The Apothecary Page 0,66

it were really possible to become a bird.”

“It is!” Pip said. “It’s great!”

“You’ve done it?” the count said. “How wildly unfair that I haven’t.”

“Can you really stop time?” I asked.

“It’s more like slowing it down briefly,” he said. “It does nothing about wrinkles.” He put a hand to his round, smooth face, which was too cheerily plump to be wrinkled.

“How do you do it?” Benjamin asked.

“My boy, it’s taken a lifetime of study.”

“But you’ll do it to stop the bomb?”

“That’s the plan!”

“Oh, please take us with you!” I said. It was partly what I thought I should be saying, as someone who wasn’t allowed to go and didn’t have a secret plan. And it was mostly what I really meant—because if they would just let us stay, then we wouldn’t need to find a place to become invisible and run freezing and naked through the streets.

“Absolutely not,” Benjamin’s father said.

“What if you don’t make it back?” Benjamin asked his father. “What am I supposed to do then? I don’t want to be an orphan!”

“Oh, it isn’t the end of the world, to be an orphan,” Count Vili said, still flipping through the Pharmacopoeia.

“Easy for you to say,” Pip said. “With your magical tutor an’ your great bleedin’ pile of money.”

Count Vili looked up from the book and broke into a delighted smile. “True!” he said. “Well, then, we’ll just have to make it back safely.”

“Can Benjamin stay with one of you?” the apothecary asked. “With your parents?”

Pip and I looked at each other and said, “Sure” at the same time.

Then they herded us out of the cabin, through the saloon, just as Jin Lo came aboard with her arms full of bags and parcels, which she set down in the little galley.

“Good luck, Jin Lo,” I said. “Good luck, Mr Burrows.”

“Look out for my son, will you, Janie?” the apothecary said. “You too, Pip.”

Then he sent us off down the steel gangway. We passed the guard at the bottom, with his thatch of white hair, and walked away up the dock before turning back to look at the boat, with its round blue icebreaking hull.

“Now,” Pip said, rubbing his hands together. “How ’bout a nice hot bath?”

CHAPTER 28

Breaking and Entering

Across the Lower Thames Road from the Port of London’s gate, there was a narrow street, and down that narrow street was a row of terraced houses, all attached to each other. Pip eyed them, looking for one in which no one was home, and no one would be. Finally he stopped in front of a house with lace curtains and dark windows. “That’s the one,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“How d’you ever know? It’s just a feeling you get.”

“Should we go around the back? It’s broad daylight.”

“Burglars go in the back,” Pip said. “Act like you’re doing nothing wrong. It’s our auntie’s house, and we’ve got our key. Sticks a bit, it does.”

So I tried to look as innocent as possible, chatting with Benjamin on the stoop, while Pip made picking the lock look convincingly like struggling with a sticky key. Then he pushed the door open, and we went inside.

“Auntie?” he called, but he was right that no one was home.

It was a narrow house, one room wide and two rooms deep on each floor. Pip locked the door behind us. A steep staircase led straight up from the front hallway, and we found a bathroom just off the second-floor landing. The bathtub was old but clean—much cleaner than a high school rubbish bin.

The pipes screeched as we turned on the water, then thundered as the water poured out, and I hoped the neighbours were away. Benjamin set the lever that stopped the drain, then poured the bottle of invisibility solution under the tap, like bath oil. I thought about the fact that Sarah Pennington’s necklace had been melted and ground into powder, and was now suspended in the water. Once, I would have teased Benjamin about taking a bath in it, but now it didn’t seem right. Sarah wasn’t Benjamin’s crush anymore; she was Pip’s—girlfriend? The thought was bizarre.

When the bath was full, we turned off the water, and the doorbell rang downstairs. “Mrs Jenkins?” a woman’s voice called, muffled by the glass in the front door. “Are you in there?”

We all froze.

“Mrs Jenkins?” the voice called again.

“Let’s find another house,” I whispered, in a panic.

“We can’t!” Benjamin said. “The bath is drawn!”

“I’ll go talk to ’er,” Pip said. “Get in the tub.” And he was