The Apothecary

Chapter 3

St Beden’s School



The next morning, I swallowed my aspen and honeysuckle, over my mother’s halfhearted objections, to prepare myself for my first day at St Beden’s School. Showing up at a new school is never easy, especially in the middle of the year, when friendships are already established, and hierarchies understood. In England, all of that was heightened to a terrifying degree. St Beden’s was a grammar school, and to get in you had to pass a test. Most kids failed the test and went to something called a “secondary modern school,” which wasn’t as good, and where the kids were just biding their time before they could get jobs. So the students who got in to the grammar schools thought—rightly—that they were on top of the pile.

The school was in a stone building with arches and turrets that seemed very old to me but wasn’t old at all, in English terms. It was built in 1880, so it was practically brand-new. It had dark-panelled walls inside, and paintings of old men in elaborate neckties, and somehow it had escaped bomb damage. Two teachers walking down the hall wore black academic gowns, and they looked ominous and forbidding, like giant bats. The students all wore dark blue uniforms with white shirts—jackets and ties for the boys, and pleated skirts for the girls. I didn’t have a uniform yet, and wore my bright green Hepburn trousers and a yellow jumper, which looked normal in LA, but here looked clownishly out of place. I might as well have carried a giant sign saying I DON’T BELONG.

The school secretary, whose tight grey curls reminded me of a sheep, gave me my class schedule. As a ninth-grader, I was to be in what they called the third form, but it wasn’t anything like freshman year at Hollywood High. My first class was Latin.

“But I don’t know any Latin,” I said. “I can’t join the class in the middle of the term.”

“Everyone in third form takes Latin here,” the secretary said. “You’ll be fine.”

Then she called to a startlingly beautiful girl walking past in the hall.

“Miss Pennington,” she said. “Please show Miss Jane Scott to your Latin class. She’s new, from California.”

The beautiful girl stopped in the door of the office and looked down at my green trousers, then lingered on my scuffed canvas shoes. She looked up at my face with a bright smile in which I could detect mockery, but I was sure the secretary couldn’t.

There are Sarah Penningtons in the United States—you probably know one. I’m sure they exist in France and Thailand and Venezuela. My Sarah Pennington, at St Beden’s, was a near-perfect specimen of her kind. She had no adolescent awkwardness or shyness about her. She had clear, rosy skin, and wide blue eyes, and a long blonde braid down her back. She seemed to glow with the perfect health that money can sometimes bestow. She certainly hadn’t been subject to wartime rationing. That she was rich, and that her money had survived the war, was clear even in a uniform. The fabric of her skirt seemed to move with her, while the other girls’ skirts hung stiffly against their legs. It’s possible that no one had ever denied Sarah Pennington anything: that her wealth and loveliness had ensured that she never needed to ask, or aspire, or even hope, before the thing she wanted was there. The look on her face was one of calm assurance that the world would always be so.

I walked with her down the hall, feeling hopelessly inadequate.

“Our Latin teacher is Mr Danby,” she said. “He’s terribly demanding, but he’s so dreamy. He was a hero in the war.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a pilot in the RAF, and shot down all sorts of planes before he was captured in Germany. He was a prisoner of war for two years. After the war, he became a teacher, and he teaches as if he’s still flying missions. If his students don’t learn Latin, he thinks he’s failed. Some people hate it, but I think it’s lovely.”

I sneaked a sideways look at her. She spoke in a strange, artificial, grown-up way, and I wondered if she was imitating some English actress. She didn’t talk like a fourteen-year-old.

Mr Danby’s class had already started when we got there. I was prepared not to like him, just because Sarah Pennington did, but he was undeniably appealing. He was young, with green eyes and long lashes and soft brown hair that curled at his temples. He wore an academic gown that was disarmingly rumpled, as if he had left it in a heap on a chair and sat on it. He was talking to the class, and he seemed exasperated.

“The city we live in was once Londinium,” he was saying. “The capital of the Roman Province of Britannia. Latin was spoken here in the street, in the fish market. It is the language of Virgil, of Seneca, of Horace. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you be able to recite a little!”

The students—some amused, some frightened—glanced to us in the doorway, as a possible distraction. Mr Danby turned, too.

“Ah, Miss Pennington,” he said. “You’re just in time for my rant.”

“We have a new student,” Sarah said. “This is Jane Scott. From California.” It was startling, in front of all those faces, to hear my name announced so formally. No one ever called me Jane. And she made the state sound faintly ridiculous, as if perhaps I had made it up.

“Janie,” I muttered, feeling the heat in my face.

Mr Danby said, “Thank you, Miss Pennington.”

Sarah beamed at him and sashayed in to take her seat.

The class was seated in alphabetical order, which meant that I was seated right behind Sarah Pennington. A large boy named Sergei Shiskin, with dark hair flopping across his eyes, had to move back one desk to make room for me.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

“It’s all right,” the boy whispered back. “I don’t get called on, in the back.” He spoke with a Russian accent, and I imagined that a Russian kid would have an even worse time at the school than an American.

Mr Danby called up students one at a time to recite long passages in Latin, and I felt as if I were standing on a beach in heavy surf: Each student’s recitation crashed over me like a wave of words, then withdrew again, leaving nothing I could understand.

Finally the bell rang and the class was over, and the students sprang to their feet.

“Remember to do these translations of Horace,” Mr Danby called, over the noise of books and papers and talk. “For tomorrow!”

I looked at the two Latin sentences he had written on the blackboard, one long and one short, both incomprehensible. I gathered my things slowly, putting off my next trial.

“Miss Scott,” Mr Danby said as the last students filed out. “I take it you don’t feel comfortable with Latin.”

“I’ve never studied it before,” I said, clutching my books as a shield.

Mr Danby looked at the blackboard and read, “Vivendi recte qui prorogat horam, Rusticus exspectat, dum defluat amnis. ‘He who delays the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out’. ”

I tried to sort the Latin words into anything like that meaning. I was nervous, but Mr Danby reminded me of some of my parents’ friends, the ones who talked to me as if I was a full-fledged person and not just a child. Somehow I summoned the courage to ask him, “What’s a rustic?”

“In this case it’s a fool, who won’t cross the river until the water is gone.”

“And the second one?”

“Decipimur specie rectie,” he said. “ ‘We are deceived by the appearance of right.’ You see why I put the two together.”

I hazarded a guess, encouraged by his assumption that I did see. “Because you can’t always know what it means to live rightly?”

“Exactly,” he said, smiling. “They taught you something in the wilds of California. How are you finding St Beden’s?”

I tried to think of something nice, or at least neutral, to say. “My mother said moving here would be like living in a Jane Austen novel, but it isn’t really.”

“But your story couldn’t be Austen, with an American heroine,” he said.

I couldn’t help smiling at him. “That’s what I said!”

“More of a Henry James novel,” he said. “The American girl abroad. Are you an Isabel Archer or a Daisy Miller?”

I blushed, but told the truth. “I don’t know. I haven’t read any Henry James novels.”

“You will soon enough,” he said. “But you wouldn’t want to be Isabel or Daisy. They come to bad ends, those girls. Confide tibi, Miss Scott. Far better to be who you are.”



That conversation with Mr Danby was the high point of the morning. I was lost in history—they were studying medieval battles and kings I’d never heard of—and in math, which was a confusing sort of geometry and which they bafflingly called “maths.” At lunch, I stood with my tray full of unappetising food, surveying the lunchroom. It wasn’t easy to be who you were, if you were the awkward new girl at a strange school. At the end of one of the long, old-fashioned tables, Sergei Shiskin was sitting alone. He was the only student I knew by name who’d been somewhat nice, so I sat at the other end of his empty table and we nodded to each other with the recognition of outcasts. I wondered why I hadn’t just sat right across from him, but it was too late for that.

Sarah Pennington sashayed past, and I tried to come up with a smile for her.

“At the Bolshevik table, are we?” she asked. Her gang of girls—none as pretty as she was, of course—followed her, giggling.

I knew Bolsheviks were Russian Communists, and I looked at my tray to keep my composure, but that was no help. The meat looked like it had been boiled. There was a small piece of rationed grey bread, with no butter, and not even any oleomargarine. I was pushing the potatoes around with my fork when a startlingly loud, long alarm went off.

“Bomb drill!” one of the lunch ladies called, coming along the long tables. “Under the tables, please!”

It was Duck and Cover, English-style. Sergei and I both got under the long table, and everyone in the lunchroom pushed back their benches and did the same.

Everyone, that is, except one boy. He was at the next table over, and he sat calmly where he was, eating his lunch. From my place on the floor, I could see the lunch lady in her white uniform approach.

“Mr Burrows,” she said. “Get under the table, please.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t.”

His eyes were serious and intent, and his hair didn’t flop limply over his eyes like so many of the boys’ hair did, but grew back from his forehead in sandy waves, leaving his face exposed and defiant. The knot of his tie was pushed off to the side, as if it got in his way.

“Do you want an engraved invitation?” the lunch lady asked, with her hands on her hips.

“It’s idiotic,” he said. “I won’t do it.”

“I’m sure you were wetting your nappies out in the country during the Blitz,” the woman said. “But some of us were in London, and a bomb drill is not a time to play at rebellion.”

The sandy-haired boy leaned towards her, across the lunch table. “I wasn’t in the country,” he said. “I was here. And we both know that these tables would have done nothing against those bombs—not the V-1, not the V-2, not even the smaller ones dropped by planes.”

The lunch lady frowned. “I’ll be forced to give you a demerit, Benjamin.”

“But this isn’t even a V-2 we’re talking about,” he said. “This is an atom bomb. When it comes, not even the basement shelters will save us. We’ll all be incinerated, the whole city. Our flesh will burn, then we’ll turn to ash.”

The woman had lost the colour in her face, but her voice still had its commanding ring. “Two demerits!”

But the boy, Benjamin Burrows, was making a speech now, for the benefit of the whole lunchroom. He had a thrilling, defiant voice to go with his thrilling, defiant face. “That is, of course,” he said, “assuming we’re lucky enough to be near the point of impact. For the children in the country, it will be slower. And much, much more painful.”

“Stop!” she said.

A short bell rang to signal the end of the drill, and people climbed out from under the tables, but I stayed where I was. I wanted to watch Benjamin Burrows a little longer without being seen. I was terrified by what he’d said, but moved by his defiance. I tried to sort out whether it was the terror or the excitement that was making my heart beat inside my rib cage at such an unexpected pace.