Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

"It was something that only a mother would do," I said. "She couldn't resist. Grace Ingleby wanted her son to be presentable when he was found, hanging by the neck, dead in Gibbet Wood."

"Good Lord!" Inspector Hewitt said.

* TWENTY-NINE *

"GOOD LORD," FATHER EXCLAIMED. "There's Broadcasting House. They've set up cameras in Portland Place."

He got up from his chair for the umpteenth time and hurried across the drawing room to twiddle with the knobs on the television receiving set.

"Please be quiet, Haviland," Aunt Felicity said. "If they were interested in your commentary, the BBC would have sent for you."

Aunt Felicity, who had barely got home to Hampstead, had hurried back again to Buckshaw as soon as the idea came into her head. She had hired the television for the occasion ("at ruinous expense," she hastened to point out), and because of it, was now enjoying vastly increased dictatorial powers.

Early in the morning of the previous day, the workmen had begun erecting a receiving aerial on the ramparts of Buckshaw.

"It needs to be high enough to pick up the signal from the new transmitting tower at Sutton Coldfield," Aunt Felicity had said, in a voice that suggested television was her own invention. "I had wanted all of us to go up to London to attend the Porson obsequies," she went on, "but when Lady Burwash let slip that the Sitwells were having in the telly ...

"No, no, don't protest, Haviland. It's educational. I'm only doing it for the good of the girls."

Several muscular workers, dressed in overalls, had lugged the set from the back of a pantechnicon and into the drawing room. There it now crouched, its single gray eye staring, like a flickering Cyclops, at those of us gathered in its baleful glow.

Daffy and Feely were huddled together on a chesterfield, feigning boredom. Father had invited the vicar and told them to watch their language.

Mrs. Mullet was enthroned in a comfortable wing-backed chair, and Dogger, who preferred not to sit in Father's presence, stood silently behind her.

"I wonder if they have televisions in Portland Place," Feely said, idly, "or whether they might, rather, be looking out their windows?"

I recognized this at once as an attempt to twit Father, whose contempt for television was legendary.

"Television is a bauble," he would reply, whenever we pleaded with him to have a receiver installed. "If God meant for pictures to be sent through the air, He'd have never given us the cinema.

"Or the National Gallery," he'd add sourly.

But in this case, he had been overruled.

"But it's History, Haviland," Aunt Felicity had said in a loud voice. "Would you have denied your daughters the opportunity to watch Henry the Fifth address his men on Crispin's Day?"

She had taken up a stance in the middle of the drawing room.

This story shall the good man teach his son;And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,From this day to the ending of the world,But we in it shall be remembered;We few, we happy few, we band of brothers —

— Nonsense! — Father said, but Aunt Felicity, like Henry the Fifth, pushed on, undaunted:

For he today that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,This day shall gentle his condition:And gentlemen in England now abedShall think themselves accursed they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon St. Crispin's day.

— That's all very well and good, but they didn't have television in 1415, — Father had said rather sullenly, missing her point entirely.

But then, yesterday, something remarkable had happened. One of the mechanics, who had been in the drawing room with his eye intently upon the receiver, had begun calling instructions out the window to a companion on the lawn, who relayed them, in a drill-sergeant voice, to the man on the roof.

— Hold it, Harry! Back ... back ... back. No ... you've lost it. Back t'other way ...

At that very moment, Father had walked into the room, planning, I think, to heap scorn upon the entire operation, when his eye was taken by something on the snow-blown screen.

— Stop! — he shouted, and his word was passed along in ever-diminishing echoes by the mechanics, out the window and up onto the ramparts.

— By George, — he said. — It's the 1856 British Guiana. Back a little! — he shouted, waving his hands to illustrate.

Again his instructions were carried aloft in a verbal bucket brigade, and the picture cleared a little.

— Just as I thought, — he said. — I'd know it anywhere. It's coming to auction. Turn up the sound.

As Fate would have it, the BBC was at that moment transmitting a program on the topic of stamp collecting, and a moment later, Father had pulled up a chair, fastened his wire-framed spectacles on the end of his nose, and refused to be budged.

— Quiet, Felicity! — he barked, when she tried to intervene. — This is of the utmost importance.

And so it was that Father had allowed the One-Eyed Beast to sit in his drawing room.

At least for the time being.

And now, as the hour drew near for Rupert's inhumation (a word I had heard Daffy trot out for Mrs. Mullet's benefit), Dogger drifted off to the foyer to admit the vicar who, even though he was not conducting the funeral, nevertheless felt the professional necessity of wringing the hands of each of us as he came into the room.

— Dear, dear, — he said. — And to think that the poor chap expired right here in Bishop's Lacey.

No sooner had he taken a seat on the sofa than the doorbell sounded again, and a few moments later Dogger returned with an unexpected guest.

— Mr. Dieter Schrantz, — he announced at the door, slipping effortlessly back into his role as butler.

Feely sprang to her feet, and came floating across the drawing room to greet Dieter, hands outstretched, palms down, as if she were walking in her sleep.

She was radiant, the vixen!

I was praying she'd trip on the rug.

— Draw the drapes, please, Dogger, — Father said, and as Dogger complied, the light vanished from the room and left all of us sitting together in the gloom.

Into view on the little tube, as I have said, floated the wet pavement of Portland Place in front of Broadcasting House, as the hushed and solemn voice of the BBC announcer took up the tale (it may have been Richard Dimbleby, or perhaps it was just someone who sounded like him):

— And now, from every corner of the realm, come the children. They are brought here today by their mothers and fathers, their nurses, their governesses, and some few, I daresay, by their grandparents.

They have been standing here in Portland Place for hours in the rain, young and old, each patiently waiting his or her turn to bid a last, sad farewell to the man who captivated their hearts; to pay their respects to Rupert Porson, the genius who kidnapped them every afternoon at four from their everyday lives and, like the Pied Piper, led them away into his Magic Kingdom....

Genius? Well, that was stretching things a bit. Rupert was a brilliant showman; there was no doubt about it. But genius? The man was a scoundrel, a womanizer, a bully, a brute.

But did that disqualify him from being a genius? I don't suppose it did. Brains and morals have nothing to do with one another. Take myself, for instance: I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.

I am quite firm in my belief that poisons were put upon the earth in the first place to be discovered — and put to good use — by those of us with the wits, but not necessarily the physical strength, to ...

The poison! I had completely forgotten about those doctored chocolates!

Had Feely actually eaten them? It seemed unlikely; if she had, she wouldn't be sitting here with such maddening calm as Dieter, like a horse breeder admiring his filly over a paddock fence, gazed appreciatively upon her better points.

The hydrogen sulfide I had injected into the sweets was not sufficient to kill, at any rate. Once inside the body — assuming that anyone was stupid enough to swallow it — it would oxidize to hydrogen sulfate, in which form it would be eliminated eventually in the urine.

Was it such a crime, this thing that I had done? Dimethyl sulfide was dumped by the boatload into artificially flavored sweets, and no one, to the best of my knowledge, had yet been hanged for it.

As my eyes became accustomed to the dimness of the drawing room, I was able to have a quick look round at the faces illuminated by the television's glow. Mrs. Mullet? No, Feely wouldn't have wasted her chocolates on Mrs. Mullet. Father and Dogger were out of the question, too, as was the vicar.

There was a remote possibility that Aunt Felicity had scarfed them, but if she had, her outraged trumpetings would have made even Sabu's elephant bolt for the hills.

Therefore, the chocolates must still be in Feely's room. If only I could slip away, unnoticed in the semidarkness ...

— Flavia, — Father said, with a wave towards the little screen, — I know how difficult this must be for you, in particular. You may be excused, if you wish.

Salvation! Off to the poisoned chocolates!

But wait: If I slunk away now, what would Dieter think of me? As for the others, I didn't give a rap ... well, perhaps a little for the vicar. But to be thought of as weak in the eyes of a man who had actually been shot down in flames ...

— Thank you, Father, — I said. — I think I shall manage to struggle through.

I knew it was the kind of stiff-upper-lippish response he wanted, and I was right. Having made the required parental noises, he sank back into his chair with something like a sigh.

A froggish sound went up from the depths of the chair in the corner, and I knew instantly that it was Daffy.

The television cameras were cutting away to the interior of Broadcasting House, to a large studio piled to the rafters with flowers, and there among them lay Rupert — or at least his coffin: an ornate piece of furniture that mirrored the television lights and the nearby mourners in its highly polished surface, its silver-plated handles positively glistening in the gloom.

Now another camera was showing a little girl as she approached the bier ... hesitantly ... tentatively — pushed forward in a series of thrusts by a self-conscious mother. The child wiped away a tear before placing a wreath of wildflowers at the rail in front of the coffin.

The scene was cut to a close-up of a full-grown woman, weeping.

Next, a man in funereal black stepped forward. He plucked three roses from the wall of floral tributes, and presented each one delicately: one to the child, one to the mother, and the third to the weeping woman. Having done so, he pulled forth a large white handkerchief, turned away from the camera, and blew his nose with grief-stricken energy.

It was Mutt Wilmott! He was stage-managing the whole thing! Just as he'd said he would! Mutt Wilmott: to the eyes of the world, a broken man.

Even at a time of national mourning, Mutt was on the spot to provide the memorable moments — the unforgettable images required by death. I almost jumped to my feet and applauded. I knew that the people who witnessed these simple devotions, either in person or on the television screen, would go on talking about them until they sat toothless on a wooden bench, in a cottage dooryard, waiting for their hearts to stop beating.

"Mutt Wilmott", the Dimbleby voice went on, "producer of Rupert Porson's The Magic Kingdom. We are told that he was devastated when news came of the puppeteer's death; that he was rushed to hospital for treatment of cardiac palpitations, but in spite of it — and against his doctor's orders — he insisted on being here today to pay tribute to his late colleague ... although we are told on good authority that an ambulance is standing by at the ready, should it be needed...".

"The view from a camera we had not seen before was now cut in. Shooting from a high angle, as if from a rotunda, the view came down and down into the studio, as it might be seen through the eyes of a descending angel, getting closer and closer to the coffin until, at its very foot, it came to rest upon a remarkable figure that could have been none other than Snoddy the Squirrel".

"Mounted on a wooden post perhaps, the hand puppet, with its little leather ears, protruding teeth, and question mark of a bushy tail, had been carefully arranged to gaze sadly down upon the coffin of its master, its squirrel paws crossed reverently, its squirrel head bent in an attitude of humble prayer".

There were often times — and this was one of them — when, as if in the sudden, blinding flash of a news photographer's camera — I saw it all. Death was no more than a simple masquerade — and so, moreover, was Life! — and both of them were artfully arranged by something or other: some backstage celestial Mutt Wilmott.

We were puppets, all of us, set in action upon the stage by God — or Fate — or Chemistry, call it what you will, where we would be pulled on like gloves upon the hands, and manipulated by the Rupert Porsons and Mutt Wilmotts of the world. Or the Ophelia and Daphne de Luces.

I wanted to let out a whoop!

How I wished that Nialla were here, so that I could share my discovery with her. After all, no one deserved it more. But by now, for all I knew, she was already steering the decrepit Austin van up the slopes of some Welsh mountain to some Welsh village, where, with the assistance of some hastily rustled-up, real-life Mother Goose, she would unpack her wooden crates and, later tonight, raise the curtain for the gawking villagers in some far-flung St. David's Hall, on her own personal vision of Jack and the Beanstalk.

With Rupert gone, which of us now was the Galligantus? I wondered. Which of us was now the monster that would come tumbling unexpectedly out of the skies and into the lives of others?

"Heartfelt tributes continue to pour in from Land's End to John O'Groats," the announcer was saying, "and from abroad." He paused and gave out a little sigh, as if he had been overwhelmed by the moment.

"Here in London, and in spite of the downpour, the queue continues to grow, stretching as far as All Souls Church, and beyond into Langham Place. From above the door of Broadcasting House, the statues of Prospero and Ariel look down upon the hordes of mourners, watching, as if they too share in the common grief.

"Immediately following today's ceremonies at Broadcasting House," he went on bravely, "Rupert Porson's coffin will be taken to Waterloo Station, and from there to its place of interment at Brookwood Cemetery, in Surrey."