The Apothecary Page 0,7

at a time to recite long passages in Latin, and I felt as if I were standing on a beach in heavy surf: Each student’s recitation crashed over me like a wave of words, then withdrew again, leaving nothing I could understand.

Finally the bell rang and the class was over, and the students sprang to their feet.

“Remember to do these translations of Horace,” Mr Danby called, over the noise of books and papers and talk. “For tomorrow!”

I looked at the two Latin sentences he had written on the blackboard, one long and one short, both incomprehensible. I gathered my things slowly, putting off my next trial.

“Miss Scott,” Mr Danby said as the last students filed out. “I take it you don’t feel comfortable with Latin.”

“I’ve never studied it before,” I said, clutching my books as a shield.

Mr Danby looked at the blackboard and read, “Vivendi recte qui prorogat horam, Rusticus exspectat, dum defluat amnis. ‘He who delays the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out’. ”

I tried to sort the Latin words into anything like that meaning. I was nervous, but Mr Danby reminded me of some of my parents’ friends, the ones who talked to me as if I was a full-fledged person and not just a child. Somehow I summoned the courage to ask him, “What’s a rustic?”

“In this case it’s a fool, who won’t cross the river until the water is gone.”

“And the second one?”

“Decipimur specie rectie,” he said. “ ‘We are deceived by the appearance of right.’ You see why I put the two together.”

I hazarded a guess, encouraged by his assumption that I did see. “Because you can’t always know what it means to live rightly?”

“Exactly,” he said, smiling. “They taught you something in the wilds of California. How are you finding St Beden’s?”

I tried to think of something nice, or at least neutral, to say. “My mother said moving here would be like living in a Jane Austen novel, but it isn’t really.”

“But your story couldn’t be Austen, with an American heroine,” he said.

I couldn’t help smiling at him. “That’s what I said!”

“More of a Henry James novel,” he said. “The American girl abroad. Are you an Isabel Archer or a Daisy Miller?”

I blushed, but told the truth. “I don’t know. I haven’t read any Henry James novels.”

“You will soon enough,” he said. “But you wouldn’t want to be Isabel or Daisy. They come to bad ends, those girls. Confide tibi, Miss Scott. Far better to be who you are.”

That conversation with Mr Danby was the high point of the morning. I was lost in history—they were studying medieval battles and kings I’d never heard of—and in math, which was a confusing sort of geometry and which they bafflingly called “maths.” At lunch, I stood with my tray full of unappetising food, surveying the lunchroom. It wasn’t easy to be who you were, if you were the awkward new girl at a strange school. At the end of one of the long, old-fashioned tables, Sergei Shiskin was sitting alone. He was the only student I knew by name who’d been somewhat nice, so I sat at the other end of his empty table and we nodded to each other with the recognition of outcasts. I wondered why I hadn’t just sat right across from him, but it was too late for that.

Sarah Pennington sashayed past, and I tried to come up with a smile for her.

“At the Bolshevik table, are we?” she asked. Her gang of girls—none as pretty as she was, of course—followed her, giggling.

I knew Bolsheviks were Russian Communists, and I looked at my tray to keep my composure, but that was no help. The meat looked like it had been boiled. There was a small piece of rationed grey bread, with no butter, and not even any oleomargarine. I was pushing the potatoes around with my fork when a startlingly loud, long alarm went off.

“Bomb drill!” one of the lunch ladies called, coming along the long tables. “Under the tables, please!”

It was Duck and Cover, English-style. Sergei and I both got under the long table, and everyone in the lunchroom pushed back their benches and did the same.

Everyone, that is, except one boy. He was at the next table over, and he sat calmly where he was, eating his lunch. From my place on the floor, I could see the lunch lady in her white uniform approach.

“Mr Burrows,” she said. “Get under