The Apothecary Page 0,55

didn’t like a girl was too smart.”

“Things have sure changed!” I said, smiling brightly, one foot out the door. I could smell the gin on her breath from where I stood. I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I was wearing Benjamin’s clothes.

“Oh, brave new world,” Mrs Parrish said. “Susan, your friend’s name was?”

“Sarah,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “Sarah. I’d better write that down.”

“Bye, Mrs Parrish!” I closed her apartment door.

We told the apothecary, as we took the back alleys to Chelsea in the dark, how we’d been arrested and taken to Turnbull, and then nearly captured by Mr Danby, our Latin teacher who seemed to be a spy, and his Stasi friend.

“Danby told us that the Scar is a double agent working for England,” Benjamin said. “But we think Danby is the double agent, secretly working for the Soviets.”

“I see,” his father said, but I wasn’t sure that he did.

We had arrived at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and the apothecary looked up at the locked gate. “I need to see where the gardener died,” he said.

I shuddered at the idea of going to the cottage, but we helped him over the fence. Pip and Jin Lo scaled it easily by themselves, and dropped down to the other side.

The garden was quiet, and we walked on the grass that bordered the paths, to avoid the crunching of the gravel. We showed him the broken sundial, and he peered through the window at the floor where we had found the gardener. There was still a dark stain I knew must be blood. It didn’t seem like a good idea to go trooping through a crime scene.

“There wasn’t any need for them to kill him,” the apothecary said. “He was the gentlest man I ever knew.”

“They killed him because he was helping us,” I said. “It’s our fault.”

“No,” he said. “It’s mine.”

We showed him where the avian elixir had been hidden among the green rows of the Artemisia veritas.

“Have you—?” he asked.

“I was a skylark,” Benjamin said. “That’s how we escaped Turnbull.”

His father smiled sadly. “My father showed me the avian elixir to win me over to his practice. I was planning to do the same with you.”

“It would’ve worked,” Benjamin said.

“Yes, I see that now. I was going to tell you when I thought you were ready. But you—well, you seemed to be headed in a different direction.”

“If you’d told me the truth, I might not have been.”

Being near the cottage was making me nervous. “I don’t think we should stay here,” I said. “Someone will find us. How long will the blindness last on Danby and Scar?”

“It depends on the dosage and the accuracy of the delivery,” the apothecary said.

“Very accurate,” Jin Lo said. “Full dosage.”

“Then perhaps overnight,” he said. “But I must be in the garden at first light.”

“We can hide in the white mulberry tree,” Benjamin said. “I used to play inside it.” He led us away from the cottage and out of the inner garden to a tree with long branches draping down to the ground. He held one of the branches aside, and we walked into a hollow that was like a green cave, with room for all five of us to sit around the trunk.

“What a hideout!” Pip said, and he flopped onto his back to look up at the canopy of leaves overhead.

“So tell us why the British military and Soviet security are both after you,” Benjamin said to his father.

The apothecary sat on the ground and seemed to gather his thoughts. “My father,” he said, “and his father before him, and generations of our family going back to the Middle Ages were engaged in a study of matter, as it grew out of the attempt to heal the human body. The work has always been secretive, and has often been considered a threat by the various authorities— with the exception of Henry the Eighth. He was very interested in medicine, and open to creative solutions to his various woes. The trouble was that he changed his mind so often about what the solutions should be. As he did about his wives.”

“Our ancestors knew the king?” Benjamin asked.

“Royal favour has come and gone,” the apothecary said. “The secrets, meanwhile, were kept in the Pharmacopoeia.” He looked suddenly anxious. “You do have the book?”

I could tell from Benjamin’s face that he had forgotten about the Pharmacopoeia. “It’s safe,” he said.

“Safe where?”

“At school.”

The apothecary looked aghast. “Where your Mr Danby works?”

“Mr Danby is blind and doesn’t know