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

It seemed unlikely: If there was one sin of which Cynthia Richardson was not guilty, that sin was vanity. Just one look at her was enough to know that makeup had never soiled that pale ferret face; jewelry had never dangled from that scrawny neck or brightened up those matchstick wrists. To put it politely, the woman was as plain as a pudding.

I sharpened my pencil and added six names to my list: Mutt Wilmott, Grace Ingleby, Dieter Schrantz, Sally Straw, Mad Meg (Daffy had once told me that Meg's surname was Grosvenor, but I didn't believe her) ... and Cynthia Richardson .

I drew a line, and below it, printed in capital letters: AFFAIRS — — LOOK UP!!!

Although I had a sketchy idea of what went on between two people having an affair, I did not actually know the precise mechanical details. Once, when Father had gone away for several days to a stamp exhibition in Glasgow, Daffy had insisted upon reading Madame Bovary aloud to us at every meal, morning, noon, and night, including tea, and finished on the third day just as Father was walking in the door.

At the time, I had nearly died of boredom, although it has since become one of my favorite books, containing, as it does in its final chapters, what must be the finest and most exciting description of death by arsenic in all of literature. I had particularly relished the way in which the poisoned Emma had "raised herself like a galvanized corpse." But now I realized that I had been so gripped by the excitement of poor Madame Bovary's suicide that I had failed to take in the fine points of her several affairs. All I could remember was that, alone with Rodolphe by the lily pond, surrounded by duckweeds and jumping frogs, Emma Bovary — in tears, hiding her face, and with a long shudder — "gave herself up to him."

Whatever that meant. I would ask Dogger.

"Dogger," I said, when I found him at last, hacking away at the weeds in the kitchen garden with a long-handled hoe, "have you read Madame Bovary ?"

Dogger paused in his work and extracted a handkerchief from the bib pocket of his overalls. He gave his face a thorough mopping before he replied.

"A French novel, is it not?" he asked.

"Flaubert."

"Ah," Dogger said, and shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket. "The one in which a most unhappy person poisons herself with arsenic."

"Arsenic from a blue jar!" I blurted, hopping from one foot to the other with excitement.

"Yes," Dogger said, "from a blue jar. Blue, not because of any danger of decomposition or oxidation of the contents, but rather — "

"To keep it from being confused with a bottle containing a harmless substance."

"Exactly," Dogger said.

"Emma Bovary swallows the stuff due to several unhappy affairs," I said.

Dogger studiously scraped a clod of mud from the sole of his shoe with the hoe.

"She had an affair with a man named Rodolphe," I added, "and then with another, named Leon. Not at the same time, of course."

"Of course," Dogger said, and then fell silent.

"What does an affair entail, precisely?" I asked, hoping my choice of words would imply, even slightly, that I already knew the answer.

I thought for a moment that I could outwait him, even though my heart knew that trying to outwait Dogger was a mug's game.

"What did Flaubert mean," I asked at last, "when he said that Madame Bovary gave herself up to Rodolphe?"

"He meant," Dogger said, "that they became the greatest of friends. The very greatest of friends."

"Ah!" I said. "Just as I thought."

"Dogger! Come up here at once before I do myself some grave internal injury!" Aunt Felicity's voice came trumpeting down from an upstairs window.

"Coming, Miss Felicity," he called out, and then in an aside to me he said, "Miss Felicity requires assistance with her luggage."

"Her luggage?" I asked. "She's leaving?"

Dogger nodded noncommittally.

"Cheese!" I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me.

Aunt Felicity was already halfway down the west staircase in a canvas outfit that suggested Africa, rather than the wilds of Hampstead. Clarence Mundy's taxicab was at the door, and Dogger was helping Bert hoist Aunt Felicity's cargo aboard.

"We're going to miss you, Aunt Fee," Feely said.

Aunt Fee? It seemed that in my absence Feely had been ingratiating herself with Father's sister, most likely, I thought, in the hope of inheriting the de Luce family jewels: that ghastly collection of gewgaws that my grandfather de Luce (on Father's and Aunt Felicity's side) had foisted upon my grandmother who, as she received each piece, had dropped it, with thumb and forefinger, into a pasteboard box as casually as if it were a grass snake, and never looked at it again.

Feely had wasted the entire afternoon slavering over this rubbish the last time we had gone up to Hampstead for one of Aunt Felicity's compulsory teas.

"So romantic!" she had breathed, when Aunt Felicity had, rather grudgingly, I thought, lent her a pink glass pendant that would not have been out of place on a cow's udder. "I shall wear it to Rosalind Norton's coming-out, and all eyes will be on yours truly. Poor Rosalind, she's such an awful sweat!"

"I'm sorry it's turned out this way, Haviland," Aunt Felicity bellowed from the landing, "but you've well and truly botched it. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put your accounts together again. I should, of course, be more than happy to rescue you from your excesses if I weren't so heavily invested in consols. There's nothing for it now but to sell those ridiculous postage stamps."

Father had drifted so silently into the hall that I had not noticed him until now. He stood, one hand holding Daffy's arm, his eyes downcast, as if he were intently studying the black and white tiles beneath his feet.

"Thank you for coming, Felicity," he said quietly, without looking up. "It was most kind of you."

I wanted to swat the woman's face!

I had actually taken half a step forward before a firm hand fell on my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks. It was Dogger.

"Will there be anything else, Miss Felicity?" he asked.

"No, thank you, Dogger," she said, rummaging in her reticule with two fingers. From its depths, like a stork pulling a fish from a pond, she extracted what looked like a shilling and handed it to him with a sigh.

"Thank you, miss," he said, pocketing the insult with ease — and without looking at it — as if it were something he did every day.

And with that Aunt Felicity was gone. A moment later, Father had stepped into the shadows of the great hall, followed closely by Daffy and Feely, and Dogger had vanished without a word into his little corridor behind the stairs.

It was like one of those electric moments just before the final curtain in a West End play: that moment when all the supporting characters have faded into the wings, leaving the heroine alone at center stage to deliver her magnificent closing line to a silent house that awaited her words with bated breath.

"Bloody hell!" I said, and stepped outdoors for a breath of fresh air.

The problem with we de Luces , I decided, is that we are infested with history in much the same way that other people are infested with lice . There have been de Luces at Buckshaw since King Harold stopped an arrow with his eye at the Battle of Hastings, and most of them have been unhappy in one complicated way or another. We seem to be born with wisps of both glory and gloom in our veins, and we can never be certain at any given moment which of the two is driving us.

On the one hand, I knew, I would never be like Aunt Felicity, but on the other, would I ever become like Harriet? Eight years after her death, Harriet was still as much a part of me as my toenails, although that's probably not the best way of putting it.