The Apothecary Page 0,58

Shiskin,” Benjamin said crossly. “I thought he was spying on England.”

“But you must have known that these were my colleagues.”

“I knew nothing, because you told me nothing!”

“Tell us more about Count Vili,” I said, to keep the two of them from going around again in the same argument. “He’s not a normal physicist, right? He’s a physicist like you’re an apothecary.”

“His name is Count Vilmos Hadik de Galántha,” the apothecary said. “He was orphaned during the first war, and was sent to Luxembourg with a German tutor and a great deal of money. His tutor was, as you say, not a normal physicist, and he took the boy on as an apprentice. Vili had a talent for the work.”

“Like you,” I said, turning to Jin Lo. She had taken out her braid and was combing her fingers through the silky strands that hung to her waist. Whenever I unbraided my hair, it held the unruly kinks of each braid until I washed it, but Jin Lo’s was like a sheet of smooth black water.

“I met Vili when he came to England to go to Cambridge,” the apothecary went on. “He was immature and unfocused then. He liked to spend all his time drinking and floating in punts down the river. My father thought him a disgrace to our craft. But like many men, he eventually found his purpose and his way. And he has accomplished what none of us thought possible. He has discovered a way to stop time.”

“That’s impossible,” Benjamin said.

“Well, yes,” his father said. “It’s more precisely that he freezes time, as when we supercool some chemical reactions so that they happen very slowly. He creates a temporal lag in his immediate vicinity, from which he is exempt, so that he can move quickly. It’s remarkable. The Hungarians are so adept at physics, and also at mathematics and music. I’ve always thought it must be because so few people speak their language. They’ve found extralinguistic means to interact with the rest of the world.” He smiled at this thought.

“So he freezes time,” Benjamin said, pulling him back to his story.

“Well, it would obviously be very useful,” the apothecary said. “You could get your ducks in a row, as it were. He also has a great deal of money, which is more immediately useful. He has engaged an icebreaking research vessel to take us to the north. He knows and trusts the Norwegian crew, and has chartered the boat on northern cruises to the fjords. It’s our only hope of getting close to Nova Zembla.”

“But first we need jaival tree,” Jin Lo reminded him. She had braided her hair again, with swift deft fingers, into a silken rope.

“Yes, of course,” the apothecary said. “We’ll begin at dawn, in the sunlight. For now, I think we should stay here and sleep.”

“But we haven’t had any tea,” Pip said.

The apothecary looked perplexed. He could turn himself into salt, and he believed he could stop an atomic bomb, but he couldn’t produce a dinner for three children out of thin air, under a mulberry tree. “We’ll get breakfast in the morning,” he said. “We can’t risk anyone’s leaving the garden. You all know too much.”

Pip narrowed his lemur’s eyes at the apothecary and said, “Look, mister, you do what you want, but I’m not sleeping on the ground, without my tea.” Then there was a rustle of branches and he was gone, as if he’d never been there.

No one went after him—no one could have caught him— but the apothecary turned to us accusingly. “What do you know about that child?” he asked. “How do you know he wasn’t planted in that cell with you?”

“We thought he was at first,” I said. “But he really wasn’t.”

“You vouch for him?”

“I do.”

“I do, too,” Benjamin said.

“Is he likely to get caught out there?”

“No one less likely,” Benjamin said.

“Still,” his father said, “it was careless to bring him in.”

“Not careless,” Jin Lo said. “I vouch, too.”

Then she wrapped her overalls tightly around her slender body, tossed her braid over her shoulder, and rolled over as if she slept under trees all the time. The apothecary, outvoted, lay on his back with his head on his doctor’s bag. That left an area about three feet square for Benjamin and me.

I spread the stolen blue raincoat on the ground and curled up with my arm for a pillow. There was no way I was ever going to get to sleep. An owl hooted outside in the night,