The Apothecary

Chapter 9

The Physic Garden



Benjamin came to my study hall at eleven fifteen, saying that the librarian needed another student to help shelve books. The study hall monitor was a tall, sallow young man. “Do you have a note?” he asked.

“The librarian is buried in books,” Benjamin said. “She asked if you’d mind if she didn’t send a note, just this once.”

I raised my hand. “Can I go?” I asked. “I want to be a librarian someday.”

This drew a ripple of laughter from the other students, which got them a frown from the monitor. I knew he felt sorry for me, as the pathetic new girl who stayed in at lunch.

“All right,” he said. “But tell her to send a note next time.”

I gathered my things, and when we were sure the hall was empty, we slipped out the main door and down the steps. Benjamin didn’t remember exactly where the Chelsea Physic Garden was, but he knew it was near the Thames, so we walked along the river.

I know now that the Physic Garden was started in the seventeenth century, as a kind of museum and nursery for medicinal plants. Botanists and ships’ physicians brought specimens back from all over the world, as England expanded its empire, and the specimens were planted in Chelsea. The garden is still there, if you visit. The British Empire may be gone, but the Physic Garden is its green ghost, growing a little bit of India, China, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands, right in the middle of London.

“I used to go with my father all the time,” Benjamin said. “He would collect cuttings, and I would skip stones on the little pond, which was really too small for skipping stones, until a gardener would tell me to stop or I’d break a window.”

“Why’d you stop going?”

“I turned ten and thought I was too old for it. I didn’t need to be watched anymore, and I thought I didn’t need to tag along to the stupid garden.”

We found the high iron gate on the embankment and pushed it open. There was a little stone guardhouse, but no one was in it. The garden was lush and thriving and made the phony Sherwood Forest in Riverton look like the papier-mâché that it was. It was almost magically green, and silent, as if the plants somehow absorbed all the city’s sounds. The paths were lined with leafy stalks that grew as high as my head, and trees from which yellow flowers hung, and something that looked like rhubarb, with enormous spreading leaves.

“If my father came here for work,” I said, “I’d go with him all the time.”

We walked down a path where the trees on either side grew together in a canopy, so we were almost in darkness in the middle of the day. Every few feet, a vine hung down, with a single pink flower at the end. There were rustling noises in the undergrowth—birds or little animals. At the end of the path, there was another gate.

“There it is!” Benjamin said, and I followed his eyes to the top of the wrought iron. There was the symbol embossed on the cover of the Pharmacopoeia, with the circles and the star. We peered inside, to a walled inner garden. Across some paths and beds was a small brick house with white trim. Benjamin tried to open the iron gate, but it was locked.

“Should we climb it?” I asked.

But just as I spoke, a figure emerged from the little brick house. It was a man, and he looked as if he had once been tall and imposing, but now he walked with a stoop. He had a grey beard and a wrinkled, kind face. He wore a long brown oilcloth coat and Wellington boots, and carried a basket and a pair of pruning shears.

“Hullo!” Benjamin called. “Sir?”

The figure looked up, surprised in his solitude.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Benjamin said. “My father’s a member of the Society of Apothecaries. I have a Society scholarship, actually. And I . . .”

The man in the oilcloth peered at him. “Is that Benjamin Burrows?”

It was Benjamin’s turn to be surprised. “Yes!”

The man hurried over and opened the gate with an ancient key. “Come in, come in,” he said, and he looked behind us, down the green tunnel. Then he relocked the gate.

Inside his tidy brick house, the gardener took off his oilcloth coat and hung it on a peg, then gestured to the chairs at his table. “Who is the young lady?” he asked suspiciously.

“My friend Janie,” Benjamin said. “She’s American.” He said it as if it made me somehow—innocent.

“I see,” the gardener said. Then he turned to Benjamin. “I remember you as a little boy, running around the garden. I knew your grandfather well. Your father always comes looking for the most unusual plants. Is he well?”

“I don’t know,” Benjamin said, and he looked to me for encouragement. I nodded—the gardener seemed entirely trustworthy—so Benjamin sat at the table, and I did, too. He told the story of the men who had come for his father, and also of the message passed in a newspaper on the park bench.

The gardener looked alarmed. “They’ve taken Jin Lo, too?”

“Who’s Jin Lo?”

“A Chinese chemist,” the gardener said. “A correspondent of your father’s. You saw the men who came to your father’s shop?”

“Only one,” Benjamin said. “He had a scar on his face. They spoke German.”

“And did your father—tell you anything? Or show you anything?”

I could see Benjamin struggling not to mention the book. “Well . . . ,” he said.

The gardener sighed. “I understand that merely to ask will make you suspicious, but we may have limited time. Do you know where the Pharmacopoeia is?”

Benjamin glanced at me once more for reassurance, then pulled the book out of his satchel and slid it onto the wooden table.

The gardener’s eyes widened. “Ah,” he said. He seemed deeply affected, as if the book were a sacred object. He touched it slowly, in awe. “I haven’t seen it in a very long time.”

“We came here because the symbol on the front is on the gate of your garden,” Benjamin said.

“Yes,” the gardener said, running his gnarled hand over the weathered cover. “It’s the Azoth of the Philosophers.

The triangle in the centre is Water, the source of all life. The seven smaller circles are the operations of alchemy: calcination, separation, dissolution—why are you making that face?”

“Because alchemists were crackpots,” Benjamin said. “Fools trying to make gold.”

“Some were trying to make gold,” the gardener said. “There will always be those who are driven by greed. They’ve given the rest a bad name. But Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist. Have you not studied calcination and separation and dissolution?”

“No,” Benjamin said, a little embarrassed.

“What on earth are you learning in school?”

“Maths,” Benjamin said. “English.”

The gardener frowned. “Reading novels,” he said, with disdain. “And now you’ve been entrusted with the Pharmacopoeia, wholly uneducated.”

“I just need to know about the book,” Benjamin said. “I don’t read Latin or Greek.”

The gardener shook his head. “There are hundreds of years of secrets in it, learned through lifetimes of research and practice. And we have so little time.”

“Can you tell us some of it?” I asked.

The gardener considered the two of us, taking our measure, then opened the book with great reverence, careful not to crack the old pages. “Well—I don’t know how to begin. There are simple infusions, like this one, the Smell of Truth. It makes it impossible for a person to tell a lie. This symbol here, with the sun at its zenith, means that you have to harvest the Artemisia veritas herb for the infusion at solar noon, which is quite different from noon on the clock.” He turned a page. “Then there are masking tinctures, which change the appearance of things without changing the thing itself. This one, for example, the Aidos Kyneê, confers a kind of invisibility. It’s named for the mythological cap of the Greek gods. Aidos means modesty, so it’s a covering of extreme modesty, which is ironic, because of course—”

“What does that say?” I asked, pointing to a note written in the margins, up the side of the page, in a different handwriting.

The gardener tilted his head and read silently in Latin. “It says . . . that if more than one person uses the masking tincture, it’s best to leave one small part of the body out, to avoid—well, knocking into each other, I suppose. This must be advice from someone who’s used it. The book is a living document, you see. New knowledge is always being added.”

“How about the knowledge that it’s all rubbish?” Benjamin asked. “Can we write that in? It’s not possible for people to be invisible!”

The gardener ignored him and turned another page. His eyes brightened as he read the Latin instructions there. “Here we are,” he said. “The most difficult of all are the transformative elixirs, which actually change the substance at hand. This one, the avian elixir, turns a human being into a bird.”

“Of course it does,” Benjamin muttered.

The gardener raised his bushy grey eyebrows at him. “You must allow for the possibilities, Benjamin. I’ve never seen it, but I hear it’s a very beautiful process.”

“And when you transform—you can fly?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Why does my father have a book of phony magic spells?” Benjamin asked.

“They aren’t spells,” the gardener said. “It’s a Pharmacopoeia, a book of medicines, or it was originally. Many of the processes in the book began as methods of healing, many generations ago: How to close a wound? How to combat sickness in the human body? Those were the original questions, but in certain minds they took unexpected directions, having to do with the fundamentals of matter. Just as cave drawings led to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, early medicine led to the Pharmacopoeia. The world is made up of atoms, which can be influenced and masked and even rearranged, by someone with the necessary skills. I’m surprised your father hasn’t begun to train you.”

Benjamin looked down. “He’s asked me, sometimes, to help him,” he said, “but I always had something else to do. I thought he just wanted me to take over his shop. You know— selling bath salts and hot water bottles.”

The gardener gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “The Society of Apothecaries wouldn’t give you a scholarship for that. They expect you to carry on your father’s real work.”

“Which is what, exactly?” Benjamin asked. “Why did those men take him?”

“I don’t know,” the gardener said. “That’s what you must discover. As soon as possible.”

“We could ask Mr Shiskin,” I said tentatively. “He’s the one who delivered the message.”

“But we don’t know if we can trust him,” Benjamin said. “And why would he tell anything to a couple of kids?”

“We could use the Smell of Truth,” I said. “From the book.”

Benjamin and the gardener looked at me. I waited for their scorn.

“You know, that’s not such a terrible idea,” the gardener said finally. “Can you safely come in close contact with this man?”

“We know his son, from school,” I said.

“Then it’s worth a try.” The gardener squinted at the light outside the window. “Let me check my charts. We can’t do much with a sextant inside the garden, since we can’t see the horizon.”

He took a book off his shelf and ran his finger down a list. “Solar noon will be at . . . twelve fourteen and nine seconds,” he said. “We can come close to that.” Then he led us outside to a sundial, a triangular pointer of oxidised green copper mounted on a squat stone base. The sun wasn’t bright, but the shadow of the pointer was visible, and it fell just after noon.

“Why does it matter when you harvest the herb?” I asked.

“The book says it’s because the fullest light of day eliminates all shadow and deceit,” the gardener said. “Very poetic. But it may in fact have something to do with photosynthesis, and the molecular structure of the veritas plant. The early alchemists knew that it was necessary to harvest it at noon, but perhaps not exactly why. The herb has always been planted beside the sundial, here.” He pointed to some bunched green leaves in careful rows.

We waited, watching the barely moving shadow.

“None of this makes any sense,” Benjamin said.

The gardener looked at him appraisingly, as if gauging his ability to do the job at hand. “We all feel strange, even apprehensive, when confronted with our own destiny,” he said. “You have to find your father. Whatever his plan is, he’s going to need you.”

“Can you come help us?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” the gardener said. “I’m old and arthritic and rarely leave this garden—I would only slow you down and raise suspicion. And now it’s time.”

He reached down to snip the leaves with his shears.

“There we are,” he said. “You crush the leaves and boil them in water to release the smell. But you’ll have to be careful. It can be an insidious little herb if you aren’t prepared for the truth.”