The Apothecary

cover

Contents

Cover

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

A note to the reader

Chapter 1: Followed

Chapter 2: The Apothecary

Chapter 3: St Beden’s School

Chapter 4: Spies

Chapter 5: Sherwood Forest

Chapter 6: His Excellency

Chapter 7: The Message

Chapter 8: The Pharmacopoeia

Chapter 9: The Physic Garden

Chapter 10: The Smell of Truth

Chapter 11: The Samovar

Chapter 12: The Return to the Garden

Chapter 13: The Gardener’s Letter

Chapter 14: Scotland Yard

Chapter 15: Turnbull Hall

Chapter 16: The Pickpocket

Chapter 17: Flight

Chapter 18: The Opera Game

Chapter 19: Invisible

Chapter 20: The Bunker

Chapter 21: The Oil of Mnemosyne

Chapter 22: The Pillar of Salt

Chapter 23: The Apothecary’s Plan

Chapter 24: The Dark Force

Chapter 25: Science Team

Chapter 26: At Lady Sarah’s

Chapter 27: The Port of London

Chapter 28: Breaking and Entering

Chapter 29: The Kong Olaf

Chapter 30: The Anniken

Chapter 31: The Execution

Chapter 32: Genii

Chapter 33: Nova Zembla

Chapter 34: The Bomb

Chapter 35: The Frozen Sea

Chapter 36: Escape

Chapter 37: The Wine of Lethe

Chapter 38: The Guardians of Peace

Acknowledgments

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Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781849399722

This edition first published in 2012 by
Andersen Press Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
www.andersenpress.co.uk

First published in 2011 in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group. The Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

The right of Maile Meloy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Bert the Turtle (The Duck and Cover Song) by Leon Carr and Leo Corday
Copyright © 1979 by Music Sales Group and Songwriters Guild of America. International
Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

ISBN 978 1 84939 506 9

About the Author

MAILE MELOY is the award-winning author of the short-story collections Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It and Half in Love and the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter. This is her first novel for young readers.

www.mailemeloy.com

www.theapothecarybook.com

For Franny

A note to the reader:

My memories of what happened to me in 1952, when I moved to London from Los Angeles with my parents and met Benjamin Burrows for the first time, aren’t perfect, for reasons I’ll explain in this book. I didn’t ‘forget’ those months the way I sometimes forget where I left my glasses, or what was happening in the novel I put down last week, or the name of the woman who sells oranges at the farmers’ market. I lost what happened to me in the spring of 1952 in a much deeper, more profound way than that.

But I kept a diary that year, when I was fourteen and my life changed in such unforeseeable ways. The diary was taken from me, but later it was returned. When I read the entries, they were in my own handwriting, but they were as strange to me as if I had written them while asleep, about a dream that had vanished.

People describe their childhoods as magical, but mine – it really was. While I was complaining to my parents about having to leave Los Angeles, a chemist in China was narrowly escaping arrest, and a Hungarian physicist was perfecting the ability to freeze time. I was drawn, through Benjamin and his father, into the web of what they had created.

But if I tell you all this now, you won’t believe me. I’ll tell it in order, as I reconstructed the events after meeting Benjamin again. For a long time the memories seemed – however fantastic – to be important only to me personally. But lately it has seemed more and more urgent to tell this story now.

Jane Scott

LOS ANGELES, 2011

CHAPTER 1

Followed

I WAS SEVEN and living in Los Angeles when Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, and my first vivid memories are of how happy and excited everyone was. My parents took me to a parade on Fairfax Avenue, where my father hoisted me onto his shoulders and sailors kissed girls in the streets. In school we made little paper flags to wave and learned that an evil force – two evil forces – had been defeated. We weren’t going to have wars anymore.

Some of my parents’ friends said it wasn’t true that we had ended war for all time.

‘People said that about the last war,’ they said, sitting on our back patio, surrounded by tall green hedges, drinking wine or lemonade, which is how I remember all of my parents’ friends from that time: the women with their hair up in French twists, the men with their ties undone, on the back patio with a drink in hand. ‘And look where we are.’

Others said that such terrible things had happened that the world would never be the same again. But my parents gave those friends hard looks when they knew I was listening.

My father said gasoline wasn’t going to be rationed anymore, and we could drive to Kings Canyon, which I imagined was populated with kings, to see the giant trees. My second-grade teacher said we would get real butter again, not white oleomargarine with the yellow colour capsule you could add to it. I didn’t remember real butter, and I liked the white oleo on toast with sprinkled sugar (my mother never added the yellow colouring because she hated fakery of all kinds), but I did believe that life was going to be better. We would have real butter, whatever that was like, and I might get a baby sister out of the deal. I would name her Lulu. The war was over and the bad guys had lost. A golden era had begun.

For a while, it actually seemed true. I never got a baby sister, but I had the cleverest, funniest parents I knew, and they had friends who were almost as clever and funny. They were a writing team, Marjorie and Davis Scott, and they had started in radio and worked together on television shows, first on Fireside Theatre, then on I Love Lucy. They had story retreats in Santa Barbara, and the other writers’ kids and I would run through the avocado fields, playing elaborate games of tag and kick-the-can. We would gather avocados that fell from the trees, and eat fat, green slices with salt right out of the shell. We swam in the ocean and played in the waves, and lay in the sand with the sun on our skin.

In my parents’ front yard, there was an orange tree, with blossoms that made people on the street stop and look around to see what smelled so sweet. I used to pick myself an orange when I came home from school and eat it over the sink to catch the juice. In school we read a poem with the line ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!’ It was supposed to be about the French Revolution, but I thought it was about my life.

But that was before I started being followed.

First the whole world changed. Another war started in Korea, against the Chinese, who had been our allies in the last war. The Russians, who had also been our allies, had the atomic bomb and seemed inclined to use it against us. The Communist threat was supposed to be everywhere, though my parents thought it was exaggerated.

In school, at Hollywood High, we watched a safety film in which a cheerful cartoon turtle named Bert explained that when a nuclear bomb came, we should get under our desks and put our heads between our knees. It had a little song that went like this:

There was a turtle by the name of Bert

And Bert the turtle was very alert

When danger threatened him, he never got hurt

He knew just what to do!

He’d duck – and cover

Duck – and cover!

He did what we all must learn to do

You – and you – and you – and you –

Duck – and cover!

Our teacher, Miss Stevens, who had been born deep in the last century and wore her white hair coiled up like a ghost’s pastry on the back of her head, would lead us in a bomb drill. ‘Here goes the flash,’ she’d say. ‘Everyone under the desks!’ And under we’d go – as if our wooden school desks full of books and pencils were going to protect us from an atomic bomb.

The important thing, the films emphasised, was not to panic. So instead, everyone maintained a constant low-grade anxiety. I was only in the ninth grade and I might have managed to shrug off the worry, except that I’d started to think that someone was watching me.

At first, it was just a feeling. I’d get it walking home: that weird sensation that comes when someone’s eyes are on you. It was February in Los Angeles, and it was brisk and cool but not cold. The tall palm trees by the school steps were as green as ever.

On the way home I practised walking like Katharine Hepburn, striding along with my shoulders back. I wore trousers whenever I could, and my favourites were bright-green sailor ones, with four big buttons and flared legs. They were worthy of Hepburn as the cuffs swished along. She was my favourite film star, and I thought if I could walk like her, then I could feel and be like her, so sure and confident, tossing her head and snapping out a witty retort. But I didn’t want anyone to see me practising my Hepburn walk, so at first the sensation of being watched only made me embarrassed. When I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing but the ordinary traffic on Highland Avenue, I hugged my books, rounded my shoulders, and walked home like an ordinary fourteen-year-old girl.

Then there was a day when I had the watched feeling, and looked back and saw a black sedan cruising more slowly than the rest of the traffic. I could have sworn it was driving at exactly the speed I was walking. I sped up, thinking that Kate Hepburn wouldn’t be afraid, and the car seemed to speed up, too. Panic rose in my chest. I turned down an alley, and the car didn’t follow, so I hurried along the side of the buildings, past the trash cans. When I got onto Selma Avenue, which was quiet and tree-lined, there was a man outside a house pruning his roses, but no cars.

My heart was pounding and I made myself breathe slowly. I nodded to the man with the roses and kept walking down Selma. I told myself it was silly to be afraid: No one was following me. They had no reason to follow me. I tossed my hair, wishing it would move in one glossy, curly mass, and then the black sedan came round the corner ahead and cruised slowly towards me. I felt a cold flush, as if ice water had been pumped through my veins.

I looked back to the rose man, but he had gone inside his house. I gripped my books to keep my hands from shaking, and I kept walking as the black car drove towards me, ridiculously slowly. As it passed, I kept my chin very high and slid a glance sideways. In the car were two men in dark suits. The one closest to me, in the passenger seat, had hair so short he looked like a soldier, and he was watching me. There were two dark, brimmed hats on the backseat. I didn’t know any man who wore a hat.

I kept walking, and the black car stopped and idled at the curb. I turned on Vista, my own street, and when I thought I was out of sight, I ran for the house, fumbling for my key. My parents were at work and wouldn’t be home yet. I dropped the key and picked it up off the sidewalk as the black sedan turned onto Vista, and then I got inside and slammed the door and slid the chain.

‘Hello?’ I called to the empty house, just in case. No one answered.

I dropped my books and ran to the back door, which led out to the patio, and I made sure the door was locked. Sometimes we were careless about that door because it led to the hedged-in garden, not to the street, but the bolt was thrown, so the house had been locked all day. I looked out the front window and saw the sedan parked by the curb at the end of the block, waiting. I closed the curtains and turned on the lights in the kitchen, my hands still shaking. The kitchen was the room where I felt safest, because it was where I sat every night with my parents, doing homework while they cooked, listening to them talk.

I told myself it was fine, it was probably in my mind. It was my imagination taking over. I made myself a peanut butter and honey sandwich and started doing my algebra homework. Each problem was like a puzzle, and it helped take my mind off the men who might or might not be sitting in their black car on the corner of our street, behind the curtains I was determined not to open.

At six o’clock, I was deep in a hunt for the value of x when I heard the door open and hit the end of the chain hard. My heart started to race again. I’d managed to pretend that the men weren’t really after me, but here they were, breaking in.

‘What is this?’ a man’s angry voice said.

Then I realised the voice was more annoyed than angry, and then I realised it was my father’s. ‘Janie?’ he called, more alarmed now than annoyed. ‘Are you here? What’s going on?’

We walked that night to Musso and Frank’s, which was my favourite restaurant, but it didn’t feel like a treat. My parents tried to pretend everything was just fine, but we took back alleys, and they watched the corners at every street. My father walked so fast that my mother and I had to walk double-time just to keep up.

We took a booth, and I ordered the thin pancakes called flannel cakes for dinner. I wanted my parents to object and make me order chicken and vegetables – I wanted things to be normal – but they didn’t even notice.

‘So who are those men in the car?’ I asked.

My mother sighed. ‘They’re US marshals,’ she said. ‘From Washington. The government.’

That didn’t make any sense. ‘What do they want?’

‘We’ve been wanting to tell you, Janie,’ she said. She always got right to the point, but now she was dancing round whatever she was trying to say. ‘We have news, and we think it’s good news. We’re – well, we’re thinking we’ll all move to London.’

I stared at her.

‘It will be an adventure,’ she said.

I looked at my father. ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘Nothing!’ he said, too loudly. A woman at another table looked at us.

‘Davis,’ my mother said.

‘But I haven’t done anything! This is all so ridiculous!’

A waiter brought water glasses to the table, and my mother smiled up at him. When he was gone, she said, ‘I don’t know if you remember Katie Lardner.’

‘Only from birthday parties,’ I said, slumped in the booth. I was being what my mother called a real pill, and I knew it, but I didn’t want to move to London. I liked my friends, and I liked my school. I liked junior lifesaving at the beach, and trips to Santa Barbara, and oranges growing in the front yard. I liked everything except being followed by men from Washington for whatever my parents had done.

‘The Lardners moved to Mexico,’ my mother said, ‘because her father became a target. It became impossible for him to work here.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They moved because her father was a Communist.’ Then the floor of Musso and Frank’s seemed to open beneath me. ‘Oh, no! Are you Communists?’

Both my parents glanced around to see if anyone was listening. Then my father leaned forward and spoke in a low voice that wouldn’t carry.

‘We believe in the Constitution, Janie,’ he said. ‘And we’ve been put on a list of people they’re watching. That’s why they’re watching you, when it has nothing to do with you. And I will not have them following my child.’ He thumped the table, and his voice had started to rise again.

‘Davis,’ my mother said.

‘I won’t, Marjorie,’ he said.

‘I don’t even understand what Communism is,’ I said.

My father sighed. ‘The idea,’ he said, in his low voice, ‘is that people should share resources, and own everything communally, so there aren’t wildly rich people who have everything and desperately poor people who have nothing. That’s the idea. It’s just hard to get it to work. The trouble right now is that the US government – or at least something called the House Committee on Un-American Activities – has gotten so paranoid about the idea, as if it’s a contagious disease, that they’re going after innocent people who may hold the idea, or have held it in the past. It isn’t fair, or rational, or constitutional.’

I was determined not to cry, and wiped my nose with my napkin. ‘Can I at least finish the semester here?’

He sighed. ‘Those men want to make us appear in court, under oath,’ he said. ‘We could answer for ourselves, but they would ask us to testify about our friends, and we can’t do that. We’ve heard they’ll confiscate passports soon so people can’t leave the country. So we have to go right away.’

‘When?’

‘This week.’

‘This week?’

My mother broke in. ‘There’s someone we’ve worked with before,’ she said. ‘Olivia Wolff. She already moved to London, to produce a television show about Robin Hood. She wants us to work on it, which is … Janie, it’s an amazing opportunity. It’ll be like living in a Jane Austen novel.’

‘You mean I’ll get married at the end?’ I asked. ‘I’m fourteen.’

‘Janie.’

‘And Jane Austen was from there, she wasn’t American. I’ll be so out of place!’

‘Janie, please,’ my mother said. ‘This is a great chance that Olivia’s giving us. We don’t have a choice.’

‘I don’t have a choice. You had a choice, and you got on that list!’

‘We didn’t choose to be on the list,’ my father said.

‘So how’d you get on it?’

‘By believing in freedom of speech. By having faith in the First Amendment!’

The waiter came and slid our plates in front of us. ‘Flannel cakes for the little lady,’ he said.

I gave him a weak smile.

My father stared at my stack of pancakes, with the pat of real butter melting on top. ‘That’s what you ordered for dinner?’

‘She can have whatever she wants,’ my mother said.

I glared at my father in defiance, but when I took a forkful of my last thin, golden, delicious Musso and Frank’s flannel cakes for a long time – maybe for ever – they tasted like sawdust, and I made a face. My father couldn’t resist the joke.

‘You look like you’re eating real flannel,’ he said, smiling. ‘Pyjamas with syrup.’

‘Very funny,’ I said.

‘Look, kiddo,’ he said. ‘If we can’t laugh together, we’re not going to make it through this thing.’

I swallowed the sawdust. ‘Don’t call me kiddo,’ I said.

CHAPTER 2

The Apothecary

IT’S SAFE TO say I was not graceful about the move to London. I was no witty, patient, adaptable Jane Austen. And if I was anything like Katharine Hepburn, it was in the scenes where she’s being a giant pest. I cried in the taxi all the way to the airport, past the churning oil rigs on La Cienega. I cried on the first aeroplane I’d ever been on, which should have been exciting, and was exciting – all those tiny buildings below – but I wasn’t going to give my parents the satisfaction of knowing that I was enjoying it.

At Heathrow Airport in London, there was a framed picture of the brand-new Queen Elizabeth II on the wall.

‘She’s not that much older than you are,’ my mother said. ‘And she’s been through a war, and her father’s dead, and now she has to be queen, poor thing.’

‘See?’ my father said. ‘Your life could be worse.’

I looked at the picture of the young queen. We had escaped ahead of the US marshals, locking up the house and packing only the things we could carry. My parents were going to be writing for the BBC under fake names – fake names, when my mother wouldn’t even put yellow food colouring in margarine! We were living like criminals or spies. Although I was angry, standing there looking at the plucky young queen’s portrait, I allowed myself to think that my mother was right, and it might be an adventure.

But February in London crushed those hopes. We took a taxi through streets that were still bomb-scarred and desolate, seven years after the war’s end, to a tiny third-floor flat on St George’s Street in Primrose Hill. Across the street was a haberdasher – my father said he was like a tailor – standing outside his shop with his hands behind his back and a look on his face as if no one would ever come in.

Our new landlady, Mrs Parrish, took off her apron and patted a wild cloud of hair to show us round. She said the gas water heater over the kitchen sink was broken, and we would have to heat pots of water on the stove. The kitchen was along one side of the living room, no bigger than a closet, and could be closed away just like a closet. The rooms were freezing and the walls seemed damp. The brown wallpaper was water-stained near the ceiling.

We must have looked dismayed, because the distracted Mrs Parrish suddenly focused on us. She was not going to let some spoiled Americans fail to appreciate their good fortune. ‘You’re lucky to get the place, you know,’ she said.

‘Of course,’ my mother said quickly. ‘We’re very grateful.’

‘People are queuing up for a flat like this, with its own lavatory, and separate bedrooms, and a working telephone line. But the BBC asked to hold it, specially.’ It was clear that we did not deserve such a bounty, when her countrymen, who had lost so much, were still going without private bathrooms.

‘We’re very grateful,’ my mother repeated.

‘Do you have your ration cards for the marketing?’

‘Not yet,’ my mother said.

‘You’ll need those,’ the landlady said. ‘And you’ll find that the butcher sells out first thing in the morning, ration cards or no.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I can sell you some eggs, if you like. They’re hard to get, but I know someone with hens.’

‘That would be very nice.’

Mrs Parrish showed us where to put penny coins into the gas heater in the wall, to make it work. We didn’t have any English pennies, but said we would get some.

‘Mark you,’ she said, brushing dust from the heater off her hands, ‘it doesn’t do much. Apart from eat up pennies. You’ll want your hot water bottles for the beds.’

‘We don’t have hot water bottles,’ my mother said.

‘Try the apothecary,’ the landlady said. ‘Round the corner, on Regent’s Park. He’ll have pennies, too.’

And she left us alone.

My mother started investigating the closet kitchen, and my father and I put on every warm thing we had, which wasn’t much, to go find the apothecary, which my father said was like a pharmacy. The sky over St George’s Street was grey, and the buildings were grey, and people wore grey. It sounds like a cliché, but it was true. Going from Los Angeles to London in 1952 was like leaving a Technicolour movie and walking into a black-and-white one.

Round the corner on Regent’s Park Road, just as the landlady said, we came to a shopfront with two bay windows full of glass bottles. A painted sign over one window said APOTHECARY, and one over the other window said ESTABLISHED 1871. My father pushed the paned-glass door open and held it for me. The shop had a strange smell, musty and herbal and metallic all at once. Behind the counter was a wall of jars. A balding man on a wheeled ladder, halfway up the wall, pulled a jar down. He seemed not to have noticed us, but then he spoke. ‘I’ll just be a moment,’ he said.

He carefully climbed down the ladder with the jar in one hand, set it on the counter, and looked up at us, ready for our needs. He had wire-rimmed glasses and the air of someone who didn’t rush things, who paid close attention to each particular task before moving on to the next.

‘We’re looking for three hot water bottles,’ my father told him.

‘Of course.’

‘And how about some chocolate bars?’

The apothecary shook his head. ‘We have them sometimes. Not often, since the war.’

‘Since the war?’ my father said, and I could see him calculating: twelve years without a steady supply of chocolate. He looked a little faint. I wondered if he could get a prescription for chocolate from a doctor. Then I could have some, too.

‘Come back again,’ the apothecary said, seeing his dismay. ‘We may have some soon.’

‘OK,’ my father said. ‘We’d better get some aspirin, too.’ I could tell he was embarrassed by his undisguised need for candy, and he always made jokes when he was embarrassed. I could feel one coming. ‘And how about something for my daughter, to cure homesickness?’

‘Dad,’ I said.

The apothecary looked at me. ‘You’re American?’

I nodded.

‘And you’ve moved here to a cold flat with cold bedrooms that need hot water bottles?’

I nodded again, and the apothecary guided the ladder along the back wall on its metal wheels.

‘I was joking,’ my father said.

‘But you are homesick?’ the apothecary asked, over his shoulder.

‘Well … yes,’ I said.

He climbed the ladder and chose two jars, tucking one beneath his arm to climb down. At the counter, he unscrewed the lids and measured two different powders, one yellow and one brown, into a small glass jar. ‘The brown is aspen, the yellow is honeysuckle,’ he said. To my father, he said, ‘Neither will hurt her.’ To me, he said, ‘Put about a dram of each – do you know how much a dram is? About a teaspoon of each in a glass of water. It won’t take effect right away, but it might make you feel better. And it might not. People have different constitutions.’

‘We really don’t—’ my father said.

‘It’s free of charge,’ the apothecary said. ‘It’s for the young lady.’ Then he rang up the hot water bottles and the bottle of aspirin.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘You’ll want some pennies, too, for the wall heater,’ he said, handing me our change in a fistful of big brown coins that clinked, rather than jingled, into my hand.

CHAPTER 3

St Beden’s School

THE NEXT MORNING, I swallowed my aspen and honeysuckle, over my mother’s half-hearted 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 sweater, 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 plait 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 chalkboard, 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 chalkboard 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 trestle 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 atomic 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 ribcage at such an unexpected pace.

CHAPTER 4

Spies

I WAS SUPPOSED to take the Underground to Riverton Studios in Hammersmith after school, to see my parents at work. Robin Hood wasn’t on the air yet, but they had built a whole Sherwood Forest in a cavernous, warehouse-like soundstage, and they wanted me to see it. I was walking home to drop my books off, in an ambivalent drizzle, thinking about orange trees and avocados, when I passed the apothecary’s shop on Regent’s Park. Through the window, I saw a familiar sandy head of hair. I stopped to watch through the glare on the glass. Benjamin Burrows was shaking his head angrily and saying something to the kind apothecary.

I pushed the door open just enough to slip in, and stepped behind a row of shelves as if browsing for toothpaste. There was no bell on the door, and Benjamin and the apothecary were too occupied with their argument to notice me. Benjamin wore a leather satchel, like a messenger bag, slung on a long strap across his chest. He didn’t wear a wool cap like most of the other St Beden’s boys did.

‘I don’t see why it matters,’ he was saying. ‘Mrs Pratt’s just a nutter who likes being sick.’

‘The delivery is still late,’ the apothecary said.

‘I had things to do.’

‘You had things to do here.’

‘Poxy things,’ Benjamin muttered.

‘We still have this shop,’ the apothecary said, ‘through war and through difficult times, because we take care of our customers. Your great-grandfather did it, and your grandfather did it, and people trust us to do it now.’

‘But you wanted to be an apothecary, like them,’ Benjamin said. ‘I don’t want to!’

The apothecary paused. ‘When I was your age, I didn’t want to be one, either.’

‘Well, you should’ve got out while you could!’ Benjamin said. His anger, which had seemed so fitting against the lunch lady, seemed petulant against his father. If I’d had to guess, in the lunchroom, what Benjamin Burrows’s father might be like, I would never have picked the quiet, methodical apothecary. Benjamin snatched the paper bag off the counter and stormed out the door without seeing me.

I tried to slip out behind a row of shelves, too, without being noticed, but the apothecary said, ‘Good afternoon. It’s the girl with the homesickness, isn’t it? Did the powder help?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was thinking about home on my way here. About orange trees. And blue sky.’

The apothecary looked out at the drizzle. ‘It would be strange not to think about orange trees and blue sky on a day like today,’ he said. ‘No matter what powder you took.’

‘And my new school is pretty awful,’ I said.

The apothecary laughed. ‘The man who develops a tincture against the awful new school will win the Nobel Prize. It would be far more useful than the cure for the common cold.’

I smiled. ‘When you have the tincture, will you give me some?’

‘You’ll be the first.’

There was an awkward pause.

‘I fear you overheard my argument with my son,’ he said.

‘A little bit.’

‘He’s a very bright, very talented young man, and he would be a fine apothecary, but he has no interest in it.’

‘Maybe he’ll change his mind.’

The apothecary nodded. His mind seemed to be elsewhere, so I said goodbye and slipped out the door.

I dropped my books at the flat and set out for Riverton. My father had left elaborate directions to the studio. But as soon as I was in the street, I had the feeling, once again, of being watched. I knew it couldn’t be the marshals – they had no jurisdiction in England. I turned and saw nothing, just the cabs and cars and people walking home.

I ran down the steps of the bomb-battered Underground, weaving round the slow old people with their bags, and hid behind a pillar to see who came down after me. There were housewives and students, and men leaving work early, and then there was Benjamin Burrows, with his incorrigible hair and his bright, curious eyes. I stepped back behind the pillar.

I watched Benjamin look around. He stood on the platform, facing away from me, as if disappointed and unsure what to do next, so I left my hiding place and tapped him on the shoulder.

He turned, startled. Then he smiled as if I’d won a game we’d been playing. ‘Very good,’ he said.

‘Why are you following me?’

‘Because you interest me.’

interest