The Apothecary

Chapter 23

The Apothecary’s Plan



The blood drained from the apothecary’s face when he heard how the gardener had been killed. I didn’t think it was safe to go back to the garden, but the apothecary insisted that he needed to. Benjamin and Jin Lo helped him around the corner to my parents’ flat, where I ran inside to tell Mrs Parrish that I was spending the night with my friend Sarah so we could do our Latin homework together.

“Your parents won’t mind?” Mrs Parrish asked.

“No, not at all,” I said.

“In my day, a girl with any looks on her never bothered with Latin,” Mrs Parrish said. “Boys didn’t like a girl was too smart.”

“Things have sure changed!” I said, smiling brightly, one foot out the door. I could smell the gin on her breath from where I stood. I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I was wearing Benjamin’s clothes.

“Oh, brave new world,” Mrs Parrish said. “Susan, your friend’s name was?”

“Sarah,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “Sarah. I’d better write that down.”

“Bye, Mrs Parrish!” I closed her apartment door.

We told the apothecary, as we took the back alleys to Chelsea in the dark, how we’d been arrested and taken to Turnbull, and then nearly captured by Mr Danby, our Latin teacher who seemed to be a spy, and his Stasi friend.

“Danby told us that the Scar is a double agent working for England,” Benjamin said. “But we think Danby is the double agent, secretly working for the Soviets.”

“I see,” his father said, but I wasn’t sure that he did.

We had arrived at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and the apothecary looked up at the locked gate. “I need to see where the gardener died,” he said.

I shuddered at the idea of going to the cottage, but we helped him over the fence. Pip and Jin Lo scaled it easily by themselves, and dropped down to the other side.

The garden was quiet, and we walked on the grass that bordered the paths, to avoid the crunching of the gravel. We showed him the broken sundial, and he peered through the window at the floor where we had found the gardener. There was still a dark stain I knew must be blood. It didn’t seem like a good idea to go trooping through a crime scene.

“There wasn’t any need for them to kill him,” the apothecary said. “He was the gentlest man I ever knew.”

“They killed him because he was helping us,” I said. “It’s our fault.”

“No,” he said. “It’s mine.”

We showed him where the avian elixir had been hidden among the green rows of the Artemisia veritas.

“Have you—?” he asked.

“I was a skylark,” Benjamin said. “That’s how we escaped Turnbull.”

His father smiled sadly. “My father showed me the avian elixir to win me over to his practice. I was planning to do the same with you.”

“It would’ve worked,” Benjamin said.

“Yes, I see that now. I was going to tell you when I thought you were ready. But you—well, you seemed to be headed in a different direction.”

“If you’d told me the truth, I might not have been.”

Being near the cottage was making me nervous. “I don’t think we should stay here,” I said. “Someone will find us. How long will the blindness last on Danby and Scar?”

“It depends on the dosage and the accuracy of the delivery,” the apothecary said.

“Very accurate,” Jin Lo said. “Full dosage.”

“Then perhaps overnight,” he said. “But I must be in the garden at first light.”

“We can hide in the white mulberry tree,” Benjamin said. “I used to play inside it.” He led us away from the cottage and out of the inner garden to a tree with long branches draping down to the ground. He held one of the branches aside, and we walked into a hollow that was like a green cave, with room for all five of us to sit around the trunk.

“What a hideout!” Pip said, and he flopped onto his back to look up at the canopy of leaves overhead.

“So tell us why the British military and Soviet security are both after you,” Benjamin said to his father.

The apothecary sat on the ground and seemed to gather his thoughts. “My father,” he said, “and his father before him, and generations of our family going back to the Middle Ages were engaged in a study of matter, as it grew out of the attempt to heal the human body. The work has always been secretive, and has often been considered a threat by the various authorities— with the exception of Henry the Eighth. He was very interested in medicine, and open to creative solutions to his various woes. The trouble was that he changed his mind so often about what the solutions should be. As he did about his wives.”

“Our ancestors knew the king?” Benjamin asked.

“Royal favour has come and gone,” the apothecary said. “The secrets, meanwhile, were kept in the Pharmacopoeia.” He looked suddenly anxious. “You do have the book?”

I could tell from Benjamin’s face that he had forgotten about the Pharmacopoeia. “It’s safe,” he said.

“Safe where?”

“At school.”

The apothecary looked aghast. “Where your Mr Danby works?”

“Mr Danby is blind and doesn’t know it’s there,” I said.

“I hope you’re right,” the apothecary said, and went on. “Over time, as travel and correspondence became easier, we began to seek out people in other countries who were engaged in a similar study. The work has always been accelerated by wartime, when the offences to the human body are increased. When new and innovative ways are found to hurt, we find new and innovative ways to combat injury and pain. And there have, of course, been offshoots of the practice, and discoveries that have nothing to do with medicine. Temporary alterations.”

“Like becoming birds,” Pip said.

“Precisely,” the apothecary said. “Tell me who this boy is again?”

“We were locked up in Turnbull together,” Benjamin said. “He helped us escape. He’s a friend.”

“Then I owe you my thanks.”

Pip nodded. “Go on with the story.”

“When you were very small, Benjamin, the war began,” he said. “Children were sent to the countryside by the thousands, with labels tied around their necks. You were too young to go alone. Some mothers went, of course, but your mother helped me in my work. She didn’t want to leave, and I—well, I didn’t know what I would do without you both. And for a long time, nothing happened. We were given an infant’s gas mask for you, and your mother carried the horrible thing everywhere, but we never had to use it.

“Then the Blitz began, and the bombs came every night. Hundreds of German planes carrying hundreds of tons of explosives and incendiary bombs. We finally decided that you couldn’t stay in London, that your mother had to take you out of the city. We were making the arrangements for both of you to leave when a bomb fell one night, unexploded, in the middle of Regent’s Park Road.”

The apothecary paused and looked at his hands.

“Your mother had nursing skills and worked for the Women’s Voluntary Service. She was out after the air raid was over, helping to see who was hurt, when the bomb suddenly went off and threw her against a wall. Her neck was broken, and she was killed instantly.”

There was a silence under the mulberry tree that seemed to fill my ears and take away all sounds.

“People were putting out fires,” he said. “And I was sitting there in the street, in the chaos, with my dead wife in my arms. I’ve never known so much pain. I was struck by the senselessness of the bombing. And the fear. And all those young men dying in France and Italy and Greece and Africa and Germany, for victory—I was in a kind of nightmare, in those years. A kind of shock.

“Then the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end the war in the Pacific. And there was great celebration and relief. It seemed—monumental. Such enormous power the Americans had. I had known, from my correspondence with other scientists, that the nuclear experiments were happening, but I was not prepared for the bomb. The first thing I remember thinking is that the unbearable pain I had felt when your mother died was spread over those two Japanese cities, hundreds of thousands of times over, in two horrific clouds. All over the whole country, really.”

Jin Lo had started to weep silently, and the apothecary turned to look at her. I thought she was remembering the Japanese soldiers in China, and I tried to think how to explain that to the apothecary. She seemed to read my mind.

“I am fine,” she said, and she wiped her eyes. “Tell story.”

“There was so much anger and grief and outrage and loss,” the apothecary said. “And now there was this terrible bomb with which angry people could simply wipe each other out. I had this small boy, you see, being raised in the grief and the rubble, and I couldn’t imagine letting him grow up with such fear. It wasn’t a world that deserved to have such an awful bomb.”

He paused. “So I began to work,” he said. “I knew in a general way what the atomic scientists were doing, and I knew how to rearrange atoms, and manipulate them, to make one thing into another. It was my father’s work, and his father’s. And as I worked, there were rumours spreading. The Soviets were making their own bomb, and the Americans were building bigger ones. Both countries were arming themselves with weapons that could destroy the world. People said that as long as they both had such terrible weapons, no one would ever use them. But I thought I knew something about people and their weapons. They want to use them.”

“Course they do,” Pip said, listening with his legs crossed under him, his chin in his hand, like a child listening to a storybook.

“I wanted to develop a way to make a whole city safe,” the apothecary said. “But this is difficult to do. I thought first of creating a kind of shield—an area in which it would be impossible for an atom to split. A small shield was possible, but a large one, big enough for a city, was very difficult.

“Then I thought of a kind of containment, something that could be done after the bomb was dropped, as long as it was done very quickly. I knew from being an Air Raid Warden that there would be some warning when an aeroplane was spotted. So perhaps, if I couldn’t maintain a shield to protect a city, I could at least contain the damage and the radiation from the bomb.

“I started writing to the people in other countries who were doing this kind of work. And I began to correspond with Jin Lo.” He looked to the young woman, with her long dark braid. “Whom I imagined rather differently, as an eminent, grey-haired man.”

Jin Lo shrugged. “This is not important.”

“You have developed the most elegant net,” he said. “Would you like to describe it?”

“You tell them everything?” she asked.

“Just the broad strokes.”

She shrugged. “It makes a polymer.”

The apothecary waited for her to go on, but she wasn’t going to.

“The idea is brilliant in its simplicity,” he explained. “She puts particles into the air that react with radiation to create, as she says, an extremely strong polymer, which then contracts as it solidifies. The contraction pulls the explosion tightly back in on itself. If it works, it will be a thing of great beauty.”

“And if not, we die,” Jin Lo said.

The apothecary ignored that. “My role was to absorb the radiation that would be released, even if the net contained the explosion,” he said. “I was convinced that the solution was botanical. Just as plants mop up our carbon dioxide for us, I was sure I could find one to absorb radiation. I tried various methods and finally settled on the flower of the jaival tree, which is a white lotus brought by traders from India in the last century. The air around the jaival’s blossom is particularly rich with the Quintessence.” He waited, as if we were supposed to understand what he meant and respond with awe.

“And—what’s the Quintessence?” I asked.

“The fifth element!” he said, amazed at my ignorance. “The source of all life. A life force to combat a killing force, you see. But the jaival in this garden, here, is the only one in England, and it has a very long, slow life cycle. It blooms only once every seven years. It isn’t due to bloom again until 1955, which is three years from now. I thought that shouldn’t matter, as I believed we had time. But then Russia began to test its own bombs, and England started developing atomic capabilities. I had no choice but to try to force the bloom— which turned out to be very difficult.”

The apothecary sank into silence, apparently preoccupied with all the complications of the jaival tree’s life cycle.

“And then?” Benjamin prompted.

“Yes, then,” he said. “Leonid Shiskin, our contact within the Soviet embassy, brought news that the Soviet Union would be testing a new bomb in the north, on an archipelago called Nova Zembla. So we had to accelerate our plan. Jin Lo and our Hungarian physicist, Count Vilmos, who had been living in Luxembourg, would come to London.”

Benjamin and I looked at each other—a Hungarian count! The man in the hotel!

“But then Jin Lo was captured on arrival,” the apothecary went on. “And I was nearly so. The British authorities must have intercepted our letters and broken our code. We underestimated them. If Count Vili is safe, then the boat may still be a secret. It was never mentioned in the letters. But we have no way of knowing if he is safe.”

“Is he a bit fat, and dandyish?” Benjamin asked.

The apothecary brightened. “That’s him! Have you seen him?”

“We saw Shiskin pass a message to him in a newspaper,” I said. “The day before he passed one to you. We followed him to a hotel but couldn’t find out his name.”

The apothecary frowned. “Why were you spying on me?”

“We weren’t, we were spying on Shiskin,” Benjamin said crossly. “I thought he was spying on England.”

“But you must have known that these were my colleagues.”

“I knew nothing, because you told me nothing!”

“Tell us more about Count Vili,” I said, to keep the two of them from going around again in the same argument. “He’s not a normal physicist, right? He’s a physicist like you’re an apothecary.”

“His name is Count Vilmos Hadik de Galántha,” the apothecary said. “He was orphaned during the first war, and was sent to Luxembourg with a German tutor and a great deal of money. His tutor was, as you say, not a normal physicist, and he took the boy on as an apprentice. Vili had a talent for the work.”

“Like you,” I said, turning to Jin Lo. She had taken out her braid and was combing her fingers through the silky strands that hung to her waist. Whenever I unbraided my hair, it held the unruly kinks of each braid until I washed it, but Jin Lo’s was like a sheet of smooth black water.

“I met Vili when he came to England to go to Cambridge,” the apothecary went on. “He was immature and unfocused then. He liked to spend all his time drinking and floating in punts down the river. My father thought him a disgrace to our craft. But like many men, he eventually found his purpose and his way. And he has accomplished what none of us thought possible. He has discovered a way to stop time.”

“That’s impossible,” Benjamin said.

“Well, yes,” his father said. “It’s more precisely that he freezes time, as when we supercool some chemical reactions so that they happen very slowly. He creates a temporal lag in his immediate vicinity, from which he is exempt, so that he can move quickly. It’s remarkable. The Hungarians are so adept at physics, and also at mathematics and music. I’ve always thought it must be because so few people speak their language. They’ve found extralinguistic means to interact with the rest of the world.” He smiled at this thought.

“So he freezes time,” Benjamin said, pulling him back to his story.

“Well, it would obviously be very useful,” the apothecary said. “You could get your ducks in a row, as it were. He also has a great deal of money, which is more immediately useful. He has engaged an icebreaking research vessel to take us to the north. He knows and trusts the Norwegian crew, and has chartered the boat on northern cruises to the fjords. It’s our only hope of getting close to Nova Zembla.”

“But first we need jaival tree,” Jin Lo reminded him. She had braided her hair again, with swift deft fingers, into a silken rope.

“Yes, of course,” the apothecary said. “We’ll begin at dawn, in the sunlight. For now, I think we should stay here and sleep.”

“But we haven’t had any tea,” Pip said.

The apothecary looked perplexed. He could turn himself into salt, and he believed he could stop an atomic bomb, but he couldn’t produce a dinner for three children out of thin air, under a mulberry tree. “We’ll get breakfast in the morning,” he said. “We can’t risk anyone’s leaving the garden. You all know too much.”

Pip narrowed his lemur’s eyes at the apothecary and said, “Look, mister, you do what you want, but I’m not sleeping on the ground, without my tea.” Then there was a rustle of branches and he was gone, as if he’d never been there.

No one went after him—no one could have caught him— but the apothecary turned to us accusingly. “What do you know about that child?” he asked. “How do you know he wasn’t planted in that cell with you?”

“We thought he was at first,” I said. “But he really wasn’t.”

“You vouch for him?”

“I do.”

“I do, too,” Benjamin said.

“Is he likely to get caught out there?”

“No one less likely,” Benjamin said.

“Still,” his father said, “it was careless to bring him in.”

“Not careless,” Jin Lo said. “I vouch, too.”

Then she wrapped her overalls tightly around her slender body, tossed her braid over her shoulder, and rolled over as if she slept under trees all the time. The apothecary, outvoted, lay on his back with his head on his doctor’s bag. That left an area about three feet square for Benjamin and me.

I spread the stolen blue raincoat on the ground and curled up with my arm for a pillow. There was no way I was ever going to get to sleep. An owl hooted outside in the night, and I was glad at least that I wasn’t a tiny bird anymore, and prey. The ground was cold, and I started to shiver inside Benjamin’s shirt and jumper.

“You’ll freeze,” he whispered, and he put his arm under my head, and moved his jacket over so I could share it. It was warm under the jacket, and I could smell his boyish smell. It didn’t sound like he was any closer to sleep than I was.

“Benjamin,” I whispered.

“Yes?”

“Will everything be all right?”

“I hope so,” he said, and I could feel the pulse in his arm against my cheek. “I really do.”