The Apothecary (11 page)

“You’re alive!” I said.

“You must run,” he said. His voice was faint and hoarse, and his eyes were fixed on me cloudily.

Benjamin had crouched beside me on the floor. “We have to call for help.”

“No,”
the gardener said, rousing himself to make the effort. “Can’t . . . trust police.”

“Why not?”

He shook his head.

I thought of the Physic Garden outside, all those medicines, brought back from all over the world. “Isn’t there some herb that can make you better?” I asked. “We can go get it!”

He squeezed my hand, but I could tell he was weakening. “
Veritas
,” he managed to say. The Smell of Truth. We had come to tell him about it, and to tell him he was in danger— but we were too late.

“We used it!” I said. “And it worked. Could it help you now?”

The gardener shook his head again. “No.” He was having trouble breathing, and his white eyebrows knitted together in an exhausted frown. “Remember,” he said, “you must . . .
allow
for the possibilities.”

Then his grip on my hand relaxed, and his body grew eerily still.

“Wait!” I said, fumbling under his scratchy beard for a pulse. The skin of his throat was loose and still, and I felt no pulse, only my own heart pounding.

“Is he dead?” Benjamin asked.

“I think so.”

“We have to get out of here.”

“I don’t think I can move.”

“You
have
to. Whoever killed him might come back.”

He pulled me by the hand, past the waiting table where the gardener would never eat dinner again, and out the open door. We passed the ruined sundial and the
Artemisia veritas
planted in neat green rows.

“Wait!” I said, tugging Benjamin back. I knew the gardener hadn’t given up his last breath just to ask if the Smell of Truth worked. “He was trying to tell us something about the herbs.”

I knelt by the rows of leafy plants, but saw nothing, so I felt blindly between them and under them, and then my hand touched something smooth and hard. It was a small bottle, hidden under the leaves, with a piece of paper tied around it with string.

“He left us something,” I said.

“Take it,” Benjamin said. “Let’s go!”

I put the bottle in my pocket, and we climbed the fence to the outer garden. The trees seemed to loom and reach for us as we ran towards the outer gate, where we clambered over again.

On the other side, in the street, I got a stitch in my side from running. I slumped down against the stone wall and felt tears welling up. “They killed him because of us,” I said.

“For helping us.”

“Get up,” Benjamin said. “We don’t know that.”

“It’s true! Shiskin’s house was bugged, and I talked about the gardener there. It was so stupid!”

“We have to go.”

“We have to tell the police.”

“We can’t trust them.”

“We have to tell my parents, then.”

“Absolutely not,” Benjamin said. “There was a murder. They’ll have to call the police. And we can’t do that.”

“But maybe we should! A
murder
. Oh, Benjamin, it’s all my fault!”

“Here,” he said, fishing a handkerchief out of his coat pocket. “Take this.”

The handkerchief was white, perfectly pressed and folded into a square. His father must have ironed it: the kind, methodical apothecary. Benjamin was right that we needed to find him. He’d know what to do.

I wiped my nose and put the handkerchief in my pocket, where I felt the hard glass. “What about the bottle?” I asked.

“First let’s get somewhere safe,” Benjamin said.

CHAPTER 13

The Gardener’s Letter

I
wouldn’t, under the circumstances, have described my parents’ flat as
safe
, but I had to get home. My parents were furious. “So you just waltz in here at ten o’clock at night?” my father demanded.

“Is it ten?” I asked. I would have guessed much later.

“Do you know how
terrified
we were?” my mother asked.

“I think so.”

“Where
were
you this late?”

Benjamin and I had agreed, after much debate as we made our way through the streets, not to tell them about the murder. Both the gardener and the apothecary had told us not to trust the police. But my parents could tell I was upset and had been crying, so we had to tell them something.

“It’s a really long story,” I said.

“So start at the beginning,” my father said. “And I want the truth!” He pointed at Benjamin. “Did your mother really die in the war?”

“Yes,” Benjamin said.

“Okay, that sounds true. Let’s go from there. Did your father go visit a sick aunt?”

“No.”

“I knew it! Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then we should call the police,” my mother said.

“No!” Benjamin said. “We can’t trust the police.”

“Have you done something wrong?”

“No,” he said.

“So why can’t you trust them?”

“I just can’t.”

“
You
don’t trust the federal marshals,” I reminded my father. “And
you
didn’t do anything wrong.”

“That’s different.”

“How do you know?” My father hated it when people jumped to conclusions about other people’s situations, and I wasn’t going to let him do the same.

He relented. “I don’t,” he said. “So tell me. Where were you?”

“At a friend’s house, working on a science project,” Benjamin said. “We made . . . a bit of a mess, and our friend’s father was angry with us.”

That was pretty much true.

“So you cleaned up the mess, and you didn’t think to
call
us, and then what?” my father asked.

“That’s it,” Benjamin said. “It took a long time.”

“What’s the name of the friend?”

Benjamin hesitated. “Stephen Smith.”

“You’re lying, Figment,” my father said. “I’ve worked in show business a long time, and I know what lying sounds like.”

“I can’t tell you his name,” Benjamin said, with stubborn dignity. We had promised Mr Shiskin we would leave him and Sergei out of it, and Benjamin wouldn’t budge on that.

“Then I want you out of my house.”

“He doesn’t have anywhere to go!” I said. “Let him stay one more night.”

“If he tells me the truth, I’ll consider it.”

“He can’t! He promised!”

“Promised who?” my father said. “I’m waiting.”

Benjamin was silent, his head stubbornly bent forward.

“Out, Figment,” my father said. “Now. And Janie, you’re going to bed.”

I begged my parents to reconsider, but it did no good, and I got into bed feeling helpless and trapped. The gardener was dead and Benjamin was out in the streets, in mortal danger, and there was nothing I could do. I was writing furiously in my diary about how my parents didn’t—couldn’t—understand
anything
, when I heard a tap at the window. I slid the window open, and Benjamin climbed in off the ledge, with his satchel slung across his chest, taking off his shoes before his feet silently touched the floor.

“How’d you get up here?” I whispered. I was too amazed to worry about the fact that I was only in my nightgown. Anyway, it was the long flannel hand-me-down nightgown from Olivia Wolff ’s daughter, and it was about as revealing as a nun’s habit.

“I climbed that tree to the window ledge.”

“If my parents catch you—”

“They won’t. I’ll leave early in the morning.”

I tried to think about the options, and the consequences, but I had no argument. He really didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Benjamin set his satchel down carefully and spotted the diary open on my bed. “You keep a diary?”

I closed it and slid it beneath my pillow. “Sometimes.”

“It doesn’t say anything about the Pharmacopoeia or the gardener, does it?”

“No.” That was a partial truth. “Not so anyone else could understand it.”

“It would be bad if someone found it, and could understand.”

“They won’t,” I said. My eyes filled. “Benjamin—the gardener.”

“We have to be strong,” he said. “Don’t cry.”

I brushed away the tears. “Where will you sleep?” My bed was very narrow, and even if it hadn’t been, the question of sharing it was too embarrassing to think about.

“On the floor.”

So I gave him one of my wool blankets, and he lay down on the floor with his satchel for a pillow. He stretched out on his back with his hands behind his head.

“Why did your father call me Figment?” he asked.

I climbed into bed, under the one remaining blanket, and tried to push the gardener from my head. “Because he thinks he’s funny.”

“But
Figment
?”

“When I told them I was going to play chess with you, my mother was teasing me about having a boyfriend. Someone said, as a joke, that it was a figment of her imagination. That’s all it took—they were off.”

Benjamin was silent, looking at the ceiling. “It’s nice that they tease you,” he finally said. “My dad’s always so serious. I wonder what he’d have been like if my mother hadn’t died. If he would have been more—I don’t know. Like your parents. Able to joke about things.”

I couldn’t imagine
not
having parents who joked: It was part of every day. I was silent because I didn’t know what to say.

“What does your diary say about me?” Benjamin asked.

“That I can’t believe my parents sent you out in the cold.”

“That’s all?”

“That you’re kind of a bully when you play chess.”

“A bully! That’s slander!”

“The truth is a defence,” I said. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was something my father liked to say, before the US marshals started looking for him.

Benjamin smiled. Then there was a knock at my bedroom door, and we both froze.

“Under the bed!” I whispered, and he rolled silently beneath, pulling his satchel and the blanket after him. I got my diary back out and posed with it on my knee.

“Yes?” I said, in a sullen voice.

My father pushed the door open and looked in. “Lights out.”

“I’m still writing.”

“You need your sleep.”

“So does Benjamin, and you sent him out in the cold.”

I was trying to act as I would have acted if Benjamin weren’t in the room, but without drawing my father into the room to discuss it. It was a gamble, and I lost it: My father sighed, and crossed to the bed and sat down. The metal springs squeaked. I held my breath, hoping he wasn’t crushing Benjamin.

“Janie,” my father said. “I know you’re upset. Your mother and I just want you to be safe. Benjamin seems like a resourceful boy. He’s probably safe at home right now.”

I was going to say that Benjamin’s home wasn’t safe, but I didn’t want to start narrowing down the options for where he might actually be. “Maybe,” I said.

“You really like him, don’t you?”

“Dad,”
I said, imagining Benjamin under the bed. Even though I’d already told him I fancied him, I thought we could set that aside, in the category of Things the Smell of Truth Made Us Do. I wasn’t going to say it again.

“It’s okay, you can tell me,” my father prodded.

I said nothing.

“He’s a nice kid, Figment,” my father said. “A little arrogant, though.”

I thought I heard a noise under the bed. I shifted, squeaking the metal springs, to cover it.

“And not as responsible as I’d like. Your mother and I were scared today. We thought something terrible had happened to you.”

“I know,” I said. “But it didn’t.” I thought of the gardener bleeding on his worn floor and wondered if we had left footprints, or fingerprints.

“The funny thing is that we’d been waiting for you to get home, to tell you that Olivia wants us to go on location for a few days, to film at a castle. The speech we’d prepared started with how responsible we think you are. But then you didn’t come home to hear it. It got later, and
later
, and we got pretty worked up. And now I think we have to take you with us.”

I stared at him. “But I have school.”

“It’s just a few days.”

“I’m so far behind already.” I couldn’t leave Benjamin to look for his father alone, and I cast around frantically for ideas.