The Apothecary

by Maile Meloy

  He lifted his glass in a toast, and we all drank. The champagne was cold and tangy, and the bubbles tickled my nose.

  The apothecary watched us. Finally, he said, in a deliberate tone, “We traveled by sea to an island in the archipelago of Nova Zembla.”

  “To where?” my father said.

  “It’s in Russia,” I said.

  “In Russia?”

  “I have been concerned for some time,” the apothecary said, “about our current race to develop catastrophic weapons. So I had been working on a way to contain an atomic bomb after it had been detonated. The Soviet Union was testing a new weapon in Nova Zembla, providing an ideal opportunity for our own test. I didn’t know when we would have another chance.”

  I glanced at my parents, who looked like they were listening to someone speaking another language. I wasn’t sure his meaning was sinking in. Or maybe they just thought he was insane. In a way, I thought he was insane, to tell them so much. It was a clear security risk. But I had told the apothecary that I wanted to tell them everything, and he seemed to have taken me at my word.

  My father turned to me. “Is that really where you were, Janie?”

  I nodded.

  “Janie and Benjamin helped me escape capture in London,” the apothecary said. “They wanted to go to Nova Zembla, but I refused to take them. In the end, they stowed away on the boat, over my objections. I have to say I was grateful for their help. But I can’t imagine the anguish it must have caused you to have your daughter missing for so long. I offer my heartfelt apologies. Please, have some more champagne.”

  “Wait, back up,” my father said, holding up his hands. “Did you say you wanted to contain an atomic bomb after it had been detonated?”

  “To control its impact,” the apothecary said. “Immediately after detonation.”

  “Are you working for the British government?” my mother asked.

  The apothecary shook his head. “Our Security Service has a bit of a problem with spies, I’m afraid. And nations with atomic weapons, or with the intention to possess them, have their own interests in mind. Their power lies in the fear the bomb creates. If there were no fear, there would be no power. Those nations, including our own, would want to prevent the use and knowledge of any antidote to the bomb.”

  “So you’re saying—it worked?” my father said.

  “It did. And now that we’ve proven that it’s possible, we can improve our methods, in league with scientists in other countries doing similar work. If a bomb is ever used, as the unimaginably destructive force that it is, we will try to be ready.”

  “Wait—wait,” my father said. “I’m sorry to keep backtracking. But I’m trying to follow you. How did you get to Nova Zembla?”

  “We took a boat until we reached Russian waters and were stopped by a Soviet patrol,” the apothecary said. “Then we flew.”

  “In a plane?”

  “As birds.”

  I cringed a little. I knew my parents weren’t going to believe that.

  “As birds?”

  “Yes.”

  My father turned to me, expecting me to tell him the actual truth.

  “It’s spectacular,” I said. “You’d love it. I was a robin.”

  My father blinked.

  The apothecary said, “And now Benjamin and I are going away.”

  I whirled on him. “Wait—what?”

  “It isn’t safe for us here,” he said. “We have a train in . . .” He checked his watch. “Four minutes.”

  “But you can’t just leave!”

  “Listen, Janie,” Benjamin said. He sat forward in his chair and caught my hands, turning me to face him. “We have to go. If you thought about it, you’d know. None of us is safe. The thing you drank, that champagne, will take a little time, but it’s going to make you forget everything that happened in the last three weeks.”

  “Forget?”

  “You better be bloody joking,” Pip said.

  “You’ve drugged us?” my father said.

  “Davis,” my mother said. “Please.”

  “You’ll still be able to get through your days,” the apothecary said. “But everything about the last few weeks will be erased. My shop, Benjamin, the trip to Nova Zembla—all of that will be gone.”

  “He drugged us, Marjorie!” my father said. He stalked away from the table in a fury, the way he did when he needed to cool off, and my mother went after him, to calm him down.

  I said, “Benjamin, you can’t do this! Those memories are mine! I saved your life! More than once!”

  “I did too!” Pip said.

  “I know,” Benjamin said. “But there’s no other way. It would be best if you gave me your diary now.”

  I shook my head. “No. I promise not to show it to anyone.”

  “I’m trying to keep you safe.”

  “But I need to remember you!”

  “Please, Janie.”

  His eyes were pleading, and I took the little book from my pocket and handed it over.

  He looked at its red cover. “I hope it says that you fancy me,” he said. “And that wasn’t just the Smell of Truth talking.”

  I was too furious to answer—it was so obvious how I felt about him, and we had been through so much since the Smell of Truth. I felt my eyes fill with tears. “Where will you go? How do you know you’ll be safe?”

  “Whole cities could be wiped out if there’s a war,” he said. “We have a responsibility to protect them.”

  “So let me go with you!”

  “You have to stay here with your parents.” He took both my hands and looked down at them. “Listen, Janie, do you remember that night on the bow of Anniken?”

  “Yes,” I said. Tears were running down my face now, and I let them.

  “I don’t think any potion could erase that,” he said. “Not for me. I hope you’ll remember that part.”

  A loose strand of hair had fallen across my face, and Benjamin tucked it behind my ear. He smiled. “American hair,” he said.

  Then he leaned forward, and I could feel the warmth of his breath and smell his clean, soapy skin. I wondered where he had slept and bathed, but then his lips touched mine and I felt a steady current of electricity running through my whole body. I knew I would never forget that feeling, as long as I lived.

  Then a vaguely familiar, silkily snide voice above us said, “Hello, Jane.”

  We both looked up, and it was Detective Montclair, the wispy-haired policeman who had arrested us at school. He was standing on the other side of the low iron railing that ran around the refreshment counter’s tables. His partner O’Nan stood beside him.

  The apothecary stood to greet them, extending a glass across the railing. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Will you join us for some champagne? I’ll open another bottle.”

  I remembered how Detective Montclair had reminded me of a cobra, swaying slightly, waiting to strike. “You’re under arrest for treason, Mr Burrows,” he said. “I’d advise you to come quietly. Mr and Mrs Scott, I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me, too.”

  “Why?” my father said. “What for?”

  “Colluding with traitors?” the detective said. “Falsely reporting your daughter missing? Criminal mischief? The question is whether to send you back to the United States to face questions about your Communist friends, or to lock you up here.”

  “I can explain everything,” the apothecary said. “Officer, please join us for a drink.”

  Officer O’Nan shook his head, but I thought he looked longingly at the bottle.

  A train was announced over the loudspeaker. While everyone paused to listen, Benjamin sprang from his seat and vaulted over the low metal railing, running for the stairs that led down from the mezzanine. The policemen ran after him. The apothecary dashed away through the other tables.

  Pip and I looked at each other. My memory of the exact connection we had to the apothecary was starting to grow hazy.

  “What’s going on?” my mother said.r />
  “We have to help them get away,” Pip said.

  My mind cleared again, and I remembered that Benjamin had been saying good-bye. Everything in me protested, but I knew Pip was right. We left my parents and sprinted down the stairs, taking them three at a time.

  When we reached the tracks, I saw Benjamin pulling his father up into the door of a train that was starting to move. The two policemen were gaining on them. Pip ran ahead and darted between the policemen’s legs, grabbing their ankles, and they all went down in a sprawl.

  I dodged around the fallen men and leaped onto the car behind Benjamin’s as the train started to pick up speed. My foot slipped and I clung to the door handle, my feet hanging free over the platform for a few long, dizzy-making seconds. Then I recovered and pulled myself up.

  I looked back and saw the policemen on the platform struggling up after their collision with Pip, but then my mother buttonholed them, brushing off their coats, asking if they were all right. She had a hand on Officer O’Nan’s chest, and I could tell she was keeping him from getting up, while pretending to help him. Through my gathering fog I thought how brave and smart she was. Pip was still tangled in the policemen’s legs and loudly complaining. My father leaped onto the train beside me.

  The train was full of passengers stowing their bags and finding their seats, and my father and I made our way through them, dodging bodies. When I reached the passageway between our car and the next, Benjamin was crouched on the other side, pouring a liquid out of a vial. There was a strange smoke coming up from the rattling floor, over the couplings between the two train cars, but it wasn’t the orange smoke Jin Lo had used to get us out of the bunker. It was pale grey, with wisps of yellow, and had a sulphurous smell.

  “Benjamin!” I said.

  He looked up, and his eyes were sad. He stood and pocketed the vial. “We can’t get arrested, Janie,” he said. “You understand, right?”

  “Pip stopped the police,” I said. “They aren’t on the train!”

  “We can’t take the chance.”

  “Just let me go with you!” I was about to step over the grey-yellow smoke, but my father caught my arm and I looked down. The floor was dissolving between our car and Benjamin’s as the metal corroded and started to fall away. The sulphur smell became stronger, and the smoke thicker in the air. I could see the exposed coupling between the two trains, until that started to crumble, too.

  “Wait!” I said, not knowing if I was talking to Benjamin or to the floor. It was impossible to take my eyes off the melting of everything that kept the two cars attached. Soon a single cable was all that was left, and finally it corroded and snapped. The front of the train seemed to leap free of its burden, and Benjamin was racing away.

  “No!” I said, reaching out, in an agony of regret. My father put his arm around me.

  “I’m sorry I put Janie in danger, Mr Scott!” Benjamin called. “But she won’t be, now. She’ll be safe!”

  Then the disappearing train was swallowed up in a pea-soup fog, which had settled over the city out of nowhere. The last I saw of Benjamin was a flash of his sandy hair in the doorway of the car.

  Our part of the train had come to a noisy stop, engineless and helpless. My father and I climbed down and pushed past the confused people milling about on the platform. Someone said the engineer had stopped the train on the tracks ahead, but I knew that Benjamin and his father would have vanished already into the suspiciously sudden fog. There was no point going after them. We walked back almost a mile along the tracks, through the confused crowds and over the awkward stones between the ties.

  The strange champagne we had drunk was making its stealthy way to our brains, carried by its innocent-seeming bubbles—as I would later discover all champagne does—and our memories were fading fast. My father seemed to grasp at the questions that occurred to him in flashes. “Did that boy’s father say you became birds?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “I’m not sure. I remember flying, sort of. And there was a skylark.” I thought hard about the skylark. “That seems important. But everything around it is too hard to remember.”

  When we got back to the station, my mother was waiting for us on the platform.

  “I feel so strange,” she said. “And I know I should know why I feel so strange, but it keeps escaping me.”

  We found Pip sitting at the bottom of the staircase that led up to the newsreel theater, with Detective Montclair and Officer O’Nan. The apothecary’s two bottles of champagne were on the step between his feet. I had just enough of my memory left to recognise them.

  “I’m just having a drink with these two ducks an’ geese,” Pip said. “Seemed a good idea at the time, but now I haven’t got the foggiest why.”

  The three of them had polished off the second bottle, and the detective, all his snakelike cunning and his threats of deportation vanished, stood to shake my father’s hand.

  “How do you do,” he said. “I’m Detective Charles Montclair of Scotland Yard. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  CHAPTER 38

  The Guardians of Peace

  My life, as it began in Victoria Station that day, was very strange. The memory loss of those of us who drank the champagne was precise and focused: The last three weeks were simply gone. My parents and I were able to make it back to our flat on St. George’s Street—my father seemed to know that we needed to get there quickly, and he pulled my mother and me through the streets by the hand—but we had to rebuild our lives from the clues that we found there.

  My parents still knew that they had a job working for Olivia Wolff, and they could find Riverton Studios, but they had completely lost the thread of the storyline they’d been working on, and had to face Olivia’s bafflement and impatience with no explanation. Olivia thought the trauma of my disappearance had made them black out the memories. But they weren’t traumatised, because they didn’t remember that I’d disappeared, and neither did I. Our landlady, Mrs Parrish, was sheepish and apologetic around my parents, and sharply disapproving of me, for no apparent reason.

  I had a uniform and books from St Beden’s, so I went to school there and followed the written class schedule I found tucked in my notebook. The pretty blonde girl who sat in front of me in Latin asked how the boat trip had gone. I looked around to the empty desk behind me, thinking she was talking to someone else.

  “With Benjamin,” she prompted.

  “Who’s that?”

  Sarah stared at me. “Oh, no!” she said. “It happened to you, too!”

  “What did?”

  “You and Pip, you both forgot everything.”

  “Who’s Pip?” I asked.

  The awkward young Latin teacher, Miss Walsh, asked us please to stop talking unless we had something to say to the whole class. Sarah rolled her eyes and passed me back a note: I miss Mr Danby!

  Who’s Mr Danby? I wrote.

  Sarah read the note and I watched her braid swing as she shook her head slightly. There was something about that braid, and about the slope of her neck beneath it, that seemed important, but I couldn’t think why. She scribbled a response and passed it back. You have to come to lunch with me.

  Sarah’s friends made room for me at their table, which took the anxiety off going to a lunchroom I’d never seen before. The girls were silly, but I liked Sarah’s boyfriend, Pip, at once. He was shorter than Sarah, with wide eyes like some animal I couldn’t think of, and a quick smile. He was new to St Beden’s, too, having transferred from the East End.

  “I showed up at my old school,” he said, “and they said I had some kind of scholarship here. It’s like I got hit over the head or something, and three weeks is gone.”

  “Three weeks are gone,” Sarah said.

  Pip grinned. “She wants me to talk all posh,” he said. “But you’ll like it here. I’m in chess club, which I learned when this bloke Timothy comes up and gives me half a crown out o’ the blue. You sh
ould join.”

  “I’m not very good at chess.”

  “Perfect!” Pip said. “Then we’ll play for money.”

  Again I felt a little electrical charge in my brain, as if my synapses were trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know what it was.

  “There was this Russian bloke who was president of the chess club, they say,” Pip went on. “But he moved to America, so now I’m president. I think I’ll move to America one day. You’re from there, right? Is it grand?”

  I said it was—but that London was, too.

  When Sarah found out my parents were writing a TV show about Robin Hood, she wanted to go see the studio, so I took Pip and her to Riverton after school, on the train.

  My parents were just happy to see I was making friends— any friends—but Olivia Wolff fell in love with Pip, with his enormous eyes and his acrobat’s grace. “Where did you find him?” she said.

  Olivia took a cab that night to the East End to see Pip’s parents, who didn’t have a telephone, so she could cast him as the youngest member of the Merry Men. Pip loved the job and the money and the attention. When the show aired, people started recognising him in the street, and I thought it must have been the first time in Sarah’s life that she didn’t get all the attention of people walking by, just for being beautiful. I guessed it would be good for her, if she could stand it.

  I joined chess club, and Pip was a patient teacher. He showed me how to think three or four moves ahead instead of leaping headlong into the moment. Slowly I became a passable opponent.

  Sergei Shiskin, the club’s ex-president, sent a short letter from Sarasota, Florida, with a blurry photograph of a man with a beard and a woman in a headscarf standing on a pretty beach with two teenage children: a tall, solidly built boy and a pale, fragile-looking girl. It was hard to see their faces, but they seemed to be smiling, squinting in the Florida sunlight. The letter said Sergei was fine and liked his new school. At the end, it said, PS Tell Janie and Benjamin I said thank you, please. I don’t have the address.