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

"Well, I suppose it's settled then," the vicar said. "We don't really have a great deal of choice, do we? Besides, it's only for one night. What harm can there be in that?

"Dear me!" he said, glancing at his wristwatch. "How tempus does fugit! I gave Cynthia my solemn promise to return straightaway. She's preparing an early supper, you see. We always have an early supper on Thursdays, because of choir practice. I'd invite you to join us for potluck, but — "

"Not at all," Rupert interrupted. "We've imposed enough for one day, Vicar. Besides, believe it or not, Nialla's a dab hand with bacon and eggs over a churchyard bonfire. We shall eat like Corsican bandits and sleep like the dead."

Nialla sat down far too gently on an unopened box, and I could see that she was suddenly exhausted. Dark circles seemed to have formed under her eyes as quickly as storm clouds blow across the moon.

The vicar rubbed his chin. "Flavia, dear," he said, "I've had the most splendid idea. Why don't you come back bright and early tomorrow morning and lend a hand? I'm sure Porson's Puppets would be most grateful to acquire the services of an eager assistant.

"I have home visits for the sick and shut-ins tomorrow, as well as Altar Guild," he added. "You could serve as my locum tenens , so to speak. Offer our guests the freedom of the parish, as it were, besides serving as general factotum and all-round dogsbody."

"I'd be happy to," I said, making an almost imperceptible curtsy.

Nialla, at least, rewarded me with a smile.

Outside, at the back of the churchyard, I retrieved Gladys, my trusty bicycle, from the long grass, and moments later we were flying homewards through the sun-dappled lanes to Buckshaw.

"HELLO, ALL," I SAID to Feely's back, after I had drifted inconspicuously into the drawing room.

Without turning away from the mirror in front of which she was regarding herself, Feely glanced up at my reflection in the time-rippled glass.

"You're in for it this time," she said. "Father's been looking for you all afternoon. He's just got off the telephone with Constable Linnet, in the village. I must say he seemed rather disappointed to hear that they hadn't fished your soggy little corpse out of the duck pond."

"How do you know they didn't?" I countered shrewdly. "How do you know I'm not a ghost come back to haunt you into the grave?"

"Because your shoe's untied and your nose is running," Daffy said, looking up from her book. It was Forever Amber and she was reading it for the second time.

"What's it about?" I had asked her on the first go-round.

"Flies in sap," she had said with a smug grin, and I had made a mental note to put it on my reading list. I adore books about the Natural Sciences.

"Aren't you going to ask me where I've been?" I said. I was simply dying to tell them about Porson's Puppets and all about Nialla.

"No," Feely answered, fingering the point of her chin as she leaned in for a closer look at herself. "No one is the slightest bit interested in what you do. You're like an unwanted dog."

"I'm not unwanted," I said.

"Oh yes you are!" she said with a hard laugh. "Name one person in this household who wants you and I'll give you a guinea. Go ahead — name one."

"Harriet!" I said. "Harriet wanted me, or she wouldn't have had me."

Feely whirled round and spat on the floor. She actually spat !

"For your information, Spot, Harriet fell into a profound mental bog immediately after you were born."

"Ha!" I said. "I've got you there! You told me I was adopted."

It was true. Whenever Daffy or Feely wanted to aggravate me beyond endurance, they would renew that claim.

"And so you were," she said. "Father and Harriet made an agreement to adopt you even before you were born. But when the time came, and your natural mother delivered you, you were given out by mistake to someone else — a couple in east Kent, I believe. Unfortunately they returned you. It was said to be the first time in the two-hundred-year history of the foundling hospital that anyone had returned a baby because they didn't like it.

"Harriet didn't care for you, either, once she got you home, but the papers were already signed, and the Board of Governors refused to take you back a second time. I'll never forget the day I overheard Harriet telling Father in her dressing room that she could never love such a rat-faced mewling. But what could she do?

"Well, she did what any normal woman would do in those circumstances: She fell into a deeply troubled state — and one from which she probably never recovered. She was still in the grip of it when she fell — or was it jumped? — off that mountain in Tibet. Father has always blamed you for it — surely you must realize that?"

The room went cold as ice, and suddenly I was numb from head to toe. I opened my mouth to say something, but found that my tongue had dried up and shriveled to a curled-up flap of leather. Hot tears welled up in my eyes as I fled the room.

I'd show that bloody swine Feely a thing or two. I'd have her so tied up in knots they'd have to hire a sailor to undo her for the funeral.

There is a tree that grows in Brazil, Carica digitata , which the natives call chamburu . They believe it to be such deadly poison that simply sleeping beneath its branches will cause, first of all, ever-festering sores, followed sooner or later by a wonderfully excruciating death.

Fortunately for Feely, though, Carica digitata does not grow in England. Fortunately for me, fool's parsley, better known as poison hemlock, does. In fact, I knew a low and marshy corner of Seaton's Meadow, not ten minutes from Buckshaw, where it was growing at that very moment. I could be there and back before supper.

I'd recently updated my notes on coniine, the active principle of the stuff. I would extract it by distilling with whatever alkali was handy — perhaps a bit of the sodium bicarbonate I kept on hand in my laboratory against Mrs. Mullet's culinary excesses. I would then, by freezing, remove by recrystallization the iridescent scales of the less powerful conhydrine. The resulting nearly pure coniine would have a deliciously mousy odor, and it would take less than half a drop of the oily stuff to put paid to old accounts.

Agitation, vomiting, convulsions, frothing at the mouth, horrendous spasms — I ticked off the highlights on my fingers as I went.

My words came echoing back to me from the high painted ceiling of the foyer and the dark polished woodwork of the galleries above. Aside from the fact that it didn't mention poison hemlock, this little poem, which I had composed for an entirely different occasion, was otherwise a perfect expression of my present feelings.

Across the black and white tiles I ran, and up the curving staircase to the east wing of the house. The "Tar" wing, as we called it, was named for Tarquin de Luce, one of Harriet's ancient uncles who had inhabited Buckshaw before us. Uncle Tar had spent the greater part of his life locked away in a magnificent Victorian chemistry laboratory at the southeast corner of the house, investigating "the crumbs of the universe," as he had written in one of his many letters to Sir James Jeans, author of The Dynamical Theory of Gases .

Directly below the laboratory, in the Long Gallery, there is a portrait in oils of Uncle Tar. In it, he is looking up from his microscope, his lips pressed together and his brow furrowed, as if someone with an easel, a palette, and a box of paints had rudely barged in just as he was about to discover deLucium.