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

"Hello?" I called quietly. "Anyone home?"

There was no reply. Not a sound. I started as one of the curious jackdaws slipped down from the top of the tower and landed with a perfect aerodynamic plop on the crumbling limestone wall.

"Hello?" I called again. "Knock, knock. Anyone home?"

There was a rustling in the tent and Rupert stuck his head out, his haystack hair falling over his eyes, which were as red as if they were driven by electric dynamos.

"Christ, Flavia!" he said. "Is that you?"

"Sorry," I said. "I'm a bit early."

He withdrew his head into the tent like a turtle, and I heard him trying to rouse Nialla. After a few yawns and grumbles, the canvas began poking out at sudden odd angles, as if someone inside with a besom broom were sweeping up broken glass.

A few minutes later, Nialla came half crawling out of the tent. She was wearing the same dress as yesterday, and although the material looked uncomfortably damp, she had pulled out a Woodbine and lighted it even before she had fully straightened up.

"Cheers," she said, flapping an inclusive hand towards me, and causing her smoke to drift off and mingle with the fog that hung among the gravestones.

She coughed with a sudden horrid spasm, and the jackdaw, cocking its head, took several steps sideways on the wall, as if in disgust.

"You oughtn't to be smoking those things," I said.

"Better than smoking kippers," she replied, and laughed at her own joke. "Besides, what do you know?"

I knew that my late great-uncle, Tarquin de Luce, whose chemical laboratory I had inherited, had, in his student days, been hooted down and ejected bodily from the Oxford Union when he took the affirmative in a debate, Resolved: That Tobacco Is a Pernicious Weed.

I had, not long before, come across Uncle Tar's notes tucked into a diary. His meticulous chemical researches seemed to have confirmed the link between smoking and what was then called "general paralysis." Since he had been, by nature, a rather shy and retiring sort, his "utter and abject humiliation," as he put it, at the hands of his fellow students, had contributed greatly to his subsequent reclusive life.

I wrapped my arms around myself and took a step back. "Nothing," I said.

I had said too much. It was cold and clammy in the churchyard, and I had a sudden vision of the warm bed I'd climbed out of to come here and help.

Nialla blew a couple of what were supposed to be casual smoke rings straight up into the air. She watched them ascend until they had dissipated.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not at my best at the crack of dawn. I didn't mean to be rude."

"It's all right," I said. But it wasn't.

A twig cracked, surprisingly loud in the muffling silence of the fog. The jackdaw unfolded its wings and flapped off to the top of a yew tree.

"Who's there?" Nialla called, making a sudden dash to the limestone wall and leaning over it. "Bloody kids," she said. "Trying to scare us. I heard one of them laughing."

Although I have inherited Harriet's extremely acute hearing, I had heard no more than the cracking of the twig. I did not tell Nialla that it would be strange indeed to find any of Bishop's Lacey's children in the churchyard at such an early hour.

"I'll set Rupert on them," she said. "That'll teach them a lesson. Rupert!" she called out loudly. "What are you doing in there?

"I'll bet the lazy sod's crawled back into the sack," she added with a wink.

She reached out and gave one of the guy ropes a twang, and like a parachute spilling the wind, the whole thing collapsed in a mass of slowly subsiding canvas. The tent had been pitched in the loose topsoil of the potter's field, and it crumpled at a touch.

Rupert was out of the wreckage in a flash. He seized Nialla by the wrist and twisted it up behind her back. Her cigarette fell to the grass.

"Don't ever — !" he shouted. "Don't ever — !"

Nialla motioned with her eyes towards me, and Rupert let go of her at once.

"Damn it," he said. "I was shaving. I might have cut my bloody throat."

He stuck out his chin and gave it a sideways hitch, as if he were freeing an invisible collar.

Odd , I thought. He still has all his morning whiskers, and moreover, there's not a trace of shaving cream on his face .

"The die is cast," said the vicar.

He had come humming across the churchyard like a spinning top, showing black and then white through the fog, rubbing his hands together and exclaiming as he came.

"Cynthia has agreed to run up some handbills in the vestry, and we'll have them distributed before lunch. Now then, about breakfast — "

"We've eaten, thanks," Rupert said, jerking a thumb back towards the tent, which now lay neatly folded in the grass. And it was true. A few wisps of smoke were still drifting up from their doused fire. Rupert had fetched a box of wood chips from the back of the van and in surprisingly short order had an admirable campfire crackling away in the churchyard. Next, he had produced a coffeepot, a loaf of bread, and a couple of sharpened sticks to make toast of it. Nialla had even managed to find a pot of Scotch marmalade somewhere in their baggage.

"Are you quite sure?" the vicar asked. "Cynthia said to tell you that if — "

"Quite sure," Rupert said. "We're quite used to — "

" — Making do," Nialla said.

"Yes, well, then," the vicar said, "shall we go in?"

He shepherded us across the grass towards the parish hall, and as he extracted a ring of keys, I turned to look back across the churchyard toward the lych-gate. If someone had been there, they had since run off. A misty graveyard offers an infinite number of places to hide. Someone could well be crouching behind a tombstone not ten feet away, and you'd never know it. With one last apprehensive look at the remnants of the drifting fog, I turned and went inside.

"Well, Flavia, what do you think?"

My breath was taken away. What yesterday had been a bare stage was now an exquisite little puppet theater, and such a one as might have been transported overnight by magic from eighteenth-century Salzburg.

The proscenium opening, which I guessed to be five or six feet wide, was covered with a set of red velvet draperies, richly trimmed and tasseled with gold, and embroidered with the masks of Comedy and Tragedy.

Rupert vanished backstage, and as I watched in awe, a row of footlights, red and green and amber, faded up little by little until the lower half of the curtains was a rich rainbow of velvet.

Beside me, the vicar sucked in his breath as they slowly opened. He clasped his hands in rapture.

"The Magic Kingdom," he breathed.

There, before our eyes, nestled among green hills, was a quaint country cottage, its thatched roof and half-timbered front complete in every detail, from the wooden bench beneath the window right down to the tiny tissue paper roses in the front garden.

For a moment, I wished I lived there: that I could shrink myself and crawl into that perfect little world in which every object seemed to glow as if lit from within. Once settled in the cottage, I would set up a chemical laboratory behind the tiny mullioned windows and —

The spell was broken by the sound of something falling, and a harsh "Damn!" from somewhere up in the blue painted sky.

"Nialla!" Rupert's voice said from behind the curtains. "Where's that hook for the thingumabob?"

"Sorry, Rupert," she called out, and I noticed that she took her time replying, "it must still be in the van. You were going to have it welded, remember?

"It's the thing that holds the giant up," she explained. "But then," she added, grinning at me, "we mustn't give away too many secrets. Takes all the mystery out of things, don't you think?"

Before I could answer, the door at the back of the parish hall opened, and a woman stood silhouetted against the sunlight. It was Cynthia, the vicar's wife.