The Apothecary Page 0,19

“Come in, come in,” he said, and he looked behind us, down the green tunnel. Then he relocked the gate.

Inside his tidy brick house, the gardener took off his oilcloth coat and hung it on a peg, then gestured to the chairs at his table. “Who is the young lady?” he asked suspiciously.

“My friend Janie,” Benjamin said. “She’s American.” He said it as if it made me somehow—innocent.

“I see,” the gardener said. Then he turned to Benjamin. “I remember you as a little boy, running around the garden. I knew your grandfather well. Your father always comes looking for the most unusual plants. Is he well?”

“I don’t know,” Benjamin said, and he looked to me for encouragement. I nodded—the gardener seemed entirely trustworthy—so Benjamin sat at the table, and I did, too. He told the story of the men who had come for his father, and also of the message passed in a newspaper on the park bench.

The gardener looked alarmed. “They’ve taken Jin Lo, too?”

“Who’s Jin Lo?”

“A Chinese chemist,” the gardener said. “A correspondent of your father’s. You saw the men who came to your father’s shop?”

“Only one,” Benjamin said. “He had a scar on his face. They spoke German.”

“And did your father—tell you anything? Or show you anything?”

I could see Benjamin struggling not to mention the book. “Well . . . ,” he said.

The gardener sighed. “I understand that merely to ask will make you suspicious, but we may have limited time. Do you know where the Pharmacopoeia is?”

Benjamin glanced at me once more for reassurance, then pulled the book out of his satchel and slid it onto the wooden table.

The gardener’s eyes widened. “Ah,” he said. He seemed deeply affected, as if the book were a sacred object. He touched it slowly, in awe. “I haven’t seen it in a very long time.”

“We came here because the symbol on the front is on the gate of your garden,” Benjamin said.

“Yes,” the gardener said, running his gnarled hand over the weathered cover. “It’s the Azoth of the Philosophers.

The triangle in the centre is Water, the source of all life. The seven smaller circles are the operations of alchemy: calcination, separation, dissolution—why are you making that face?”

“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