by Maile Meloy
“On the floor.”
So I gave him one of my wool blankets, and he lay down on the floor with his satchel for a pillow. He stretched out on his back with his hands behind his head.
“Why did your father call me Figment?” he asked.
I climbed into bed, under the one remaining blanket, and tried to push the gardener from my head. “Because he thinks he’s funny.”
“But Figment?”
“When I told them I was going to play chess with you, my mother was teasing me about having a boyfriend. Someone said, as a joke, that it was a figment of her imagination. That’s all it took—they were off.”
Benjamin was silent, looking at the ceiling. “It’s nice that they tease you,” he finally said. “My dad’s always so serious. I wonder what he’d have been like if my mother hadn’t died. If he would have been more—I don’t know. Like your parents. Able to joke about things.”
I couldn’t imagine not having parents who joked: It was part of every day. I was silent because I didn’t know what to say.
“What does your diary say about me?” Benjamin asked.
“That I can’t believe my parents sent you out in the cold.”
“That’s all?”
“That you’re kind of a bully when you play chess.”
“A bully! That’s slander!”
“The truth is a defence,” I said. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was something my father liked to say, before the US marshals started looking for him.
Benjamin smiled. Then there was a knock at my bedroom door, and we both froze.
“Under the bed!” I whispered, and he rolled silently beneath, pulling his satchel and the blanket after him. I got my diary back out and posed with it on my knee.
“Yes?” I said, in a sullen voice.
My father pushed the door open and looked in. “Lights out.”
“I’m still writing.”
“You need your sleep.”
“So does Benjamin, and you sent him out in the cold.”
I was trying to act as I would have acted if Benjamin weren’t in the room, but without drawing my father into the room to discuss it. It was a gamble, and I lost it: My father sighed, and crossed to the bed and sat down. The metal springs squeaked. I held my breath, hoping he wasn’t crushing Benjamin.
“Janie,” my father said. “I know you’re upset. Your mother and I just want you to be safe. Benjamin seems like a resourceful boy. He’s probably safe at home right now.”
I was going to say that Benjamin’s home wasn’t safe, but I didn’t want to start narrowing down the options for where he might actually be. “Maybe,” I said.
“You really like him, don’t you?”
“Dad,” I said, imagining Benjamin under the bed. Even though I’d already told him I fancied him, I thought we could set that aside, in the category of Things the Smell of Truth Made Us Do. I wasn’t going to say it again.
“It’s okay, you can tell me,” my father prodded.
I said nothing.
“He’s a nice kid, Figment,” my father said. “A little arrogant, though.”
I thought I heard a noise under the bed. I shifted, squeaking the metal springs, to cover it.
“And not as responsible as I’d like. Your mother and I were scared today. We thought something terrible had happened to you.”
“I know,” I said. “But it didn’t.” I thought of the gardener bleeding on his worn floor and wondered if we had left footprints, or fingerprints.
“The funny thing is that we’d been waiting for you to get home, to tell you that Olivia wants us to go on location for a few days, to film at a castle. The speech we’d prepared started with how responsible we think you are. But then you didn’t come home to hear it. It got later, and later, and we got pretty worked up. And now I think we have to take you with us.”
I stared at him. “But I have school.”
“It’s just a few days.”
“I’m so far behind already.” I couldn’t leave Benjamin to look for his father alone, and I cast around frantically for ideas.
“Janie, it’s a castle,” my father said.
“I know!” Once I would have loved to skip school to go on location to a castle, but it was unthinkable now. “What was your plan before, when you were going to say how responsible I am?”
My father frowned. “That Mrs Parrish, the landlady downstairs, would look after you.”
“Perfect!” I nearly shouted.
“But Janie, you came home at ten o’clock tonight. You can’t do that with Mrs Parrish.”
“I won’t! I promise!” I didn’t know, at the time, how true that would be.
My father shook his head. “We thought about telling Olivia we couldn’t go, but we’ve just started working for her.” He paused, looking at his hands. “We haven’t wanted to make you afraid or upset, Janie, but we really need this job.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry I was a pill about leaving LA. And I’m sorry I was late tonight. But I’ll check in constantly with Mrs Parrish and I’ll be fine. Really. You can go.”
My father sat on the bed thinking. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know what else to do,” he said. “You really did scare us. We got so mad because we love you and want you to be safe. You understand that?”
“I do. I love you, too.”
“Now lights out, okay?”
When the door clicked closed, Benjamin rolled out from under the bed. “Arrogant?” he whispered.
“But nice,” I whispered back.
“And irresponsible!”
“We were home really late,” I said. “And you wouldn’t tell him anything!”
“Oh, right, so I should have told him that someone kidnapped my father and stabbed the gardener with a sundial?”
“No,” I said.
We sat in silence. Then Benjamin said, “So you get to stay in London.”
I looked at him—was he glad? Had I done right to campaign to stay? “Yes,” I said warily.
He didn’t catch my eye, or give any indication of feeling. “What did the gardener leave us?” he asked.
The note! I’d forgotten to read it. My coat was hanging on the bedpost, and I drew out the little brown glass bottle. The note was tied to the neck with a piece of twine.
I unfolded the piece of paper and spread it on the bed. Benjamin sat beside me and his hand brushed mine, which made it hard to concentrate for a second, but then I was caught up in the letter.
Children,
After much reflection, I begin to think that my life may be in danger. The man with the scarred face is walking in the garden as I write. I will hide this letter among the only plants you know to be useful. If you return to the garden in my absence, perhaps that’s where you’ll go. I know of no other way to contact you safely.
It is clearly of the utmost importance that you find Benjamin’s father. I’m convinced that what he wants is for the good. I have tried to think what I could offer to help you find him, when I may have little time.
There was a transformative elixir you doubted could exist, and I have taken the liberty of making some for you, from the directions in your remarkable book.
I have contemplated using it myself, to escape, but I am old, and have nowhere to go. I would be lost outside the garden. Please give the elixir the respect it deserves—use it not as a frivolous plaything, but approach the transformation with the seriousness that your father has always brought to his work. That will be the best way to find him.
I pray that you will not find this letter under dreadful circumstances. I would prefer to pass the bottle directly into your hands. But I am not hopeful. I wish you all luck.
Your friend
I picked up the bottle when I finished reading the letter. “A transformative elixir,” I said. “It’s the bird spell.”
“Oh, great,” Benjamin said. “The nuttiest one.”
“Don’t you think it works?”
“No,” Benjamin
said. “If it did, he would have used it to escape.”
“To go where? He had nowhere to go, like he said.”
“It just isn’t possible, Janie. It isn’t like smelling some truth serum. There are physical laws—the conservation of mass, for one thing. A human being can’t just become a tiny bird-sized thing. We’d have to become something the size of us. Like a baby ostrich. And a lot of good that would do.”
“A giant condor?” I suggested.
“A bit conspicuous in central London.” He reached towards the bottle. “Here, let’s try it now and see.”
I pulled the bottle back. “The gardener said not to use it as a plaything,” I said. “Think how amazing it would be, if it worked, to become a bird and fly!”
“Uh-huh,” Benjamin said.
It did seem fairly unlikely. The exhaustion of the day swept over me and a yawn seemed to take over my whole body. “How are you going to get out of here in the morning?”
“Same way I came in.” He turned over on his side with his head on the satchel, pulling the blanket up.
I reached over and turned out the light and we lay in silence for a while. My brain was spinning through everything that had happened, stopping first on the upside-down face of the man with the scar, then on Shiskin’s angry switching on of the radio. Then on the cold stillness of the gardener’s throat as I felt for his pulse, then on my parents’ fury and the fact that they were going away, and my conflicted feelings about not telling them everything. Then on Benjamin Burrows lying on my bedroom floor. I could tell from his breathing that he wasn’t asleep either.
“Benjamin?” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“What are we going to do tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m not used to someone sleeping on my floor.”
“You don’t have girly sleepovers back in Hollywood?”
“Sure, but no one sleeps at them,” I said. “And anyway, you’re not very girly.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. It’s a step up from ‘arrogant’.”
“He said ‘resourceful’, too.”
“I like ‘resourceful’. Hey, Janie?”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad you’re staying in London.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Me too.”
I smiled idiotically at the ceiling for a while, and then lay listening to Benjamin’s even breathing in the dark, trying to concentrate on our problems so that my brain could solve them while I slept. It was a trick my mother had taught me, but I had never been thinking about problems this big before. Eventually exhaustion won out, and I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 14
Scotland Yard
When I woke, Benjamin was already gone. A note on the windowsill said he’d meet me at school. While I was eating breakfast, the postman brought my school uniform, wrapped in brown paper. I put it on and surveyed myself in the bathroom mirror in a stiff pleated skirt, a white button-down shirt, and a navy blue blazer. They all had tiny tags on them that said UTILITY.
“What does that mean?” I asked my father, showing him the tag.
“Must have something to do with rationing,” he said. “Government-issue clothes, no frills, no extra fabric.”
The skirt was too big, and my mother brought me a safety pin to make it tighter. “If they really wanted to save fabric,” she said, “they’d send the right size. And leave out all these pleats.”
“You can’t have a uniform skirt without pleats,” my father said.
My mother smiled at him. “Is that in the Magna Carta?”
“Sure,” he said. “No schoolgirl of the realm shall be caused to attend her place of instruction in the absence of—” He stopped, thinking.
“Of sufficient folds of lambswool about her lower limbs,” my mother said.
“By the law of the land,” he said.
My mother laughed, and I did too. Things felt normal with them again, and I was grateful. Then my mother caught my hand and grew serious. “Janie,” she said. “You’ll check in with Mrs Parrish every morning and afternoon? And be safe?”
“Of course!” I said. “I have sufficient folds of lambswool now. I’ll be fine.”
We went down to talk to Mrs Parrish, who agreed cheerily to the arrangement and gave me a hug before I left her apartment. I smelled something that at first I thought was pine needles—maybe some unfamiliar English cleaning product. But then she straightened uncertainly, and I realised that the smell was gin. It was eight o’clock in the morning. I didn’t want to worry my parents, who were waiting in the hall, so I said nothing and gently closed her door.
At school, I didn’t see Benjamin outside, so I walked in alone. No one stared at me in the halls, in my uniform. It was the perfect disguise, and I thought that if I could look like an ordinary schoolgirl, maybe I could be one.
In Mr Danby’s Latin class, I slid unnoticed into my chair. Sarah Pennington swanned in and took her seat in front of me. The boy next to me, I noticed, had his jacket sleeves rolled up, and he had inked an F on the little tag so it said fUTILITY.
Sergei Shiskin wasn’t at his desk, but I told myself he was probably just late. I tried not to think about the man with the scar slinking into the Shiskins’ kitchen and reaching for a knife. I realised we should have told them what had happened to the gardener, to warn them.
There were new quotations from Horace on the blackboard. A pimply boy with a squeaky, breaking voice recited a passage, and my mortification for him almost made me forget we were in danger. While he stammered, I studied the nape of Sarah Pennington’s neck beneath her braid. Her skin was smooth and creamy, I had to admit. And the fine blonde hair that escaped her braid curled silkily behind her small, round ears. But still it was just a neck—it didn’t seem very earth-shattering to me.
Finally the bell rang, and people started to file out. Sarah Pennington gave Mr Danby a thousand-watt smile as she passed his desk. “Thank you, Mr Danby,” she said.
He nodded vaguely. “You’re welcome, Miss Pennington.” Then he turned to me. “Miss Scott, I brought you these.”
He handed me paperback copies of The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller, both by Henry James. The girls in white dresses on the covers seemed very far from anything that mattered, at the moment. But I appreciated the gesture.
“Thank you,” I said, and I felt myself blushing. Sarah Pennington shot me an unforgiving look as she left.
Mr Danby had the sort of eyes that can’t help looking kind. They had wounded depths in them. If he hadn’t been a war hero, he could have been a movie star. In Hollywood, he would have been both. He’d have been discovered at a lunch counter as soon as he got demobilised, and a studio would have engaged him to marry some starlet for the publicity. It seemed very English of him to be a plain old Latin teacher. I realised that we were alone.
“Are you finding London less painful yet?” he asked, erasing the blackboard.
Images of the dead gardener and the terrified apothecary flashed through my mind, but I pushed them down. “School’s okay,” I said.
“And everything else?”
“It’s . . . fine.”
“I don’t suppose I can do anything to help.”
It occurred to me that if I hadn’t told Benjamin about Sarah Pennington’s crush, he might agree that it was worth asking Mr Danby for help. And Sarah Pennington’s crush had nothing to do with anything. Mr Danby was kind and wise, like the gardener, but he was also worldly. Obviously he knew what it was to be in danger, if he’d been shot down over Germany. And he knew the system, in England, in a way my parents couldn’t. I took a deep breath.
“Well,” I said, “there’s this book.”
Mr Danby stood with the eraser, looking puzzled, then said, “Yes?”
“It’s a very rare book, and some people are after it.”
“Which people?”
“I’m not sure.”
“And to whom does it belong?”
“My f
riend’s father. But he gave it to my friend to protect.”
“And where is his father?”
“We think he might have been kidnapped.”
Mr Danby looked alarmed. “Kidnapped? You’ve spoken to Scotland Yard?”
“No.” I was in too deep here. “We—my friend isn’t sure the police would understand.”
“Miss Scott, that’s . . . you have to tell the police. Has he done something wrong?”
“No!” I said. “It seems like maybe someone was after the book.”
Mr Danby said, “What kind of book?”
“It’s written mostly in Latin. And some Greek. So I thought maybe you could help us understand it better. But my friend doesn’t want to show it to anyone.”
“I see.”
“But maybe I can convince him. If you’re willing.”
“If you like, of course,” he said. “But I really think you should go to the police. Goodness, Miss Scott, I thought you were only having difficulty with the labyrinthine St Beden’s social codes. This seems—well, rather worse.”
When I told Benjamin at lunch about our new ally, he was furious. “You did what?” he said.
“I didn’t tell him anything specific,” I said, flustered by his anger. “But I think he can help us.” We were alone at the empty table where I had watched him stare down the lunch lady.
“We aren’t supposed to tell anyone!”
“Your father never said that. He said you had to keep the Pharmacopoeia safe from people who want it. And we need help to do that. We’re in over our heads.”
Benjamin scowled at the food on his tray and said nothing. Then a familiar, loud, long bell rang.
“Bomb drill!” called the lunch lady. “Everyone under the tables!”
“Again?” I said, looking around. People started to push back their benches.
“It’s so stupid,” Benjamin said, his shoulders set in opposition to the noise.
“It is,” I said. “But I don’t think this is the time to make a scene and get kept after school. Or have them try to call your father.”
“It’s ridiculous.”