The Apothecary

by Maile Meloy

  Pip stopped in front of it. “That’s you.”

  “Oh,” Sarah said. “I was so bored, sitting for that.”

  “You looked lonely,” he said.

  “Lonely? I had a nurse or a governess with me every second!”

  Pip said nothing, and raised his eyebrows at her.

  “It was a perfectly ordinary childhood,” she snapped.

  I bit my tongue to keep from reminding her that she had a butler and a nurse and a governess, which wasn’t very ordinary. I reminded myself we needed the clothes.

  She led us down the hall to a bedroom done all in flowered upholstery, with a canopied bed and an enormous window seat. The room seemed unused and in perfect order. I went to the window and pushed the curtain aside to look outside. There were two men in suits standing on the other side of Knightsbridge, and I wondered if they were watching the house. But after a moment, they shook hands and walked in different directions without looking up at the windows. I let the curtain fall.

  “This was my aunt Margaret’s room,” Sarah said, opening a wardrobe that ran along one wall. “She went off to America in the twenties, to Vassar or someplace, and brought back all kinds of shocking clothes.”

  “Is she dead?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” Sarah said. “She’s just married. She lives in Scotland and she’s old and dull. But she used to be so glamorous.” She pulled out what looked like a diaphanous white silk handkerchief with spaghetti straps, embroidered with silver thread. “That’s one of her dresses. I don’t think she could get one arm in it now.”

  “But we need warm things,” I said.

  Sarah dropped the silver dress to the floor. “Where are you going again?”

  “My uncle’s a fisherman,” Pip said. “He’s taking us on his boat.”

  “Ugh,” Sarah said. “I get seasick in the bath. It’s tragic for my father, who’s terribly yachty.” She pulled out a long, dark fur. “That’s a raccoon coat. Everyone wore them in the twenties. I think it’s for a man.”

  She handed the coat to Benjamin, who put it on and stood in front of a long oval mirror beside the wardrobe. He looked like a bear escaped from the zoo, and raised his arms as if to lumber forward in attack. Pip convulsed with laughter.

  “Now this might be suitable for a boat,” Sarah said, pulling out a lined wool peacoat. “Here, Janie, try it.”

  I shrugged the peacoat onto my shoulders, and it fit me. I put my hands in the pockets and came out with a navy blue watch cap, which I pulled over my hair. It was a good feeling, to be enshrouded in thick military wool like that—I felt oddly safer.

  Sarah tilted her head to consider me. “That’s not terrible, actually,” she said. “It’s rather chic.”

  Against my will, my eyes went to Benjamin in the mirror, to gauge his reaction. He stood with his arms hanging at his sides in the raccoon coat.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Looks warm.”

  “But your legs will be cold,” Sarah said. She pulled out some silk long underwear and a few pairs of heavy wool pants, and she added them to the growing pile on the floor.

  “Try those on,” she said. “I’ll take the boys to my brother’s room.”

  They left, and I tried the warmest-looking pants on under my skirt. They fit fine, and I folded the warm clothes and sat on the end of the bed. The mattress was soft and inviting, and the room was quiet, and I had an overwhelming urge to lie down. It felt so luxurious just to be alone. I lay back and let my body relax into the bed’s silk coverlet, and looked up at the flowered patterns in the canopy overhead.

  I thought it would be very restful to be Sarah Pennington for a little while. There would be no worries, no running naked through the cold, no fear of what would happen if the apothecary caught us and wouldn’t let us on the boat. I could feel myself sinking into the soft bed, as if I were falling very slowly, floating into oblivion.

  Then I heard a slight cough, and I shot upright to see the long-faced butler standing in the door. I felt that my hair was askew and tried to smooth it with my hand.

  “Did you find what you need, miss?” the butler asked.

  “I think so.”

  “May I ask, will Miss Pennington accompany you on this boat trip?”

  “Oh, no. She gets seasick.”

  “That’s a relief,” he said. “I answer to her father, you see.”

  Sarah came back down the hall with the boys, who looked like Eskimos in heavy trousers and ski coats with fur-lined hoods. They were carrying warm boots. “We’ll need a trunk,” Sarah said.

  “Of course,” the butler said. “I can have it delivered to the boat.”

  I looked at Benjamin and Pip. It might actually work. The others would have luggage, too, and the crew wouldn’t know which trunks were coming from where.

  “The boat’s called the Kong Olav,” I said. “It’s at the Port of London.”

  “It’s Norwegian?” the butler said, frowning thoughtfully. “Then I daresay they’ll have dried codfish aboard, but have you arranged for proper things to eat?”

  CHAPTER 27

  The Port of London

  The trunk was sent ahead, and the chauffeured Daimler waited for us in Sarah Pennington’s drive. We crowded into the backseat, with Benjamin on my left, the side of his leg pressed against mine. Pip was on my right, with Sarah squeezed between him and the door.

  “One of you can sit in front,” the driver said. He had clearly met a few charming pickpockets in his time, and he wasn’t amused by Sarah’s slumming.

  “We have plenty of room,” Sarah said imperiously.

  The driver sighed and pulled out into the street.

  At St Beden’s, Pip stole a kiss while the driver wasn’t looking, and Sarah blushed crimson as she climbed out of the car. “Have fun!” she said, and she waved good-bye and skipped up the steps.

  Pip looked at me. “What?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said, trying not to laugh. “I owe you a dollar.”

  Benjamin did laugh, and I felt it in his body, through the leg that rested against mine. We didn’t need to sit quite so close together anymore, but it didn’t seem urgent to move away.

  “To the port?” the driver asked.

  “To the port,” Benjamin said, and the car swung away towards the river.

  There was a guard at the gate, but he took one look at the shiny chauffeured Daimler and waved us through. We drove slowly past the docks, past the hulking boats and barges and cranes. There were little sailboats in one section and big industrial-looking cargo steamers in another.

  Then we saw a steel boat about a hundred feet long, tucked in against the dock. It was painted bright blue, with a long white deckhouse on top. In crisp white letters on the blue hull, it said KONG OLAV. The bow was rounded and sledlike, I guessed for breaking the ice, but the boat itself was long and narrow, and looked like it might go fast.

  Two crewmen were carrying Sarah Pennington’s trunk, with its mahogany leather sides, up the gangway. I guessed they were used to nice luggage, with Count Vili aboard, and no one stopped them. So that was progress at least: Our warm clothes were on the boat. We thanked the driver and walked down the dock as the Daimler purred away.

  A longshoreman carrying a coil of rope over his shoulder bumped into Pip, knocking him forward a few steps.

  “No bloody nippers on the docks,” he growled. “’Less you fancy a swim.”

  Pip called the man something shocking.

  The longshoreman grinned and called, “Same t’you, mate!”

  I looked down into the murky water of the Thames and remembered my father telling me that the river had always been the city’s sewer system and that London’s toilets still flowed, ultimately, into it. I definitely didn’t fancy a swim.

  There was a man standing beside the short gangway for climbing aboard the Kong Olav, and we walked over to him. His hair was sun-bleached white, and his skin weathered, and his lips so thin he seemed not to have any.
/>   “We’re meeting my father on board,” Benjamin said. “Marcus Burrows. I’m supposed to bring him something.”

  The man called up to the deck, “Ask the count if he wants a delivery!”

  The plump, elegant man we had seen in Hyde Park appeared at the rail. He was as well-dressed as before: His three-piece suit was dark green, and over it he wore a long trench coat, unbuttoned, lined with dark silky fur. His eyes were friendly, and he didn’t have the manner of someone who was sought by both the British and the Soviet authorities.

  “Ah, the children!” he said. “Thank you, Ludvik, send them up. Tell me, have you ever seen such a marvellous boat?” His voice reminded me of expensive furniture, something that belonged in Sarah Pennington’s house: rich and soft-textured.

  Ludvik the guard stepped aside, and we climbed aboard the blue icebreaker, our footsteps ringing hollowly on the metal gangway. I made a mental note that we would have to step quietly when we were invisible.

  The apothecary met us on deck, his face looking anxious beside the happy, complacent count. “Were you followed?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Benjamin said.

  “You have the book?”

  Benjamin nodded.

  “Jin Lo is still collecting provisions,” his father said. “I hope she’s all right.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” I said, just because he seemed so nervous and agitated.

  The Kong Olav wasn’t fancy, but it was orderly and clean, the steel deck painted and scrubbed, and the chrome metalwork polished. The skipper’s name was Captain Norberg, and he had a cragged face that looked as if it had spent years squinting into the wind. Aside from him, I counted five crewmen, including the guard at the bottom of the gangway, who all seemed to speak English. The bridge was at the foreward end of the deckhouse, with a tiny galley behind it. Next was a little sitting area Vili called the “saloon,” with built-in couches and a square table.

  Beyond the saloon was a corridor with doors to the cabins on either side, and the apothecary led us back towards his cabin. Everything was small and crowded, and smelled of things that had been damp once. But Count Vili clearly loved the boat, and rhapsodised about its usefulness and efficiency, pointing with his knobby walking stick. As he gushed, Pip touched my arm and pointed to an open cabin door.

  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?”

  CHAPTER 28

  Breaking and Entering

  Across 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.