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

"I've wanted for ages to render the south front as it was in the days of dear Uncle Tar," she shouted, as if I were on the far side of the world.

"Now, then, dear," she said, when I had finally set up the painting gear to her satisfaction, "it's time for a quiet talk. Out here, at least, we shall not be overheard — save by the bees and the water rats."

I looked at her in astonishment.

"I expect you think I know nothing about the kind of life you lead."

This was the sort of statement of which I had learned to be exceptionally wary: Its implications were immense and, until I saw which way the conversational wind was blowing, I knew that it was best to keep quiet.

"On the contrary," she went on, "I know a great deal about what you must feel: your loneliness, your isolation, your older sisters, your preoccupied father ..."

I was about to say that she must be mistaken, when I suddenly saw that the coming chat could be turned to my advantage.

"Yes," I said, staring off over the water and blinking, as if to stop a tear, "it can be difficult at times...."

"That's precisely what your mother used to say about living at Buckshaw. I remember her coming here summers, as a girl, as had I before her."

Picturing Aunt Felicity as a girl was not an easy task.

"Oh, don't look so shocked, Flavia. In my youth, I used to run wild here on the island like a Pawnee princess. 'Moo-noo-tonowa,' I called myself. Pinched nice bits of beef from the larder and pretended I was cooking dog over a campfire lighted with rubbing sticks and snuff.

"Later, even in spite of the great difference in our ages, Harriet and I were always the greatest of chums. 'The Wretched Outcasts' we used to call ourselves. We would come out here to the island to talk. Once, when we hadn't seen one another for a very long time, we sat out all night in the folly, wrapped in blankets, jabbering away until the sun came up. Uncle Tar sent Pierrepoint, the old butler, to bring us Plasmon biscuits and calf's-foot jelly. He had spotted us from the windows of his laboratory, you see, and — "

"What was she like," I interrupted. "Harriet, I mean."

Aunt Felicity made a dark slash of color on her canvas, which I guessed was supposed to represent the trunk of one of the chestnuts in the drive.

"She was exactly like you," she answered. "As you very well know."

I gulped. "She was?"

"Of course she was! How could you not be aware of it?"

I could have filled her ears with the horrid tales that Feely and Daffy had told me, but I chose not to.

"Zipped lips save ships."

Dogger had said that to me once when I asked him a rather personal question about Father. "Zipped lips save ships," he had answered, turning back to his deadheading, and I hadn't the nerve to ask which of the three of us were the mutes and which the vessels.

I had mumbled something unsatisfactory then, and now I found myself doing it again.

"Good heavens, child! If you want to see your mother, you have no more than to look in the glass. If you want to know her character, look inside yourself. You're so much like her it gives me the willies."

Well, then.

"Uncle Tar used to invite us down to Buckshaw for the summer," she went on, either unaware of or choosing to ignore my burning face.

"He had some extraordinary idea that the presence of young females in the house held it together in some abstruse chemical fashion — something about bonds and the unsuspected dual gender of the carbon molecule. Mad as a March hare, Tar de Luce was, but a lovely old gentleman, for all that.

"Harriet, of course, was his favorite; perhaps because she never grew weary of sitting on a tall stool in that stinking laboratory, and taking down notes as he dictated them. 'My whiz-bang assistant,' he used to call her. It was a private joke: Harriet told me once that he was referring to a spectacular experiment gone awry that might have wiped Buckshaw off the map — to say nothing of Bishop's Lacey and beyond. But she swore me to silence. I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"He was investigating the first-order decomposition of nitrogen pentoxide," I said. "It was work that led eventually to the development of the atomic bomb. There are some letters among his papers from Professor Arrhenius of Stockholm that make it quite clear what they were onto."

"And you, as it were, are left to carry the torch."

"I beg your pardon?"

"To carry on the glorious name of de Luce," she said. "Wherever it may lead you."

This was an interesting thought; it had never occurred to me that one's name could be a compass.

"And where might that be?" I asked, somewhat slyly.

"You must listen to your inspiration. You must let your inner vision be your Pole Star."

"I try," I said. I must sound to Aunt Felicity like the village idiot.

"I know you do, dear. I've heard several reports of your doings. For instance there was that horrid business with Bunpenny, or whatever his name was."

"Bonepenny," I said. "Horace. He died just over there."

I pointed across the lake to the wall of the kitchen garden.

Aunt Felicity plowed on regardless. "You must never be deflected by unpleasantness. I want you to remember that. Although it may not be apparent to others, your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road. You must follow it, Flavia."

"Even when it leads to murder?" I asked, suddenly bold.

With her brush extended to arm's length, she painted in the dark shadow of a tree. "Even when it leads to murder."

We sat for a few moments in silence, Aunt Felicity dabbing away at her canvas with no particularly exciting results, and then she spoke again: "If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one's self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world."

I wanted to throw my arms around this dotty old bat in her George Bernard Shaw costume and hug her until the juices ran out. But I didn't. I couldn't.

I was a de Luce.

"Thank you, Aunt Felicity," I said, scrambling to my feet. "You're a brick."

WE WERE AT TEA in the library. Mrs. Mullet had come in and gone out, leaving behind a vast tray of Jenny Lind cake and currant scones. To my whispered question about Nialla, she had replied with a shrug, and wrinkled her brow to remind me that she was on duty.

Feely was at the piano. It hadn't taken more than three minutes for Dieter to ask politely which of us played, and Feely had replied with her blushes. Now, sufficiently coaxed and implored, she was just beginning the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique sonata.

It was a lovely piece and, as the music faded away and then welled up again, like longings in the heart, I remembered that it was the music Laurie Laurence had played in Little Women , as Jo, who had refused his proposal, walked away outside his window, and I wondered if Feely had chosen it subconsciously.

Father was dreamily tapping a forefinger against the edge of his saucer, which he held beautifully balanced in his hands. There were times when, for no apparent reason, I felt a huge tidal wave of love — or at least respect — for him, and this was one of them.

In the corner, Daffy was curled up like a cat in an armchair, still in the clutches of The Anatomy of Melancholy , and Aunt Felicity sat contentedly near the window, doing something intricate with a pair of needles and a ball of sulfur yellow wool.

Suddenly I noticed that Dieter was biting the corner of his lip, and there was a glistening at the corner of his eye. He was almost in tears, and trying not to show it.