The Apothecary Page 0,38

Then everything I recognised as Benjamin was gone.

CHAPTER 17

Flight

Where Benjamin had been, on the stone floor of the turret of Turnbull Hall, was a plump-chested, sand-coloured bird with a crest of feathers on his head. I’ve wondered since that day about why I wasn’t more astonished, watching Benjamin turn into a bird. But it’s very hard not to accept your friend turning into a bird when you see it happening in front of you, and could reach out and touch his feathered head if you wanted. I didn’t recognise the type of bird he was at the time, but I learned later that it was a skylark, which is a very scruffy, energetic, Benjamin-like bird. “I don’t know what exactly you are,” I said. “But you’re definitely something that flies. And you’re not the size of a giant condor.”

“That’s amazing,” Pip said. He grabbed the bottle, drank half of what was left, and handed it off to me. His eyes widened. “Oh, that is odd, that is,” he said.

After a few seconds, he started to shrink, too, and his head tilted and lengthened into a beak, and then he was a tiny, dark-feathered swallow. He shook out his curving wings as if to test their length.

I had been so preoccupied with their transformations that I hadn’t noticed Danby’s exasperated face rising over the turret wall. He stared at me, and then at the two birds. He looked down over the side of the turret for the missing boys, and then back at me. “Where did they go?” he asked.

“What is it, sir?” the matron’s voice called anxiously from below. “What’s happened?”

“Only the girl is here,” Danby called back. “And two birds.”

“Two what?”

“Two birds,” Danby said.

He started to push himself up over the turret wall towards us, and I moved away from him.

Pip the swallow gave a little double hop and lifted off, as if casually, into the sky. He didn’t look like a child who’d become a bird with no preparation—he flew as if he’d been a bird all his life, dipping and soaring through the air. Benjamin the skylark watched him, too.

A high, piping child’s voice came up from the ground, saying, “Perhaps they became the birds!”

An older girl said sharply, “People don’t just become birds.”

I thought of the gardener saying we had to allow for the possibilities, and I felt sorry for the older girl, who couldn’t make room in her imagination for what the smaller child had guessed.

Danby seemed suddenly to make room for it in his imagination, and he grabbed at the skylark, but Benjamin leaped just out of reach along the turret wall. Then he was in the air. He gave a birdcall of surprise, and swooped and chirped in a way that sounded like laughter. He wasn’t as graceful as Pip, but he was flying. There were cheers from the children, who were all allowing for the possibility now.

While Danby watched Benjamin fly away, I drank the rest of the bottle. The elixir was syrupy in texture, and bitter and mossy in taste.

I felt a strange, rushing feeling in my veins, and understood why Benjamin and Pip had looked so surprised. I’d never been aware of each individual blood vessel in my body like that, and of the blood coursing through them. Then I felt my heartbeat speed up, and my bones seemed to lighten. I dropped the bottle and it fell to the ground. The distant sound of glass smashing on the walk below seemed to shake Danby from his reverie, and he lunged towards me.

My skull felt like it was changing shape, and lightening, and I thought: Allow for the possibilities. And then I leaped, still human, off the roof. Danby caught the end of my scarf, and it’s a good thing it wasn’t tied on, or he might have broken my neck. It slipped over my shoulder as I jumped, and I left him with the scarf in his hand.

I plummeted, of course, but I knew from Benjamin and Pip how quickly I would change. My hands became wings in midair, and my legs became tiny bird legs. I stretched my new wings tentatively and rose up just as they finished growing, and just before I would have crashed into the hard ground.

I rose to the second-storey windows, and then the third. I looked down at myself and saw a smooth, round red-feathered stomach. I was a robin! But there seemed to be something wrong with my upper wings, just around