by Maile Meloy
“Because alchemists were crackpots,” Benjamin said. “Fools trying to make gold.”
“Some were trying to make gold,” the gardener said. “There will always be those who are driven by greed. They’ve given the rest a bad name. But Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist. Have you not studied calcination and separation and dissolution?”
“No,” Benjamin said, a little embarrassed.
“What on earth are you learning in school?”
“Maths,” Benjamin said. “English.”
The gardener frowned. “Reading novels,” he said, with disdain. “And now you’ve been entrusted with the Pharmacopoeia, wholly uneducated.”
“I just need to know about the book,” Benjamin said. “I don’t read Latin or Greek.”
The gardener shook his head. “There are hundreds of years of secrets in it, learned through lifetimes of research and practice. And we have so little time.”
“Can you tell us some of it?” I asked.
The gardener considered the two of us, taking our measure, then opened the book with great reverence, careful not to crack the old pages. “Well—I don’t know how to begin. There are simple infusions, like this one, the Smell of Truth. It makes it impossible for a person to tell a lie. This symbol here, with the sun at its zenith, means that you have to harvest the Artemisia veritas herb for the infusion at solar noon, which is quite different from noon on the clock.” He turned a page. “Then there are masking tinctures, which change the appearance of things without changing the thing itself. This one, for example, the Aidos Kyneê, confers a kind of invisibility. It’s named for the mythological cap of the Greek gods. Aidos means modesty, so it’s a covering of extreme modesty, which is ironic, because of course—”
“What does that say?” I asked, pointing to a note written in the margins, up the side of the page, in a different handwriting.
The gardener tilted his head and read silently in Latin. “It says . . . that if more than one person uses the masking tincture, it’s best to leave one small part of the body out, to avoid—well, knocking into each other, I suppose. This must be advice from someone who’s used it. The book is a living document, you see. New knowledge is always being added.”
“How about the knowledge that it’s all rubbish?” Benjamin asked. “Can we write that in? It’s not possible for people to be invisible!”
The gardener ignored him and turned another page. His eyes brightened as he read the Latin instructions there. “Here we are,” he said. “The most difficult of all are the transformative elixirs, which actually change the substance at hand. This one, the avian elixir, turns a human being into a bird.”
“Of course it does,” Benjamin muttered.
The gardener raised his bushy grey eyebrows at him. “You must allow for the possibilities, Benjamin. I’ve never seen it, but I hear it’s a very beautiful process.”
“And when you transform—you can fly?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Why does my father have a book of phony magic spells?” Benjamin asked.
“They aren’t spells,” the gardener said. “It’s a Pharmacopoeia, a book of medicines, or it was originally. Many of the processes in the book began as methods of healing, many generations ago: How to close a wound? How to combat sickness in the human body? Those were the original questions, but in certain minds they took unexpected directions, having to do with the fundamentals of matter. Just as cave drawings led to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, early medicine led to the Pharmacopoeia. The world is made up of atoms, which can be influenced and masked and even rearranged, by someone with the necessary skills. I’m surprised your father hasn’t begun to train you.”
Benjamin looked down. “He’s asked me, sometimes, to help him,” he said, “but I always had something else to do. I thought he just wanted me to take over his shop. You know— selling bath salts and hot water bottles.”
The gardener gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “The Society of Apothecaries wouldn’t give you a scholarship for that. They expect you to carry on your father’s real work.”
“Which is what, exactly?” Benjamin asked. “Why did those men take him?”
“I don’t know,” the gardener said. “That’s what you must discover. As soon as possible.”
“We could ask Mr Shiskin,” I said tentatively. “He’s the one who delivered the message.”
“But we don’t know if we can trust him,” Benjamin said. “And why would he tell anything to a couple of kids?”
“We could use the Smell of Truth,” I said. “From the book.”
Benjamin and the gardener looked at me. I waited for their scorn.
“You know, that’s not such a terrible idea,” the gardener said finally. “Can you safely come in close contact with this man?”
“We know his son, from school,” I said.
“Then it’s worth a try.” The gardener squinted at the light outside the window. “Let me check my charts. We can’t do much with a sextant inside the garden, since we can’t see the horizon.”
He took a book off his shelf and ran his finger down a list. “Solar noon will be at . . . twelve fourteen and nine seconds,” he said. “We can come close to that.” Then he led us outside to a sundial, a triangular pointer of oxidised green copper mounted on a squat stone base. The sun wasn’t bright, but the shadow of the pointer was visible, and it fell just after noon.
“Why does it matter when you harvest the herb?” I asked.
“The book says it’s because the fullest light of day eliminates all shadow and deceit,” the gardener said. “Very poetic. But it may in fact have something to do with photosynthesis, and the molecular structure of the veritas plant. The early alchemists knew that it was necessary to harvest it at noon, but perhaps not exactly why. The herb has always been planted beside the sundial, here.” He pointed to some bunched green leaves in careful rows.
We waited, watching the barely moving shadow.
“None of this makes any sense,” Benjamin said.
The gardener looked at him appraisingly, as if gauging his ability to do the job at hand. “We all feel strange, even apprehensive, when confronted with our own destiny,” he said. “You have to find your father. Whatever his plan is, he’s going to need you.”
“Can you come help us?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” the gardener said. “I’m old and arthritic and rarely leave this garden—I would only slow you down and raise suspicion. And now it’s time.”
He reached down to snip the leaves with his shears.
“There we are,” he said. “You crush the leaves and boil them in water to release the smell. But you’ll have to be careful. It can be an insidious little herb if you aren’t prepared for the truth.”
CHAPTER 10
The Smell of Truth
We left the Physic Garden and walked back down the Chelsea Embankment with the veritas herb and something like a plan—or at least I thought we had a plan. But Benjamin was having none of it.
“It’s all rubbish!” he said. “Invisibility spells. Herbs that make you tell the truth if you cut them at noon. If the gardener told you he was king of the fairies, would you believe him?”
“No,” I said. “But it’s possible that the herb affects the brain somehow, like alcohol does, or coffee.”
“So you want to just waltz into Shiskin’s house and get him to smell a pot of leaves. Do you know how a Soviet agent is trained?”
“Do you?” I asked.
“I know we’re no match for it.”
I wasn’t sure what had made me so brave—possibly being in another country that was so different from my own, possibly trying to match what I thought was Benjamin’s courage. But I felt determined to move forward in the only way we could. “You said you wanted to live a life of adventure,” I said. “Let’s just test the herb and see if it works.”
Benjamin rolled his eyes but had no argument, so we went to my flat, which was eerily quiet with my parents
at work. I filled a pot with water, according to the gardener’s instructions, and boiled the crushed herb on the tiny kitchen-closet stove. Benjamin sat stubbornly at the card table with his arms crossed. The leaves turned dark green in the hot water, and the steam from the pot was sharp and minty. I stood over the pot, breathing it in for a few long seconds, then turned to him.
“Now you do it,” I said, feeling strange and a little giddy.
Benjamin eyed me. “D’you feel all right?”
“A little strange,” I admitted. “But go ahead. You’re the one who thinks nothing will happen.”
“And how do you propose to test it, Madame Curie?”
“We have to think of a question that we wouldn’t otherwise want to answer.”
He stood over the pot, looking down at the leaves. “Something like, ‘Who do you fancy?’”
“That might work,” I said, even though it was the last question I wanted to answer. But it was impossible, suddenly, to tell a lie.
Benjamin took a deep sniff over the steam and turned to me. “All right,” he said. “So who do you fancy?”
I hesitated. “Fancy means like, right?” I asked, stalling.
“Of course.”
I gritted my teeth against the answer coming out, but I couldn’t stop myself. “You,” I said helplessly.
“Me?” Benjamin flushed crimson. I was sure I was doing the same. His freckles darkened when he blushed.
“Oh, that’s embarrassing,” I said. “I hate this. Quick, before it wears off, who do you fancy?”
“I don’t want to answer.”
“You’ll have to.”
I could see him struggling with the effort. “Aargh,” he said. “I hate this, too! All right! I like Sarah Pennington!”
I was too shocked, briefly, to be mortified that it wasn’t me. “Sarah Pennington?” I said. “She’s awful! She’s mean and pretentious!”
“I know.” He seemed genuinely sorry about it. “But she’s also beautiful. I don’t want to like her. But I can’t help it! She sits in front of me in maths, and the curve of her neck, under that braid, drives me completely mad.”
“Stop!” I said. “Enough! It works.”
We glared at each other in silence.
“Anyway, she has a crush on Mr Danby,” I said before I could stop myself.
Benjamin was aghast. “Mr Danby?”
“She thinks he’s dreamy. And she’s right! He’s also smart, and nice!”
Benjamin looked pained, and there was another long, sullen silence. I didn’t know if I was happy to have hurt him or not, so I crossed my arms and looked out the window at St. George’s Street below. The sad haberdasher across the street was standing in his doorway as usual, waiting for customers who never came.
“How do we tell when this thing wears off?” Benjamin asked.
“I don’t like you,” I said, experimentally. “But that’s not a good test. At the moment it’s kind of true. Say you don’t fancy Sarah Pennington.”
“I don’t fancy Sarah Pennington.”
“There we go,” I said, with a pang in my heart. “You can lie. It’s worn off.”
“Let’s pretend that never happened,” he said.
“Do you still think it’s rubbish?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “It works.”
CHAPTER 11
The Samovar
Benjamin, from his amateur spying, knew exactly where the Shiskins lived, in a flat near the Soviet embassy. The afternoon had grown cold, and we walked in silence, nursing our regrets about the Smell of Truth, scarves wrapped around our faces and hands shoved in our pockets.
The Shiskins’ front door was in a row of narrow brick houses, all attached to each other. There were steps leading up to it. Benjamin said, “So now what?”
“Well,” I said. “We’ll say we’re here to see Sergei. Maybe I have a Latin question.”
“You don’t know enough Latin to have a question!”
“So it’s a social visit. We want to show him this wonderful tea we’ve discovered.”
“As if that doesn’t sound suspicious.”
“You have a better idea, Mr Super-spy?”
“No.”
“All right,” I said, and I strode up the steps and rang the bell, thinking he would rather be with Sarah Pennington anyway, so why was I doing this?
“Janie, wait!” he said.
“Are you coming or not?”
Benjamin looked up and down the empty street, as if someone with a better plan might be coming along, then ran up the steps after me. “This is daft,” he said.
Sergei opened the door. He had changed out of his school uniform, and wore a jumper and grey wool pants, with house slippers. His broad shoulders seemed slightly less rounded and protective of his soft middle than they did at school. He was surprised to see us, and tossed his hair out of his eyes. Loneliness came off him like steam rising, so I tried to summon some confidence that whatever crazy thing I proposed, he would want to join in.
“Hi, Sergei!” I said. “We wondered if you were busy.”
“For what?” he asked.
“We’re thinking of entering the science competition at school,” I said. “But we need a third person on our team.”
“Science competition?” Sergei said. “There is a science competition?”
“We want to do botany as our subject,” I said, willing myself not to blush. “Right now we’re exploring the properties of this one particular herb.”
“A remarkable herb,” Benjamin put in, pronouncing the h, as if to clarify. “May we please come in?”
Sergei stood back from the door, and we walked into a small anteroom hung with coats, with a staircase that led up to a second floor. I wondered if his father was up there, the Soviet agent.
“We have to brew it, like tea,” I said. “Can we use your kitchen?”
“You want the samovar?”
We must have looked at him blankly.
“It’s a Russian teapot.”
“Perfect!” Benjamin said.
I heard uneven footsteps upstairs as Sergei led us into the kitchen. I remembered Mr Shiskin’s wooden leg. So he was home, and we could try the herb on him. The kitchen clearly belonged to two men living alone: It was full of unwashed dishes and smelled of onions.
“My mother is in Russia with my sister,” Sergei said, in apology. “Here is the samovar.”
It was a large silver urn, elaborately decorated in relief with leaves and vines, with a teapot on top. It looked out of place in the shabby kitchen.
“It was my grandmother’s,” he said. “We just had tea, so it’s hot.”
“Terrific,” Benjamin said.
I heard a thump upstairs, and then another, and then the careful sound of Mr Shiskin’s wooden leg coming all the way down the stairs. I tried to act natural, bustling around in the kitchen, but my heart felt like it would leap out of my chest.
Then Mr Shiskin was standing in the kitchen doorway. “What are you doing with the samovar?” he asked. His accent was more Russian than Sergei’s, less British, and he was even bigger up close. His body filled the door frame and his hands looked the size of baseball mitts.
“Making tea, sir,” Benjamin said. “Sorry to intrude.”
“You are Sergei’s friends?”
“Yes,” I said.
He gazed past us to the dirty dishes in the sink. “My wife is in Russia,” he explained. “I am not a good housekeeper.”
“We don’t mind, sir,” Benjamin said. “If you and Sergei want to sit in the parlour, we’re about to do an experiment.”
Mr Shiskin’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What experiment?”
“We’ll show you,” Benjamin said, with the air of a magician about to do a trick. “It’s science. Please, have a seat in there.”
The two Shiskins removed themselves reluctantly to the little front parlour, and Benjamin and I stuffed the crushed leaves into the samovar’s teapot and filled it with
boiling water from the urn. We could hear the Shiskins talking together, and I heard the words “science competition” mixed in with the Russian.
“You think it’ll work in the samovar?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Benjamin said. “We’ll have to pour it into something else.”
I handed him the only clean teacup from a row of hooks, and we filled it with the pale greenish brew. “Just don’t smell it yourself,” I said. “Or we’ll start confessing everything.”
Benjamin took the cup in one hand, held a tea towel over his face with the other, and headed into the parlour. I followed.
“The very fascinating thing about this herb,” Benjamin told the Shiskins, through the towel, “is the way the smell changes, over time. It starts out very sharp and exhilarating. Here, please try.” He held the cup out.
Mr Shiskin leaned away. “Why do you cover your face?”
“I’m getting a cold, sir. Please, smell the tea before it changes.”
“You smell it first. It might be dangerous.”
“Oh, I’ve already smelled it,” Benjamin said.
“And you are sick!”
“An unrelated winter cold. I don’t want to infect you.”
Mr Shiskin crossed his thick arms over his chest. “We are Russian. We don’t get colds.”
Sergei said something imploring to his father and the older man finally sighed, uncrossed his arms, and leaned over the diminishing steam from the cup. He seemed startled by the smell, and looked up sharply at Benjamin.
“Where did you get this plant?” he asked.
“In—in the park.”
Mr Shiskin lunged from his chair towards Benjamin, surprisingly agile in spite of his size and his wooden leg. “Chush sobach’ya!” he said. “You smell it, and then tell me again where you found it!”
I backed into the kitchen, and Benjamin backed up after me, holding the teacup in front of him like a weapon. Mr Shiskin seemed even bigger and more powerful now that he was angry.
Sergei was mortified. “Leave them alone, Papa!” he said. “They’re going to let me on their science team!”