The Apothecary

Chapter 17

Flight



Where Benjamin had been, on the stone floor of the turret of Turnbull Hall, was a plump-chested, sand-coloured bird with a crest of feathers on his head. I’ve wondered since that day about why I wasn’t more astonished, watching Benjamin turn into a bird. But it’s very hard not to accept your friend turning into a bird when you see it happening in front of you, and could reach out and touch his feathered head if you wanted. I didn’t recognise the type of bird he was at the time, but I learned later that it was a skylark, which is a very scruffy, energetic, Benjamin-like bird. “I don’t know what exactly you are,” I said. “But you’re definitely something that flies. And you’re not the size of a giant condor.”

“That’s amazing,” Pip said. He grabbed the bottle, drank half of what was left, and handed it off to me. His eyes widened. “Oh, that is odd, that is,” he said.

After a few seconds, he started to shrink, too, and his head tilted and lengthened into a beak, and then he was a tiny, dark-feathered swallow. He shook out his curving wings as if to test their length.

I had been so preoccupied with their transformations that I hadn’t noticed Danby’s exasperated face rising over the turret wall. He stared at me, and then at the two birds. He looked down over the side of the turret for the missing boys, and then back at me. “Where did they go?” he asked.

“What is it, sir?” the matron’s voice called anxiously from below. “What’s happened?”

“Only the girl is here,” Danby called back. “And two birds.”

“Two what?”

“Two birds,” Danby said.

He started to push himself up over the turret wall towards us, and I moved away from him.

Pip the swallow gave a little double hop and lifted off, as if casually, into the sky. He didn’t look like a child who’d become a bird with no preparation—he flew as if he’d been a bird all his life, dipping and soaring through the air. Benjamin the skylark watched him, too.

A high, piping child’s voice came up from the ground, saying, “Perhaps they became the birds!”

An older girl said sharply, “People don’t just become birds.”

I thought of the gardener saying we had to allow for the possibilities, and I felt sorry for the older girl, who couldn’t make room in her imagination for what the smaller child had guessed.

Danby seemed suddenly to make room for it in his imagination, and he grabbed at the skylark, but Benjamin leaped just out of reach along the turret wall. Then he was in the air. He gave a birdcall of surprise, and swooped and chirped in a way that sounded like laughter. He wasn’t as graceful as Pip, but he was flying. There were cheers from the children, who were all allowing for the possibility now.

While Danby watched Benjamin fly away, I drank the rest of the bottle. The elixir was syrupy in texture, and bitter and mossy in taste.

I felt a strange, rushing feeling in my veins, and understood why Benjamin and Pip had looked so surprised. I’d never been aware of each individual blood vessel in my body like that, and of the blood coursing through them. Then I felt my heartbeat speed up, and my bones seemed to lighten. I dropped the bottle and it fell to the ground. The distant sound of glass smashing on the walk below seemed to shake Danby from his reverie, and he lunged towards me.

My skull felt like it was changing shape, and lightening, and I thought: Allow for the possibilities. And then I leaped, still human, off the roof. Danby caught the end of my scarf, and it’s a good thing it wasn’t tied on, or he might have broken my neck. It slipped over my shoulder as I jumped, and I left him with the scarf in his hand.

I plummeted, of course, but I knew from Benjamin and Pip how quickly I would change. My hands became wings in midair, and my legs became tiny bird legs. I stretched my new wings tentatively and rose up just as they finished growing, and just before I would have crashed into the hard ground.

I rose to the second-storey windows, and then the third. I looked down at myself and saw a smooth, round red-feathered stomach. I was a robin! But there seemed to be something wrong with my upper wings, just around my bird’s shoulders. Then I remembered Danby snatching my scarf away just as I was changing, and realised my wings must be missing feathers.

Benjamin and Pip were circling overhead, calling out to me, and I fluttered clumsily towards them. I started to think about what I should do to get to where they were, but as soon as I started analysing all the necessary motions, I felt myself fall.

“Catch the robin!” Mr Danby called.

“I’ll get her!” the matron said.

The ground came dizzyingly close, and the children shouted, “Fly! Fly away!”

I heard a panicked call from the skylark. I willed myself to be near him, stopped thinking, and instantly shot up into the air. The children cheered as I rose free. We were high over Turnbull, looking down at the dumbstruck and furious adults and the laughing, triumphant children. And then we were sailing away.





I had sometimes, before that day, had dreams about flying, but dreams had nothing on the real thing. We soared high over the streets of the East End, and the people looked tiny below. We could see where the bombs had fallen in the war, and where they had left buildings untouched. Pip wheeled and hovered and then dived with rocket speed towards the ground before soaring up again with a gleeful, birdlike laugh.

I couldn’t manage the acrobatics with my incomplete wings. I wondered if Danby still had the scarf, or if it had turned to feathers in his hand. I looked back towards Turn-bull and saw the green sedan pulling out of the drive. I realised that Danby and the Scar would know where Benjamin’s father was, and if we followed them, they might take us there.

Benjamin must have thought the same thing. When I swooped to follow the sedan through the streets, the boys did, too. We passed a few actual birds as we flew, and they all gave us a wide berth, not trusting a skylark, a swallow, and a robin all traveling together. One curious crow flew close to investigate, but it seemed to detect something unnatural about us, and cawed and flapped away.

The green sedan drove south, and west, and then stopped in an ordinary London neighbourhood, with rows of terraced houses. The car parked in a side street, and neither of the men got out.

I dropped down to the roof of the parked car, trying to land softly but nearly hurtling off the edge. The passenger window was open, letting out a curl of cigarette smoke, and I perched just above it. Benjamin landed beside me, then Pip. My hearing was better than usual, as a robin, and I could hear the Scar, out of sight in the driver’s seat, say in heavily accented English, “Children do not become birds, like this.”

“I would concur,” Danby said, “except that I saw it happen.”

“They cannot shrink so.”

“But they did!” Danby said. “It’s because of that book. The apothecary’s book. That Scott girl, the American, was ready to hand it over to me.”

Benjamin turned to me. His shiny bird’s eyes were bright, and he held his beak at a significant angle. You wouldn’t think that a skylark’s face could convey I told you so, but I’m here to tell you that it can. I was glad that Danby hadn’t discovered that Sergei had the satchel with the Pharmacopoeia in it.

“The children had clearly seen you before,” Danby continued. “Which means you’ve been careless.”

The German’s voice was icy and clear. “I am never careless.”

“They must have seen you at the shop,” Danby said. “Or in the garden. Someone who is careful might have noticed that they were there.”

The Scar muttered something I didn’t understand.

“And now they’ve flown away,” Danby said. “And they no longer trust me, and it’s impossible to get answers when your prisoner has taken those bloody muting pills.”

Benjamin and I looked at each other. The mute prisoner must be his father. He’d taken a pill like Shiskin’s, to make him unable to speak. Danby’s cigarette appeared through the open window, and he knocked the ash to the ground. I wondered how I had ever found his long, pale hands appealing. They seemed so sinister now.

“I could get answers,” the Scar said.

Danby sighed. “The drug makes speech impossible. It’s very clever.”

The passenger door opened with sudden decisiveness, and I flew, panicked, into a nearby tree. Benjamin and Pip scattered, too. Danby didn’t seem to see us. He got out of the car and ground out his cigarette with his heel, then straightened his tie and walked around the corner.

The three of us left our trees and flew after him, keeping our distance, and Danby walked to the end of the block. He stopped outside a boxy-looking building, turned a key in the door, and vanished inside.

There was a large tree that looked like a sycamore outside the building, and I landed on a leafy, low branch beside Benjamin and Pip. I didn’t know what the building might be, but I was sure it was where they were keeping Benjamin’s father.

We couldn’t communicate in speech, but I knew that Benjamin wanted to fly in as a skylark as soon as someone opened the door, and I knew Pip thought it was a bad idea. I can’t explain now exactly how I knew all of that, but it was clear in their eyes and in the movement of their heads and their wings.

At some point during this avian battle of wills, a stealthy orange tabby cat must have been climbing our tree. We were oblivious, thinking only about the locked door and the question of whether to go in.

Then a man pushed open the bunker’s door and came outside. Benjamin spread his wings to fly in the open door, but Pip chirped and fluttered to stop him. And then the giant tabby reached our branch and pounced on Benjamin’s back. Benjamin screeched, in his thin bird’s voice, and tried to fly away, but she had him in her claws.

I was paralysed with fear, but Pip wasn’t. He flew straight at the cat’s huge yellow eyes with his sharp beak. She yowled in pain, dropping Benjamin to the ground. Then she swiped at Pip with her paw, pinning him to the branch.

The man leaving the bunker stopped to watch the commotion for a moment, but it was only a cat after a couple of birds in a tree, and he walked away, lighting a cigarette inside a cupped hand.

I grabbed the cat’s soft ear with my talons just as she took Pip’s neck in her sharp white teeth. I squeezed her ear, and her yowl of pain turned to one of surprise as Pip started to grow, right under her claws. He lost his feathers and grew clothes, and suddenly the cat had a full-sized boy in her clutches, crouching precariously on the branch.

The cat scrambled back in a panic and fell out of the tree. I watched her twist in midair and land heavily on her feet. She didn’t stop to contemplate what had gone wrong, but raced off down the street, an orange streak.

Benjamin, too, had become a boy again, and was sitting on the ground. Pip lowered himself by his arms off the branch, then dropped the remaining distance. They both seemed a little dazed, and Pip was rubbing the back of his neck, where he had four small puncture wounds from the cat’s teeth. I thought the stress of the attack must have caused the boys’ bodies to change back. I hadn’t changed yet, but I had become a bird last and I hadn’t been seized by a cat. I flew down to the grass, where Benjamin felt his legs. “No broken bones,” he said. “I don’t think.”

“That cat put holes in me!” Pip said.

I flew to his shoulder to look. Benjamin peered at them, too. “They’re tiny.”

“Says you!”

“We still have to get inside that building,” Benjamin said. “Janie could fly in, when that man comes back.”

“She can’t!” Pip said. “I’ve been tryin’ to tell you, it’s a secret bunker. She’ll get caught if she turns human, and she can’t carry your da out with her little wings.”

Benjamin stared at him. “It’s a secret bunker?”

“Sure. It’s a military bomb shelter, underground. For Churchill and that lot, if there’s another war.”

“How do you know that?” Benjamin asked.

Pip shrugged his narrow shoulders, nearly dislodging me. “Everybody knows. To put a bloody enormous bunker right under Bethnal Green, you need builders, right? And the builders all say the job’s top secret, mind your business, till they get a few pints in ’em. Then they spill it. They swear all the barmaids to secrecy, like.”

“How big is it?”

“The whole block, underground.”

I had an idea, but I couldn’t speak. Then the idea was interrupted by a strange sensation coming over me. It came in a wave, and I couldn’t control it. I hopped off Pip’s shoulder as my heartbeat started to slow, and my arms prickled in a thousand places where the feathers were disappearing, retracting back into my skin. I grew fingers and toes, and my skull thickened and expanded, and hair grew from my head.

And then I was sitting on the grass in my school uniform.

“Right,” Pip said. “Good. She can’t fly in.”

Through the fogginess in my new human head, I remembered my idea. “What if we could be invisible?” I asked.

“That would solve a lot o’ things,” Pip said, as if I was joking.

“We’d need the Pharmacopoeia,” I said.

“The farm-a what?”

“It’s a book,” I said, “and Sergei has it.”

“We hope he still has it,” Benjamin said.