The Apothecary Page 0,36

an old trunk, and Benjamin pushed it so it bumped and slid down the stairs with an appalling noise. Mr Danby dived backward as the trunk slammed into the wall. Pip whipped the remains of his bread roll at his head for good measure, hitting him just above the eye.

We ran down a long, narrow hall and up another flight of stairs, and then up a ladder that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Pip pushed open the trapdoor and hoisted himself into the dim attic with the agility of a spider, his legs disappearing into the dark. Benjamin and I followed more clumsily. We were in a dim, dusty space under the eaves, full of broken school desks and stacked mattresses.

“Over here!” Pip called from somewhere in the dark.

Benjamin and I dragged a musty old mattress onto the trapdoor to keep it closed. Then we crawled on our hands and knees to get to Pip, trying not to bump our heads on the low ceiling. He had found a small, filthy window, the pane crosshatched with old tape, and was trying to push it open.

“What’s out there?” I asked.

“The roof.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “You fancy waiting here?”

The sash wouldn’t open, so Pip leaned back on his hands and kicked the glass out with his heels. The tape kept it from shattering easily, and it took several kicks.

“Oh, that’s discreet,” Benjamin said.

Pip ignored him and picked shards of glass out of the frame.

“Why’s it taped?” I asked.

“To keep bombs from breaking the windows in the war,” Benjamin said.

Pip leaned out, looked around, and got hold of something above the window on the outside. He was ridiculously graceful and limber, and we watched his skinny legs disappear as he lifted himself up and out.

I stuck my head out the window and looked down at the pieces of glass on the ground, far below. No one seemed to have noticed the broken window yet, but looking down made me terribly dizzy. I heard a bumping noise over by the trapdoor. Someone—probably Danby—was trying to get it open, but the mattress was weighing it down. I looked up at Pip on the roof, but the roof seemed impossibly far above the window.

“I can’t climb up there!” I said.

Pip was calm. “Take the top of the sill with your left hand,” he said, “and reach for the roof with your right.”

I did, sure I was going to fall.

“Now stand on the sill and give me your left hand.”

I did, and Pip pulled with surprising strength. I clambered up. The slate roof was steeply pitched, and worn and slippery, and I clung to the peak of it. Something in the pit of my stomach strongly objected to the height.

Pip hoisted Benjamin up after me.

“Now what?” I asked.

“We look for a gutter,” Pip said. “A pipe. Some way down.” He scrambled down to the edge of the roof to look, and just watching him made my stomach seize and flip again. If getting to a gutter meant climbing down that steep pitch, I didn’t think I could do it. Benjamin seemed no better off than I was—he was straddling the roof ’s peak as if it were an unpredictable horse.

A cry went up below. All of the children had spilled out of the back of the house, and they stared up at us from the ground, with the pink-faced matron.

Pip climbed, still more like a spider, back up to join us. “They’re right underneath the gutter pipe,” he said. “We can’t climb down.”

“Some plan,” Benjamin said.

“Right, you come up with a better one!”

“The elixir!” I plunged my hand into the pocket of my school blazer. The gardener had told us to use it only for a good purpose, and escaping off this roof seemed awfully good. But my pocket was empty. I felt the other one. “It’s gone,” I wailed. “I was sure I had it.”

“What’s a lickser?” Pip asked.

“An elixir,” Benjamin said. “Like a potion.”

I was too stunned by the loss to lie. I lowered my voice so the people on the ground couldn’t hear. “It was supposed to, well . . . to turn us into birds,” I said. “At least we think it would. But I lost it.”

“How could you lose it?” Benjamin asked.

That made me indignant. “You didn’t even think it would work!”

“But you did!” he said. “So you should have kept it!”

Then we heard a grunt of effort, and saw Danby’s hand grip the roof where we