The Cartographer's Apprentice

What it looks like, and what it does

A young man in ink-stained shirtsleeves at a drafting table by a window, drawing a road across blank paper. Beyond the road's end the paper is a fine stipple of forms. Maps stacked behind him, curling at the corners.

Draws after dark with the window open. Does not erase. Writes a small house at the end of each new road and a name in the margin.

What is known

Tobias Wren, nineteen, apprentice at Hallam & Voss Surveyors. His first solo map of the Marlow district carried a road the county did not have.

The road was built the following year. Every map he has drawn since has come true within three years. He cannot say where he gets them. The firm keeps the maps in a locked drawer, because the roads he draws now have names.

What it can do

• Draws places that will exist within a few years
• Names them correctly

Where it stops

• Cannot draw what has not yet been decided
• Is accurate only within the district he has walked

An encounter

Voss pinned his latest map against the window and held it to the county plan. Where the plan showed a field, the map showed a lane, six houses and a chapel. In the margin of the last house, in his careful hand, was her husband's name. She gave the map back to him and asked him not to draw any more that week.

Prudence Voss, senior partner, Drawing office, Hallam & Voss, A winter evening

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Fourteen of fourteen maps have been matched to later construction within three years.
• incomplete: Eleven margin names have been traced to later residents. Three have not been traced.
• interpretation: He may not be predicting. He may be where the plan is made.

Still unresolved

His last map ends at the paper's edge in a road that leads to a house with his own name in the margin.

Where it has been recorded

• The Marlow District (confirmed) — Recorded by Prudence Voss, senior partner.

Stories about it

• The Cartographer's Apprentice at Marlow (Grotesque encounter, 3 min) — A surveyor's apprentice in Marlow draws the map of the new road that the council has promised, and the road appears on the ground three years later, but the apprentice himself is not on the survey sheet, and the figure walking the road at dusk has his face.

Connected entities

• The Rearranger — Both lay out a place before anyone lives in it, and both lay it out for a particular person.