The Apothecary Page 0,78

called the Dark Force. It was like a cloud.”

The count looked startled. “You saw it?”

“We watched it float away,” I said. “Except it didn’t really float. It seemed to know where it was going.”

A momentary frown crossed the count’s face. “Have you noticed ill effects from your experiments with the Pharmacopoeia?”

Benjamin and I glanced at each other. “You were missing the feathers around your neck,” Benjamin said. “When you were a bird.”

“But that was because Mr Danby grabbed my scarf,” I said. I thought about the other things we’d done. “I kicked the drain before Pip could become invisible, but that was my fault, and it ended up helping us, because he was still visible and could distract the police.”

“The memory oil paralysed Jin Lo,” Benjamin said.

“Whenever we tamper with natural laws, there are consequences,” the count said. “The larger the disruption, the larger the consequence. The name of your Pharmacopoeia, for example, comes from the ancient Greek Pharmakon, which meant both ‘drug’ and ‘poison’: the power to heal and harm. I have never seen the Dark Force as a cloud before. But I have seen its effects, in small ways. My tutor, Konstantin, compared it to the Roman idea of the ‘genius’, or guardian spirit. He felt that something like those genii resided in matter, and were released and disturbed when matter was transformed. It explained, for him, the effect of the cloud seeming to know where it is going. There is a kind of intelligence to what is released, and sometimes it has a mischievous or irritable character. But these genii have a strange kind of loyalty. The fact that they bother to tease us with ill effects means they are inextricably linked to those who disturb them, if you see what I mean. I’m not sure of any of this, of course. We work in the dark—we do what we can, as Henry James said.”

“Mr Danby told me to read Henry James,” I said.

“Ah, you see?” Count Vili said. “The dreadful Mr Danby reads good books. Even the darkest forces are never all bad.”

That night, Benjamin and I stood on the rail in the dark, bundled up against the cold, watching the water break and foam beneath the Anniken’s bow. It poured away along the sides of the hull, bright white against the black sea, as if the boat had wings. Overhead, the stars were impossibly clear, brighter than any stars in smoky England or smoggy Los Angeles, and they gave me an odd feeling, as if something was expanding inside my chest and spilling over. It would seem very unfair to be killed at fourteen when the world had so much loveliness in it.

Benjamin broke the silence, saying, “I’m sorry I lost control yesterday, Janie. I couldn’t stand it, watching Shiskin hold that gun to your head and not being able to move or do anything. It was my plan that had put you in danger, and—I sort of snapped.”

“It was a good plan,” I said. “I just wasn’t careful enough.”

“You were brave to do it.”

“I wasn’t brave. I was scared to death.”

“He believed you the whole time. Did you ever want to be an actress?”

I thought about the vain and silly Maid Marian, with her false eyelashes and her obvious flirting, and the other versions of her who’d been in my parents’ shows back home. “No,” I said. “I mean, I used to practise walking like Katharine Hepburn. But that was more about wanting to be the characters she plays than about wanting to be her.”

“Show me the walk!” he said.

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I’d told him about the Hepburn walk.

“Please?” he said.

“No!”

Benjamin smiled. “Someday.”

I couldn’t help smiling back. “Maybe.”

We watched the bow wave a while longer, and then Benjamin said, “Listen, Janie. Remember that thing I said about Sarah Pennington? Under the Smell of Truth?”

I nodded. My heart was pounding inside my coat.

“I just wanted to say,” Benjamin said, staring hard down at the water, “that—well, that you’re the one I’d want to be here with.”

It was exactly the thing I might have wanted him to say, but wouldn’t have dared to wish for, back when I’d had time to worry about whether he liked me or not. Hearing it out loud, I didn’t know how to answer. He turned to look at me, and his dark, serious eyes had the same effect on me as they had in the lunchroom that first day. The wind blew my hair against my