The Apothecary Page 0,20

for people to be invisible!”

The gardener ignored him and turned another page. His eyes brightened as he read the Latin instructions there. “Here we are,” he said. “The most difficult of all are the transformative elixirs, which actually change the substance at hand. This one, the avian elixir, turns a human being into a bird.”

“Of course it does,” Benjamin muttered.

The gardener raised his bushy grey eyebrows at him. “You must allow for the possibilities, Benjamin. I’ve never seen it, but I hear it’s a very beautiful process.”

“And when you transform—you can fly?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Why does my father have a book of phony magic spells?” Benjamin asked.

“They aren’t spells,” the gardener said. “It’s a Pharmacopoeia, a book of medicines, or it was originally. Many of the processes in the book began as methods of healing, many generations ago: How to close a wound? How to combat sickness in the human body? Those were the original questions, but in certain minds they took unexpected directions, having to do with the fundamentals of matter. Just as cave drawings led to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, early medicine led to the Pharmacopoeia. The world is made up of atoms, which can be influenced and masked and even rearranged, by someone with the necessary skills. I’m surprised your father hasn’t begun to train you.”

Benjamin looked down. “He’s asked me, sometimes, to help him,” he said, “but I always had something else to do. I thought he just wanted me to take over his shop. You know— selling bath salts and hot water bottles.”

The gardener gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “The Society of Apothecaries wouldn’t give you a scholarship for that. They expect you to carry on your father’s real work.”

“Which is what, exactly?” Benjamin asked. “Why did those men take him?”

“I don’t know,” the gardener said. “That’s what you must discover. As soon as possible.”

“We could ask Mr Shiskin,” I said tentatively. “He’s the one who delivered the message.”

“But we don’t know if we can trust him,” Benjamin said. “And why would he tell anything to a couple of kids?”

“We could use the Smell of Truth,” I said. “From the book.”

Benjamin and the gardener looked at me. I waited for their scorn.

“You know, that’s not such a terrible idea,” the gardener said finally. “Can you safely come in close contact with this man?”

“We know his son, from school,” I said.

“Then it’s worth a try.” The gardener squinted at the light outside the window. “Let me check my charts. We can’t do much with a sextant inside the garden, since we can’t see the horizon.”

He took a book off his shelf and ran his finger down a list. “Solar noon will be at . . . twelve fourteen and nine seconds,” he said. “We can come close to that.” Then he led us outside to a sundial, a triangular pointer of oxidised green copper mounted on a squat stone base. The sun wasn’t bright, but the shadow of the pointer was visible, and it fell just after noon.

“Why does it matter when you harvest the herb?” I asked.

“The book says it’s because the fullest light of day eliminates all shadow and deceit,” the gardener said. “Very poetic. But it may in fact have something to do with photosynthesis, and the molecular structure of the veritas plant. The early alchemists knew that it was necessary to harvest it at noon, but perhaps not exactly why. The herb has always been planted beside the sundial, here.” He pointed to some bunched green leaves in careful rows.

We waited, watching the barely moving shadow.

“None of this makes any sense,” Benjamin said.

The gardener looked at him appraisingly, as if gauging his ability to do the job at hand. “We all feel strange, even apprehensive, when confronted with our own destiny,” he said. “You have to find your father. Whatever his plan is, he’s going to need you.”

“Can you come help us?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” the gardener said. “I’m old and arthritic and rarely leave this garden—I would only slow you down and raise suspicion. And now it’s time.”

He reached down to snip the leaves with his shears.

“There we are,” he said. “You crush the leaves and boil them in water to release the smell. But you’ll have to be careful. It can be an insidious little herb if you aren’t prepared for the truth.”

CHAPTER 10

The Smell of Truth

We left the Physic Garden and walked back down the Chelsea Embankment with the veritas herb and something like a