The Apothecary Page 0,95

along the tracks, through the confused crowds and over the awkward stones between the ties.

The strange champagne we had drunk was making its stealthy way to our brains, carried by its innocent-seeming bubbles—as I would later discover all champagne does—and our memories were fading fast. My father seemed to grasp at the questions that occurred to him in flashes. “Did that boy’s father say you became birds?”

“I think so,” I said.

“What did he mean by that?”

“I’m not sure. I remember flying, sort of. And there was a skylark.” I thought hard about the skylark. “That seems important. But everything around it is too hard to remember.”

When we got back to the station, my mother was waiting for us on the platform.

“I feel so strange,” she said. “And I know I should know why I feel so strange, but it keeps escaping me.”

We found Pip sitting at the bottom of the staircase that led up to the newsreel theater, with Detective Montclair and Officer O’Nan. The apothecary’s two bottles of champagne were on the step between his feet. I had just enough of my memory left to recognise them.

“I’m just having a drink with these two ducks an’ geese,” Pip said. “Seemed a good idea at the time, but now I haven’t got the foggiest why.”

The three of them had polished off the second bottle, and the detective, all his snakelike cunning and his threats of deportation vanished, stood to shake my father’s hand.

“How do you do,” he said. “I’m Detective Charles Montclair of Scotland Yard. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

CHAPTER 38

The Guardians of Peace

My life, as it began in Victoria Station that day, was very strange. The memory loss of those of us who drank the champagne was precise and focused: The last three weeks were simply gone. My parents and I were able to make it back to our flat on St. George’s Street—my father seemed to know that we needed to get there quickly, and he pulled my mother and me through the streets by the hand—but we had to rebuild our lives from the clues that we found there.

My parents still knew that they had a job working for Olivia Wolff, and they could find Riverton Studios, but they had completely lost the thread of the storyline they’d been working on, and had to face Olivia’s bafflement and impatience with no explanation. Olivia thought the trauma of my disappearance had made them black out the memories. But they weren’t traumatised, because they didn’t remember that I’d disappeared, and neither did I. Our landlady, Mrs Parrish, was sheepish and apologetic around my parents, and sharply disapproving of me, for no apparent reason.

I had a uniform and books from St Beden’s, so I went to school there and followed the written class schedule I found tucked in my notebook. The pretty blonde girl who sat in front of me in Latin asked how the boat trip had gone. I looked around to the empty desk behind me, thinking she was talking to someone else.

“With Benjamin,” she prompted.

“Who’s that?”

Sarah stared at me. “Oh, no!” she said. “It happened to you, too!”

“What did?”

“You and Pip, you both forgot everything.”

“Who’s Pip?” I asked.

The awkward young Latin teacher, Miss Walsh, asked us please to stop talking unless we had something to say to the whole class. Sarah rolled her eyes and passed me back a note: I miss Mr Danby!

Who’s Mr Danby? I wrote.

Sarah read the note and I watched her braid swing as she shook her head slightly. There was something about that braid, and about the slope of her neck beneath it, that seemed important, but I couldn’t think why. She scribbled a response and passed it back. You have to come to lunch with me.

Sarah’s friends made room for me at their table, which took the anxiety off going to a lunchroom I’d never seen before. The girls were silly, but I liked Sarah’s boyfriend, Pip, at once. He was shorter than Sarah, with wide eyes like some animal I couldn’t think of, and a quick smile. He was new to St Beden’s, too, having transferred from the East End.

“I showed up at my old school,” he said, “and they said I had some kind of scholarship here. It’s like I got hit over the head or something, and three weeks is gone.”

“Three weeks are gone,” Sarah said.

Pip grinned. “She wants me to talk all posh,” he said. “But you’ll like it here. I’m in chess club, which I learned