The Apothecary (25 page)
The cabin was piled with duffel bags and suitcases, including Sarah Pennington’s mahogany leather trunk. They were using the room for storage. I nodded. That was where we would hide and recover our warm clothes when we got on board.
“We can talk freely here,” Count Vili said. “The crew knows of our plan. They come from northern Norway, which will suffer from the effects of radiation if the test proceeds. The reindeer will be affected, and the fish, not to mention the children.”
We crowded into the apothecary’s cabin, which had twin bunks and a small washstand. There was barely room for all of us to stand. Benjamin pulled the worn leather Pharmacopoeia from his knapsack.
Count Vili reached for it with awe. “May I?” he asked. “I haven’t seen it since I was an undergraduate. I was far too stupid to appreciate it then.”
“You were very young,” the apothecary said.
“So were you,” Count Vili said, sitting on the bunk and crossing one plump leg over the other to prop up the book. “But you weren’t a fool.”
“You’d lost your parents,” the apothecary said.
“What did Oscar Wilde say? ‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’”
“How did they die?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine not having any parents to care deeply what happened to me. I thought I would feel unmoored, like a boat allowed to drift free.
Count Vili opened the book and scanned a page. “My mother was carried off by the Spanish flu,” he said, as if he had told the story many times, “in the epidemic of nineteen eighteen. She was a bit inbred, in the way of the aristocracy, I’m afraid, and had never been terribly strong. My father was executed without a trial by the Communists who came to power in Hungary after the first war.”
“The Communists
executed
people?” I said.
“Of course,” Vili said. “But then they themselves were executed, by the counter-revolutionaries who called themselves the Whites. It was a dreadful time in Hungary. We have not yet recovered. I love telling the story to Americans. You are so sweetly innocent, always aghast.” He turned a page of the book. “Ah, the avian elixir! I always wondered, in my dissolute youth, if it were really possible to become a bird.”
“It is!” Pip said. “It’s
great
!”
“You’ve done it?” the count said. “How wildly unfair that I haven’t.”
“Can you really stop time?” I asked.
“It’s more like slowing it down briefly,” he said. “It does nothing about wrinkles.” He put a hand to his round, smooth face, which was too cheerily plump to be wrinkled.
“How do you do it?” Benjamin asked.
“My boy, it’s taken a lifetime of study.”
“But you’ll do it to stop the bomb?”
“That’s the plan!”
“Oh,
please
take us with you!” I said. It was partly what I thought I should be saying, as someone who wasn’t allowed to go and didn’t have a secret plan. And it was mostly what I really meant—because if they would just let us stay, then we wouldn’t need to find a place to become invisible and run freezing and naked through the streets.
“Absolutely not,” Benjamin’s father said.
“What if you don’t make it back?” Benjamin asked his father. “What am I supposed to do then? I don’t want to be an orphan!”
“Oh, it isn’t the end of the world, to be an orphan,” Count Vili said, still flipping through the Pharmacopoeia.
“Easy for you to say,” Pip said. “With your magical tutor an’ your great bleedin’ pile of money.”
Count Vili looked up from the book and broke into a delighted smile. “True!” he said. “Well, then, we’ll just have to make it back safely.”
“Can Benjamin stay with one of you?” the apothecary asked. “With your parents?”
Pip and I looked at each other and said, “Sure” at the same time.
Then they herded us out of the cabin, through the saloon, just as Jin Lo came aboard with her arms full of bags and parcels, which she set down in the little galley.
“Good luck, Jin Lo,” I said. “Good luck, Mr Burrows.”
“Look out for my son, will you, Janie?” the apothecary said. “You too, Pip.”
Then he sent us off down the steel gangway. We passed the guard at the bottom, with his thatch of white hair, and walked away up the dock before turning back to look at the boat, with its round blue icebreaking hull.
“Now,” Pip said, rubbing his hands together. “How ’bout a nice hot bath?”
A
cross the Lower Thames Road from the Port of London’s gate, there was a narrow street, and down that narrow street was a row of terraced houses, all attached to each other. Pip eyed them, looking for one in which no one was home, and no one would be. Finally he stopped in front of a house with lace curtains and dark windows. “That’s the one,” he said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“How d’you ever know? It’s just a feeling you get.”
“Should we go around the back? It’s broad daylight.”
“
Burglars
go in the back,” Pip said. “Act like you’re doing nothing wrong. It’s our auntie’s house, and we’ve got our key. Sticks a bit, it does.”
So I tried to look as innocent as possible, chatting with Benjamin on the stoop, while Pip made picking the lock look convincingly like struggling with a sticky key. Then he pushed the door open, and we went inside.
“Auntie?” he called, but he was right that no one was home.
It was a narrow house, one room wide and two rooms deep on each floor. Pip locked the door behind us. A steep staircase led straight up from the front hallway, and we found a bathroom just off the second-floor landing. The bathtub was old but clean—much cleaner than a high school rubbish bin.
The pipes screeched as we turned on the water, then thundered as the water poured out, and I hoped the neighbours were away. Benjamin set the lever that stopped the drain, then poured the bottle of invisibility solution under the tap, like bath oil. I thought about the fact that Sarah Pennington’s necklace had been melted and ground into powder, and was now suspended in the water. Once, I would have teased Benjamin about taking a bath in it, but now it didn’t seem right. Sarah wasn’t Benjamin’s crush anymore; she was Pip’s—
girlfriend
? The thought was bizarre.
When the bath was full, we turned off the water, and the doorbell rang downstairs. “Mrs Jenkins?” a woman’s voice called, muffled by the glass in the front door. “Are you in there?”
We all froze.
“Mrs Jenkins?” the voice called again.
“Let’s find another house,” I whispered, in a panic.
“We can’t!” Benjamin said. “The bath is drawn!”
“I’ll go talk to ’er,” Pip said. “Get in the tub.” And he was gone.
Benjamin pulled his jacket off. “I know this is awkward,” he said. “You can turn around if you want. But you should undress, too. I won’t look. We need to move quickly.”
I turned to face the towel rack, which had a blue towel hanging from it, under a framed needlepoint of a basket of flowers. Each blossom was made of tiny cross-stitches. I felt frozen with shyness and indecision, and wished we still had the rolling blackboard as a screen.
“Hullo!” I heard Pip say downstairs. “Can I help you?”
I couldn’t hear the woman’s exact words, but she sounded surprised to have the door opened by a smallish boy. I heard Benjamin step into the water behind me, and imagined his lean body sliding into the tub. I took off my school blazer and dropped it to the floor. Then I slipped off my shoes.
“My auntie Jenkins isn’t home,” Pip said downstairs. I could tell he was making his voice a little sweeter and more childish than usual, and his accent more like Benjamin’s. “She’ll be here soon. I’m meant to have a bath. Is there a message?”
The woman stammered an uncertain apology.
I managed to roll my tights down under my skirt, and hopped on one foot to pull them off my toes. I pretended I was just slipping a swimsuit off under a towel, after junior lifesaving, with a bunch of other kids on the sand in Santa Monica. It was the same as that, I told myself—but of course it wasn’t.
The tub water sloshed, and I turned and saw wet, foot-shaped depressions form on the tufted blue bath mat. I stood there in my skirt with the cool air on my bare legs, knowing I had to unbutton my shirt next, and that Benjamin was standing naked—invisible, but still naked—in front of me. I could see one of his knees.
“I promise I won’t look,” Benjamin said. “But you should hurry.”
I fumbled with my shirt buttons, wondering if he really wouldn’t look, then slid the shirt off my arms and dropped the pleated skirt. As I moved towards the tub, my bare shoulder brushed Benjamin’s invisible one.
“Sorry!” we both said at once.
I stepped into the bath and sank down into its enveloping warmth, with my eyes closed and the world silent and sealed away. I left the tip of my nose out, and when I sat up and opened my eyes, the rest of me seemed to be gone.
A towel floated in the air as Benjamin held it up for me. I pushed myself up out of the bath and accidentally kicked the lever that controlled the drain plug, stubbing my toe.
“Ow!” I said.
“Janie!” Benjamin said.
The mechanism behind the wall of the tub had opened the drain, and the water was rushing out at an alarming rate.
“Oh, no!” I tried to push the lever down again to stop the drain, but it was stuck. I tried to close the drain itself, but it wasn’t one you could push into place.
I felt Benjamin’s arm slide wetly against mine as he tried to force the lever down, but he couldn’t do it either. I held my hands over the drain, but it wasn’t a small one, and the water went through my fingers. I put my foot over it, and that finally stopped the water, but by then there was only an inch or two left in the bath—not enough for Pip to get fully invisible in.
“What do we
do
?” I asked.
Downstairs, Pip’s voice said, “I’ll tell her you called round, then. It’s time for my bath. Ta!” We heard his footsteps on the stairs, and he came into the bathroom.
“You two in here?” he said, pulling off one boot. “I don’t think she believed me. She might come back.” Then he saw the bath, and heard the last of the bathwater draining away. “You didn’t save none for me?”
“I kicked the drain lever and it stuck,” I said. “I’m so sorry!”
He looked around the empty bathroom. “There’s no more potion?”
“We used it all,” Benjamin’s voice said.
Pip sighed. “All right, then. I’ll jus’ find another way onto the boat.”
I took the towel from Benjamin, thinking that if anyone could get on that boat visible, it was Pip. But I also thought that if Pip had gotten in the tub before me,
he
would never have kicked the lever. “I’m so sorry,” I said again.
“S’all right,” he said. “Dry your hair off. It’s cold out.”
There was another knock at the front door, downstairs. A stern male voice called, “Who’s in there?”
“Let’s go!” Pip said.
“What about our clothes?” They were scattered all over the floor, and they were traceable to St Beden’s.
“I’ll take ’em,” Pip said, and he bundled them under his arm. Then he turned the noisy water in the bathtub on again, and let it run.
We crept quietly downstairs, watching the doorknob rattle as the man outside tried to get in. Pip whispered to us to stay out of the way, and then stood close to the hinge side of the door. He unlocked it, and the man pushed, and the door swung open, hiding Pip with the bundle of clothes.
“Hello?” the man said, stepping into the house.
Upstairs, the bathtub water was rumbling. The man tiptoed up to catch the bathing boy-housebreaker, and as he did, the three of us slipped out onto the stoop. Pip stashed our clothes behind the first likely low wall, and we ran back towards Lower Thames Street. The cold pavement stung my bare feet, and I thought that if we were going to keep doing this invisibility thing, I had to find some invisible shoes.
“What time do you think it is?” I asked. The boat was leaving at three.
“Half past two,” Pip said.
I saw a new watch buckled on his wrist. “Where’d you get that?”
“From my auntie Jenkins,” he said. “Can’t be late.”
I was very cold, and all I could think about was getting onto the boat and burrowing into the enormous raccoon coat, but then I noticed a familiar car parked on our side of the street, just across from the Port of London’s gate.
“Look!” I said.
It was the green sedan with three men sitting in it: two in front and one in back.
“Go listen,” Pip said. “I’ll see that the boat don’t leave.”
He sauntered off across the street, and Benjamin and I moved invisibly closer to the green sedan. The passenger side window was open a few inches to let the smoke from Mr Danby’s cigarette out. The Scar was in the driver’s seat, so I assumed he had his vision back. And the man in the back was Leonid Shiskin, in a warm wool coat.
Mr Shiskin looked nervous, and twisted a fur hat in his lap. “The apothecary is very clever,” he was saying.
“I agree,” Danby said. “He’s a formidable opponent. I thought he’d blinded us for life.”
“He is also my friend.”