The Apprentices (35 page)

The helicopter settled on the lawn like a noisy dragonfly, and Janie and Pip ducked in the wind from the rotors. The first two men who climbed out were elaborately dressed in dark red uniforms, carrying rifles. Another man in a yellow robe climbed out after them.

Janie was about to step forward, but she guessed they would prefer to talk to a man—or at least a boy. She pushed Pip forward.

“Hiya,” Pip said over the noise. He folded his arms in defiance over his Hawaiian shirt.

“You wish to speak English?” the robed man asked.

“Yeah,” Pip said. “I do.”

Janie winced. She was upset, too, but she wished Pip would be diplomatic and obliging for just a minute or two.

“I am the envoy of His Exalted Highness the Sultan,” the robed man said.

“I know who you are,” Pip said. “I sent you lot a telegram when the sultan’s granddaughter needed help, and you never answered it. His own granddaughter! If you’d answered, we’d never be in this mess!”

The envoy frowned. “I know nothing of this telegram.”

“Well, maybe you
should’ve
known,” Pip said.

The envoy drew himself up to his full height. “We are reclaiming this island as property of the sultanate,” he said. “The princess demands a divorce from Magnus Magnusson.”

“She won’t need one,” Pip said. “He’s dead.”

“Dead!” the envoy said. “Then we must—speak with the proper delegate!”

“How ’bout you kiss my proper arse?” Pip said.

The envoy looked outraged, and the guards stepped forward with their rifles, but Janie saw a man in a pale linen suit walking up the road from the beach. Now he was striding up the lawn. He was plump, but moved lightly, and carried a package under his arm, wrapped in oilcloth. His hair had been blown back by the wind, and he wore aviator-style sunglasses.

Janie said, “Excuse me. Your most esteemed royal envoy, sir. Allow me to introduce our proper delegate. This is the man you’ll wish to speak to about the situation on the island—His Excellency Count Vilmos Hadik de Galántha.” The envoy seemed interested, so she kept going: “Professor of Pharmacology, Doctor of Letters, and—Honorary Consul of the Hapsburgs.”

Count Vili took off his sunglasses and bowed deeply. He said how honored he was to make the envoy’s acquaintance.
He was eager to discuss the situation on the island, and was convinced they could resolve it to everyone’s satisfaction. Then he asked for a moment to speak with his niece, and drew Janie away.

“I had a devil of a time getting Vinoray to let me take the Pharmacopoeia,” he said in a low voice. “I promised to deliver it
only
into the hands of Marcus Burrows.”

Janie felt her eyes filling with tears. She didn’t want to tell Vili. She watched as sorrow came over the count’s sunny face.

T
here was a feast, of sorts, on the island. It was not a victory celebration. It was a reunion, and it was a diplomatic dinner. But mostly it was
food.
No one had eaten since the day before, and they fell upon the plates Osman brought. They sat outside in the warm air, beside the pool at the villa, with lanterns lit in the equatorial twilight. They ate rice steamed in coconut milk, a spicy stew, and hauntingly sweet mangosteens, the white segments of fruit nestled inside the thick purple rind.

Jin Lo wanted to go after Danby in Count Vili’s boat, but Vili said that night was falling. There were islands and reefs, invisible in the darkness. Danby could have gone in any direction, and his landing craft could stop on any island to hide. They would go after him, but they would do it deliberately, with preparation.

“When you are in a hurry, dress slowly,” Jin Lo said.

“Exactly,” Vili said.

“I do not like this rule.”

He put a plate of food in her hands. “Too bad,” he said. “Now eat.”

The crew of the
Payday
had come ashore, and Harry and Charlotte sat in deck chairs on either side of Janie. “So you’re the girl Benjamin came all this way for,” Harry said. “I told him not to do it. I said when a girl runs off, she usually has a good reason.”

“I didn’t want to run off,” Janie said.

“I know you’re an infant,” Charlotte said, “too young to think about these things, but Benjamin’s a good one. He’s a keeper.”

“I’m sixteen,” Janie said.

“Good lord,” Charlotte said. “What I didn’t know at sixteen.”

“I know a
lot,
” Janie said.

Charlotte looked wistful. “That’s what I thought, too.”

Angelica Lowell sat next to Pip. Her father, eating happily, asked Osman if he was looking for a new cooking job. Osman glanced at Count Vili, who was talking with the sultan’s envoy, and said he thought he already had one.

They had cut Magnusson’s guard down out of the vines, and brought his terrified friend out of the gardening shed, and the two guards sat at the edge of the lantern light, eating gratefully. Sylvia had locked two more guards up in a storage closet, and knocked one over the head with the butt of her pistol, but he was recovering. The two miners who had carried the apothecary went back to their families with food. They nodded in consolation to Benjamin as they slipped away.
Some of the miners would leave and go to their home islands, Osman predicted, and some would stay to see what the new ownership of the island would bring.

Tessel and Efa tried to cheer Benjamin up, but they were awed by his desolation. He sat in furious silence, consumed by grief and guilt. It was exactly what his father had told him not to do. Janie ached for him.

After dinner, Vili appeared with a tray of champagne flutes, the liquid golden in the lantern light. The forgetting wine.

“I would like to propose a toast,” he said, handing the narrow glasses to Harry and Charlotte, to Angelica and her father, to Sylvia and to Magnusson’s guards. Osman followed with a second tray of sparkling cider for the envoy’s party, who didn’t drink alcohol. Janie didn’t get a champagne flute. Neither did Pip or Benjamin.

“Here, take mine,” Harry said to Janie.

“I’m happy with lemonade,” she said. “I’m an infant, remember?”

Count Vili stood among the group in the flickering light. “To Marcus Burrows,” he said. “Who was my friend. And my colleague. And my teacher. He had a devotion to his work that most of us can only envy. And an equal devotion to his son, of whom he was deeply proud, although perhaps he didn’t always know how to show it. But everything he did for the world, he did for Benjamin.”

Janie looked to Benjamin, whose face was stormy.

“Marcus Burrows was a true master of his craft,” the count went on. “And more than that, he was a guardian of peace. I
promise you that we will honor his memory and continue his cause. In that way, he will live on.” He lifted his glass. “
Fenékig,
as they say in my country. It means, ‘To the bottom of the glass.’”

“Fenékig!”
Charlotte said cheerfully.

“Pro,”
the sultan’s envoy said.

“Cheers,” Angelica’s father said.

“Gan bei,”
Jin Lo said quietly, lifting her lemonade.

Janie watched as everyone drained their glasses. She drank to Marcus Burrows, too, and her lemonade was icy cold.

* * *

Another dinner was held, after an endless series of flights, at Janie’s parents’ house in Ann Arbor. She had brought Benjamin home, and Count Vili had come along in the role of rescuer, to smooth the reentry. Janie had made him promise he wouldn’t give her parents any champagne.

“It would make everything so much easier,” Vili said.

“I don’t care,” she said. She could face her parents’ anger, but it was too horrible to make them forget.

Her parents weren’t just angry, they were
furious,
and exhausted from driving around Florida on a wild-goose chase. The road trip had used up all their considerable goodwill. And they had no memory of Janie’s trip to Nova Zembla, so they were unprepared for a trip to Malaya. But as dinner went on, they listened and asked questions, and Janie told them a version of what had happened: how Magnusson was after Marcus Burrows’s scientific secrets, and she was taken as bait, and Benjamin and Vili had rescued her.

“What kind of scientific secrets?” her father asked.

“I don’t really understand it all,” she said.

“And why don’t we remember Benjamin?”

“You met him in England, Dad. You just forgot. You called him Figment as a joke.”

Benjamin nodded confirmation.

Her parents looked sheepish. “I guess we were a little preoccupied at the time,” her father said.

Janie wondered if Vili had slipped them something that made them more pliable and accepting, but she decided not to ask.

Benjamin, who had barely spoken on the flight home, or during the meal, excused himself when they got to the part about his father’s death. Janie guessed he was going to sit alone and read the Pharmacopoeia, which he did a lot lately. He was an orphan now, and didn’t have anywhere else to go. She told her parents about Mr. Burrows asking, before he died, if Benjamin could live with her, and they looked at each other for a long moment, and then her father sighed.

“Okay,” he said. “But it’s
our rules
from here on out. No lies, and no major omissions, like not telling us that you’ve been kicked out of school. And no running off to other countries. I think that should go without saying.”

Janie agreed to all their terms.

Count Vili left to help Jin Lo go after Danby, and Janie and Benjamin enrolled at the local high school. She set about being a normal American teen, but it wasn’t easy. She chafed at her parents’ rules, at the way they chaperoned her all the
time and treated her like a child. They didn’t seem to understand that she had been on her own at Grayson, and they couldn’t keep an eye on her every minute.

Benjamin still wasn’t speaking, or wasn’t speaking much. Sometimes he would launch into anguished monologues about how he had failed his father. If Janie told him that wasn’t true, he would argue with her, with some of his old fire. Then he would sink beneath the waves of his despair and go quiet again.

In February, they went to Grayson to collect her things, and to fulfill a promise. The New Hampshire cold was biting, and Janie wrapped her scarf around her neck and took her parents and Benjamin to the auditorium at East High.

The theater, empty and dark on the morning she had tried to contact Benjamin, was bright and full of the happy clamor of people greeting each other and finding their seats. Janie saw Opal and Mrs. Magnusson in the aisle, and her heart thudded. She still wasn’t sure what she was going to say to her roommate. Opal had stopped wearing the heavy glasses and looked beautiful, but Benjamin didn’t stop and stare, he just said “How do you do,” and went to take his seat. Mrs. Magnusson wore an orange silk dress and held her fur coat in her arms, like an enormous pet. She stood protectively close to Opal.

“I’m so sorry about your dad,” Janie said.

Opal’s naked eyes looked vulnerable and sad. “Were you there when it happened?” she asked.

“There’s an official inquiry,” Mrs. Magnusson said briskly. “Everything will be taken care of, and answered by the envoy.”