The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

by Alan Bradley

  More for my own amusement than anything, I placed the leaf in a test tube, into which I decanted a few ounces of dilute hydrochloric acid, then corked it and gave it a vigorous shaking. Holding it up to the light, I could see the tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide form and rise to the surface as the acid reacted with the calcium carbonate of the tiny spurs.

  This test was not conclusive, though, since cystoliths were sometimes present in certain nettles, for instance. In order to confirm my findings, I would need to go a little further.

  I was eternally grateful to Uncle Tar who, before his death in 1928, had bought a lifetime subscription to Chemical Abstracts & Transactions, which, perhaps because the editors had never been informed of his death, still arrived faithfully each month on the hall table at Buckshaw.

  Piles of these enticing journals, each issue with a cover the exact blue of a mid-March sky, were now stacked in every corner of my laboratory, and it was among these—in one of the issues from 1941, in fact—that I had found a description of the then newly discovered Duquenois-Levine test. It was my own variation of this procedure that I was about to perform.

  First I would need a small quantity of chloroform. Since I had used the last available bottle for a failed fireworks display on Buckshaw’s south lawn to celebrate Joseph Priestley’s birthday in March, I would first have to manufacture a fresh supply.

  A quick raid below-stairs produced (from Mrs. Mullet’s cleaning cupboard) a tin of chlorine bleaching powder, and from her pantry, a bottle of pure vanilla extract.

  Safely back upstairs in the laboratory, I locked the door and rolled up my sleeves.

  The tin of Bleachitol was, in reality, no more than calcium hypochlorite. Would calcium hypochlorite, I wondered, by any other name smell as sweet? Heated with acetone to a temperature of somewhere between 400 and 500 degrees Fahrenheit—or until the haloform reaction occurs—a quite decent chloroform may afterwards be extracted from the resulting acetate salts by simple distillation. This part of it was, as they say, a piece of cake.

  “Yarooh!” I shouted, as I poured the results into a brown bottle and shoved home the cork.

  Next, I stirred a half teaspoon of vanilla extract into a few drops of acetaldehyde (which, because the stuff is volatile and boils at room temperature, Uncle Tar had thoughtfully stored beneath a layer of argon in a sealed bottle), then tipped the mixture into a clean beaker into which I had already measured six and a half tablespoons of ethanol—plain old C2H5OH. This I had pinched from Father’s sideboard, where it had lain unopened for ages after being brought him as a gift from a fellow philatelist who had been posted to Russia by the Foreign Office.

  And now the stage was set.

  Placing a fresh sample of one of the leaves into a clean test tube, I added a few drops of my alcoholic vanillin preparation (which I thought of calling the Duquenois-Levine-de-Luce reagent), and after waiting for a minute, just a nibbins of concentrated hydrochloric acid.

  Again, as in my previous test, small bubbles arose in the tube as the carbon dioxide was formed, but this time, the liquid in the test tube turned quickly to a shade of blueish purple.

  Excitedly, I added to the mixture a couple of drops of my homemade chloroform, which, since chloroform is not miscible in water, sank promptly to the bottom.

  When the stuff had stratified into two distinct layers (the clear chloroform on the bottom and the blueish purple of the Duquenois reagent floating on top of it), I gave it a jolly good mixing up with a glass stirring rod and, holding my breath, waited for it to settle one last time.

  It didn’t take long: Now the chloroform layer had taken on the color of its upper blanket, the mauve of a hidden bruise.

  Because I had already suspected the outcome, I didn’t bother to cry “Eureka.”

  It wasn’t parsnips Gordon Ingleby was growing in his secret glade: It was Indian hemp!

  I had read about the stuff in an offprint of O’Shaughnessy’s On the Preparations of the Indian Hemp, or Gunjah; Their Effects on the Animal System in Health, and Their Utility in the Treatment of Tetanus and Other Convulsive Diseases, a copy of which I had found tucked away in one of Uncle Tar’s desk drawers.

  Had Uncle Tar been using Indian hemp? Would that further explain his sudden and spectacular departure from Oxford as a young man?

  Gunjah, or bhang, had long been known as an opium substitute, and Dr. O’Shaughnessy himself had reported great success in using it to treat a case of infantile convulsions.

  And what more was Rupert’s infantile paralysis, I thought, than muscular convulsions that would drag on cruelly, all day every day, until the last day of his life?

  Testing the ends of the cigarettes that Gordon and Rupert had smoked was almost an anticlimax. The results were as I knew they would be. When I had washed up and put away the glassware (ughh!—how I loathe washing up!), I wrote in my notebook:

  Friday, 21st of July 1950, 9:50 P.M.

  Duquenois-Levine test of leaves and cigarette remnants from

  Gibbet Wood indicates presence of Indian hemp (Cannabis

  sativa). Gordon Ingleby growing—and smoking—the stuff.

  Overheard his remark that it was “the end of the line” for

  him. What did he mean? Who are the “rest of us” Rupert

  spoke of? Who is “the dead woman”? Could it be Mrs.

  Ingleby? Whatever is going on at Culverhouse Farm,

  Rupert Porson is part of it.

  “And so …” as that man Pepys would have written: “to bed.”

  BUT I COULD NOT SLEEP. For a long while I lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the curtains as they whispered quietly to one another in the night breeze.

  At Buckshaw, time does not pass as it does in other places. At Buckshaw, time seems to be controlled not by those frantic, scurrying little cogs in the hall clock that spin like hamsters in their shuttered cages, but rather by the solemn great gears that manage to creep through just one complete turn each year.

  How could I be so contented, I suddenly wondered, when someone I knew personally was hiding out in the dark tower of a dovecote?

  Which made me think at once, of course, of King Lear. Father had taken us to see John Gielgud in the title role at Stratford-upon-Avon, and although Gielgud was marvelous, it was the words of Poor Tom, the Bedlam beggar on the stormy heath (actually Edgar, in disguise), that still rang in my ears:

  Child Rowland to the dark tower came;

  His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum,

  I smell the blood of a British man.

  “Did Shakespeare steal that from Jack and the Beanstalk?” I had whispered in Daffy’s ear. Or had the fairy tale borrowed the words from Shakespeare? “Neither,” she whispered back: Both had cribbed from Thomas Nashe’s Have With You to Saffron-Walden, which, having been staged in 1596, predated them.

  Good old Daffy. There were times when I could almost forgive her for hating me.

  Well, Rupert would be presenting his own version of Jack and the Beanstalk in just a few hours’ time. I might even learn something from it.

  After a while I got up, dressed, and crept outside.

  I FOUND DOGGER SITTING ON a bench that overlooked the ornamental lake and the folly.

  He was dressed as he had been the previous evening: dark suit, polished shoes, and a tie that probably spoke volumes to those in the know.

  The full moon was rolling up the sky like a great silver cheese, and Dogger sat bolt upright, his face upturned, as if he were basking in its rays, holding a black umbrella open above his head.

  I slid quietly onto the bench beside him. He did not look at me, nor I at him, and we sat, for a time, like a couple of grave ancient astronomers studying the moon.

  After a while, I said, “It’s not raining, Dogger.”

  Somewhere, during the war, Dogger had been exposed to torrential rains: rains without mercy; rains from which there could be no shelter and no escape. Or so Mrs. Mullet had told me.

  “’E takes great co
mfort in ’is brolly, dear,” she had said. “Even when the dogs is pantin’ in the dust.”

  Slowly, like a clockwork figure, Dogger reached up and released the lock on the umbrella’s handle, allowing the ribs and the waterproof cloth to fold down like bats’ wings, until his upper hand was enveloped in black.

  “Do you know anything about polio?” I asked at last.

  Without removing his eyes from the moon, Dogger said: “Infantile paralysis. Heine-Medin disease. Morning paralysis. Complete bed rest.

  “Or so I’ve been told,” he added, looking at me for the first time.

  “Anything else?”

  “Agony,” he said. “Absolute agony.”

  “Thank you, Dogger,” I said. “The roses are beautiful this year. You’ve put a great deal of work into them.”

  “Thank you for saying so, miss,” he said. “The roses are beautiful every year, Dogger or no Dogger.”

  “Good night,” I said, as I got up from the bench.

  “Good night, Miss Flavia.”

  Halfway across the lawn, I stopped and looked back. Dogger had raised the umbrella again, and was sitting beneath it, straight-backed as Mary Poppins, smiling at the summer moon.

  ten

  “PLEASE DON’T GO WANDERING OFF TODAY, FLAVIA,” Father said after breakfast. I had encountered him rather unexpectedly on the stairs.

  “Your aunt Felicity wants to go through some family papers, and she’s particularly asked that you be with her to help lift down the boxes.”

  “Why can’t Daffy do it?” I asked. “She’s the expert on libraries and so forth.”

  This was not entirely true, since I had charge of a magnificent Victorian chemistry library, to say nothing of Uncle Tar’s papers by the ton.

  I was simply hoping I wouldn’t have to mention the puppet show, which was now just hours away. But Duty trumped Entertainment.

  “Daphne and Ophelia have gone to the village to post some letters. They’re lunching there, and going on to Foster’s to look at Sheila’s pony.”

  The dogs! Those scheming wretches!

  “But I’ve promised the vicar,” I said. “He’s counting on me. They’re trying to raise money for something or other—oh, I don’t know. If I’m not at the church by nine, Cynthia—Mrs. Richardson, I mean—will have to come for me in her Oxford.”

  As I expected it would, this rather low blow gave Father real pause.

  I could see his eyebrows pucker as he weighed his options, which were few: Either concede gracefully or risk coming face-to-face with the Wreck of the Hesperus.

  “You are unreliable, Flavia,” he said. “Utterly unreliable.”

  Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself.

  Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We’re past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like “boof-boof”—just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we’re still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we’re invisible—except when we choose not to be.

  At the moment, I was not. I was fixed in the beam of Father’s fierce-eyed tiger stare. I batted my eyelids twice: just enough not to be disrespectful.

  I knew the instant he relented. I could see it in his eyes.

  “Oh, very well,” he said, gracious even in his defeat. “Run along. And give my compliments to the vicar.”

  Paint me with polka dots! I was free! Just like that!

  GLADYS’S TIRES HUMMED THEIR LOUD song of contentment as we sped along the tarmac.

  “Summer is icumen in,” I warbled to the world. “Lhude sing cuccu!”

  A Jersey cow looked up from her grazing, and I stood on the pedals and gave her a shaky curtsy in passing.

  I pulled up outside the parish hall just as Nialla and Rupert were coming through the long grass at the back of the churchyard.

  “Did you sleep well?” I called out to them, waving.

  “Like the dead,” Rupert replied.

  Which described perfectly what Nialla looked like. Her hair hung in long, unwashed strings, and the black circles under her red eyes reminded me of something I’d rather not think about. Either she’d ridden with witches all night from steeple to steeple, or she and Rupert had had a filthy great row.

  Her silence told me it was Rupert.

  “Fresh bacon … fresh eggs,” Rupert went on, giving his chest a hearty pounding, like Tarzan, with his fists. “Sets a man up for the day.”

  Without so much as a glance at me, Nialla darted past and ducked into the parish hall—to the ladies’ W.C., I expected.

  Naturally, I followed.

  Nialla was on her knees, shouting “Rope!” into the porcelain, crying and vomiting at the same time. I bolted the door.

  “You’re having a baby, aren’t you?” I asked.

  She looked up at me, her mouth gaping open, her face white. “How did you know?” she gasped.

  I wanted to say “Elementary,” but I knew this was no time for cheek.

  “I did a lysozome test on the handkerchief you used.”

  Nialla scrambled to her feet and seized me by the shoulders. “Flavia, you mustn’t breathe a word of this! Not a word! Nobody knows but you.”

  “Not even Rupert?” I asked. I could hardly believe it.

  “Especially Rupert,” she said. “He’d kill me if he knew. Promise me. Please, Flavia … promise me!”

  “On my honor,” I said, holding up three fingers in the Girl Guide salute. Although I had been chucked from that organization for insubordination (among other things), I felt it was hardly necessary to share the gruesome details with Nialla.

  “Bloody good job we’re camped in the country. They must have heard us for miles around, the way the two of us went at one another’s throats. It was about a woman, of course. It’s always about a woman, isn’t it?”

  This was beyond my field of expertise, but still, I tried to look attentive.

  “It never takes long for Rupert to zero in on the skirt. You saw it; we weren’t in Jubilee Field for half a tick when he was off up the wood with that Land Girl, Sarah, or whatever her name is.”

  “Sally,” I said.

  Although it was an interesting idea, I knew that Rupert had, in actual fact, been smoking Indian hemp in Gibbet Wood with Gordon Ingleby. But I could hardly tell Nialla that. Sally Straw had been nowhere in sight.

  “I thought you said he went to see about the van.”

  “Oh, Flavia, you’re such a—” She bit off the word in the nick of time. “Of course I said that. I didn’t want to air our dirty laundry in front of a stranger.”

  Did she mean me—or was she referring to Dieter?

  “Rupert always smudges himself with smoke, trying to cover up the scent of his tarts. I smell it on him.

  “But I went a bit too far,” she added ruefully. “I opened up the van and threw the first thing at him that came to hand. I shouldn’t have. It was his new Jack puppet: He’s been working on it for weeks. The old one’s getting tatty, you see, and it tends to come apart at the worst possible moment.

  “Like me,” she wailed, and threw up again.

  I wished that I could make myself useful, but this was one of those situations in which a bystander can do nothing to help.

  “Up all the night he was, trying to fix the thing.”

  By the fresh marks on her neck, I could see that Rupert had done more in the night than patch up a puppet.

  “Oh, I wish I were dead,” she moaned.

  There was a banging at the door: a sharp, rapid volley of rat-a-tat-tat knocks.

  “Who’s in there?” a woman’s voice demanded, and my heart cringed. It was Cynthia Richardson.

  “There may be others wishing to use the facilities,” she called. “Please try to be more considerate of other people’s needs.”

  “Just coming, Mrs. Richardson,” I called out. “It’s me, Fla
via.”

  Damn the woman! How could I quickly feign illness?

  I grabbed the cotton hand towel from the ring beside the sink, and gave my face a rough scrubbing. I could feel the blood rising even as I worked. I messed up my hair, ran a bit of water from the tap and mopped it across my reddening brow, and let loose a thread of spit to dangle horribly from the corner of my mouth.

  Then I flushed the toilet and unbolted the door.

  As I waited for Cynthia to open it, as I knew she would, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: I was the very image of a malaria victim whose doctor had just stepped out to ring the undertaker.

  As the knob turned and the door swung inwards, I took a couple of unsteady steps out into the hallway, puffing out my cheeks as if I were about to vomit. Cynthia shrank back against the wall.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Richardson,” I said shakily. “I’ve just sicked up. It must have been something I ate. Nialla’s been very kind … but I think, with a bit of fresh air, I’ll be all right.”

  And I tottered past her with Nialla in my wake; Cynthia didn’t give her so much as a glance.

  “YOU ARE TERRIFYING,” NIALLA SAID. “You really are. Do you know that?”

  We were sitting on a slab tomb in the churchyard as I waited for the sun to dry my feverish face. Nialla put away her lipstick and rummaged in her bag for a comb.

  “Yes,” I said, matter-of-factly. It was true—and there was no use denying it.

  “Aha!” said a voice. “Here you are, then!”

  A dapper little man in slacks and jacket with a yellow silk shirt was coming rapidly towards us. His neck was swathed in a mauve ascot, and an unlit pipe protruded from between his teeth. He stepped gingerly from side to side, trying not to tread directly on some of the more sunken graves.

  “Oh, God!” Nialla groaned without moving her mouth, and then to him: “Hello, Mutt. Half-holiday at the monkey house, is it?”

  “Where’s Rupert?” he demanded. “Inside?”