The Apothecary Page 0,25

innocuous, a light burning somewhere inside. We crept quietly towards the door, which stood ajar, leaving a vertical line of light.

“Should we knock?” I asked.

Benjamin pushed at the door and it creaked, making both of us jump back. The house was silent. “Hullo?” he called again.

He pushed the door open, and we stepped inside.

“I don’t like this,” I whispered. “We should leave.”

A lantern with a glass shield sat lit on a chair by the door, as if someone had planned to take it outside. The gardener’s oilcloth coat was hanging on its peg. The table was set meticulously for one, with a place mat, a folded cloth napkin, and a white bowl, none of which had been used.

There was a woodstove at the other end of the room, with a pot on it. Benjamin picked up the lantern and held it over the pot. Some kind of soup had been simmering there, but the fire had gone out in the woodstove and the soup was congealed around the edges.

As I moved away from the stove, my foot hit something on the floor and I bumped into Benjamin, rattling the lantern’s glass shield.

The spill of light caught the sole of a rubber boot, which I had tripped over. Then a second boot. I held my breath as Benjamin raised the lantern to reveal two legs in wool trousers, stretched out on the floor, suspenders over a wool shirt, and then the gardener’s grey beard.

A scream caught in my throat. The gardener’s shirt was dark with something wet. I started to see spots around the edges of my eyes, breaking up the room, until I could only see straight ahead. In that small circle of vision, I could see the jagged, broken pointer of the sundial sticking out of the gardener’s chest. I didn’t faint, but fell to my knees beside him.

“Janie!” Benjamin said.

I had learned in First Aid, for junior lifesaving, that you were never supposed to remove an impaled object, because the person might bleed to death, but it seemed unthinkable to leave the horrible thing there, and anyway he was already dead. I reached for the sundial to pull it out, but a hard and callused hand caught my wrist and gripped it.

I screamed.

“Shh,” the gardener whispered, still holding my wrist. His palm felt like it was made of rough bark, as if he had become one of the trees he planted.

“You’re alive!” I said.

“You must run,” he said. His voice was faint and hoarse, and his eyes were fixed on me cloudily.

Benjamin had crouched beside me on the floor. “We have to call for help.”

“No,” the gardener said, rousing himself to make the effort. “Can’t . . . trust police.”

“Why not?”

He shook his head.

I thought of the Physic Garden outside, all those medicines, brought back from all over the world. “Isn’t there some herb that can make you better?” I asked. “We can go get it!”

He squeezed my hand, but I could tell he was weakening. “Veritas,” he managed to say. The Smell of Truth. We had come to tell him about it, and to tell him he was in danger— but we were too late.

“We used it!” I said. “And it worked. Could it help you now?”

The gardener shook his head again. “No.” He was having trouble breathing, and his white eyebrows knitted together in an exhausted frown. “Remember,” he said, “you must . . . allow for the possibilities.”

Then his grip on my hand relaxed, and his body grew eerily still.

“Wait!” I said, fumbling under his scratchy beard for a pulse. The skin of his throat was loose and still, and I felt no pulse, only my own heart pounding.

“Is he dead?” Benjamin asked.

“I think so.”

“We have to get out of here.”

“I don’t think I can move.”

“You have to. Whoever killed him might come back.”

He pulled me by the hand, past the waiting table where the gardener would never eat dinner again, and out the open door. We passed the ruined sundial and the Artemisia veritas planted in neat green rows.

“Wait!” I said, tugging Benjamin back. I knew the gardener hadn’t given up his last breath just to ask if the Smell of Truth worked. “He was trying to tell us something about the herbs.”

I knelt by the rows of leafy plants, but saw nothing, so I felt blindly between them and under them, and then my hand touched something smooth and hard. It was a small bottle, hidden under the leaves, with a piece of