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

What bubbled up inexplicably from the bottom of my memory at that moment was a sermon the vicar had preached at the beginning of the year. Part of his text, taken from Genesis, was the phrase "There were giants in the earth in those days." In the original Hebrew, the vicar told us, the word for giants was nephilim , which, he said, meant cruel bullies or fierce tyrants: not physically large, but sinister. Not monsters, but human beings filled with malevolence.

"I'd better be getting back," I said. "Thank you for showing me Galligantus."

Nialla was nowhere in sight, and I had no time to look for her.

"Dear, dear," the vicar had said. "I don't know what to tell you to do. Just make yourself generally useful, I expect."

And so I did. For the next hour, I looked at tickets and ushered people (mostly children) to their seats. I glared at Bobby Broxton and motioned for him to take his feet off the rungs of the chair in front of him.

"It's reserved for me," I hissed menacingly.

I clambered up onto the kitchen counter and found the second teapot, which had somehow been shoved to the very back of the top shelf, and helped Mrs. Delaney place empty cups and saucers on a tea tray. I even ran up the high street to the post office to swap a ten-pound note for loose change.

"If the vicar needs coins," said Miss Cool, the postmistress, "why doesn't he break into those paper collection boxes from the Sunday school? I know the money's for missions, but he could always stuff in banknotes to replace what he's taken. Save him from imposing on His Majesty for pennies, wouldn't it? But then, vicars are not always as practical as you might think, are they, dear?"

By two o'clock, I was completely fagged out.

As I took my seat at last — front row, center — the eager buzz of the audience rose to a climax. We had a full house.

Somewhere backstage, the vicar switched off the house lights, and for a few moments we were left sitting in utter darkness.

I settled back in my chair — and the music began.

IT WAS A LITTLE thing by Mozart: one of those melodies that make you think you've heard it before, even if you haven't.

I could imagine the reels of Rupert's tape machine winding away backstage, the strains of music being summoned up, by magnetism, from the subatomic world of iron oxide. As it had likely been nearly two hundred years since Mozart first heard them in his head, it seemed somehow appropriate that the sounds of the symphony orchestra should be stored in nothing more than particles of rust.

As the curtains opened, I was taken by surprise: Rather than the cottage and the idyllic hills I had been expecting, the stage was now totally black. Rupert had obviously masked the country setting with a dark throw-cloth.

A spotlight faded up, and in the very center of the stage there stood a miniature harpsichord, the ivories of its two keyboards starkly white against the surrounding blackness.

The music faded down, and an expectant hush fell upon the audience. We were all of us leaning forward, anticipating....

A stir at one side of the stage caught our attention, and then a figure strode confidently out towards the harpsichord — it was Mozart!

Dressed in a suit of green silk, with lace at his throat, white knee-stockings, and buckled shoes, he looked as if he had stepped straight through a window from the eighteenth century and into our own. His perfectly powdered white wig framed a pink and insolent face, and he put a hand up to shade his eyes, peering out into the darkness to see who it was that had the audacity to be giggling.

Shaking his head, he went to his instrument, pulled a match from his pocket, and lit the candles: one at each end of the harpsichord's keyboards.

It was an astonishing performance! The audience erupted in applause. Every one of us knew, I think, that we were witnessing the work of a master showman.

The little Mozart seated himself on the spindled chair that stood before the keyboard, raised his hands, as if to begin — then loudly cracked his knuckles.

A great gust of laughter went up from the audience. Rupert must have recorded the close-up sound of a wooden nutcracker cracking walnuts, I thought: It sounded as if the little puppet had crushed every bone in his hands.

And then he began to play, his hands flitting easily over the keys like the shuttles in a loom. The music was the Turkish March: a lilting, driving, lively tune that made me grin.

There's no need to describe it all: From the collapsing chair to the twin keyboards that snapped at the puppet's fingers like shark's teeth, the whole thing, from beginning to end, had all of us rocking with laughter.

When at last the little figure had managed, in spite of it all, to fight his way to the final, triumphant chord, the harpsichord reared up, took a bow, and folded itself neatly up into a suitcase, which the puppet picked up. Then he strode off the stage to a storm of applause. A few of us even leapt to our feet.

The lights went down again.

There was a pause — a silence.

When the audience had settled, a strain of music — different music — came floating to our ears.

I recognized the melody at once. It was "Morning," from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and it seemed to me the perfect choice.

"Welcome to the Land of Fairy Tales," said a woman's voice as the music faded down, and a spotlight came up to reveal the most strange and remarkable character!

Seated to the right of the stage — she must have taken her place during the moments of darkness, I thought — she wore a ruff of Elizabethan lace, a black Pilgrim dress with a laced bodice, black shoes with square silver buckles, and a tiny pair of spectacles that perched precariously on the end of her nose. Her hair was a mass of gray curls, spilling out from under a tall pointed hat.

"My name is Mother Goose."

It was Nialla!

There were oohs and aahs from the audience, and she sat, smiling patiently, until the excitement died down.

"Would you like me to tell you a story?" she asked, in a voice that was not Nialla's, yet at the same time, not anyone else's.

"Yes!" everyone shouted, including the vicar.

"Very well, then," said Mother Goose. "I shall begin at the beginning, and go on till I come to the end. And then I shall stop."

You could have heard a pin drop.

"Once upon a time," she said, "in a village not far away ..."

And as she spoke those words, the red velvet curtains with their gold tassels opened slowly to reveal the cozy cottage I had glimpsed from behind the scenes, but now I could see it in far greater detail: the diamond-paned windows, the painted hollyhocks, the three-legged milking stool ...

"... there lived a poor widow with a son whose name was Jack."

At that, a boy in short leather pants and an em broidered jacket and jerkin came strolling into the scene, whistling off-key to the music.

"Mother," he shouted, "are you at home? I want my supper."

As he turned to look around, his hand shielding his eyes from the light of the painted sun, the audience let out a collective gasp.

Jack's carved wooden face was a face we all recognized: It was as if Rupert had deliberately modeled the puppet's head from a photograph of Robin, the Inglebys' dead son. The likeness was uncanny.

Like a wind in the cold November woods, a wave of uneasy whispers swept through the hall.

"Shhh!" someone said at last. I think it was the vicar.

I wondered how he must feel at being confronted with the face of a child he had buried in the churchyard.

"Jack was a very lazy boy," Mother Goose went on. "And because he refused to work, it was not long before his mother's small savings were completely gone. There was nothing to eat in the house, and not so much as a farthing left for food."