Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

"Fourth movement. Allegro. Key of C major," Father boomed, as if he were a railway conductor calling out the next station.

I gave him a brisk nod to show I was paying attention, then dived back into my thoughts. Now then, where was I? Oh, yes — Oliver Twist.

Once, on a trip to London, Daffy had pointed out to us from the window of our taxicab the precise spot in Bloomsbury where Oliver's foundling hospital had stood. Although it was now a rather pleasant and leafy square, I had no trouble imagining myself plodding up those long-gone but nevertheless snowdrifted front steps, raising the huge brass door knocker, and applying for refuge. When I told them of my semi-orphan life at Buckshaw with Feely and Daffy, there would be no questions asked. I would be welcomed with open arms.

London! Damn and blast! I'd completely forgotten. Today was the day I was supposed to have gone up to the City with Father to be fitted for braces. No wonder he was peeved. While I was relishing death in the churchyard and chewing the fat with Nialla and the vicar, Father had almost certainly been steaming and fuming round the house like an over-stoked destroyer. I had the feeling I hadn't heard the last of it.

Well, too late now. Beethoven was — at last — winding his weary way homeward, like Thomas Gray's ploughman, leaving the world to darkness and to me — and to Father.

"Flavia, a word, if you please," he said, switching off the wireless with an ominous click .

Feely and Daffy got up from their respective places and went out of the room in silence, pausing only long enough at the door to shoot me a pair of their patented "Now you're in for it!" grimaces.

"Damn it all, Flavia," Father said when they had gone. "You knew as well as I that we had an appointment for your teeth this afternoon."

For my teeth! He made it sound as if the National Health were issuing me a full set of plaster dentures.

But what he said was true enough: I had recently destroyed a perfectly good set of wire braces by straightening them to pick a lock. Father had grumbled, of course, but had made another appointment to have me netted and dragged back up to London, to that third-floor ironmonger's shop in Farringdon Street, where I would be strapped to a board like Boris Karloff as various bits of ironmongery were shoved into my mouth, screwed in, and bolted to my gums.

"I forgot," I said. "I'm sorry. You should have reminded me at breakfast."

Father blinked. He had not expected such a vigorous — or such a neatly deflected! — response. Although he had been a career army officer, when it came to household maneuvers, he was little more than a babe-in-arms.

"Perhaps we could go tomorrow," I added brightly.

Although it may not seem so at first glance, this was a masterstroke. Father despised the telephone with a passion beyond all belief. He viewed the thing — "the instrument," as he called it — not just as a letting-down of the side by the post office, but as an outright attack on the traditions of the Royal Mail in general, and the use of postage stamps in particular. Accordingly he refused, point-blank, to use it in any but the direst of circumstances. I knew that it would take him weeks, if not months, to pick the thing up again. Even if he wrote to the dentist, it would take time for the necessary back-and-forth to be completed. In the meantime, I was off the hook.

"And remember," Father said, almost as an afterthought, "that your aunt Felicity is arriving tomorrow."

My heart sank like Professor Picard's bathyscaphe.

Father's sister descended upon us every summer from her home in Hampstead. Although she had no children of her own (perhaps because she had never married) she had, nevertheless, quite startling views upon the proper upbringing of children: views that she never tired of stating in a loud voice.

"Children ought to be horsewhipped," she used to say, "unless they are going in for politics or the Bar, in which case they ought in addition to be drowned." Which quite nicely summed up her entire philosophy. Still, like all harsh and bullying tyrants, she had a few drops of sentimentality secreted somewhere inside that would come bubbling to the surface now and then (most often at Christmas but sometimes, belatedly, for birthdays), when she would inflict her handpicked gifts upon us.

Daffy, for instance, who would be devouring Melmoth the Wanderer , or Nightmare Abbey , would receive from Aunt Felicity a copy of The Girl's Jumbo Book , and Feely, who never gave a thought to anything much beyond cosmetics and her own pimply hide, would rip open her parcel to find a pair of gutta-percha motoring galoshes ("Ideal for Country Breakdowns").

And yet once, when we had poked fun at Aunt Felicity in front of Father, he had become instantly as angry as I had ever seen him. But he quickly gained control of himself, touching a finger to the corner of his eye to stop a twitching nerve.

"Has it ever occurred to you," he asked, in that horrible level voice, "that your aunt Felicity is not what she may seem?"

"Do you mean to say," Feely shot back, "that this whole batty business is a pose?"

I could only look on agog at her boldness.

Father fixed her for a moment in the fierce glare of that cold blue de Luce eye, then turned on his heel and strode from the room.

"Lawks-a-mercy!" Daffy had said, but only after he had gone.

And so Aunt Felicity's ghastly gifts had continued to be received in silence — at least in my presence.

Before I could even begin to recall her trespasses on my own good nature, Father went on: "Her train gets in to Doddingsley at five past ten, and I'd like you to be there to meet her."

"But — "

"Please don't argue, Flavia. I've made plans to settle up a few accounts in the village. Ophelia is giving some sort of recital for the Women's Institute's morning tea, and Daphne simply refuses to go."

Boil me dry! I should have known that something like this would happen.

"I'll have Mundy send round a car. I'll book him when he comes tonight for Mrs. Mullet." Clarence Mundy was the owner of Bishop Lacey's only taxicab.

Mrs. Mullet was staying late to finish off the semiannual scouring of the pots and pans: a ritual that always filled the kitchen with greasy, superheated steam, and Buckshaw's inhabitants with nausea. On these occasions, Father always insisted on sending her home afterwards by taxicab. There were various theories in circulation at Buckshaw about his reasons for doing so.

It was obvious that I couldn't be en route to or from Doddingsley with Aunt Felicity and, at the same time, be helping Rupert and Nialla set up their puppet show. I would simply have to sort out my priorities and attend to the most important matters first.

Although there was a sliver of gold in the eastern sky, the sun was not yet up as I barreled along the road to Bishop's Lacey. Gladys's tires were humming that busy, waspish sound they make when she's especially content.

Low fog floated in the fields on either side of the ditches, and I pretended that I was the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw flying to Heathcliff (except for the bicycle) across the Yorkshire moors. Now and then, a skeletal hand would reach out of the bramble hedges to snatch at my red woolen sweater, but Gladys and I were too fast for them.

As I pulled up alongside St. Tancred's, I could see Rupert's small white tent set up in the long grass, at the back of the built-up churchyard. He had pitched it in the potter's field: the plots where paupers had been laid to rest and where, consequently, there were bodies but no tombstones. I supposed that Rupert and Nialla had not been told of this, and I decided that they would not hear it from me.

Before I had waded more than a few feet through the sodden grass, my shoes and socks were soaking wet.