The Apothecary Page 0,6

ninth-grader, I was to be in what they called the third form, but it wasn’t anything like freshman year at Hollywood High. My first class was Latin.

“But I don’t know any Latin,” I said. “I can’t join the class in the middle of the term.”

“Everyone in third form takes Latin here,” the secretary said. “You’ll be fine.”

Then she called to a startlingly beautiful girl walking past in the hall.

“Miss Pennington,” she said. “Please show Miss Jane Scott to your Latin class. She’s new, from California.”

The beautiful girl stopped in the door of the office and looked down at my green trousers, then lingered on my scuffed canvas shoes. She looked up at my face with a bright smile in which I could detect mockery, but I was sure the secretary couldn’t.

There are Sarah Penningtons in the United States—you probably know one. I’m sure they exist in France and Thailand and Venezuela. My Sarah Pennington, at St Beden’s, was a near-perfect specimen of her kind. She had no adolescent awkwardness or shyness about her. She had clear, rosy skin, and wide blue eyes, and a long blonde braid down her back. She seemed to glow with the perfect health that money can sometimes bestow. She certainly hadn’t been subject to wartime rationing. That she was rich, and that her money had survived the war, was clear even in a uniform. The fabric of her skirt seemed to move with her, while the other girls’ skirts hung stiffly against their legs. It’s possible that no one had ever denied Sarah Pennington anything: that her wealth and loveliness had ensured that she never needed to ask, or aspire, or even hope, before the thing she wanted was there. The look on her face was one of calm assurance that the world would always be so.

I walked with her down the hall, feeling hopelessly inadequate.

“Our Latin teacher is Mr Danby,” she said. “He’s terribly demanding, but he’s so dreamy. He was a hero in the war.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a pilot in the RAF, and shot down all sorts of planes before he was captured in Germany. He was a prisoner of war for two years. After the war, he became a teacher, and he teaches as if he’s still flying missions. If his students don’t learn Latin, he thinks he’s failed. Some people hate it, but I think it’s lovely.”

I sneaked a sideways look at her. She spoke in a strange, artificial, grown-up way, and I wondered if she was imitating some English actress. She didn’t talk like a fourteen-year-old.

Mr Danby’s class had already started when we got there. I was prepared not to like him, just because Sarah Pennington did, but he was undeniably appealing. He was young, with green eyes and long lashes and soft brown hair that curled at his temples. He wore an academic gown that was disarmingly rumpled, as if he had left it in a heap on a chair and sat on it. He was talking to the class, and he seemed exasperated.

“The city we live in was once Londinium,” he was saying. “The capital of the Roman Province of Britannia. Latin was spoken here in the street, in the fish market. It is the language of Virgil, of Seneca, of Horace. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you be able to recite a little!”

The students—some amused, some frightened—glanced to us in the doorway, as a possible distraction. Mr Danby turned, too.

“Ah, Miss Pennington,” he said. “You’re just in time for my rant.”

“We have a new student,” Sarah said. “This is Jane Scott. From California.” It was startling, in front of all those faces, to hear my name announced so formally. No one ever called me Jane. And she made the state sound faintly ridiculous, as if perhaps I had made it up.

“Janie,” I muttered, feeling the heat in my face.

Mr Danby said, “Thank you, Miss Pennington.”

Sarah beamed at him and sashayed in to take her seat.

The class was seated in alphabetical order, which meant that I was seated right behind Sarah Pennington. A large boy named Sergei Shiskin, with dark hair flopping across his eyes, had to move back one desk to make room for me.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

“It’s all right,” the boy whispered back. “I don’t get called on, in the back.” He spoke with a Russian accent, and I imagined that a Russian kid would have an even worse time at the school than an American.

Mr Danby called up students one