The Apothecary (14 page)
“I want to go home,” I said pathetically.
“Then lend me a hair grip,” Pip said, from the other side of the wall.
“What’s a hair grip?”
“It’s, y’know, a little wire folded in half, like. For your hair.”
“A bobby pin,” I said.
“That’s a silly name.”
“I don’t have one.”
“What?”
Pip said. “You’re a girl, ain’t you?”
“I don’t wear them!” I said, still watching the crouching rat.
“She has American hair,” Benjamin’s voice explained.
“What’s American hair?” I asked.
“It’s—you know, there’s sort of a lot of it, and it’s not all pinned back.”
“You’re making that up.”
“No,” Benjamin said. “You can always tell Americans by their hair. And their shoes.”
“It’s true,” Pip’s voice agreed.
I looked down at my shoes and remembered my too-big skirt. “Wait!” I said. “I have a safety pin!”
“Well, why din’t you
say
so?” Pip said.
I took the pin out of my skirt and handed it around the wall, hoping my skirt would stay up.
“Wish it was a bit longer,” he complained.
“It’s all I’ve got, okay?”
By pressing my forehead against the bars, I could just see Pip’s dirty hands fiddling experimentally with the safety pin in the lock. It seemed hopeless.
Then the door outside the cells to our right opened, and Pip’s hands quickly withdrew. A pink-faced matron in a grey wool dress came in and said, “There’s someone here to see you.”
“Me?” Pip said.
“No,” she said.
There were footsteps in the hall behind her, and then Mr Danby came into the room. I’d never been so relieved to see anyone in my life.
“Are these the children you mean?” she asked. “Not the little one, the other two.”
“These are they!” Mr Danby said. “Have they treated you all right, Miss Scott?”
I wanted to throw my arms around him, through the bars, but I sensed that would embarrass him. “No!” I said. “They keep saying we’re not really arrested, so we can’t have a lawyer. And they threatened to deport my parents, and it’s freezing, and there’s a
rat
in here. And we haven’t even done anything!” I added that last part as an afterthought.
“Let’s get you out of there, then,” he said. “And really, madam, can you do something about the rats? It’s unsanitary for the children.”
“Certainly, sir,” the matron said, though I could tell she intended to do nothing. She unlocked the bars and let me out.
Benjamin said, “What about the police? How do you have the authority to let us out?”
“He’s from the Foreign Office,” the matron said.
“The
Foreign
Office?” Benjamin said. “As in the
government
Foreign Office?”
“Yes,” Mr Danby said, looking slightly abashed. I didn’t know why our Latin teacher was handling matters for the government, but I thought Mr Danby could handle anything, so I didn’t care.
Pip tried to slip out after Benjamin, but the matron closed the door on him with a clank and relocked it. He pressed his face between the bars. “Take me, too!”
I had thought Pip was younger than we were, when I’d only seen him quickly, because he was so much smaller than Benjamin, but now I guessed he was thirteen or fourteen, like us. His hair was cropped close to his head in the way of the other Turnbull children, to combat lice, and his eyes were enormous, an unsettling bright hazel. He reminded me of a lemur I’d once seen in a zoo. “Don’t leave me!” he cried.
“I apologise,” Mr Danby said. “I’m only authorised to take Mr Burrows and Miss Scott.”
“But they’re my mates!” Pip said.
Mr Danby turned to Benjamin. “Is that true?”
Benjamin shook his head. “I think he’s a snitch.”
“I ain’t a snitch!”
Mr Danby and the matron led us away down the hall.
“Please!” Pip howled after us. “Take me with you!”
Mr Danby ignored him.
We passed the empty classroom where I’d been questioned, and the one full of ragged-looking students. There was a fight going on, and the matron stopped to break it up. I felt sorry for the kids, stuck in here.
“What a miserable place,” Mr Danby said when we were further down the hall and out of earshot. “Dickens would recognise it in an instant. We’ll go someplace warm for a hot cocoa.”
“Where’s Detective Montclair?” I asked.
“I sent him away.”
“What do you do for the Foreign Office?” Benjamin asked.
“It’s difficult to explain, but I’ll try.”
“Are you a
spy
?”
Mr Danby smiled. “Would I tell you if I were?”
“You
are
!” Benjamin said, delighted. “But then why do you teach Latin?”
Mr Danby sighed. “Our country lost many good men in the war,” he said. “And now we’re in another war, of a different kind. You’re clever, so I’m sure you know that we have always stationed people in our best schools to keep an eye out for emerging—
talent
.”
Benjamin went silent. I could feel his excitement at the idea that Mr Danby was a spy, charged with recruiting new spies. Myself, I’d had plenty of excitement already, and was ready for a hot cocoa.
“And the truth is,” Mr Danby said, “that I was assigned to St Beden’s to keep an eye on you, in particular.”
“On
me
?” Benjamin asked.
“We’ll go to E. Pellicci’s, just up the road,” Mr Danby said. “I have a driver waiting, and it’s rather a good little café.”
The matron joined us again and unlocked the heavy front door with a ring of keys, and Benjamin beamed at her as if they were old friends. “Thank you, madam, for the fine hospitality,” he said, imitating Mr Danby’s arch politeness.
The matron scowled at Benjamin, but stood aside and let us out the door.
On the steps of Turnbull, there was sunlight and a fresh breeze, and I realised how sour and unhappy the air inside had been. I breathed deeply, and felt almost safe. Mr Danby was going to make everything all right. “There’s the car,” he said.
A shining green sedan idled in the curving drive. The driver turned to look at us, and smiled a welcoming smile. I felt Benjamin catch my arm, and the blood seemed to turn to ice in my veins.
Mr Danby’s driver was the man with the scar.
I
t took about a second and a half to register what the smiling, scarred face of the driver meant. It meant that we weren’t going to have cocoa, and that Danby was not our friend, and that whatever he did for the Foreign Office— if he did work for the Foreign Office—was not in our interest. Those facts came through in a flood, as if I’d torn off a blindfold in a bright, crowded room. Benjamin and I both had the same response, almost instantly: We ran
back
into the dismal, foul-smelling, cold Turnbull Hall.
The matron must have been watching us through the cracked door, because we nearly knocked her over as we ran inside. Benjamin slammed the door behind us and leaned his shoulder into it.
“Give me the keys!” he commanded, holding the doorknob so it wouldn’t turn. “Arrest us again! Just give me the keys!”
Danby pounded on the other side. “Open this door!” his muffled voice shouted.
The matron hesitated. “But . . . he’s from the government.”
“No he’s not—he’s a Soviet spy!”
I hadn’t yet put all the information together to get to that point, but I realised that Benjamin was right. Shiskin had told us that the Scar was working for the Soviets, and Danby was working with the Scar, so that meant that Danby was working for the Soviets. If he’d been keeping an eye on Benjamin, it was because of the apothecary,
not
because Benjamin seemed like raw talent for the British Secret Service.
“Stuff and nonsense!” the matron said, regaining her composure. She moved towards the door as if to open it, and I grabbed the ring of keys from her hand. She yanked my hair with surprising strength, pulling my head back. I tossed Benjamin the keys, then turned and shoved her away. She fell heavily to the floor, and I resisted the urge to apologise.
Benjamin locked the front door and we ran back past the tumbled matron, down the hall. He stuck his head into the classroom full of children.
“There’s a Russian spy chasing us!” he said. “Where’s the back door?”
The children were too surprised to speak, until one small boy piped, “Through the kitchen!”
We ran on, and the children all jumped up from their desks and spilled after us. They filled the hall, blocking the way like a herd of sheep. I heard the matron shouting at them to stand aside.
We ran through the door to the holding cells, and Benjamin found the key to lock it behind us. Pip was still working the lock of his cell with my safety pin, and he looked up at us with surprise. “Where’s your mate?” he asked.
“He’s not our mate!” I said. “Will you help us escape, if we let you out?”
He shrugged. “I’ve almost got this picked.”
Benjamin pushed his hands away and unlocked the cell with the keys.
“I almost had that!” Pip said, stamping his foot. “An’ it’s a bloody hard one!”
“There’s a way out through the kitchen,” I said. “Do you know where the kitchen is?”
“This way,” Pip said, and he led us out the far door of the room.
We ran down one whitewashed hallway, and then another, and encountered a strong, sour soup smell. Finally we arrived in a large, steamy room with pots on the stove, and three cooks in stained aprons. Without slowing down, Pip took a bread roll off a tray and bit into it. Beyond the cooks was a door that looked like it led outside.
“There it is!” I said.
But then the door swung open, and Danby stepped in.
“Turn back!” Benjamin cried.
We ran back down the narrow hallway again.
“Upstairs!” Pip said, through a mouthful of bread. We wheeled right, up a flight of wooden stairs, with Danby close behind. At the top of the stairs there was an old trunk, and Benjamin pushed it so it bumped and slid down the stairs with an appalling noise. Mr Danby dived backward as the trunk slammed into the wall. Pip whipped the remains of his bread roll at his head for good measure, hitting him just above the eye.
We ran down a long, narrow hall and up another flight of stairs, and then up a ladder that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Pip pushed open the trapdoor and hoisted himself into the dim attic with the agility of a spider, his legs disappearing into the dark. Benjamin and I followed more clumsily. We were in a dim, dusty space under the eaves, full of broken school desks and stacked mattresses.
“Over here!” Pip called from somewhere in the dark.
Benjamin and I dragged a musty old mattress onto the trapdoor to keep it closed. Then we crawled on our hands and knees to get to Pip, trying not to bump our heads on the low ceiling. He had found a small, filthy window, the pane crosshatched with old tape, and was trying to push it open.
“What’s out there?” I asked.
“The roof.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t
know
yet,” he said. “You fancy waiting here?”
The sash wouldn’t open, so Pip leaned back on his hands and kicked the glass out with his heels. The tape kept it from shattering easily, and it took several kicks.
“Oh, that’s discreet,” Benjamin said.
Pip ignored him and picked shards of glass out of the frame.
“Why’s it taped?” I asked.
“To keep bombs from breaking the windows in the war,” Benjamin said.
Pip leaned out, looked around, and got hold of something above the window on the outside. He was ridiculously graceful and limber, and we watched his skinny legs disappear as he lifted himself up and out.
I stuck my head out the window and looked down at the pieces of glass on the ground, far below. No one seemed to have noticed the broken window yet, but looking down made me terribly dizzy. I heard a bumping noise over by the trapdoor. Someone—probably Danby—was trying to get it open, but the mattress was weighing it down. I looked up at Pip on the roof, but the roof seemed impossibly far above the window.
“I can’t climb up there!” I said.
Pip was calm. “Take the top of the sill with your left hand,” he said, “and reach for the roof with your right.”
I did, sure I was going to fall.
“Now stand on the sill and give me your left hand.”
I did, and Pip pulled with surprising strength. I clambered up. The slate roof was steeply pitched, and worn and slippery, and I clung to the peak of it. Something in the pit of my stomach
strongly
objected to the height.
Pip hoisted Benjamin up after me.
“Now what?” I asked.
“We look for a gutter,” Pip said. “A pipe. Some way down.” He scrambled down to the edge of the roof to look, and just watching him made my stomach seize and flip again. If getting to a gutter meant climbing down that steep pitch, I didn’t think I could do it. Benjamin seemed no better off than I was—he was straddling the roof ’s peak as if it were an unpredictable horse.
A cry went up below. All of the children had spilled out of the back of the house, and they stared up at us from the ground, with the pink-faced matron.
