Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

"Stage right," I said. "Behind the black tormentor curtains."

Rupert blinked once or twice, shot me a barbed look, and clattered back up the narrow steps to the stage. For a few moments we could hear him muttering away to himself up there, punctuated by the metallic sounds of panels being opened and slammed, and switches clicked on and off.

"Don't mind him," Nialla whispered. "He's always nervous as a cat from the minute a show's booked until the final curtain falls. After that, he's generally as right as rain."

As Rupert tinkered with the electricity, Nialla began unfastening several bundles of smooth wooden posts, which were bound tightly together with leather straps.

"The stage," she told me. "It all fits together with bolts and butterfly nuts. Rupert designed and built it all himself. Mind your fingers."

I had stepped forward to help her with some of the longer pieces.

"I can do it myself, thanks," she said. "I've done it hundreds of times — got it down to a science. Only thing that needs two to lift is the floor."

A rustling sound behind me made me turn around. There stood the vicar with rather an unhappy look on his face.

"Not good news, I'm afraid," he said. "Mrs. Archer tells me that Bert has gone up to London for a training course and won't be back until tomorrow, and there's no answer at Culverhouse Farm, where I had hoped to put you up. But then Mrs. I doesn't often answer the telephone when she's home alone. She'll be bringing the eggs down on Saturday, but by then it will be far too late. I'd offer the vicarage, of course, but Cynthia has quite forcibly reminded me that we're in the midst of painting the guest rooms: beds taken down and stowed in the hallways, armoires blockading the landings, and so forth. Maddening, really."

"Don't fret, Vicar," Rupert said from the stage.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. I'd forgotten he was there.

"We'll camp where we are, in the churchyard. We've a good tent in the van, with wool rugs and a rubber groundsheet, a little Primus stove, and beans in a tin for breakfast. We'll be as cozy as bugs in a blanket."

"Well," the vicar said, "if it were solely up to me, I — "

"Ah," Rupert said, raising a finger. "I know what you're thinking: Can't have gypsies camping among the graves. Respect for the dear departed, and all that."

"Well," said the vicar, "there might be a modicum of truth in that, but — "

"We'll set up in an unoccupied corner, won't we? No desecration, that way. Shan't be the first time we've slept in a churchyard, will it, Nialla?"

Nialla colored slightly and became fascinated with something on the floor.

"Well, I suppose it's settled then," the vicar said. "We don't really have a great deal of choice, do we? Besides, it's only for one night. What harm can there be in that?

"Dear me!" he said, glancing at his wristwatch. "How tempus does fugit! I gave Cynthia my solemn promise to return straightaway. She's preparing an early supper, you see. We always have an early supper on Thursdays, because of choir practice. I'd invite you to join us for potluck, but — "

"Not at all," Rupert interrupted. "We've imposed enough for one day, Vicar. Besides, believe it or not, Nialla's a dab hand with bacon and eggs over a churchyard bonfire. We shall eat like Corsican bandits and sleep like the dead."

Nialla sat down far too gently on an unopened box, and I could see that she was suddenly exhausted. Dark circles seemed to have formed under her eyes as quickly as storm clouds blow across the moon.

The vicar rubbed his chin. "Flavia, dear," he said, "I've had the most splendid idea. Why don't you come back bright and early tomorrow morning and lend a hand? I'm sure Porson's Puppets would be most grateful to acquire the services of an eager assistant.

"I have home visits for the sick and shut-ins tomorrow, as well as Altar Guild," he added. "You could serve as my locum tenens, so to speak. Offer our guests the freedom of the parish, as it were, besides serving as general factotum and all-round dogsbody."

"I'd be happy to," I said, making an almost imperceptible curtsy.

Nialla, at least, rewarded me with a smile.

Outside, at the back of the churchyard, I retrieved Gladys, my trusty bicycle, from the long grass, and moments later we were flying homewards through the sun-dappled lanes to Buckshaw.

* FOUR *

"HELLO, ALL," I SAID to Feely's back, after I had drifted inconspicuously into the drawing room.

Without turning away from the mirror in front of which she was regarding herself, Feely glanced up at my reflection in the time-rippled glass.

"You're in for it this time," she said. "Father's been looking for you all afternoon. He's just got off the telephone with Constable Linnet, in the village. I must say he seemed rather disappointed to hear that they hadn't fished your soggy little corpse out of the duck pond."

"How do you know they didn't?" I countered shrewdly. "How do you know I'm not a ghost come back to haunt you into the grave?"

"Because your shoe's untied and your nose is running," Daffy said, looking up from her book. It was Forever Amber and she was reading it for the second time.

"What's it about?" I had asked her on the first go-round.

"Flies in sap," she had said with a smug grin, and I had made a mental note to put it on my reading list. I adore books about the Natural Sciences.

"Aren't you going to ask me where I've been?" I said. I was simply dying to tell them about Porson's Puppets and all about Nialla.

"No," Feely answered, fingering the point of her chin as she leaned in for a closer look at herself. "No one is the slightest bit interested in what you do. You're like an unwanted dog."

"I'm not unwanted," I said.

"Oh yes you are!" she said with a hard laugh. "Name one person in this household who wants you and I'll give you a guinea. Go ahead — name one."

"Harriet!" I said. "Harriet wanted me, or she wouldn't have had me."

Feely whirled round and spat on the floor. She actually spat!

"For your information, Spot, Harriet fell into a profound mental bog immediately after you were born."

"Ha!" I said. "I've got you there! You told me I was adopted."

It was true. Whenever Daffy or Feely wanted to aggravate me beyond endurance, they would renew that claim.

"And so you were," she said. "Father and Harriet made an agreement to adopt you even before you were born. But when the time came, and your natural mother delivered you, you were given out by mistake to someone else — a couple in east Kent, I believe. Unfortunately they returned you. It was said to be the first time in the two-hundred-year history of the foundling hospital that anyone had returned a baby because they didn't like it.

"Harriet didn't care for you, either, once she got you home, but the papers were already signed, and the Board of Governors refused to take you back a second time. I'll never forget the day I overheard Harriet telling Father in her dressing room that she could never love such a rat-faced mewling. But what could she do?

"Well, she did what any normal woman would do in those circumstances: She fell into a deeply troubled state — and one from which she probably never recovered. She was still in the grip of it when she fell — or was it jumped? — off that mountain in Tibet. Father has always blamed you for it — surely you must realize that?"

The room went cold as ice, and suddenly I was numb from head to toe. I opened my mouth to say something, but found that my tongue had dried up and shriveled to a curled-up flap of leather. Hot tears welled up in my eyes as I fled the room.

I'd show that bloody swine Feely a thing or two. I'd have her so tied up in knots they'd have to hire a sailor to undo her for the funeral.

There is a tree that grows in Brazil, Carica digitata, which the natives call chamburu. They believe it to be such deadly poison that simply sleeping beneath its branches will cause, first of all, ever-festering sores, followed sooner or later by a wonderfully excruciating death.

Fortunately for Feely, though, Carica digitata does not grow in England. Fortunately for me, fool's parsley, better known as poison hemlock, does. In fact, I knew a low and marshy corner of Seaton's Meadow, not ten minutes from Buckshaw, where it was growing at that very moment. I could be there and back before supper.

I'd recently updated my notes on coniine, the active principle of the stuff. I would extract it by distilling with whatever alkali was handy — perhaps a bit of the sodium bicarbonate I kept on hand in my laboratory against Mrs. Mullet's culinary excesses. I would then, by freezing, remove by recrystallization the iridescent scales of the less powerful conhydrine. The resulting nearly pure coniine would have a deliciously mousy odor, and it would take less than half a drop of the oily stuff to put paid to old accounts.

Agitation, vomiting, convulsions, frothing at the mouth, horrendous spasms — I ticked off the highlights on my fingers as I went.

"Sanctified cyanideSuper-quick arsenicHiggledy-piggledyInto the soup.Put out the mourning lampsCall for the coffin clampsTeach them to trifle withFlavia de Luce!"

My words came echoing back to me from the high painted ceiling of the foyer and the dark polished woodwork of the galleries above. Aside from the fact that it didn't mention poison hemlock, this little poem, which I had composed for an entirely different occasion, was otherwise a perfect expression of my present feelings.

Across the black and white tiles I ran, and up the curving staircase to the east wing of the house. The "Tar" wing, as we called it, was named for Tarquin de Luce, one of Harriet's ancient uncles who had inhabited Buckshaw before us. Uncle Tar had spent the greater part of his life locked away in a magnificent Victorian chemistry laboratory at the southeast corner of the house, investigating "the crumbs of the universe," as he had written in one of his many letters to Sir James Jeans, author of The Dynamical Theory of Gases.

Directly below the laboratory, in the Long Gallery, there is a portrait in oils of Uncle Tar. In it, he is looking up from his microscope, his lips pressed together and his brow furrowed, as if someone with an easel, a palette, and a box of paints had rudely barged in just as he was about to discover deLucium.

"Fizz off!" his expression clearly says. "Fizz off and leave me alone!"

And so they had fizzed off — and so, eventually, had Uncle Tar.

The laboratory, and all that was in it, was now mine, and had been for a number of years. No one ever came here — which was just as well.

As I reached into my pocket and pulled out the key, something white fluttered to the floor. It was the handkerchief I had lent Nialla in the churchyard — and it was still vaguely damp to the touch.

An image rose up in my mind of Nialla as she had been when first I saw her, lying facedown upon a weathered tombstone, hair spread out like a sea of red, her hot tears sizzling in the dust.

Everything dropped into place like the tumblers in a lock. Of course!

Vengeance would have to wait.

With a pair of cuticle scissors I had pinched from Feely's vanity table, I snipped four damp disks from the linen handkerchief, taking care to avoid the green grass stains I had inflicted upon it, and cutting out only those parts diagonally opposite the stains — the spots into which Nialla had wept.

These I stuffed — with tweezers — into a test tube, which I then injected with a three-percent solution of sulfosalicylic acid to precipitate the protein. This was the so-called Ehrlich test.

As I worked, I thought with pleasure of how profoundly the great Alexander Fleming had changed the world when he accidentally sneezed into a petri dish. This was the sort of science that was dear to my heart. Who, after all, can honestly say that they have never sneezed on a culture? It could happen to anyone. It has happened to me.

After the sneeze, the magnificently observant Fleming noticed that the bacteria in the dish were shrinking back, as if in fear, from the flecks of his spattered mucus. It wasn't long before he had isolated a particular protein in his snot that repelled bacteria in much the same way that the presence of a dog foaming at the mouth keeps off burglars. He called it lysozyme, and it was this substance for which I was now testing.

Fortunately, even in high summer, the ancestral halls of Buckshaw were as cold and dank as the proverbial tomb. Room temperature in the east wing, where my laboratory was located — in spite of the heating that had been spitefully installed by warring brothers in only the west wing of the once politically divided house — was never more than sixty degrees Fahrenheit, which, as luck would have it, was precisely the temperature at which lysozyme precipitates when sulfosalicylic acid is added.

I watched, entranced, as a veil of crystals began to form, their white flakes drifting gently down in the little winter inside the test tube.

Next, I lit a Bunsen burner, and carefully warmed a beaker of water to seventy degrees. It did not take long. When the thermometer indicated that it was ready, I dipped the bottom of the test tube into the warm bath and swirled it gently.

As the newly formed precipitate dissolved, I let out a gasp of delight.

"Flavia." Father's faint voice came drifting up to the laboratory. Having traversed the front hall, floated up the curving stair, penetrated the east wing, and wended its way down the long corridor to its southernmost point, it now seeped through my closed door, its force spent, as wispy as if it had come drifting to England all the way from Ultima Thule.

"Supper," I thought I heard him call.

"It's damnably irritating," Father said.

We were seated round the long refectory table, Father at the far end, Daffy and Feely one on each side, and me at the very bottom, at Cape Horn.

"It's damnably irritating," he said again, "for one to sit here and listen to one's daughter admit that she absconded with one's eau de cologne for a bloody chemical experiment."

No matter if I denied these things or admitted my guilt, Father found it equally irritating. I simply couldn't win. I had learned that it was best to remain silent.

"Damn it, Flavia, I just bought the bloody stuff. Can't very well go up to London in this heat smelling like a shoulder of pork that's gone off, can I?"

Father was most eloquent when he was angry. I had nicked the bottle of Roger & Gallet to fill an atomizer with which I needed to spray the house after an experiment involving hydrogen sulfide had gone spectacularly wrong.

I shook my head.

"I'm sorry," I said, assuming a hangdog look and dabbing at my eye with a napkin. "I'd buy you a new bottle — but I have no money."