The Apothecary Page 0,29

have used it to escape.”

“To go where? He had nowhere to go, like he said.”

“It just isn’t possible, Janie. It isn’t like smelling some truth serum. There are physical laws—the conservation of mass, for one thing. A human being can’t just become a tiny bird-sized thing. We’d have to become something the size of us. Like a baby ostrich. And a lot of good that would do.”

“A giant condor?” I suggested.

“A bit conspicuous in central London.” He reached towards the bottle. “Here, let’s try it now and see.”

I pulled the bottle back. “The gardener said not to use it as a plaything,” I said. “Think how amazing it would be, if it worked, to become a bird and fly!”

“Uh-huh,” Benjamin said.

It did seem fairly unlikely. The exhaustion of the day swept over me and a yawn seemed to take over my whole body. “How are you going to get out of here in the morning?”

“Same way I came in.” He turned over on his side with his head on the satchel, pulling the blanket up.

I reached over and turned out the light and we lay in silence for a while. My brain was spinning through everything that had happened, stopping first on the upside-down face of the man with the scar, then on Shiskin’s angry switching on of the radio. Then on the cold stillness of the gardener’s throat as I felt for his pulse, then on my parents’ fury and the fact that they were going away, and my conflicted feelings about not telling them everything. Then on Benjamin Burrows lying on my bedroom floor. I could tell from his breathing that he wasn’t asleep either.

“Benjamin?” I whispered.

“Yes?”

“What are we going to do tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not used to someone sleeping on my floor.”

“You don’t have girly sleepovers back in Hollywood?”

“Sure, but no one sleeps at them,” I said. “And anyway, you’re not very girly.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. It’s a step up from ‘arrogant’.”

“He said ‘resourceful’, too.”

“I like ‘resourceful’. Hey, Janie?”

“Yes?”

“I’m glad you’re staying in London.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Me too.”

I smiled idiotically at the ceiling for a while, and then lay listening to Benjamin’s even breathing in the dark, trying to concentrate on our problems so that my brain could solve them while I slept. It was a trick my mother had taught me, but I had never been thinking about problems this big before. Eventually exhaustion won out, and I fell asleep.

CHAPTER 14

Scotland Yard

When I woke, Benjamin was already gone. A note on the windowsill said he’d meet me at school. While I was eating breakfast, the postman brought my school uniform, wrapped in brown paper. I put it on and surveyed myself in the bathroom mirror in a stiff pleated skirt, a white button-down shirt, and a navy blue blazer. They all had tiny tags on them that said UTILITY.

“What does that mean?” I asked my father, showing him the tag.

“Must have something to do with rationing,” he said. “Government-issue clothes, no frills, no extra fabric.”

The skirt was too big, and my mother brought me a safety pin to make it tighter. “If they really wanted to save fabric,” she said, “they’d send the right size. And leave out all these pleats.”

“You can’t have a uniform skirt without pleats,” my father said.

My mother smiled at him. “Is that in the Magna Carta?”

“Sure,” he said. “No schoolgirl of the realm shall be caused to attend her place of instruction in the absence of—” He stopped, thinking.

“Of sufficient folds of lambswool about her lower limbs,” my mother said.

“By the law of the land,” he said.

My mother laughed, and I did too. Things felt normal with them again, and I was grateful. Then my mother caught my hand and grew serious. “Janie,” she said. “You’ll check in with Mrs Parrish every morning and afternoon? And be safe?”

“Of course!” I said. “I have sufficient folds of lambswool now. I’ll be fine.”

We went down to talk to Mrs Parrish, who agreed cheerily to the arrangement and gave me a hug before I left her apartment. I smelled something that at first I thought was pine needles—maybe some unfamiliar English cleaning product. But then she straightened uncertainly, and I realised that the smell was gin. It was eight o’clock in the morning. I didn’t want to worry my parents, who were waiting in the hall, so I said nothing and gently closed her door.

At school, I didn’t see Benjamin outside, so I walked in alone. No one stared at me in