Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

At the time, I had nearly died of boredom, although it has since become one of my favorite books, containing, as it does in its final chapters, what must be the finest and most exciting description of death by arsenic in all of literature. I had particularly relished the way in which the poisoned Emma had "raised herself like a galvanized corpse." But now I realized that I had been so gripped by the excitement of poor Madame Bovary's suicide that I had failed to take in the fine points of her several affairs. All I could remember was that, alone with Rodolphe by the lily pond, surrounded by duckweeds and jumping frogs, Emma Bovary — in tears, hiding her face, and with a long shudder — "gave herself up to him."

Whatever that meant. I would ask Dogger.

"Dogger," I said, when I found him at last, hacking away at the weeds in the kitchen garden with a long-handled hoe, "have you read Madame Bovary?"

Dogger paused in his work and extracted a handkerchief from the bib pocket of his overalls. He gave his face a thorough mopping before he replied.

"A French novel, is it not?" he asked.

"Flaubert."

"Ah," Dogger said, and shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket. "The one in which a most unhappy person poisons herself with arsenic."

"Arsenic from a blue jar!" I blurted, hopping from one foot to the other with excitement.

"Yes," Dogger said, "from a blue jar. Blue, not because of any danger of decomposition or oxidation of the contents, but rather — "

"To keep it from being confused with a bottle containing a harmless substance."

"Exactly," Dogger said.

"Emma Bovary swallows the stuff due to several unhappy affairs," I said.

Dogger studiously scraped a clod of mud from the sole of his shoe with the hoe.

"She had an affair with a man named Rodolphe," I added, "and then with another, named Leon. Not at the same time, of course."

"Of course," Dogger said, and then fell silent.

"What does an affair entail, precisely?" I asked, hoping my choice of words would imply, even slightly, that I already knew the answer.

I thought for a moment that I could outwait him, even though my heart knew that trying to outwait Dogger was a mug's game.

"What did Flaubert mean," I asked at last, "when he said that Madame Bovary gave herself up to Rodolphe?"

"He meant," Dogger said, "that they became the greatest of friends. The very greatest of friends."

"Ah!" I said. "Just as I thought."

"Dogger! Come up here at once before I do myself some grave internal injury!" Aunt Felicity's voice came trumpeting down from an upstairs window.

"Coming, Miss Felicity," he called out, and then in an aside to me he said, "Miss Felicity requires assistance with her luggage."

"Her luggage?" I asked. "She's leaving?"

Dogger nodded noncommittally.

"Cheese!" I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me.

Aunt Felicity was already halfway down the west staircase in a canvas outfit that suggested Africa, rather than the wilds of Hampstead. Clarence Mundy's taxicab was at the door, and Dogger was helping Bert hoist Aunt Felicity's cargo aboard.

"We're going to miss you, Aunt Fee," Feely said.

Aunt Fee? It seemed that in my absence Feely had been ingratiating herself with Father's sister, most likely, I thought, in the hope of inheriting the de Luce family jewels: that ghastly collection of gewgaws that my grandfather de Luce (on Father's and Aunt Felicity's side) had foisted upon my grandmother who, as she received each piece, had dropped it, with thumb and forefinger, into a pasteboard box as casually as if it were a grass snake, and never looked at it again.

Feely had wasted the entire afternoon slavering over this rubbish the last time we had gone up to Hampstead for one of Aunt Felicity's compulsory teas.

"So romantic!" she had breathed, when Aunt Felicity had, rather grudgingly, I thought, lent her a pink glass pendant that would not have been out of place on a cow's udder. "I shall wear it to Rosalind Norton's coming-out, and all eyes will be on yours truly. Poor Rosalind, she's such an awful sweat!"

"I'm sorry it's turned out this way, Haviland," Aunt Felicity bellowed from the landing, "but you've well and truly botched it. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put your accounts together again. I should, of course, be more than happy to rescue you from your excesses if I weren't so heavily invested in consols. There's nothing for it now but to sell those ridiculous postage stamps."

Father had drifted so silently into the hall that I had not noticed him until now. He stood, one hand holding Daffy's arm, his eyes downcast, as if he were intently studying the black and white tiles beneath his feet.

"Thank you for coming, Felicity," he said quietly, without looking up. "It was most kind of you."

I wanted to swat the woman's face!

I had actually taken half a step forward before a firm hand fell on my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks. It was Dogger.

"Will there be anything else, Miss Felicity?" he asked.

"No, thank you, Dogger," she said, rummaging in her reticule with two fingers. From its depths, like a stork pulling a fish from a pond, she extracted what looked like a shilling and handed it to him with a sigh.

"Thank you, miss," he said, pocketing the insult with ease — and without looking at it — as if it were something he did every day.

And with that Aunt Felicity was gone. A moment later, Father had stepped into the shadows of the great hall, followed closely by Daffy and Feely, and Dogger had vanished without a word into his little corridor behind the stairs.

It was like one of those electric moments just before the final curtain in a West End play: that moment when all the supporting characters have faded into the wings, leaving the heroine alone at center stage to deliver her magnificent closing line to a silent house that awaited her words with bated breath.

"Bloody hell!" I said, and stepped outdoors for a breath of fresh air.

The problem with we de Luces, I decided, is that we are infested with history in much the same way that other people are infested with lice. There have been de Luces at Buckshaw since King Harold stopped an arrow with his eye at the Battle of Hastings, and most of them have been unhappy in one complicated way or another. We seem to be born with wisps of both glory and gloom in our veins, and we can never be certain at any given moment which of the two is driving us.

On the one hand, I knew, I would never be like Aunt Felicity, but on the other, would I ever become like Harriet? Eight years after her death, Harriet was still as much a part of me as my toenails, although that's probably not the best way of putting it.

I read the books that she had owned, rode her bicycle, sat in her Rolls-Royce; Father had once, in a distracted moment, called me by her name. Even Aunt Felicity had put aside her gorgon manner long enough to tell me how much like Harriet I was.

But had she meant it as a compliment? Or a warning?

Most of the time I felt like an imposter; a changeling; a sackcloth-and-ashes stand-in for that golden girl who had been snatched up by Fate and dashed down a mountainside in an impossibly distant land. Everyone, it seemed, would be so much happier if Harriet were brought back to life and I were done away with.

These thoughts, and others, tumbled in my mind like autumn leaves in a millstream as I walked along the dusty lane towards the village. Without even noticing them, I had passed the carved griffins of the Mulford Gates, which marked the entrance to Buckshaw, and I was now within sight of Bishop's Lacey.

As I slouched along, a bit dejectedly (all right, I admit it — I was furious at Aunt Felicity for making such a chump of Dogger!) I shoved my hand into my pocket and my fingers came in contact with a round, metallic object: something that hadn't been there before — a coin.

"Hullo!" I said. "What's this?"

I pulled it out and looked at it. As soon as I saw the thing, I knew what it was and how it had made its way into my pocket. I turned it over and had a jolly good squint at the reverse.

Yes, there could be no doubt about it — no doubt whatsoever.

* TWENTY-FOUR *

AS I LOOKED AT it from across the high street, the St. Nicholas Tea Room was like a picture postcard of Ye Olde England. Its upstairs rooms, with their tiny-paned bow windows, had been the residence of the present Mr. Sowbell's grandparents, in the days when they had lived above their coffin and furniture manufactory.

The Sowbell tables, sideboards, and commodes, once known far and wide for the ferocity of their black shine and the gleam of their ornate silver knobs and drawer pulls, had now fallen out of favor, and were often to be found at estate sales, standing sullen and alone in the driveway until being knocked down at the end of the day for little more than a pound or two.

"By unscrupulous sharpers who use the wood to turn Woolworth's dressers into antiques," Daffy had once told me.

The undertaker's shop, I noticed, now had a cardboard clock stuck in its window, suspended from an inverted V of black cord. The minute hand pointed to twelve, and the hour hand was missing. Mr. Sowbell had obviously gone to the Thirteen Drakes for his afternoon pint.

I crossed the street and, opening the tearoom door, stepped inside. To my right was a steep wooden staircase, with a painted blue hand pointing upwards: Tea Room Upstairs. Beside the stairs, a dim, narrow passageway vanished into the gloom at the rear of the building. On the wall, another helpful painted hand — this one in red, and marked Gentlemen's and Ladies' Water Closets — pointed the way discreetly.

I knew that the tea shop and the undertaker's shared the W.C. Feely had insisted on dragging us here for tea one autumn afternoon, and I had been gobsmacked at the sight of three women in black dresses and black veils, chattering happily away at the door to the toilet like a congress of toothy crows, before resuming their grim demeanors and slipping back into Mr. Sowbell's premises. The door through which they had vanished opened directly into the undertaker's rooms.

I was right! A discreet Sowbell & Sons, lettered in gold upon the dark varnish, must have been meant to remind mourners not to go blundering off into the tea shop's corridor after they had "soaped their 'ands," as Mrs. Mullet put it.

The black paneled door swung open on silent hinges.

I found myself in a dark Victorian parlor, with flocked wallpaper of black and yellow-cream. On three sides of the room were spindly wooden chairs and a small round table with a spray of artificial baby's breath. The place smelled of dust, with an underlying chemical base.

The wall at the far end of the room was bare, save for a dark framed print of Millet's Angelus, in which a man and a woman, obviously Flemish peasants, stand alone in a field at sunset. The woman's huge hands, which are those of a laborer, are clasped at her breast in prayer. The man has removed his hat, which he holds clutched uncomfortably in front of him. He has set aside his fork and stuck it half into the loose earth. As crows congregate above them like vultures, the couple stands with downcast eyes. Between them, half-empty on the ground, lies a wicker basket.

Max Wight had once told me that when the original of Millet's painting was exhibited in America, the sale of prints had been sluggish at best until someone thought of changing the name from Angelus to Burying the Baby.

It was beneath this print, I guessed, that the coffins were customarily parked. Since the spot was empty, it was obvious that Rupert's body, if it were still on the premises, must be in another room.

To my right was an L-shaped partition. There had to be another door behind it.

I peered round behind the half-wall and found myself looking into a room that was nearly the twin of the first. The only difference that I could see was that the flocked wallpaper was black and pink-cream, and the print on the far wall was Holman Hunt's Light of the World, in which Jesus stands at the door like Diogenes seeking an honest man, with a tin lantern in His hand.

Beneath its dark frame, on trestles, was a coffin.

I crept towards it on tiptoe, my ears tuned for the slightest sound.

I ran my fingers along the highly polished woodwork, the way one might caress a piano lid before lifting it to reveal the keys. I put my thumbs under the join and felt it lift slightly.

I was in luck! The lid was not screwed down. I lifted it and looked inside.

There, like a doll in a box, lay Rupert. In life, his personality had made him seem so much larger, I had forgotten how small he really was.

Was I frightened out of my wits? I'm afraid not. Since the day I had found a body in the kitchen garden at Buckshaw, I had developed a fascination with death, with a particular emphasis on the chemistry of putrefaction.

In fact, I had already begun making notes for a definitive work which I would call De Luce on Decomposition, in which I would outline, step by step, the process of human cadaveric decay.

How exciting it was to reflect upon the fact that, within minutes of death, the organs of the body, lacking oxygen, begin to digest themselves! Ammonia levels start to rise and, with the assistance of bacterial action, methane (better known as marsh gas) is produced, along with hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and mercaptan, a captivating sulfur-alcohol in whose structure sulfur takes the place of oxygen — which accounts for its putrid smell.

How curious it was, I thought, that we humans had taken millions of years to crawl up out of the swamps and yet, within minutes of death, we were already tobogganing back down the slope.

My keen sense of smell told me that Mr. Sowbell had used a formalin-based embalming fluid on Rupert (a two-percent solution of formaldehyde seemed most likely, with a slight bouquet of something else: chloroform, by the smell of it) and by the slight green tint at the end of Rupert's nose, I could tell that the undertaker had skimped on the ingredients. One could only hope that the lying-in-state at the BBC would be a closed-coffin affair.

Better hurry up, though, I thought. Mr. Sowbell might walk in at any moment.

Rupert's pale hands were folded across his abdomen, with the right hand uppermost. I took hold of his fingers (it was like lifting linked sausages from the icebox) and pulled upwards.

To my amazement, his left hand came with it, and I saw at once that they had been cunningly sewn together. By twisting the cold hands and bending down for a better look beneath them, I saw what I was looking for: a blackened channel that ran from the base of his left thumb to the tips of his first and second fingers.

In spite of Mr. Sowbell's embalming efforts, Rupert was still giving off rather a scorched smell. And there could be no doubt about it: The burn on the palm of his left hand was the precise width of the lever that operated Galligantus.