by Maile Meloy
“We’ll go to E. Pellicci’s, just up the road,” Mr Danby said. “I have a driver waiting, and it’s rather a good little café.”
The matron joined us again and unlocked the heavy front door with a ring of keys, and Benjamin beamed at her as if they were old friends. “Thank you, madam, for the fine hospitality,” he said, imitating Mr Danby’s arch politeness.
The matron scowled at Benjamin, but stood aside and let us out the door.
On the steps of Turnbull, there was sunlight and a fresh breeze, and I realised how sour and unhappy the air inside had been. I breathed deeply, and felt almost safe. Mr Danby was going to make everything all right. “There’s the car,” he said.
A shining green sedan idled in the curving drive. The driver turned to look at us, and smiled a welcoming smile. I felt Benjamin catch my arm, and the blood seemed to turn to ice in my veins.
Mr Danby’s driver was the man with the scar.
CHAPTER 16
The Pickpocket
It took about a second and a half to register what the smiling, scarred face of the driver meant. It meant that we weren’t going to have cocoa, and that Danby was not our friend, and that whatever he did for the Foreign Office— if he did work for the Foreign Office—was not in our interest. Those facts came through in a flood, as if I’d torn off a blindfold in a bright, crowded room. Benjamin and I both had the same response, almost instantly: We ran back into the dismal, foul-smelling, cold Turnbull Hall.
The matron must have been watching us through the cracked door, because we nearly knocked her over as we ran inside. Benjamin slammed the door behind us and leaned his shoulder into it.
“Give me the keys!” he commanded, holding the doorknob so it wouldn’t turn. “Arrest us again! Just give me the keys!”
Danby pounded on the other side. “Open this door!” his muffled voice shouted.
The matron hesitated. “But . . . he’s from the government.”
“No he’s not—he’s a Soviet spy!”
I hadn’t yet put all the information together to get to that point, but I realised that Benjamin was right. Shiskin had told us that the Scar was working for the Soviets, and Danby was working with the Scar, so that meant that Danby was working for the Soviets. If he’d been keeping an eye on Benjamin, it was because of the apothecary, not because Benjamin seemed like raw talent for the British Secret Service.
“Stuff and nonsense!” the matron said, regaining her composure. She moved towards the door as if to open it, and I grabbed the ring of keys from her hand. She yanked my hair with surprising strength, pulling my head back. I tossed Benjamin the keys, then turned and shoved her away. She fell heavily to the floor, and I resisted the urge to apologise.
Benjamin locked the front door and we ran back past the tumbled matron, down the hall. He stuck his head into the classroom full of children.
“There’s a Russian spy chasing us!” he said. “Where’s the back door?”
The children were too surprised to speak, until one small boy piped, “Through the kitchen!”
We ran on, and the children all jumped up from their desks and spilled after us. They filled the hall, blocking the way like a herd of sheep. I heard the matron shouting at them to stand aside.
We ran through the door to the holding cells, and Benjamin found the key to lock it behind us. Pip was still working the lock of his cell with my safety pin, and he looked up at us with surprise. “Where’s your mate?” he asked.
“He’s not our mate!” I said. “Will you help us escape, if we let you out?”
He shrugged. “I’ve almost got this picked.”
Benjamin pushed his hands away and unlocked the cell with the keys.
“I almost had that!” Pip said, stamping his foot. “An’ it’s a bloody hard one!”
“There’s a way out through the kitchen,” I said. “Do you know where the kitchen is?”
“This way,” Pip said, and he led us out the far door of the room.
We ran down one whitewashed hallway, and then another, and encountered a strong, sour soup smell. Finally we arrived in a large, steamy room with pots on the stove, and three cooks in stained aprons. Without slowing down, Pip took a bread roll off a tray and bit into it. Beyond the cooks was a door that looked like it led outside.
“There it is!” I said.
But then the door swung open, and Danby stepped in.
“Turn back!” Benjamin cried.
We ran back down the narrow hallway again.
“Upstairs!” Pip said, through a mouthful of bread. We wheeled right, up a flight of wooden stairs, with Danby close behind. At the top of the stairs there was an old trunk, and Benjamin pushed it so it bumped and slid down the stairs with an appalling noise. Mr Danby dived backward as the trunk slammed into the wall. Pip whipped the remains of his bread roll at his head for good measure, hitting him just above the eye.
We ran down a long, narrow hall and up another flight of stairs, and then up a ladder that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Pip pushed open the trapdoor and hoisted himself into the dim attic with the agility of a spider, his legs disappearing into the dark. Benjamin and I followed more clumsily. We were in a dim, dusty space under the eaves, full of broken school desks and stacked mattresses.
“Over here!” Pip called from somewhere in the dark.
Benjamin and I dragged a musty old mattress onto the trapdoor to keep it closed. Then we crawled on our hands and knees to get to Pip, trying not to bump our heads on the low ceiling. He had found a small, filthy window, the pane crosshatched with old tape, and was trying to push it open.
“What’s out there?” I asked.
“The roof.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “You fancy waiting here?”
The sash wouldn’t open, so Pip leaned back on his hands and kicked the glass out with his heels. The tape kept it from shattering easily, and it took several kicks.
“Oh, that’s discreet,” Benjamin said.
Pip ignored him and picked shards of glass out of the frame.
“Why’s it taped?” I asked.
“To keep bombs from breaking the windows in the war,” Benjamin said.
Pip leaned out, looked around, and got hold of something above the window on the outside. He was ridiculously graceful and limber, and we watched his skinny legs disappear as he lifted himself up and out.
I stuck my head out the window and looked down at the pieces of glass on the ground, far below. No one seemed to have noticed the broken window yet, but looking down made me terribly dizzy. I heard a bumping noise over by the trapdoor. Someone—probably Danby—was trying to get it open, but the mattress was weighing it down. I looked up at Pip on the roof, but the roof seemed impossibly far above the window.
“I can’t climb up there!” I said.
Pip was calm. “Take the top of the sill with your left hand,” he said, “and reach for the roof with your right.”
I did, sure I was going to fall.
“Now stand on the sill and give me your left hand.”
I did, and Pip pulled with surprising strength. I clambered up. The slate roof was steeply pitched, and worn and slippery, and I clung to the peak of it. Something in the pit of my stomach strongly objected to the height.
Pip hoisted Benjamin up after me.
“Now what?” I asked.
“We look for a gutter,” Pip said. “A pipe. Some way down.” He scrambled down to the edge of the roof to look, and just watching him made my stomach seize and flip again. If getting to a gutter meant climbing down that steep pitch, I didn’t think I could do it. Benjamin seemed no better off than I was—he was straddling the roof ’s peak as if it were an unpredictable horse.
A cry went up below. All of the children had spilled out of the back of the house, and they stared up at us from the ground, with the pink-faced matron.
Pip climbed, still more like a spider, back up to join us. “They’re right underne
ath the gutter pipe,” he said. “We can’t climb down.”
“Some plan,” Benjamin said.
“Right, you come up with a better one!”
“The elixir!” I plunged my hand into the pocket of my school blazer. The gardener had told us to use it only for a good purpose, and escaping off this roof seemed awfully good. But my pocket was empty. I felt the other one. “It’s gone,” I wailed. “I was sure I had it.”
“What’s a lickser?” Pip asked.
“An elixir,” Benjamin said. “Like a potion.”
I was too stunned by the loss to lie. I lowered my voice so the people on the ground couldn’t hear. “It was supposed to, well . . . to turn us into birds,” I said. “At least we think it would. But I lost it.”
“How could you lose it?” Benjamin asked.
That made me indignant. “You didn’t even think it would work!”
“But you did!” he said. “So you should have kept it!”
Then we heard a grunt of effort, and saw Danby’s hand grip the roof where we had climbed up from the broken window. I looked back at Pip in a panic, and he was holding up the little brown bottle, between his thumb and forefinger.
“This it?” he asked.
“How did you get that?”
“From your pocket,” he said. “When you left with your mate there.” He nodded towards the pale fingers gripping the roof ’s edge.
I put my hand on my blazer pocket and tried to think when Pip could have reached into it. It seemed impossible. There was another grunt, and a second hand appeared on the roof next to the first. Then Mr Danby’s face appeared, strained with effort. He hadn’t yet figured out how to lever himself up onto the roof.
“Benjamin,” he called. “Janie. Please. That man you saw in the car is a friend. He’s been working for England. I can give you proof.”
“You’re lying!” I said. I turned back to Pip. “You have to give me the bottle.”
Pip backed away, along the peak of the roof. “So you can leave me again?” he said. “What if I just drink it, and leave you?”
“We couldn’t take you with us before,” I said, crawling forward. “But now we can. We’ll all leave together.”
“How long does it last?”
“We don’t know.”
“Is there enough for all three of us?”
“Probably.”
“You don’t know!”
Danby got one leg up over the edge of the roof with a thump. Pip stood, right on the peak, and ran effortlessly away. Benjamin and I tried to follow, but my feet kept slipping down the sides.
The gothic roof of Turnbull had two peaks, like a child’s drawing of two triangular mountains side by side, and then a round turret beyond. Pip slid easily down into the valley between the two peaks and clambered up the second one. I hesitated behind him.
“Go!” Benjamin said.
So I slid with effort after Pip and started climbing. Benjamin followed.
Danby was still slipping along on the first peak, in slick leather-soled shoes. “Don’t be ridiculous, Miss Scott,” he called. “We’re on the same side!”
Pip slid down the second peak, which dropped off into empty space, except where it attached to the cylindrical turret. The crowd on the ground had moved so they were still just below him. He edged over to the base of the turret and started to climb up it. Benjamin and I followed. The brickwork on the turret wall was uneven, and the bricks created footholds and handholds, so it was possible to scale. I’d even started to get used to the height. The children were cheering, and looked happy and excited, as if they were watching a film.
Once we had climbed into the top of the turret, it was as if we were in a kind of lookout post. There didn’t seem to be any way to get back inside the house. Maybe there had once been access, but now there was only a drain to let out the rain. The lookout had walls about three feet high, so the people below couldn’t see us unless we stood and looked over the wall, which we did.
The children immediately cheered, and the matron looked stern. “Come down,” she said. “You have nowhere to go.”
“Call the detectives!” Benjamin said. “Tell them to come back!” He pointed at Danby, who had sat down on the nearest peak to rest. “That man is a Russian spy!”
Danby, his striped socks revealed below his trouser cuffs by his bent knees, wiped his handsome forehead with a handkerchief. “Benjamin,” he said wearily. “I am no more a Russian spy than you are.”
“Jump!” one of the ragged children shouted to us. “We’ll catch you!”
“Yes, jump!” some of the others joined in, shouting and laughing and leaping, to demonstrate how we should do it.
Danby started climbing down the roof towards the base of our turret.
I sank down behind the wall and turned to Pip. “Open the bottle,” I said. “We’ll all take some.”
But Pip hesitated, and Benjamin lost patience. He snatched it away, unscrewed the top, and drank.
Right away, a startled look came over his face, and he set the bottle down. For a second, nothing more happened. I looked over the wall and saw Danby trying to scale our turret. His feet slipped, and he swore.
When I looked back at Benjamin, he had started to shrink. His head grew longer in front and sank into his shoulders, and his body tilted forward at the hips. A feathered tail grew out behind him, and he kept rapidly getting smaller. His hands disappeared, and his arms became wings. Then everything I recognised as Benjamin was gone.
CHAPTER 17
Flight
Where Benjamin had been, on the stone floor of the turret of Turnbull Hall, was a plump-chested, sand-coloured bird with a crest of feathers on his head. I’ve wondered since that day about why I wasn’t more astonished, watching Benjamin turn into a bird. But it’s very hard not to accept your friend turning into a bird when you see it happening in front of you, and could reach out and touch his feathered head if you wanted. I didn’t recognise the type of bird he was at the time, but I learned later that it was a skylark, which is a very scruffy, energetic, Benjamin-like bird. “I don’t know what exactly you are,” I said. “But you’re definitely something that flies. And you’re not the size of a giant condor.”
“That’s amazing,” Pip said. He grabbed the bottle, drank half of what was left, and handed it off to me. His eyes widened. “Oh, that is odd, that is,” he said.
After a few seconds, he started to shrink, too, and his head tilted and lengthened into a beak, and then he was a tiny, dark-feathered swallow. He shook out his curving wings as if to test their length.
I had been so preoccupied with their transformations that I hadn’t noticed Danby’s exasperated face rising over the turret wall. He stared at me, and then at the two birds. He looked down over the side of the turret for the missing boys, and then back at me. “Where did they go?” he asked.
“What is it, sir?” the matron’s voice called anxiously from below. “What’s happened?”
“Only the girl is here,” Danby called back. “And two birds.”
“Two what?”
“Two birds,” Danby said.
He started to push himself up over the turret wall towards us, and I moved away from him.
Pip the swallow gave a little double hop and lifted off, as if casually, into the sky. He didn’t look like a child who’d become a bird with no preparation—he flew as if he’d been a bird all his life, dipping and soaring through the air. Benjamin the skylark watched him, too.
A high, piping child’s voice came up from the ground, saying, “Perhaps they became the birds!”
An older girl said sharply, “People don’t just become birds.”
I thought of the gardener saying we had to allow for the possibilities, and I felt sorry for the older girl, who couldn’t make room in her imagination for what the smaller child had guessed.
Danby seemed suddenly to make room for it in his imagination, and he grabbed at the skylark, but Benjamin leaped just out of reach along the
turret wall. Then he was in the air. He gave a birdcall of surprise, and swooped and chirped in a way that sounded like laughter. He wasn’t as graceful as Pip, but he was flying. There were cheers from the children, who were all allowing for the possibility now.
While Danby watched Benjamin fly away, I drank the rest of the bottle. The elixir was syrupy in texture, and bitter and mossy in taste.
I felt a strange, rushing feeling in my veins, and understood why Benjamin and Pip had looked so surprised. I’d never been aware of each individual blood vessel in my body like that, and of the blood coursing through them. Then I felt my heartbeat speed up, and my bones seemed to lighten. I dropped the bottle and it fell to the ground. The distant sound of glass smashing on the walk below seemed to shake Danby from his reverie, and he lunged towards me.
My skull felt like it was changing shape, and lightening, and I thought: Allow for the possibilities. And then I leaped, still human, off the roof. Danby caught the end of my scarf, and it’s a good thing it wasn’t tied on, or he might have broken my neck. It slipped over my shoulder as I jumped, and I left him with the scarf in his hand.
I plummeted, of course, but I knew from Benjamin and Pip how quickly I would change. My hands became wings in midair, and my legs became tiny bird legs. I stretched my new wings tentatively and rose up just as they finished growing, and just before I would have crashed into the hard ground.
I rose to the second-storey windows, and then the third. I looked down at myself and saw a smooth, round red-feathered stomach. I was a robin! But there seemed to be something wrong with my upper wings, just around my bird’s shoulders. Then I remembered Danby snatching my scarf away just as I was changing, and realised my wings must be missing feathers.
Benjamin and Pip were circling overhead, calling out to me, and I fluttered clumsily towards them. I started to think about what I should do to get to where they were, but as soon as I started analysing all the necessary motions, I felt myself fall.
“Catch the robin!” Mr Danby called.
“I’ll get her!” the matron said.
The ground came dizzyingly close, and the children shouted, “Fly! Fly away!”