by Maile Meloy
The shop was silent, but smelled oddly of smoke. Benjamin locked the door behind us, and we moved through the silent aisles towards a light in a back room. I tried walking on tiptoe, but that made my legs shake. I had to put my heels down to stop the trembling.
In the back office, the apothecary was burning papers in a small metal wastepaper basket, feeding them into the fire.
“Benjamin!” he said. “You can’t be here! They’re coming!”
“Who’s coming?”
“I’m not certain. But you mustn’t be here!”
“Are you a spy for the Russians?”
His father peered at him through his spectacles. “Of course not!”
“But I saw you in the park! Shiskin passed you a message. He works for the Soviet embassy.”
The apothecary shook his head. “I don’t have time to explain, Benjamin. I have to hide the book.”
“What book?”
The apothecary answered by pulling a large leather-bound volume from a cupboard. Then we heard the locked door rattling in the front of the shop. “They’re here!” he said. “You both have to hide.” He set down the book to lift an iron grate in the floor, revealing stairs leading down to a cellar.
“I’m not going down there!” Benjamin said.
“You’ll go now,” his father said, with a sharpness I hadn’t imagined he was capable of. As if he had just had the desperate thought, he thrust the book into Benjamin’s hands.
“We can stay and help you fight them!” Benjamin said.
“Go!” his father said.
“We’ll go get the police,” I said.
“No police! I need you to protect the Pharmacopoeia and keep it safe. Please do this thing for me.”
“Protect it from what?” Benjamin asked.
“Anyone who comes looking for it.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be all right. Just take care of the book. It’s been in our family for seven hundred years.”
“Dad, wait!”
“I have a plan. I’ll be fine. Just go.” The apothecary lowered the grate after us. Someone was pounding at the front door.
The cellar smelled like damp earth, and we found ourselves at the bottom of the stairs in a concrete-floored room. Enough light came down through the iron grate that we could see a little of what was around us. There were shelves lined with dusty jars, and there was a heavy iron door in one of the walls. Benjamin tried the door handle, but it was locked.
I heard a violent explosion upstairs, and it made us both crouch behind the shelves. There were footsteps and voices, speaking what sounded like German.
“Do you understand them?” I asked.
Benjamin shook his head.
We listened while the men searched the office. I could hear Benjamin’s breathing in the dark, and my own, which was unsteady. He looked at the heavy book on his knees, and I knew he was wondering if it was worth more than his father’s life. I could tell he wanted to go upstairs and fight.
“There are too many of them,” I whispered. “Your father said to keep the book safe.”
We waited what seemed a long time, then heard a scraping of metal above us, and Benjamin pulled me back further into the dusty shadows behind the shelves. The grate was pulled away, and a man’s head peered into the cellar. He had a long scar across one cheek, and the hideousness of a face hanging upside down. He seemed to be grinning, or gritting his teeth: They were bared in the dim light as he looked around. Then we heard the clang of a police car’s bell on the street, and someone shouted in German. It was clear that the voice was urging the others to leave. The horrible upside-down face disappeared, and the grate was lowered again.
Benjamin and I crouched in the darkness, barely daring to breathe. As the immediate terror faded, I realised that his arm was across my shoulders, and the side of my body against his. He seemed to become aware of it, too, and he relaxed his grip on my arm. We moved an inch apart and my arm tingled where his fingers had been. The police bell had faded into the distance: They must have been after someone else.
When the shop was silent above us, Benjamin and I crept back out, pushing the heavy grate open. The place had been ransacked. Papers were thrown on the floor, drawers opened, chairs toppled. Broken jars of herbs filled the air with sharp, strange smells. Things had been pulled off the shelves in the front of the shop: bottles of pills, boxes of bandages, bags of cotton wool.
The apothecary was gone.
CHAPTER 8
The Pharmacopoeia
Benjamin and his father lived in a flat above the shop, and we decided that it would surely be watched. So we went to my flat, where my parents were sitting at the card table we’d set up near the tiny kitchen. I could tell I was interrupting some serious conversation, but I didn’t have time to wonder what it was. We had decided not to tell them what had happened, because they would want to call the police, and the apothecary had told us not to.
My father turned in his chair and smiled. “How was the rematch?” he asked.
“It was . . . fine,” I said. I’d forgotten all about chess.
“Who won?”
Benjamin and I glanced at each other. “The game got interrupted,” I said. “His father had to go to Scotland to visit his aunt. She’s sick.”
“I’m so sorry,” my mother said, all concern. “I hope she’s all right.”
I felt suddenly and sadly grown up—not because I had brought a boy to meet my parents, but because I had told them a lie. “I wondered if he could stay here tonight,” I said. “I mean, his father asked if he could.”
My parents glanced at each other. “I don’t see why not,” my father said, after a pause that suggested that he did see why not.
My mother made scrambled eggs again for dinner, and we ate at the little card table, where we all had to sit too close together. Benjamin was formal and polite, and everyone seemed uncomfortable.
“We haven’t really figured out shopping yet,” my mother said. “So we’re relying heavily on our landlady’s eggs.”
“They’re delicious,” Benjamin said. “It’s hard to get eggs.”
There was an awkward silence.
“So what do your parents do, Benjamin?” my father asked.
“My father is the apothecary down the street.”
My father pushed back his chair with a screech of wood. “No kidding!” he said. “The source of all our heat. And your mother?”
Because my mother worked, my parents always made a point of inquiring about other kids’ mothers. Nowadays it seems a perfectly normal thing to ask, but in 1952, most kids’ mothers stayed home, and the question was sometimes embarrassing.
“She died when I was little,” Benjamin said.
I stared at him. I’d never thought to ask about his mother, but he hadn’t said anything about her dying.
“I’m so sorry,” my mother said. “How did it happen?”
“In a bombing raid,” he said. “In the war.”
“Oh, Benjamin, how terrible.”
“I was just a baby,” he said. “I don’t really remember her.”
There was another long silence. My parents, who were usually so warm and friendly, had no idea what to do with this tragic news and this stiff, formal boy. I wished they could have seen him during the bomb drill, defiant and strong, when they would have admired him. I saw now why he couldn’t take the drill seriously—or why he took it so seriously that he wouldn’t take part in it, if it wouldn’t do any good.
Benjamin’s leather satchel was leaning against our little couch, with the Pharmacopoeia sticking out of it because the buckle wouldn’t close over the big book. My father nodded towards it, to change the subject.
“What’s the great tome?” he asked. “Is that for chemistry?”
“Sort of,” Benjamin said.
“Can I see it? I’d like to see what they teach in England.”
“I’m very tired, sir,” Benjamin said, too quickly. “And have an essay t
o finish. Do you mind if I just work on that?”
“Of course not,” my father said. He gave Benjamin the wide smile he used in friendly arguments, or when he knew someone was lying to him. “If you’ll stop calling me ‘sir’.”
When I was sure my parents were asleep, I crept out to the living room, where my mother had made a bed for Benjamin on the couch. He had the Pharmacopoeia open on his lap.
“You didn’t tell me your mother was dead!” I whispered.
“Where’d you think she was?” he asked. “Timbuktu?”
“I didn’t have time to think about it.”
“Well, I don’t have time to talk about it,” he said. “I’ve been looking at the book. It’s mostly in Latin.”
He made room for me on the couch. I felt shaken by his father’s disappearance, and curious about the book, but none of that dispelled my nervousness about sitting with him in the middle of the night on my parents’ couch. It was impossible to imagine any boy from Hollywood High sleeping in my parents’ living room in Los Angeles, and there was no one back home who had made me feel so unsettled and strange.
I looked at the book—in the excitement, I hadn’t really taken it in before. Pages were slipped in between the bound pages, which seemed to be hand-lettered, in an old calligraphic style. The paper was ivory inside, brown around the edges, and scarred with burn marks. It looked like a very old, important version of my mother’s overstuffed Joy of Cooking.
“I think the Latin’s really old,” Benjamin said. “Or some of it is, anyway. I’m supposed to be able to read Latin, to be an apothecary, but I’m no good at it.”
“What language is that?” I asked, pointing to some words made up of letters I didn’t recognise.
“I think it’s Greek.”
He flipped another page. There were symbols and little drawings interspersed with the text. One looked like a snake inside a circle. “Maybe that one’s a cure for snakebite,” I said.
“Why would he need to hide that from those Germans?”
“Because the book’s valuable?”
“They weren’t ordinary thieves.”
“I guess not.” I shuddered, remembering the man with the scar. “Where do you think they took him?”
“I don’t know. I wish I understood German.”
“And Latin.”
“And Latin.”
“Or Greek.”
He closed the book and we studied the embossed symbol on the cover. It had a circle at its centre, with an upside-down triangle in it. Around that circle was a star with seven points, inside another larger circle, with smaller circles between the points of the star.
I ran my hand over it, feeling the ridges and indentations in the smooth, worn leather.
“That symbol looks familiar,” Benjamin said. “But I don’t know why.”
“We could ask Mr Danby to translate some of the Latin.”
“We can’t just go showing it to people.”
“Mr Danby’s a war hero.”
“I don’t recall my father saying we could show it to war heroes. He said we had to keep it from anyone who wanted to see it.”
“Well, Mr Danby doesn’t want to see it,” I said. My eyes were starting to itch with tiredness, and my eyelids threatened to close. “It’s too bad your father had to get kidnapped for you to start doing what he asks you to do.”
“You’re not taking the seriousness of this, Janie.”
“I really am,” I said. “I’m just so tired.”
I laid my head against the arm of the couch, just to rest it for a minute, and the next thing I knew, Benjamin was shaking me awake. It was still dark in the room, and I wasn’t sure where I was. I fought my way out of sleep.
“The symbol on the book!” Benjamin whispered. “I know where I’ve seen it before!”
CHAPTER 9
The Physic Garden
Benjamin came to my study hall at eleven fifteen, saying that the librarian needed another student to help shelve books. The study hall monitor was a tall, sallow young man. “Do you have a note?” he asked.
“The librarian is buried in books,” Benjamin said. “She asked if you’d mind if she didn’t send a note, just this once.”
I raised my hand. “Can I go?” I asked. “I want to be a librarian someday.”
This drew a ripple of laughter from the other students, which got them a frown from the monitor. I knew he felt sorry for me, as the pathetic new girl who stayed in at lunch.
“All right,” he said. “But tell her to send a note next time.”
I gathered my things, and when we were sure the hall was empty, we slipped out the main door and down the steps. Benjamin didn’t remember exactly where the Chelsea Physic Garden was, but he knew it was near the Thames, so we walked along the river.
I know now that the Physic Garden was started in the seventeenth century, as a kind of museum and nursery for medicinal plants. Botanists and ships’ physicians brought specimens back from all over the world, as England expanded its empire, and the specimens were planted in Chelsea. The garden is still there, if you visit. The British Empire may be gone, but the Physic Garden is its green ghost, growing a little bit of India, China, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands, right in the middle of London.
“I used to go with my father all the time,” Benjamin said. “He would collect cuttings, and I would skip stones on the little pond, which was really too small for skipping stones, until a gardener would tell me to stop or I’d break a window.”
“Why’d you stop going?”
“I turned ten and thought I was too old for it. I didn’t need to be watched anymore, and I thought I didn’t need to tag along to the stupid garden.”
We found the high iron gate on the embankment and pushed it open. There was a little stone guardhouse, but no one was in it. The garden was lush and thriving and made the phony Sherwood Forest in Riverton look like the papier-mâché that it was. It was almost magically green, and silent, as if the plants somehow absorbed all the city’s sounds. The paths were lined with leafy stalks that grew as high as my head, and trees from which yellow flowers hung, and something that looked like rhubarb, with enormous spreading leaves.
“If my father came here for work,” I said, “I’d go with him all the time.”
We walked down a path where the trees on either side grew together in a canopy, so we were almost in darkness in the middle of the day. Every few feet, a vine hung down, with a single pink flower at the end. There were rustling noises in the undergrowth—birds or little animals. At the end of the path, there was another gate.
“There it is!” Benjamin said, and I followed his eyes to the top of the wrought iron. There was the symbol embossed on the cover of the Pharmacopoeia, with the circles and the star. We peered inside, to a walled inner garden. Across some paths and beds was a small brick house with white trim. Benjamin tried to open the iron gate, but it was locked.
“Should we climb it?” I asked.
But just as I spoke, a figure emerged from the little brick house. It was a man, and he looked as if he had once been tall and imposing, but now he walked with a stoop. He had a grey beard and a wrinkled, kind face. He wore a long brown oilcloth coat and Wellington boots, and carried a basket and a pair of pruning shears.
“Hullo!” Benjamin called. “Sir?”
The figure looked up, surprised in his solitude.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Benjamin said. “My father’s a member of the Society of Apothecaries. I have a Society scholarship, actually. And I . . .”
The man in the oilcloth peered at him. “Is that Benjamin Burrows?”
It was Benjamin’s turn to be surprised. “Yes!”
The man hurried over and opened the gate with an ancient key. “Come in, come in,” he said, and he looked behind us, down the green tunnel. Then he relocked the gate.
Inside his tidy brick house, the gardener took off his oilcloth coat and hung it on a peg, then gestured to the chair
s at his table. “Who is the young lady?” he asked suspiciously.
“My friend Janie,” Benjamin said. “She’s American.” He said it as if it made me somehow—innocent.
“I see,” the gardener said. Then he turned to Benjamin. “I remember you as a little boy, running around the garden. I knew your grandfather well. Your father always comes looking for the most unusual plants. Is he well?”
“I don’t know,” Benjamin said, and he looked to me for encouragement. I nodded—the gardener seemed entirely trustworthy—so Benjamin sat at the table, and I did, too. He told the story of the men who had come for his father, and also of the message passed in a newspaper on the park bench.
The gardener looked alarmed. “They’ve taken Jin Lo, too?”
“Who’s Jin Lo?”
“A Chinese chemist,” the gardener said. “A correspondent of your father’s. You saw the men who came to your father’s shop?”
“Only one,” Benjamin said. “He had a scar on his face. They spoke German.”
“And did your father—tell you anything? Or show you anything?”
I could see Benjamin struggling not to mention the book. “Well . . . ,” he said.
The gardener sighed. “I understand that merely to ask will make you suspicious, but we may have limited time. Do you know where the Pharmacopoeia is?”
Benjamin glanced at me once more for reassurance, then pulled the book out of his satchel and slid it onto the wooden table.
The gardener’s eyes widened. “Ah,” he said. He seemed deeply affected, as if the book were a sacred object. He touched it slowly, in awe. “I haven’t seen it in a very long time.”
“We came here because the symbol on the front is on the gate of your garden,” Benjamin said.
“Yes,” the gardener said, running his gnarled hand over the weathered cover. “It’s the Azoth of the Philosophers.
The triangle in the centre is Water, the source of all life. The seven smaller circles are the operations of alchemy: calcination, separation, dissolution—why are you making that face?”