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

The sagging wooden door stood ajar, and I found that I could slip through easily into the hollow center of the tower. Tock brushed past my ankles, then vanished into the shadows in search of mice.

The sharp reek of the place slapped me in the face: the unmistakable chemical smell of dove's guano, which the great Humphry Davy had found to yield, by distillation, carbonate of ammonia, with a residuum of carbonate of lime and common salt, a finding I had once verified by experiment in my chemical laboratory at Buckshaw.

Far above my head, countless beams of sunshine slanting in through the open ports dappled the curving walls with dots of yellow light. It was as if I had stepped into the colander in which some giant strained his soup bones.

Here, inside, the wailing sound was even louder, a whirlpool of noise amplified by the circular walls, of which I was the very center. I couldn't have called out — even if I'd dared.

At the center of the room, pivoting on an ancient wooden post, was a moveable scaffold, somewhat like a library ladder, which must at one time have been used by their keepers to gain access to the doomed little birds.

The thing groaned fearsomely as I stepped onto it.

Up I went, inch by inch, hanging on for dear life, stretching my arms and legs to make impossible giant steps from one creaking crosspiece to the next. I looked down only once, and it made my head swim.

The higher I climbed, the louder the keening sound became, its echoes now coming together in a chorus of voices that seemed to congregate in some wild, high lament.

Above me, and to my left, was a vaulted opening that gave onto a niche larger than the others. By standing on tiptoe and seizing the brick ledge with my fingertips, I was able to pull myself up until my eyes were level with the floor of this grotto.

Inside, a woman knelt, her back towards me. She was singing. Her thin voice echoed from the bricks and swirled round my head:

It was Mrs. Ingleby!

In front of her, on an overturned box, a candle burned, adding its smoky odor to the stifling heat of the little brick cave. To her right was propped up a black-and-white photograph of a child: her dead son, Robin, who grinned happily at the camera, his shock of blond hair bleached nearly white by the sun of long-gone summer days. To her left, lying on its side, as if it were hauled up on the beach to be cleaned of barnacles, was a toy sailboat.

I held my breath. She mustn't know I was here. I would climb down slowly, and —

My legs began to shake. I hadn't much of a grip, and my leather soles were already slipping on the weathered wooden frame. As I started to slide back, Mrs. Ingleby began her wail again, this time another song and, oddly, in another voice: a harsh, swashbuckling, piratical gargle:

And she let out a horrible, snuffling laugh. I pulled myself up on tiptoe again, just in time to see her twist the cork from a tall clear bottle, and take a quick, bobbing swig. It looked to me like gin, and it was plain to see that she had been at it for some time.

With a long, shuddering sigh, she pushed the bottle back under a pile of straw and lit a new candle from the dwindling flame of the one that was dying. With drips of flowing wax, she stuck it in place beside its exhausted fellow.

And now she began another song, this one in a darker minor key; sung more slowly, and more like a dirge, pronouncing every word with an awful, exaggerated clarity:

Rope and butter? Deeds of darkness?

I suddenly realized that my hair was standing completely on end, the way it did when Feely stroked her black ebonite comb on her cashmere sweater and brought it close to the nape of my neck. But while I was still trying to calculate how quickly I could scramble back down the wooden frame and make a run for it, the woman spoke: "Come up, Flavia," she said. "Come up and join in my little requiem."

Requiem? I thought. Do I really want to scramble up into a brick cell with a woman who is at best more than a little inebriated, and at worst a homicidal maniac?

I hauled myself up into the gloom.

As my eyes became accustomed to the candlelight, I saw that she wore a white cotton blouse with short puffed sleeves and a low peasant-girl neckline. With her raven black hair and her brightly colored dirndl skirt, she might easily be taken for a gypsy fortune-teller.

"Robin's gone," she said.

Those two words nearly broke my heart. Like everyone else in Bishop's Lacey, I had always thought that Grace Ingleby lived in her own private, insulated world: a world where Robin still played in the dusty dooryard, chasing flustered hens from fence to fence, dashing into the kitchen now and then to beg a sweet.

But it was not true: She had stood as I had done, beside the small gravestone in the churchyard of St. Tancred's, and read its simple inscription: Robin Tennyson Ingleby, 1939-1945, Asleep in the Lamb .

"Robin's gone," she said again, and now it was almost a moan.

"Yes," I said, "I know."

Motes of dust floated like little worlds in the pencil beams of sunlight that penetrated the chamber's gloom. I sat down in the straw.

As I did so, a pigeon clattered up from its nest, and out through the little arched window. My heart almost stopped. I had thought the pigeons long gone, and I almost sat on the stupid thing.

"I took him to the seaside," Grace went on, caressing the sailboat, oblivious to the bird. "Robin loved the seaside, you know."

I pulled my knees up under my chin and wrapped my arms around them.

"He played in the sand. Built a sand castle."

There was a long silence, and I saw that she had drifted off somewhere.

"Did you have ice cream?" I asked, as if it were the most important question in the world. I couldn't think of anything else.

"Ice cream?" She nodded her head. "They gave it to us in paper cups ... little pointed paper cups. We wanted vanilla — we both loved vanilla, Robin and I. Funny thing, though ..." She sighed. "When we ate it, there was a taste of chocolate ... as if they hadn't rinsed the scoop properly."

I nodded wisely.

"That sometimes happens," I said.

She reached out and touched the sailboat again, running her fingertips over its smooth painted hull. And then she blew out the candle.

We sat for a while in silence among the spatterings of sunshine that seeped into the red brick cave. This must be what the womb is like , I thought.

Hot. Waiting for something to happen.

"Why are you here?" she said at last. I noticed that she was not slurring her words as much as before.

"The vicar sent some people to camp in Jubilee Field. He asked me to show them the way." She seized my arm.

"Does Gordon know?" she demanded.

"I think he does," I said. "He told the vicar it would be all right if they camped at the bottom of the lane."

"The bottom of the lane ..." She let out a long, slow breath. "Yes, that would be all right, wouldn't it?"

"It's a traveling puppet show," I said. "Porson's Puppets. They're putting on a performance Saturday. The vicar's asked them. Their van's broken down, you see, and ..."

I was gripped by a sudden inspiration.

"Why don't you come?" I asked. "Everyone in the village will be there. You could sit with me, and — "