The Apothecary (24 page)
“All right.”
“It’s
really
important.”
“So what is it?”
“They didn’t even think you’d have what we need.”
Sarah stamped her pretty foot with impatience. “Why don’t you just
tell
me!” she said.
W
e left school without being stopped, and Sarah Pennington led us to her house to look for warm clothes. It was as if Pip had his own spell, a love potion that made her agreeable to whatever he wanted. He caught my eye when Sarah wasn’t looking and mimed money crossing his hand—five bob. I mimed putting on a warm coat to indicate that he’d get his money when we had everything we needed. Pip laughed and walked ahead with Sarah.
“I don’t even know what five bob is,” I said to Benjamin. “How much am I in for?”
“About a hundred dollars,” he said.
I stopped walking.
“What?”
It was Benjamin’s turn to laugh. “No,” he said. “Maybe a dollar. Come on.”
I caught up to him. “I believed you!”
Benjamin looked pleased.
“Keep an eye out for truant officers,” Pip called back to us.
“Oh, they won’t bother
us
,” Sarah said.
The Pennington house, when we got there, was the biggest house I’d ever seen. It was in Knightsbridge, and it took up much of a city block. A butler let us in, looking Benjamin and Pip over suspiciously.
“These are my friends,” Sarah said. “They need some warm clothes to go out on a boat. We’ll just go look in the old wardrobes.”
The butler nodded. “Don’t you have school?”
“We were excused,” Sarah said.
“Ah,” the butler said. “Shall I take your things?”
I felt Benjamin, beside me, tighten his grip on the strap of his satchel.
“No, thank you,” Sarah said. “We won’t be long.”
We started up a grand staircase, past old portraits of pink-cheeked young men in tailcoats and willowy maidens in long dresses: generations of Penningtons who had been the richest and most attractive students at their schools. At the top of the stairs was a small painting of a little girl in a blue dress who crossed her ankles and gazed at the artist with a bearing that was already regal.
Pip stopped in front of it. “That’s you.”
“Oh,” Sarah said. “I was so bored, sitting for that.”
“You looked lonely,” he said.
“Lonely? I had a nurse or a governess with me every second!”
Pip said nothing, and raised his eyebrows at her.
“It was a perfectly ordinary childhood,” she snapped.
I bit my tongue to keep from reminding her that she had a butler and a nurse and a governess, which wasn’t very
ordinary
. I reminded myself we needed the clothes.
She led us down the hall to a bedroom done all in flowered upholstery, with a canopied bed and an enormous window seat. The room seemed unused and in perfect order. I went to the window and pushed the curtain aside to look outside. There were two men in suits standing on the other side of Knightsbridge, and I wondered if they were watching the house. But after a moment, they shook hands and walked in different directions without looking up at the windows. I let the curtain fall.
“This was my aunt Margaret’s room,” Sarah said, opening a wardrobe that ran along one wall. “She went off to America in the twenties, to Vassar or someplace, and brought back all kinds of shocking clothes.”
“Is she dead?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” Sarah said. “She’s just married. She lives in Scotland and she’s old and dull. But she used to be
so
glamorous.” She pulled out what looked like a diaphanous white silk handkerchief with spaghetti straps, embroidered with silver thread. “That’s one of her dresses. I don’t think she could get one arm in it now.”
“But we need
warm
things,” I said.
Sarah dropped the silver dress to the floor. “Where are you going again?”
“My uncle’s a fisherman,” Pip said. “He’s taking us on his boat.”
“Ugh,” Sarah said. “I get seasick in the bath. It’s tragic for my father, who’s terribly yachty.” She pulled out a long, dark fur. “That’s a raccoon coat. Everyone wore them in the twenties. I think it’s for a man.”
She handed the coat to Benjamin, who put it on and stood in front of a long oval mirror beside the wardrobe. He looked like a bear escaped from the zoo, and raised his arms as if to lumber forward in attack. Pip convulsed with laughter.
“Now
this
might be suitable for a boat,” Sarah said, pulling out a lined wool peacoat. “Here, Janie, try it.”
I shrugged the peacoat onto my shoulders, and it fit me. I put my hands in the pockets and came out with a navy blue watch cap, which I pulled over my hair. It was a good feeling, to be enshrouded in thick military wool like that—I felt oddly safer.
Sarah tilted her head to consider me. “That’s not terrible, actually,” she said. “It’s rather chic.”
Against my will, my eyes went to Benjamin in the mirror, to gauge his reaction. He stood with his arms hanging at his sides in the raccoon coat.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Looks warm.”
“But your legs will be cold,” Sarah said. She pulled out some silk long underwear and a few pairs of heavy wool pants, and she added them to the growing pile on the floor.
“Try those on,” she said. “I’ll take the boys to my brother’s room.”
They left, and I tried the warmest-looking pants on under my skirt. They fit fine, and I folded the warm clothes and sat on the end of the bed. The mattress was soft and inviting, and the room was quiet, and I had an overwhelming urge to lie down. It felt so luxurious just to be alone. I lay back and let my body relax into the bed’s silk coverlet, and looked up at the flowered patterns in the canopy overhead.
I thought it would be very restful to be Sarah Pennington for a little while. There would be no worries, no running naked through the cold, no fear of what would happen if the apothecary caught us and wouldn’t let us on the boat. I could feel myself sinking into the soft bed, as if I were falling very slowly, floating into oblivion.
Then I heard a slight cough, and I shot upright to see the long-faced butler standing in the door. I felt that my hair was askew and tried to smooth it with my hand.
“Did you find what you need, miss?” the butler asked.
“I think so.”
“May I ask, will Miss Pennington accompany you on this boat trip?”
“Oh, no. She gets seasick.”
“That’s a relief,” he said. “I answer to her father, you see.”
Sarah came back down the hall with the boys, who looked like Eskimos in heavy trousers and ski coats with fur-lined hoods. They were carrying warm boots. “We’ll need a trunk,” Sarah said.
“Of course,” the butler said. “I can have it delivered to the boat.”
I looked at Benjamin and Pip. It might actually work. The others would have luggage, too, and the crew wouldn’t know which trunks were coming from where.
“The boat’s called the
Kong Olav
,” I said. “It’s at the Port of London.”
“It’s Norwegian?” the butler said, frowning thoughtfully. “Then I daresay they’ll have dried codfish aboard, but have you arranged for proper things to eat?”
T
he trunk was sent ahead, and the chauffeured Daimler waited for us in Sarah Pennington’s drive. We crowded into the backseat, with Benjamin on my left, the side of his leg pressed against mine. Pip was on my right, with Sarah squeezed between him and the door.
“One of you can sit in front,” the driver said. He had clearly met a few charming pickpockets in his time, and he wasn’t amused by Sarah’s slumming.
“We have plenty of room,” Sarah said imperiously.
The driver sighed and pulled out into the street.
At St Beden’s, Pip stole a kiss while the driver wasn’t looking, and Sarah blushed crimson as she climbed out of the car. “Have fun!” she said, and she waved good-bye and skipped up the steps.
Pip looked at me. “What?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said, trying not to laugh. “I owe you a dollar.”
Benjamin did laugh, and I felt it in his body, through the leg that rested against mine. We didn’t need to sit quite so close together anymore, but it didn’t seem urgent to move away.
“To the port?” the driver asked.
“To the port,” Benjamin said, and the car swung away towards the river.
There was a guard at the gate, but he took one look at the shiny chauffeured Daimler and waved us through. We drove slowly past the docks, past the hulking boats and barges and cranes. There were little sailboats in one section and big industrial-looking cargo steamers in another.
Then we saw a steel boat about a hundred feet long, tucked in against the dock. It was painted bright blue, with a long white deckhouse on top. In crisp white letters on the blue hull, it said
KONG OLAV
. The bow was rounded and sledlike, I guessed for breaking the ice, but the boat itself was long and narrow, and looked like it might go fast.
Two crewmen were carrying Sarah Pennington’s trunk, with its mahogany leather sides, up the gangway. I guessed they were used to nice luggage, with Count Vili aboard, and no one stopped them. So that was progress at least: Our warm clothes were on the boat. We thanked the driver and walked down the dock as the Daimler purred away.
A longshoreman carrying a coil of rope over his shoulder bumped into Pip, knocking him forward a few steps.
“No bloody nippers on the docks,” he growled. “’Less you fancy a swim.”
Pip called the man something shocking.
The longshoreman grinned and called, “Same t’you, mate!”
I looked down into the murky water of the Thames and remembered my father telling me that the river had always been the city’s sewer system and that London’s toilets still flowed, ultimately, into it. I definitely didn’t fancy a swim.
There was a man standing beside the short gangway for climbing aboard the
Kong Olav
, and we walked over to him. His hair was sun-bleached white, and his skin weathered, and his lips so thin he seemed not to have any.
“We’re meeting my father on board,” Benjamin said. “Marcus Burrows. I’m supposed to bring him something.”
The man called up to the deck, “Ask the count if he wants a delivery!”
The plump, elegant man we had seen in Hyde Park appeared at the rail. He was as well-dressed as before: His three-piece suit was dark green, and over it he wore a long trench coat, unbuttoned, lined with dark silky fur. His eyes were friendly, and he didn’t have the manner of someone who was sought by both the British and the Soviet authorities.
“Ah, the children!” he said. “Thank you, Ludvik, send them up. Tell me, have you ever seen such a marvellous boat?” His voice reminded me of expensive furniture, something that belonged in Sarah Pennington’s house: rich and soft-textured.
Ludvik the guard stepped aside, and we climbed aboard the blue icebreaker, our footsteps ringing hollowly on the metal gangway. I made a mental note that we would have to step quietly when we were invisible.
The apothecary met us on deck, his face looking anxious beside the happy, complacent count. “Were you followed?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Benjamin said.
“You have the book?”
Benjamin nodded.
“Jin Lo is still collecting provisions,” his father said. “I hope she’s all right.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” I said, just because he seemed so nervous and agitated.
The
Kong Olav
wasn’t fancy, but it was orderly and clean, the steel deck painted and scrubbed, and the chrome metalwork polished. The skipper’s name was Captain Norberg, and he had a cragged face that looked as if it had spent years squinting into the wind. Aside from him, I counted five crewmen, including the guard at the bottom of the gangway, who all seemed to speak English. The bridge was at the foreward end of the deckhouse, with a tiny galley behind it. Next was a little sitting area Vili called the “saloon,” with built-in couches and a square table.
Beyond the saloon was a corridor with doors to the cabins on either side, and the apothecary led us back towards his cabin. Everything was small and crowded, and smelled of things that had been damp once. But Count Vili clearly loved the boat, and rhapsodised about its usefulness and efficiency, pointing with his knobby walking stick. As he gushed, Pip touched my arm and pointed to an open cabin door.