The Apothecary (21 page)
He looked around, dazed, and held out his hands in front of him, staring at them. Then he saw his son looking up at him from below. “Benjamin!” he said.
Pip stepped off his footstool and offered it to the apothecary, who climbed down from the counter. He wiped ooze off his pale chest, and it plopped to the floor. Benjamin threw his arms around his father, and the apothecary looked surprised, then wrapped his arms around Benjamin, too. I remembered their argument in the shop, and how little Benjamin had wanted to be an apothecary, and I wondered if it had been a long time since they hugged like this. Benjamin was as tall as his father, but rested his head on his shoulder with his eyes closed, like a kid. I had a pang, thinking of my own parents, who were out in the country knowing nothing about where I was.
When Benjamin and his father released each other, Jin Lo stepped forward and extended her hand. “I am Jin Lo.”
The apothecary blinked at her. “You are?”
“Not safe here,” she said. “We go now. You have clothes?”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “In our correspondence, I had thought you were—well, a man.”
Jin Lo shrugged, as if she got that all the time. She was extraordinarily pretty, especially when she stopped looking annoyed and looked relieved, as she did now that the apothecary was back.
Mr Burrows took in all of us now. “You’re the American girl,” he said to me.
“Yes,” I said. “Janie. This is Pip.”
“Pip,” he said, still dazed, and he turned to Jin Lo. “How long has it been? Have I missed the test?”
“No,” she said. “We meet at boat tomorrow.”
“What test?” Benjamin asked.
The apothecary rubbed his sticky forehead. “I haven’t finished preparing.”
“You have things you need?” Jin Lo asked.
“Yes, of course,” he said, wiping his face. Most of the ooze had dripped off him now, onto the floor. Benjamin found him a spare pair of spectacles. He took a folded change of clothes from a cupboard and quickly pulled them on, then looked around at his shelves. From another cupboard, he took a black leather medical bag and started filling it with bottles. Jin Lo helped, suggesting items.
“I have to go to the Physic Garden,” the apothecary said, and I realised he couldn’t know.
“The gardener’s dead,” I said.
The apothecary stared at me.
Just then Pip looked up, with a twig of licorice root in his mouth. “Shh!” he said. He pointed to the ceiling.
We listened. There were footsteps upstairs.
“Is there a way out, down here?” I whispered.
The apothecary shook his head. He took a jar of grey powder off the shelf and handed it to Jin Lo, who opened it and nodded, as if she understood. She took a long glass tube from a rack of tools and stuck it into the powder like a drinking straw.
The apothecary picked up his medical bag in silence.
Jin Lo climbed the ladder first, carrying the jar of powder, and I followed close behind her. I saw the backs of two men crouched in the shop, inspecting the disturbed Morrison shelter. I couldn’t see their faces, but I knew from their shapes that it was Danby and the Scar.
Jin Lo crept silently towards the door. I climbed out of the cellar, but I wasn’t as soundless as Jin Lo. A floorboard squeaked, and the men heard me and turned.
The Scar lunged for me, but Jin Lo pulled the straw from the jar and blew a cloud of grey powder in their faces. Both men clutched their eyes. Danby shouted, and the Scar said something in German. He stumbled towards Jin Lo, trying blindly to grab her, but she slipped past him.
We ran through the ruined shopfront and out the front door, followed by Benjamin and his father and Pip. Danby and the Scar tried to chase after us, but crashed blindly into the standing shelves, unable to see.
“Is that stuff permanent?” Benjamin asked as we walked quickly down Regent’s Park Road, but not so quickly that we would draw attention.
“Oh, no,” his father said. “It would be a terrible thing to blind someone.”
“Not so terrible to blind
those
two,” Benjamin said.
“Oh, yes,” his father said. “Even them.”
T
he blood drained from the apothecary’s face when he heard how the gardener had been killed. I didn’t think it was safe to go back to the garden, but the apothecary insisted that he needed to. Benjamin and Jin Lo helped him around the corner to my parents’ flat, where I ran inside to tell Mrs Parrish that I was spending the night with my friend Sarah so we could do our Latin homework together.
“Your parents won’t mind?” Mrs Parrish asked.
“No, not at all,” I said.
“In my day, a girl with any looks on her never bothered with Latin,” Mrs Parrish said. “Boys didn’t like a girl was
too
smart.”
“Things have sure changed!” I said, smiling brightly, one foot out the door. I could smell the gin on her breath from where I stood. I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I was wearing Benjamin’s clothes.
“Oh, brave new world,” Mrs Parrish said. “Susan, your friend’s name was?”
“Sarah,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “Sarah. I’d better write that down.”
“Bye, Mrs Parrish!” I closed her apartment door.
We told the apothecary, as we took the back alleys to Chelsea in the dark, how we’d been arrested and taken to Turnbull, and then nearly captured by Mr Danby, our Latin teacher who seemed to be a spy, and his Stasi friend.
“Danby told us that the Scar is a double agent working for England,” Benjamin said. “But we think
Danby
is the double agent, secretly working for the Soviets.”
“I see,” his father said, but I wasn’t sure that he did.
We had arrived at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and the apothecary looked up at the locked gate. “I need to see where the gardener died,” he said.
I shuddered at the idea of going to the cottage, but we helped him over the fence. Pip and Jin Lo scaled it easily by themselves, and dropped down to the other side.
The garden was quiet, and we walked on the grass that bordered the paths, to avoid the crunching of the gravel. We showed him the broken sundial, and he peered through the window at the floor where we had found the gardener. There was still a dark stain I knew must be blood. It didn’t seem like a good idea to go trooping through a crime scene.
“There wasn’t any need for them to kill him,” the apothecary said. “He was the gentlest man I ever knew.”
“They killed him because he was helping us,” I said. “It’s our fault.”
“No,” he said. “It’s mine.”
We showed him where the avian elixir had been hidden among the green rows of the
Artemisia veritas
.
“Have you—?” he asked.
“I was a skylark,” Benjamin said. “That’s how we escaped Turnbull.”
His father smiled sadly. “My father showed me the avian elixir to win me over to his practice. I was planning to do the same with you.”
“It would’ve worked,” Benjamin said.
“Yes, I see that now. I was going to tell you when I thought you were ready. But you—well, you seemed to be headed in a different direction.”
“If you’d told me the truth, I might not have been.”
Being near the cottage was making me nervous. “I don’t think we should stay here,” I said. “Someone will find us. How long will the blindness last on Danby and Scar?”
“It depends on the dosage and the accuracy of the delivery,” the apothecary said.
“Very accurate,” Jin Lo said. “Full dosage.”
“Then perhaps overnight,” he said. “But I must be in the garden at first light.”
“We can hide in the white mulberry tree,” Benjamin said. “I used to play inside it.” He led us away from the cottage and out of the inner garden to a tree with long branches draping down to the ground. He held one of the branches aside, and we walked into a hollow that was like a green cave, with room for all five of us to sit around the trunk.
“What a hideout!” Pip said, and he flopped onto his back to look up at the canopy of leaves overhead.
“So tell us why the British military and Soviet security are both after you,” Benjamin said to his father.
The apothecary sat on the ground and seemed to gather his thoughts. “My father,” he said, “and his father before him, and generations of our family going back to the Middle Ages were engaged in a study of matter, as it grew out of the attempt to heal the human body. The work has always been secretive, and has often been considered a threat by the various authorities— with the exception of Henry the Eighth. He was very interested in medicine, and open to creative solutions to his various woes. The trouble was that he changed his mind so often about what the solutions should be. As he did about his wives.”
“Our ancestors knew the
king
?” Benjamin asked.
“Royal favour has come and gone,” the apothecary said. “The secrets, meanwhile, were kept in the Pharmacopoeia.” He looked suddenly anxious. “You do have the book?”
I could tell from Benjamin’s face that he had forgotten about the Pharmacopoeia. “It’s safe,” he said.
“Safe where?”
“At school.”
The apothecary looked aghast. “Where your Mr Danby works?”
“Mr Danby is blind and doesn’t know it’s there,” I said.
“I hope you’re right,” the apothecary said, and went on. “Over time, as travel and correspondence became easier, we began to seek out people in other countries who were engaged in a similar study. The work has always been accelerated by wartime, when the offences to the human body are increased. When new and innovative ways are found to hurt, we find new and innovative ways to combat injury and pain. And there have, of course, been offshoots of the practice, and discoveries that have nothing to do with medicine. Temporary alterations.”
“Like becoming birds,” Pip said.
“Precisely,” the apothecary said. “Tell me who this boy is again?”
“We were locked up in Turnbull together,” Benjamin said. “He helped us escape. He’s a friend.”
“Then I owe you my thanks.”
Pip nodded. “Go on with the story.”
“When you were very small, Benjamin, the war began,” he said. “Children were sent to the countryside by the thousands, with labels tied around their necks. You were too young to go alone. Some mothers went, of course, but your mother helped me in my work. She didn’t want to leave, and I—well, I didn’t know what I would do without you both. And for a long time, nothing happened. We were given an infant’s gas mask for you, and your mother carried the horrible thing everywhere, but we never had to use it.
“Then the Blitz began, and the bombs came every night. Hundreds of German planes carrying hundreds of tons of explosives and incendiary bombs. We finally decided that you couldn’t stay in London, that your mother had to take you out of the city. We were making the arrangements for both of you to leave when a bomb fell one night, unexploded, in the middle of Regent’s Park Road.”
The apothecary paused and looked at his hands.
“Your mother had nursing skills and worked for the Women’s Voluntary Service. She was out after the air raid was over, helping to see who was hurt, when the bomb suddenly went off and threw her against a wall. Her neck was broken, and she was killed instantly.”
There was a silence under the mulberry tree that seemed to fill my ears and take away all sounds.
“People were putting out fires,” he said. “And I was sitting there in the street, in the chaos, with my dead wife in my arms. I’ve never known so much pain. I was struck by the senselessness of the bombing. And the fear. And all those young men dying in France and Italy and Greece and Africa and Germany, for victory—I was in a kind of nightmare, in those years. A kind of shock.
“Then the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end the war in the Pacific. And there was great celebration and relief. It seemed—monumental. Such enormous power the Americans had. I had known, from my correspondence with other scientists, that the nuclear experiments were happening, but I was not prepared for the bomb. The first thing I remember thinking is that the unbearable pain I had felt when your mother died was spread over those two Japanese cities, hundreds of thousands of times over, in two horrific clouds. All over the whole country, really.”
Jin Lo had started to weep silently, and the apothecary turned to look at her. I thought she was remembering the Japanese soldiers in China, and I tried to think how to explain that to the apothecary. She seemed to read my mind.
“I am fine,” she said, and she wiped her eyes. “Tell story.”
“There was so much anger and grief and outrage and loss,” the apothecary said. “And now there was this terrible bomb with which angry people could simply wipe each other out. I had this small boy, you see, being raised in the grief and the rubble, and I couldn’t imagine letting him grow up with such fear. It wasn’t a world that deserved to have such an awful bomb.”
He paused. “So I began to work,” he said. “I knew in a general way what the atomic scientists were doing, and I knew how to rearrange atoms, and manipulate them, to make one thing into another. It was my father’s work, and his father’s. And as I worked, there were rumours spreading. The Soviets were making their own bomb, and the Americans were building bigger ones. Both countries were arming themselves with weapons that could destroy the world. People said that as long as they both had such terrible weapons, no one would ever use them. But I thought I knew something about people and their weapons. They
want
to use them.”