter's Funeral (Apprentices #1)

the long version

Each day the lamplighter tends his lamps, fills them with oil, trims the wicks, and lights them as twilight falls. Each night he walks the streets of London with a burning torch, giving safe passage to late revellers. This is Pallcat, who sees it as his solemn charge to shed light in dark places. The last thing Pallcat wants is company. He is a crusty old fellow and keeps himself to himself. But one night Possul walks into his life – a ragged little urchin with an angelic countenance that somehow touches him. Possul becomes the lamplighter’s apprentice. But as they make their nightly rounds together Pallcat grows more and more uneasy, for the child has an uncanny way of lighting up with his torch the very darkest corners of all, where it is better not to look ... Just who *is* Possul? Leon Garfield has written a powerfully atmospheric story of the mysterious brotherhood of lamplighters and linkmen who saw so much of the noisy, jostling, grim and dangerous life of the streets of night-time London, in the middle of the eighteenth century.