The After-Room Read online

  Praise for Maile Meloy’s award-winning

  Apothecary series

  for the New York Times bestselling The Apothecary

  E. B. White Read Aloud Book Award Winner

  A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year 2011

  A Wall Street Journal Best of the Year 2011

  Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Reading List 2012

  California Book Awards Gold Medal 2012

  “Inventive, smart and fun, an absolute delight.”

  —Rebecca Stead,

  Newbery Award–winning author of When You Reach Me

  “[Meloy] brings to her first book for young readers the same emotional resonance that has won acclaim for her adult fiction, grounding her story in the intricacies of family love, friendship and loyalty blended here with the complicated fluctuations of adolescence.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Maile Meloy’s sly commingling of the real and the imaginary make this a witty and entertaining Cold War romp—with a touch of age-appropriate romance.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “A gem of historical fiction for the middle-school set, Meloy’s children’s debut is a pitch-perfect melding of postwar intrigue and ancient medicinal arts.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Think of a cross between Harry Potter and Nancy Drew. . . . The magic of this book is dazzling.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “As the plot darkens, even reluctant readers will find it hard to pull away from the intrigue. A level of storytelling this high, with Schoenherr’s fabulous illustrations as chapter openers, make this book a gem indeed.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “[A] thoroughly enjoyable adventure, filled with magic, humor, memorable characters, and just a bit of sweet romance."

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  for The Apprentices

  An NPR Best Book of the Year 2013

  Kids’ Indie Next Pick Summer 2013

  Los Angeles Times Summer Reading Guide 2013

  Junior Library Guild’s Summer Reading List 2013

  “The Apprentices is thrilling! The characters may know magic, but it’s their courage and resourcefulness that save the day. This book is even better than The Apothecary, and I didn’t think that was possible.”

  —Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of State of Wonder

  “[This] well-constructed adventure accurately conveys the geopolitical instability of the era and is leavened with just enough magic, chaste romance and humor to appeal to middle-grade readers through teens.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[A] magical romp.”

  —Family Circle

  “Meloy boldly weaves the disparate strings of the story together in inventive—sometimes breathtaking—ways. More nuanced than the first book, this brings together a large and intriguing cast and explores their knotty relationships . . . the characters become more memorable as the pages fly by.”

  —Booklist

  “The sequel to Meloy’s The Apothecary takes Janie Scott to boarding school in New Hampshire and Benjamin to a war in a jungle on the other side of the world, where he experiments with a new formula that will let him communicate with Janie. Magical adventures (and more illustrations from Schoenherr) ensue.”

  —The Atlantic Wire

  “This sequel . . . features the same fun, fast-moving formula as the first book, with charming characters and exciting intrigue mixed with a handful of magic.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia

  New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2015 by Maile Meloy.

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Ian Schoenherr.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meloy, Maile.

  The After-room / Maile Meloy ; with illustrations by Ian Schoenherr.

  pages cm Sequel to: The apprentices, The apothecary.

  Summary: Teenagers Janie and Benjamin continue to explore the secrets of the Pharmacopoeia while Benjamin risks everything to find a way to connect with his father. [1. Alchemy—Fiction. 2. Future life—Fiction. 3. Adventure and adventurers— Fiction.] I. Schoenherr, Ian, illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.M516354Af 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014046252

  ISBN 978-0-698-19819-7

  The art was done in ink and acrylic paint on Strathmore Aquarius II paper.

  Version_1

  For my grandparents,

  Lou and Ed Montagne,

  with love

  Contents

  Praise for Maile Meloy’s award-winning series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  1. Skylark

  2. Dreams

  3. The Coastwatcher

  4. The Debriefing

  5. The List

  6. Traffic

  7. The Magician

  8. Keep Mum

  9. The Deal

  10. Malingering

  11. Fishing

  12. The Filter

  13. The Cricket and the Flame

  14. Followed

  15. The Commander

  16. Syncope

  17. Conscience

  18. A Vanishing Act

  19. Deus Ex Machina

  20. At Sea

  Part Two

  21. Cinecittà

  22. Roman Holiday

  23. Termini Station

  24. A Disappearance

  25. Visitors

  26. The Herbalist

  27. Honor

  28. In the After-Room

  29. Oranges

  30. Ashore

  31. An Aubade

  32. The Capo

  33. The Go-Between

  34. A Squall

  35. A Telegram

  36. The Afterworld

  37. The Grand Canal

  38. The Breach

  39. Death in Rome

  40. The Visitation

  41. In Prigione

  42. The Pharmacopoeia

  43. Discovery

  44. The Tiger’s Back

  Part Three

  45. A Portal

  46. Another Telegram

  47. Captives

  48. Catastrophe

  49. A Decision

  50. The Vessel

  51. Teatime

  52. Grief

  53. Negotiations

  54. Orpheus

  55. Coercion

  56. Primo

  57. Mutiny

  58. The Quintessence

  59. Tung Shing

  60. Book Thieves

  61. Intercepted

 
; 62. Shooting Script

  63. The Brig

  64. A Screening

  65. A Letter

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Skylark

  Green and gold streamers hung from the ceiling of the gym, and the band glowed under the stage lights, against the folded bleachers. The singer had a shiny black sweep of hair and wore a narrow blue satin tie. It was late in the evening, and the punch bowl had been emptied many times.

  The school dance had posed a problem for Janie Scott and Benjamin Burrows, because he was enrolled as her cousin, although he wasn’t her cousin. They were not supposed to be a romantic couple. At Ann Arbor High, going to the spring formal together meant you were practically engaged. Janie wished they had spent more time thinking their cover story through.

  Benjamin had wanted to just skip the dance.

  “We have to try to have a normal life here,” Janie had said.

  The look on Benjamin’s face said that he would never have a normal life. Ever. He lived underwater with grief.

  Finally, Janie asked the Doyle twins to go with them. Nat Doyle was an excellent dancer, and had spun Janie all over the floor. His sister, Valentina, wore a pale blue strapless dress, her arms brown and strong from tennis, but Benjamin didn’t seem to have noticed.

  As a schoolboy in London, Benjamin had taken dancing lessons, and he could waltz and foxtrot in an automatic way, but he steered Valentina with only a small corner of his mind, as he did everything now. The best part of him wasn’t there. He excused himself and wandered off toward the bathrooms.

  The singer’s face dripped with sweat under the lights, beneath his shiny helmet of hair. Janie and the twins went outside to cool off, and stood near the open door in a fresh breeze. Valentina had a complicated look on her face, and Janie knew a question was coming.

  “Where are Benjamin’s parents?” Valentina asked.

  “His mother died when he was little,” Janie said. “His father died last year.”

  “Oh,” Valentina said. “How?”

  The question had been bound to come up sometime, but Janie still struggled for an answer. The suffocating smell of smoke came back to her, and the dark of a deep mine. “In an accident,” she said. “Smoke inhalation.”

  “Was he your father’s brother?” Valentina asked.

  This was another place the cover story broke down. Benjamin had an English accent, and Janie’s father was clearly American. They should have thought this all through, but it had been a difficult time. “Um—” Janie said.

  “He’s not really your cousin, is he?” Valentina asked.

  Janie shook her head.

  “I didn’t think so,” Valentina said, smiling. “You don’t seem like cousins. Your family took him in?”

  Janie nodded.

  “It’s okay,” Valentina said. “You don’t have to explain.”

  Janie was grateful that she didn’t push. The twins were private, too, and protective of each other. Their parents worked at the University of Michigan, like Janie’s parents did, and their mother was black and their father was white. Most of the kids at Ann Arbor High in 1955 were just white. The twins played on the tennis team—they were unbeatable at mixed doubles—and they were careful with their friendship. They had been nicer to Janie and Benjamin, the lonely midyear arrivals, than anyone else at the school had, but they always had a kind of reserve.

  Benjamin had just joined them when the backup singer took the microphone, and the band played the slow opening bars of “Skylark.” It was Janie’s favorite song, and she took Benjamin’s hand. “We have to dance this one,” she said. “Just one.”

  They walked out onto the dance floor, which had cleared for the slow song, and she stepped into Benjamin’s well-trained dancing position. One of his hands touched her back and the other lifted her hand, but in no sense was she in his arms. At least someone was keeping the cover story intact: He danced like he was her cousin.

  The girl sang, “Skylark, have you anything to say to me? Won’t you tell me where my love can be?”

  Benjamin looked over Janie’s shoulder. Even his incorrigible hair seemed subdued. The stubborn waves had given up, and lay neatly down. As they moved across the floor, the girl sang, “And in your lonely flight, haven’t you heard the music in the night?”

  “This is your song,” Janie said.

  “It’s not my song,” he said. “It’s someone talking to a skylark.”

  At least Benjamin still had his tendency to argue the smallest points. She would take that as a good sign. “All right, then it’s my song,” she said.

  It was her song because Benjamin’s father had disappeared in London, when she first met them, and had left behind a book full of strange instructions in Latin and Greek. An old gardener had helped Janie and Benjamin understand it, and made them an elixir that transformed people into birds. It all seemed unlikely and fantastical, now that they were in Michigan, surrounded by sensible Midwesterners with their feet planted firmly on the ground, but the avian elixir had really worked. Of all the things that had happened since Janie met Benjamin and his father, that moment of taking flight had been the most magical. To be suddenly free of the earth, to feel air currents in your outstretched wings, there was nothing else like it.

  Janie had become an American robin: curious, a little proud, inconspicuous at home but noticeably out of place in England. Their friend Pip, a London pickpocket with acrobatic grace, had become a swallow with a long tail and a swooping dive. And Benjamin, with his shock of sandy hair, had become an English skylark, bright and quick and crowned with feathers.

  Now he didn’t seem anything like a skylark. He didn’t take pleasure in anything. He was going through the motions of dancing, as he went through the motions at school. He hated doing algebra and identifying the metaphors in Romeo and Juliet, and did just enough work to keep the teachers off his back. He spent his spare time reading the Pharmacopoeia, his father’s book, in his bedroom.

  When Janie came downstairs before the dance in a dress the color of a lemon ice, with her hair up in time-consuming curls, Benjamin had barely looked up. She thought maybe living in the same house was a very bad idea, and they were going to end up like brother and sister. But she couldn’t imagine being apart from him. There was no good answer.

  The song ended and the band started a jangling fast number, to coax back the dancers who had wandered into the shadows. Janie dropped her arms and stood inside the cold fog of misery that Benjamin carried around with him.

  “I know you miss your dad,” she said. “I do, too.”

  He shook his head, staring at the parquet floor with its painted basketball markings. “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “I do,” she said. “I think about it all the time. I didn’t want him to die.”

  “But he—” Benjamin stopped himself. There was a look of frustration and also of defiant challenge in his eyes. It was the look he’d had on his face the first time she ever saw him, when he refused to get under the table during a school bomb drill in London. It was a look that said I am set apart. Around them, people danced, swinging and twirling, skirts flying.

  “He what?” she asked.

  “He’s still here,” he said in a harsh whisper, the words catching in his throat.

  Janie frowned. “You mean in dreams?”

  Benjamin shook his head with impatience. A girl somersaulted over a boy’s arm, behind him. “It’s not a dream,” he said. “I know it. My father’s still here.”

  Chapter 2

  Dreams

  Janie took Benjamin’s elbow and steered him off the dance floor, dodging flying legs and arms. The Doyle twins stood talking in the doorway, and Valentina gave Janie a questioning look.

  “Just going to get some air,” Janie said.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow?” Valentina as
ked.

  “Of course!” Janie said. The Doyles were having an afternoon party. “Can’t wait!”

  The air outside was cool and fresh, and Janie sat beside Benjamin on the lamplit steps of the school. Her skirt made a bell around her knees. “Tell me everything,” she said.

  Benjamin took a deep breath and said, “It started after your parents sent me to that psychologist.”

  Benjamin had been unhappy in Ann Arbor, and Janie’s parents had suggested that he talk to someone. His mother had died when he was three, so he had no one now that his father was gone. And living with Janie’s parents seemed to remind him of what he’d lost. They tried to be kind and understanding, although her father still called Benjamin “Figment” because of a forgotten, annoying joke. Benjamin had been reluctant to talk to the doctor.

  “What did he say?” Janie asked.

  “That it was normal for a kid to want to surpass his father, and replace him,” Benjamin said. “But it’s bad if your father actually dies. Destabilizing, he said. Because then it feels like your fantasy has come true, and you’ve defeated your own father, so you have all these feelings of guilt and responsibility.”

  “That makes sense,” Janie said.

  “No, it doesn’t!” Benjamin said. “Because the doctor didn’t know how actually guilty I am. He just knew that my father died in an accident. And what was I supposed to tell him? That my father was an international outlaw with quasi-magical powers, who was interfering with nuclear tests, and I poisoned him trying to make a smoke screen, when we were held captive underground?”

  Janie winced. “I guess not.”

  “So I skipped the second appointment,” Benjamin said. “It was pointless, talking to that guy. Lying to him. And then the dreams started. I would be thinking about my father, about how I’d failed him, and how much I missed him, and then I would be in a dark place where I couldn’t see anything. But I felt that he was there. When I came out of the dream each time, I felt dizzy. That should have tipped me off.”

  “To what?” she asked.

  “You remember the powder I sent you. How it worked.”

  Benjamin had sent Janie a small glassine envelope of coarse powder, when she was at school in New Hampshire. He’d told her, in a note, to dissolve a few grains in water, drink it down, and close her eyes. It was something he’d been working on while he was on the run with his father, so that they could communicate.