The Apothecary (15 page)

Pip climbed, still more like a spider, back up to join us. “They’re right underneath the gutter pipe,” he said. “We can’t climb down.”

“Some plan,” Benjamin said.

“Right, you come up with a better one!”

“The elixir!” I plunged my hand into the pocket of my school blazer. The gardener had told us to use it only for a good purpose, and escaping off this roof seemed awfully good. But my pocket was empty. I felt the other one. “It’s gone,” I wailed. “I was sure I had it.”

“What’s a lickser?” Pip asked.

“An
elixir
,” Benjamin said. “Like a potion.”

I was too stunned by the loss to lie. I lowered my voice so the people on the ground couldn’t hear. “It was supposed to, well . . . to turn us into birds,” I said. “At least we think it would. But I lost it.”

“How could you
lose
it?” Benjamin asked.

That made me indignant. “You didn’t even think it would work!”

“But you did!” he said. “So you should have kept it!”

Then we heard a grunt of effort, and saw Danby’s hand grip the roof where we had climbed up from the broken window. I looked back at Pip in a panic, and he was holding up the little brown bottle, between his thumb and forefinger.

“This it?” he asked.

“How did you get that?”

“From your pocket,” he said. “When you left with your mate there.” He nodded towards the pale fingers gripping the roof ’s edge.

I put my hand on my blazer pocket and tried to think when Pip could have reached into it. It seemed impossible. There was another grunt, and a second hand appeared on the roof next to the first. Then Mr Danby’s face appeared, strained with effort. He hadn’t yet figured out how to lever himself up onto the roof.

“Benjamin,” he called. “Janie. Please. That man you saw in the car is a friend. He’s been working for England. I can give you proof.”

“You’re lying!” I said. I turned back to Pip. “You have to give me the bottle.”

Pip backed away, along the peak of the roof. “So you can leave me again?” he said. “What if I just drink it, and leave
you
?”

“We
couldn’t
take you with us before,” I said, crawling forward. “But now we can. We’ll all leave together.”

“How long does it last?”

“We don’t know.”

“Is there enough for all three of us?”

“Probably.”

“You don’t know!”

Danby got one leg up over the edge of the roof with a thump. Pip stood, right on the peak, and ran effortlessly away. Benjamin and I tried to follow, but my feet kept slipping down the sides.

The gothic roof of Turnbull had two peaks, like a child’s drawing of two triangular mountains side by side, and then a round turret beyond. Pip slid easily down into the valley between the two peaks and clambered up the second one. I hesitated behind him.

“Go!” Benjamin said.

So I slid with effort after Pip and started climbing. Benjamin followed.

Danby was still slipping along on the first peak, in slick leather-soled shoes. “Don’t be ridiculous, Miss Scott,” he called. “We’re on the same side!”

Pip slid down the second peak, which dropped off into empty space, except where it attached to the cylindrical turret. The crowd on the ground had moved so they were still just below him. He edged over to the base of the turret and started to climb up it. Benjamin and I followed. The brickwork on the turret wall was uneven, and the bricks created footholds and handholds, so it was possible to scale. I’d even started to get used to the height. The children were cheering, and looked happy and excited, as if they were watching a film.

Once we had climbed into the top of the turret, it was as if we were in a kind of lookout post. There didn’t seem to be any way to get back inside the house. Maybe there had once been access, but now there was only a drain to let out the rain. The lookout had walls about three feet high, so the people below couldn’t see us unless we stood and looked over the wall, which we did.

The children immediately cheered, and the matron looked stern. “Come
down
,” she said. “You have nowhere to go.”

“Call the detectives!” Benjamin said. “Tell them to come back!” He pointed at Danby, who had sat down on the nearest peak to rest. “That man is a Russian spy!”

Danby, his striped socks revealed below his trouser cuffs by his bent knees, wiped his handsome forehead with a handkerchief. “Benjamin,” he said wearily. “I am no more a Russian spy than you are.”

“Jump!” one of the ragged children shouted to us. “We’ll catch you!”

“Yes, jump!” some of the others joined in, shouting and laughing and leaping, to demonstrate how we should do it.

Danby started climbing down the roof towards the base of our turret.

I sank down behind the wall and turned to Pip. “Open the bottle,” I said. “We’ll all take some.”

But Pip hesitated, and Benjamin lost patience. He snatched it away, unscrewed the top, and drank.

Right away, a startled look came over his face, and he set the bottle down. For a second, nothing more happened. I looked over the wall and saw Danby trying to scale our turret. His feet slipped, and he swore.

When I looked back at Benjamin, he had started to shrink. His head grew longer in front and sank into his shoulders, and his body tilted forward at the hips. A feathered tail grew out behind him, and he kept rapidly getting smaller. His hands disappeared, and his arms became wings. Then everything I recognised as Benjamin was gone.

CHAPTER 17

Flight

W
here Benjamin had been, on the stone floor of the turret of Turnbull Hall, was a plump-chested, sand-coloured bird with a crest of feathers on his head. I’ve wondered since that day about why I wasn’t more astonished, watching Benjamin turn into a bird. But it’s very hard
not
to accept your friend turning into a bird when you see it happening in front of you, and could reach out and touch his feathered head if you wanted. I didn’t recognise the type of bird he was at the time, but I learned later that it was a skylark, which is a very scruffy, energetic, Benjamin-like bird. “I don’t know what exactly you are,” I said. “But you’re definitely something that flies. And you’re not the size of a giant condor.”

“That’s a
maz
ing,” Pip said. He grabbed the bottle, drank half of what was left, and handed it off to me. His eyes widened. “Oh, that
is
odd, that is,” he said.

After a few seconds, he started to shrink, too, and his head tilted and lengthened into a beak, and then he was a tiny, dark-feathered swallow. He shook out his curving wings as if to test their length.

I had been so preoccupied with their transformations that I hadn’t noticed Danby’s exasperated face rising over the turret wall. He stared at me, and then at the two birds. He looked down over the side of the turret for the missing boys, and then back at me. “Where did they go?” he asked.

“What is it, sir?” the matron’s voice called anxiously from below. “What’s happened?”

“Only the girl is here,” Danby called back. “And two birds.”

“Two what?”

“Two
birds
,” Danby said.

He started to push himself up over the turret wall towards us, and I moved away from him.

Pip the swallow gave a little double hop and lifted off, as if casually, into the sky. He didn’t look like a child who’d become a bird with no preparation—he flew as if he’d been a bird all his life, dipping and soaring through the air. Benjamin the skylark watched him, too.

A high, piping child’s voice came up from the ground, saying, “Perhaps they became the birds!”

An older girl said sharply, “People don’t just become
birds
.”

I thought of the gardener saying we had to
allow for the
possibilities
, and I felt sorry for the older girl, who couldn’t make room in her imagination for what the smaller child had guessed.

Danby seemed suddenly to make room for it in his imagination, and he grabbed at the skylark, but Benjamin leaped just out of reach along the turret wall. Then he was in the air. He gave a birdcall of surprise, and swooped and chirped in a way that sounded like laughter. He wasn’t as graceful as Pip, but he was flying. There were cheers from the children, who were all allowing for the possibility now.

While Danby watched Benjamin fly away, I drank the rest of the bottle. The elixir was syrupy in texture, and bitter and mossy in taste.

I felt a strange, rushing feeling in my veins, and understood why Benjamin and Pip had looked so surprised. I’d never been aware of each individual blood vessel in my body like that, and of the blood coursing through them. Then I felt my heartbeat speed up, and my bones seemed to lighten. I dropped the bottle and it fell to the ground. The distant sound of glass smashing on the walk below seemed to shake Danby from his reverie, and he lunged towards me.

My skull felt like it was changing shape, and lightening, and I thought:
Allow for the possibilities
. And then I leaped, still human, off the roof. Danby caught the end of my scarf, and it’s a good thing it wasn’t tied on, or he might have broken my neck. It slipped over my shoulder as I jumped, and I left him with the scarf in his hand.

I plummeted, of course, but I knew from Benjamin and Pip how quickly I would change. My hands became wings in midair, and my legs became tiny bird legs. I stretched my new wings tentatively and rose up just as they finished growing, and just before I would have crashed into the hard ground.

I rose to the second-storey windows, and then the third. I looked down at myself and saw a smooth, round red-feathered stomach. I was a robin! But there seemed to be something wrong with my upper wings, just around my bird’s shoulders. Then I remembered Danby snatching my scarf away just as I was changing, and realised my wings must be missing feathers.

Benjamin and Pip were circling overhead, calling out to me, and I fluttered clumsily towards them. I started to think about what I should do to get to where they were, but as soon as I started analysing all the necessary motions, I felt myself fall.

“Catch the robin!” Mr Danby called.

“I’ll get her!” the matron said.

The ground came dizzyingly close, and the children shouted, “Fly! Fly away!”

I heard a panicked call from the skylark. I willed myself to be near him, stopped thinking, and instantly shot up into the air. The children cheered as I rose free. We were high over Turnbull, looking down at the dumbstruck and furious adults and the laughing, triumphant children. And then we were sailing away.

I had sometimes, before that day, had dreams about flying, but dreams had
nothing
on the real thing. We soared high over the streets of the East End, and the people looked tiny below. We could see where the bombs had fallen in the war, and where they had left buildings untouched. Pip wheeled and hovered and then dived with rocket speed towards the ground before soaring up again with a gleeful, birdlike laugh.

I couldn’t manage the acrobatics with my incomplete wings. I wondered if Danby still had the scarf, or if it had turned to feathers in his hand. I looked back towards Turn-bull and saw the green sedan pulling out of the drive. I realised that Danby and the Scar would know where Benjamin’s father was, and if we followed them, they might take us there.