by Maile Meloy
I heard a panicked call from the skylark. I willed myself to be near him, stopped thinking, and instantly shot up into the air. The children cheered as I rose free. We were high over Turnbull, looking down at the dumbstruck and furious adults and the laughing, triumphant children. And then we were sailing away.
I had sometimes, before that day, had dreams about flying, but dreams had nothing on the real thing. We soared high over the streets of the East End, and the people looked tiny below. We could see where the bombs had fallen in the war, and where they had left buildings untouched. Pip wheeled and hovered and then dived with rocket speed towards the ground before soaring up again with a gleeful, birdlike laugh.
I couldn’t manage the acrobatics with my incomplete wings. I wondered if Danby still had the scarf, or if it had turned to feathers in his hand. I looked back towards Turn-bull and saw the green sedan pulling out of the drive. I realised that Danby and the Scar would know where Benjamin’s father was, and if we followed them, they might take us there.
Benjamin must have thought the same thing. When I swooped to follow the sedan through the streets, the boys did, too. We passed a few actual birds as we flew, and they all gave us a wide berth, not trusting a skylark, a swallow, and a robin all traveling together. One curious crow flew close to investigate, but it seemed to detect something unnatural about us, and cawed and flapped away.
The green sedan drove south, and west, and then stopped in an ordinary London neighbourhood, with rows of terraced houses. The car parked in a side street, and neither of the men got out.
I dropped down to the roof of the parked car, trying to land softly but nearly hurtling off the edge. The passenger window was open, letting out a curl of cigarette smoke, and I perched just above it. Benjamin landed beside me, then Pip. My hearing was better than usual, as a robin, and I could hear the Scar, out of sight in the driver’s seat, say in heavily accented English, “Children do not become birds, like this.”
“I would concur,” Danby said, “except that I saw it happen.”
“They cannot shrink so.”
“But they did!” Danby said. “It’s because of that book. The apothecary’s book. That Scott girl, the American, was ready to hand it over to me.”
Benjamin turned to me. His shiny bird’s eyes were bright, and he held his beak at a significant angle. You wouldn’t think that a skylark’s face could convey I told you so, but I’m here to tell you that it can. I was glad that Danby hadn’t discovered that Sergei had the satchel with the Pharmacopoeia in it.
“The children had clearly seen you before,” Danby continued. “Which means you’ve been careless.”
The German’s voice was icy and clear. “I am never careless.”
“They must have seen you at the shop,” Danby said. “Or in the garden. Someone who is careful might have noticed that they were there.”
The Scar muttered something I didn’t understand.
“And now they’ve flown away,” Danby said. “And they no longer trust me, and it’s impossible to get answers when your prisoner has taken those bloody muting pills.”
Benjamin and I looked at each other. The mute prisoner must be his father. He’d taken a pill like Shiskin’s, to make him unable to speak. Danby’s cigarette appeared through the open window, and he knocked the ash to the ground. I wondered how I had ever found his long, pale hands appealing. They seemed so sinister now.
“I could get answers,” the Scar said.
Danby sighed. “The drug makes speech impossible. It’s very clever.”
The passenger door opened with sudden decisiveness, and I flew, panicked, into a nearby tree. Benjamin and Pip scattered, too. Danby didn’t seem to see us. He got out of the car and ground out his cigarette with his heel, then straightened his tie and walked around the corner.
The three of us left our trees and flew after him, keeping our distance, and Danby walked to the end of the block. He stopped outside a boxy-looking building, turned a key in the door, and vanished inside.
There was a large tree that looked like a sycamore outside the building, and I landed on a leafy, low branch beside Benjamin and Pip. I didn’t know what the building might be, but I was sure it was where they were keeping Benjamin’s father.
We couldn’t communicate in speech, but I knew that Benjamin wanted to fly in as a skylark as soon as someone opened the door, and I knew Pip thought it was a bad idea. I can’t explain now exactly how I knew all of that, but it was clear in their eyes and in the movement of their heads and their wings.
At some point during this avian battle of wills, a stealthy orange tabby cat must have been climbing our tree. We were oblivious, thinking only about the locked door and the question of whether to go in.
Then a man pushed open the bunker’s door and came outside. Benjamin spread his wings to fly in the open door, but Pip chirped and fluttered to stop him. And then the giant tabby reached our branch and pounced on Benjamin’s back. Benjamin screeched, in his thin bird’s voice, and tried to fly away, but she had him in her claws.
I was paralysed with fear, but Pip wasn’t. He flew straight at the cat’s huge yellow eyes with his sharp beak. She yowled in pain, dropping Benjamin to the ground. Then she swiped at Pip with her paw, pinning him to the branch.
The man leaving the bunker stopped to watch the commotion for a moment, but it was only a cat after a couple of birds in a tree, and he walked away, lighting a cigarette inside a cupped hand.
I grabbed the cat’s soft ear with my talons just as she took Pip’s neck in her sharp white teeth. I squeezed her ear, and her yowl of pain turned to one of surprise as Pip started to grow, right under her claws. He lost his feathers and grew clothes, and suddenly the cat had a full-sized boy in her clutches, crouching precariously on the branch.
The cat scrambled back in a panic and fell out of the tree. I watched her twist in midair and land heavily on her feet. She didn’t stop to contemplate what had gone wrong, but raced off down the street, an orange streak.
Benjamin, too, had become a boy again, and was sitting on the ground. Pip lowered himself by his arms off the branch, then dropped the remaining distance. They both seemed a little dazed, and Pip was rubbing the back of his neck, where he had four small puncture wounds from the cat’s teeth. I thought the stress of the attack must have caused the boys’ bodies to change back. I hadn’t changed yet, but I had become a bird last and I hadn’t been seized by a cat. I flew down to the grass, where Benjamin felt his legs. “No broken bones,” he said. “I don’t think.”
“That cat put holes in me!” Pip said.
I flew to his shoulder to look. Benjamin peered at them, too. “They’re tiny.”
“Says you!”
“We still have to get inside that building,” Benjamin said. “Janie could fly in, when that man comes back.”
“She can’t!” Pip said. “I’ve been tryin’ to tell you, it’s a secret bunker. She’ll get caught if she turns human, and she can’t carry your da out with her little wings.”
Benjamin stared at him. “It’s a secret bunker?”
“Sure. It’s a military bomb shelter, underground. For Churchill and that lot, if there’s another war.”
“How do you know that?” Benjamin asked.
Pip shrugged his narrow shoulders, nearly dislodging me. “Everybody knows. To put a bloody enormous bunker right under Bethnal Green, you need builders, right? And the builders all say the job’s top secret, mind your business, till they get a few pints in ’em. Then they spill it. They swear all the barmaids to secrecy, like.”
“How big is it?”
“The whole block, underground.”
I had an idea, but I couldn’t speak. Then the idea was interrupted by a strange sensation coming over me. It came in a wave, and I couldn’t control it. I hopped off Pip’s shoulder as my heartbeat started to slow, and my arms prickled in a thousand places where the feathers were disappearing, retracting back into my skin. I grew fingers and toes, and my sku
ll thickened and expanded, and hair grew from my head.
And then I was sitting on the grass in my school uniform.
“Right,” Pip said. “Good. She can’t fly in.”
Through the fogginess in my new human head, I remembered my idea. “What if we could be invisible?” I asked.
“That would solve a lot o’ things,” Pip said, as if I was joking.
“We’d need the Pharmacopoeia,” I said.
“The farm-a what?”
“It’s a book,” I said, “and Sergei has it.”
“We hope he still has it,” Benjamin said.
CHAPTER 18
The Opera Game
School was just getting out when we got back to St. Beden’s to recover the Pharmacopoeia, and students were streaming out into the grey afternoon, released for the day. They were all going about their lives, heading off to field hockey practice or choir rehearsal, and I felt that an enormous, unbridgeable gulf had opened up between us. Wearing the wrong clothes and not knowing Latin seemed like enviable problems to have.
Pip stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looked up at the tall, imposing Victorian building, and shuddered. “I’ll just wait out ’ere,” he said.
It struck me as funny that Pip had no problem running across a peaked roof three stories off the ground, or attacking a monstrous cat as a tiny bird, but when confronted with a school, even after hours, he looked scared. It was as if someone might come after him with a butterfly net and pin him inside a case.
“But school’s out,” Benjamin said. “It’s safe.”
Pip looked doubtful.
“They’re not going to kidnap you and make you go,” I said. “No one will notice one more kid.”
Benjamin and I started up the stone steps, but Pip hung back.
Then Sarah Pennington came out the front door, and the February clouds momentarily parted—they really did. I’m not making this up. A shaft of sunlight caught her golden hair as she stopped at the top of the steps.
Pip stared, openmouthed, at this paragon of schoolgirl beauty. A few strands had escaped from Sarah’s long braid, and they sparkled around her face. She blinked her long eyelashes in the unexpected light.
Then her eyes met Pip’s bright hazel ones. I doubt she could have avoided it, given the intensity of his unconcealed longing. She seemed startled by what she saw, and she glanced at me, then at Benjamin, then back at Pip. We were all standing on the steps below her, like acolytes before the queen. I thought it might be good for Pip that she couldn’t see how short he was.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” Pip said, as if in a dream.
“How do you do?” she asked.
He nodded, paralysed with love.
“This is our friend Pip,” I said.
“Pip?” she asked, tilting her head fetchingly. “As in Great Expectations?”
“Why not?” Pip said.
She smiled. “Do you have great expectations?”
“I do now.”
“Do you go to this school?”
“Not yet,” he said. “But if you go here, I will.”
I noticed that he had pronounced the h in “here,” and wondered how much he changed his accent to suit his situation each day.
Sarah blushed, flustered. Having started the flirtation, she didn’t seem to know how to keep it up. “My car is waiting,” she said, and she skipped lightly past us, down the steps, ignoring Benjamin and me but glancing one more time at Pip.
Pip gazed after her. Then he scampered down to the black car that waited at the kerb, slid in front of the chauffeur, and opened the back door for her, saying something I couldn’t hear.
“Is that a limousine?” I asked Benjamin.
“A Daimler,” he said. “It picks her up every day.”
As the Daimler pulled away, with Sarah safely inside, Pip clutched his heart and staggered backward, with the mock-clumsiness of a vaudeville performer. Then he ran back up the stairs.
“I think I should go to this school,” he announced.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She told me ’er name. Sarah Eleanor Pennington!” He sighed.
“She told you her middle name?” Benjamin asked.
“Benjamin fancies her, too,” I explained.
“I do not!”
“Yes you do. You know how she leaves school every day.”
“I don’t fancy her,” Benjamin said. “I did.”
Pip sized up his new rival, then shrugged. “May the best man win,” he said.
Benjamin stalked into the building, letting the door swing closed behind him, and I wondered if he was pretending not to like Sarah because he envied Pip’s success, or if he really meant it.
“What was that she said about great spectations?” Pip asked.
“It’s a novel,” I said. “Great Expectations. About a poor boy named Pip who falls in love with a beautiful rich girl.”
“And the girl falls in love with ’im, too?”
“I can’t give away the ending.”
“Huh,” Pip said. “Then I’ll ’afta read it.”
We found Sergei at chess club in one of the history classrooms. Six unassuming boys sat at chessboards set up on three desks. Sergei was across from the pimply kid from our Latin class, about to make the first move, but he jumped up from the desk when he saw us.
“Benjamin! Janie!” he said. “I have your—”
He caught Benjamin’s look of displeasure.
“Oh!” he said. “Sorry! But it’s only chess club. They’re my friends!”
Benjamin drew Sergei to the back of the room, out of earshot, and Pip slid into the vacated chair.
“Is this game like checkers?” he asked the pimply boy.
The boy rolled his eyes. “No. Well, only superficially.”
“What’s superficially?”
The boy thought about it. “On the surface.”
“Aright,” Pip said. “What do you play for?”
“Nothing,” the boy said. “For pleasure.”
“Pleasure,” Pip said. “That’s daft. Let’s say half a crown. Can I move this little round-headed one?”
I left them to their game and followed Benjamin and Sergei to the back of the room.
“I have the book right here!” Sergei whispered. “I’ve kept it with me! I was worried. Where did the police take you?” His face was flushed with excitement.
“Has anyone asked you about the book?” Benjamin asked.
Sergei thought about that. “No! What should we do next?”
“Nothing,” Benjamin said. “I just need it back.”
Sergei reluctantly handed over Benjamin’s satchel. “I didn’t even get to look at it,” he complained.
“I also need to borrow your Latin book.”
Sergei dug in his bag and produced Kennedy’s Latin Primer. “Can’t I help you? Please? I’m good at Latin.”
“We promised your father we’d leave you out of it,” Benjamin said.
“He doesn’t have to know!”
“Is he okay?” I asked Sergei. “I mean, did he get in trouble for what we said in your house?”
“I don’t think so,” Sergei said. “And he can talk again.”
“You should tell him to be careful,” I said. “He’s in a lot of danger.”
“Really?” Sergei asked.
Across the room, Pip said, “Checkmate!”
His pimply opponent was staring down at the board. He looked up at me in protest. “He asked if the game was like checkers!”
“That’s half a crack, please,” Pip said smugly.
“I don’t have half a crown.”
“S’all right,” Pip said. “I’ll take your marker. I think you’re good for it.”
We stood over their chessboard and Sergei studied it for a moment, then looked at Pip with respect. “Is it the Opera game?”
“The what?”
“It’s outright thievery!” the pimply boy said.
&n
bsp; “The Opera game was played in sixteen moves,” Sergei said, “by an American master against two amateurs, in an opera box. Where do you study chess?”
“I don’t study it,” Pip said. “My uncle taught me down the pub.”
“Will you join our chess club?”
“Don’t let him!” the boy said. “He tricked me!”
“He can’t join chess club,” Benjamin said. “He doesn’t even go to this school.”
“I will soon!”
“Let’s go,” Benjamin said, and he nudged Pip towards the classroom door.
Sergei caught my arm. “Please take me with you.”
“I’m so sorry, Sergei,” I said, and gently pulled my arm free. “We can’t.”
So we weren’t, as you see, very good at being sneaky. We’d interrogated our own ally in a bugged house, and turned into birds in front of the entire population of Turnbull Hall, and now we’d hustled the St Beden’s chess club in the space of five minutes. We left Sergei looking brokenhearted, the pimply boy looking fiercely indignant, and the rest of the club looking like they weren’t sure what had hit them. If we were going to do anything unseen and unnoticed, we needed help.
CHAPTER 19
Invisible
Mr Gilliam’s chemistry classroom was locked, but it only took Pip a few seconds to open the door with a bent paper clip. The room was empty, and Benjamin relocked the door and lodged a chair under the knob.
I remembered that the invisibility spell the gardener had shown us in the Pharmacopoeia was on the page just after the Smell of Truth, and had the Greek letters ƒŸƒo at the top. I remembered because invisibility appealed to me—much more, even, than flying. We found the page, and the instructions were in Latin, so Benjamin started translating with Sergei’s primer.
“Balineum means ‘bath’,” he said. “I think we have to prepare a bath.”
“A bath?” Pip said. “Don’t you just drink a lickser?”
“Maybe you have to soak in this one, to be invisible,” I said.
We considered the classroom sink, which wasn’t deep enough.
