The Apothecary Page 0,43

a big rubbish bin in the corner.

We emptied the crumpled paper out and carried the can over near the book. It was large enough to get inside, and it wasn’t even too disgusting.

“Now what?” Pip asked.

“Liquefac aurum.” Benjamin flipped the primer’s pages. “Liquefac means ‘melt’. We have to melt something. We’ll need a Bunsen burner. Here, take the dictionary, Janie, and I’ll set one up. What’s aurum?”

I looked it up. “Gold!” I said, my heart sinking. “We don’t have that.”

“If we were decent alchemists, we could make it,” Benjamin said.

“We need two drachms.”

Benjamin looked at the ceiling, calculating—he’d retained at least some knowledge of compounding medicines, from working for his father. “That’s about a quarter of an ounce, I think. Not much.”

“Janie’s got gold earrings,” Pip said.

I reached for my ears and felt the small, round studs. “They were my grandmother’s,” I said. “She’s dead.”

There was a silence in the room. My nana Helen was my mother’s mother, and she’d tried to act elegant and sophisticated when she came to visit us, because that’s how she thought Hollywood was, but she couldn’t help being warm and silly, because that was her nature. The earrings were the only things of hers I had.

Benjamin looked uncomfortable. “You don’t have to give them up,” he said.

“Yes I do,” I said, and I took off an earring. “Here. Melt them.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” And I almost was sure, now that I’d made the offer. “She’d want us to find your father.”

“Thank you,” Benjamin said, holding them for a second in indecision before he dropped them in a clay crucible over a Bunsen burner. I looked away.

There were other ingredients, and I helped translate the rest of the instructions, but I can’t tell you what they were, because I was thinking about how my nana Helen had made me promise to wait to pierce my ears until I was twenty. I had promised, but only because I thought she’d live to see me grown up, well past twenty. She died when I was twelve, and it seemed unfair. At a slumber party that same year, I let Penny Meadows numb my earlobe with ice and then pierce it with a needle and dental floss, using half a potato as a backstop. I almost fainted—not from the piercing, which didn’t hurt as much as the ice did, but from the feeling of the floss being pulled, dragging slightly, through my ear. I let Penny do the other one, too, because I was going to be elegant like my nana Helen had always wanted to be. My mother was upset, but she came around. “A sewing needle?” she’d said, inspecting the neat holes. “And you didn’t faint? You take after your father.”

Benjamin ground the melted gold with something else until it became a powder, which he mixed into a solution that he poured into the rubbish bin and diluted with water from Mr Gilliam’s chemistry lab sink.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Lava vestibus depositis,” Benjamin read. “That’s the last thing on the page.”

I flipped through the primer. “Oh no,” I said.

“What does it mean?” Pip asked.

“It’s a command to wash . . . um, the clothes having been dropped,” I said. “I think it means ‘get in the bath naked’. ”

We all looked at one another.

“The bird thing worked on clothes,” Benjamin said in a tone of protest, as if being naked was my idea.

“The gardener said there are different ways of changing something,” I said. “I think he called the avian elixir a transformative process, and said that this one is only a masking process. Maybe it only works on your body.”

“So if it wears off, we’ll be starkers inside a military bunker,” Pip said.

“We might feel it wearing off,” Benjamin said. “And have some time.”

“What, three seconds?” Pip asked. “Time to put your hands over your willy?”

Benjamin shook his head, dismissing the objections. “I have to find my father,” he said. “You don’t have to do this, but I do.” He shrugged off his school blazer and started untying his tie.

“We’ll go with you,” I said.

“Maybe you should turn around, Janie.”

“Wait!” Pip said. Mr Gilliam had a freestanding blackboard in the room, the two-sided kind that moves on wheels, and Pip rolled it between the rubbish bin and us. “We’ve got a screen like this at home,” he said. “’Cause the bath’s in the kitchen.”

Benjamin stepped behind the rolling blackboard, and we could only see him from the knees down. His white shirt dropped to the floor, and