The Apothecary (22 page)
“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.”
I
must have slept, finally, because I dreamed of being on a boat in the vast sea, among seals and walruses that rose up out of the water and spoke Norwegian. For much of the dream I was panicked that I didn’t have the Pharmacopoeia, and when I did have it, its pages were terrifyingly blank.
I woke at dawn to a racket of birds and didn’t know where I was until I saw Benjamin’s face, blinking and frowning close to mine. The early light filtered through the mulberry leaves. I sat up and saw the apothecary and Jin Lo waking up, too. Jin Lo was brushing dirt off her overalls. Neither of them seemed to notice that I had slept under Benjamin’s jacket with him. The apothecary was too distracted, and Jin Lo, I was pretty sure, would never notice such a thing.
“That boy isn’t back,” the apothecary said. “Your friend.”
“He will be,” I promised, though I wasn’t sure.
We emerged cautiously from our little cave of leaves, and there were no police officers waiting to arrest us, no Danby with his sight returned, no Scar. The apothecary led us across the dew-soaked garden to a leafless tree I hadn’t noticed before. His eyes were locked on it as if he were facing a formidable adversary. There wasn’t a single bud on the tree, or even a bit of warm brown colour in the bark. It could have been a sculpture made of stone or concrete: an expanse of smooth, grey, bare branches, reaching up to the sky.
“You can make that bloom?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, but started to methodically unpack his bag.
Jin Lo went to the gardener’s shed and brought back a long metal rod with a T-shaped handle. She walked around the tree, making deep holes in the earth among its gnarled grey roots. The apothecary followed her with a bottle of green powder, tapping the powder down into the holes.
Then he circled the tree a second time, with a bottle of clear liquid, pouring it into the same holes where he had sprinkled the powder. Green foam bubbled up out of the ground, until there was a ring of popping, fizzing bubbles around the roots and the thick trunk.
The apothecary walked around a third time, with a trowel, and covered all of the holes with dirt so that the fizzing and foaming was trapped underground. And then he stood back with us and waited. I remembered a poem we’d read in school: “Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread.”
But nothing happened. We watched and waited.
“That’s the jive-o tree?” a voice said behind me, and I turned and saw Pip, holding a paper bag. He’d approached without any of us noticing, and he’d changed out of the rolled-up overalls into his own clothes and shoes.
“You’re back!” I said.
“You think I’d miss the show? Have a popover.”
He held out the bag, and I brushed off my dirty hands and took one. It was hot and soft and smelled delicious, and I realised I was starving. “Where’d you get these?”
“Portuguese lady makes ’em on the King’s Road,” he said, and he took a bite of golden dough.
Benjamin said, “Look!”
I did, and tiny green leaves had started to pop out and unfold on the tree. As they unfurled, they grew, until there were thick, green, waxy leaves on every branch. Then, while the leaves were still unfolding, tiny white flower buds appeared.
“Take this,” Benjamin’s father said, handing him a glass bell. “I don’t know how long the bloom will last.”
The buds grew into tight fist-sized bundles of petals, which then burst open, all over the tree. It was as if the great tree had spontaneously burst into flame, but the fire was made of white flowers as big as my head. The air smelled heady and sweet, like spring.
The apothecary pulled down a branch with one of the white blossoms on it, and showed Benjamin how to hold the glass bell over the flower. Then he snipped it free. They cut two more like that, and the apothecary fastened a piece of cloth tightly over the open base of the bell and dampened the cloth with something from a bottle.
As soon as he’d sealed up the three blossoms, there came a rumbling noise from deep in the earth, among the roots of the tree, and the thick trunk seemed to shudder.
