The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

by Alan Bradley

  “How lovely to see you, Nialla,” Nialla said. “How perfectly lovely you’re looking today, Nialla. Forgotten your manners, Mutt?”

  Mutt—or whoever he was—turned on his heel in the grass and trod off towards the parish hall, still minding where he stepped.

  “Mutt Wilmott,” Nialla told me. “Rupert’s producer at the BBC. They had a flaming row last week and Rupert walked out right in the middle of it. Left Mutt holding the bag with Auntie—the Corporation, I mean. But how on earth did he find us? Rupert thought we’d be quite safe here. ‘Rusticating in the outback,’ he called it.”

  “He got off the train at Doddingsley yesterday morning,” I said, making a leap of deduction, but knowing I was right.

  Nialla sighed. “I’d better go in. There’s bound to be fireworks.”

  Even before we reached the door, I could hear Rupert’s voice rising furiously inside the echoing hall.

  “I don’t care what Tony said. Tony can go sit on a paintbrush, and so can you, Mutt, come to think of it. You’ve shat on Rupert Porson for the last time—the lot of you.”

  As we entered, Rupert was halfway up the little staircase that led to the stage. Mutt stood in the middle of the hall with his hands on his hips. Neither seemed to notice we were there.

  “Oh, come off it, Rupert. Tony has every right to tell you when you’ve overstepped the mark. And hearken unto me, Rupert, this time you have overstepped the mark, and by quite a long chalk at that. It’s all very well for you to stir up a hornet’s nest and then dodge the flak by taking your little show on the road. That’s what you always do, don’t you? But this time you at least owe him the courtesy of a hearing.”

  “I don’t owe Tony a parson’s whistle.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, old boy. How many binds has he extracted you from?”

  Rupert said nothing as Mutt ticked them off on his fingers.

  “Well, let’s see: There was the little incident with Marco. Then there was the one with Sandra Paisley—a nasty business, that. Then the thing with Sparkman and Blondel—cost the BBC a bundle, that one did. To say nothing of—”

  “Shut your gob, Mutt!”

  Mutt went on counting. “To say nothing of that girl in Beckenham … what was her name … Lulu? Lulu, for God’s sake!”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  Rupert was into a full-fledged tantrum. He came storming stiff-legged down the steps, his brace clattering dreadfully. I glanced over at Nialla, who had suddenly become as pale and as still as a painted Madonna. Her hand was at her mouth.

  “Go get in your bloody Jaguar, little man, and drive it straight to hell!” Rupert snarled. “Leave me alone!”

  Mutt was not intimidated. Even though they were now nose to nose, he didn’t give an inch. Rather, he plucked an imaginary bit of lint from the sleeve of his jacket and pretended to watch it float to the floor.

  “Didn’t drive down, old boy. Came by British Rail. You know as well as I that the BBC’s cutting back on expenses, what with the Festival of Britain next year, and all that.”

  Rupert’s eyes widened as he spotted Nialla.

  “Who told you we were here?” he shouted, pointing. “Her?”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Mutt said, his voice rising for the first time. “Don’t go blaming Nialla. As a matter of fact it was a Mrs. Something right here in Bishop’s Lacey. Her boy saw your van by the church and scooted off home to tell Mummy he’d hold his breath and pop if he couldn’t have Porson’s Puppets for his birthday party, but by the time he dragged her back, you were gone. She made a long-distance call to the BBC, and the switchboard put her through to Tony’s secretary. Tony told me to come and fetch you straightaway. And here I am. End of story. So don’t go blaming Nialla.”

  “All snug with Nialla, are you?” Rupert fumed. “Sneaking round on—”

  Mutt placed the palm of his hand on Rupert’s chest. “And while we’re at it, Rupert, I might as well tell you that if you lay so much as a fingerprint on her again, I’ll—”

  Rupert shoved Mutt’s hand away roughly. “Don’t threaten me, you vile little snail. Not if you value living!”

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! What on earth? You must stop this at once.”

  It was the vicar. He stood in the open doorway, a dark figure against the daylight.

  Nialla ducked past him and fled. I quickly followed.

  “DEAR LADY,” THE VICAR SAID, holding out an engraved brass collection plate. “Try a cucumber and lettuce sandwich. They’re said to be remarkably soothing. I made them myself.” Made them himself? Had domestic warfare been declared at the vicarage?

  We were outside in the churchyard again, quite near the spot where I had first seen Nialla weeping facedown on the gravestone. Had it been only two days ago? It seemed an eternity.

  “No, thank you, Vicar,” Nialla said. “I’m quite myself again, and I have things to do.”

  LUNCH WAS A TRIAL. Because the windows of the hall had been covered with heavy blackout curtains for the performance, we sat in near darkness as the vicar fussed with sandwiches and a jug of lemonade he must have conjured from thin air. Nialla and I sat at one end of the front row of chairs, with Mutt at the other. Rupert had vanished backstage some time before.

  “We shall soon have to open the doors,” said the vicar, drawing back the edge of a curtain for a peek outside. “Our public has already begun to queue up, their pockets heavy with coins of the realm.”

  He consulted his watch. “Ninety minutes to curtain time,” he called through cupped hands. “Ninety minutes.”

  “Flavia,” Nialla said, “be a dear—run backstage and tell Rupert to fade the music down when I begin speaking. He botched it in Fringford, and I don’t want it to happen again.”

  I looked at her questioningly.

  “Please—as a favor. I’ve my costume to get ready, and I don’t much want to see him right now.”

  Actually, I didn’t much want to see Rupert either. As I plodded up the steps to the stage, I thought of Sydney Carton ascending the scaffold to meet Madame Guillotine.I found the opening in the black tormentor drapes that hung on either side of the puppet stage, and stepped through into another world.

  Little pools of light were everywhere, illuminating rows of electrical switches and controls, their wires and cables snaking off in all directions. Behind the stage, everything fell away into darkness, and the glow of the little lamps, gentle as it was, made it impossible to see beyond the shadows.

  “Come up,” said a voice from the darkness above me. It was Rupert.

  “There’s a ladder on the other side. Watch your step.”

  I felt my way round the back of the stage and found the rungs with my hands. A few steps up and I found myself standing on a raised wooden platform that ran across and above the back of the puppet stage.

  A sturdy rail of black metal piping provided support for Rupert’s waist as he leaned forward to operate his puppets. Although they were turned away so that I could not see their faces, several of these jointed characters were hanging from a rod behind me: an old woman, a man, and a boy, judging from their peasant clothing.

  To one side, and within easy reach, the magnetic tape recorder was mounted, its two spools loaded with a shiny brown ribbon which, judging by its color, I thought must be coated with an emulsion of iron oxide.

  “Nialla said to remember to lower the music volume when she starts speaking,” I whispered, as if telling him a secret.

  “All right,” he said. “No need to whisper. The curtains absorb the sound. No one can hear us up here.”

  This was not a particularly comforting thought. If he were so inclined, Rupert could put his powerful hands around my neck and strangle me in luxurious silence. No one out front would be any the wiser until there was nothing left of me but a limp corpse.

  “Well, I’d better be getting back,” I said. “I’m helping with the tickets.”

  “Right,” Rupert said, “but have a look at this before y
ou go. Not many kids get a chance to come backstage.”

  As he spoke, he reached out and rotated a large knob, and the lights faded up on the stage below us. I nearly lost my balance as the little world seemed to materialize from nothingness beneath my feet. I found myself suddenly gazing down, like God, into a dreamy countryside of blue sky and green painted hills. Nestled in a valley was a thatched cottage with a bench in the yard, and a ramshackle cowshed.

  It took my breath away.

  “You made all this?”

  Rupert smiled and reached for another control. As he moved it, the daylight faded away to darkness and the lights came on in the windows of the cottage.

  Even though I was looking at it upside down, as it were, from above, I felt a pang—a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before.

  It was homesickness.

  Now, even more than I had earlier when I’d first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.

  Rupert had been transformed, too. I could see it in his face. Lit from below, his features completely at peace, his broad features relaxed in a gentle and benevolent smile.

  Leaning against the piping of the rail, he reached forward and pulled a black cotton hood from a bulky object at the side of the stage.

  “Meet Galligantus the giant,” he said. “Last chance before he gets his comeuppance.”

  It was the face of a monster, its features twisted into a look of perpetual anger and spotted with boils, its chin covered with grizzled black whiskers like carpet tacks.

  I let out a squeak and took a step backwards.

  “He’s only papier-mâché,” Rupert said. “Don’t be alarmed—he’s not as horrid as he looks. Poor old Galligantus—I’m quite fond of him, actually. We spend a lot of time together up here, waiting for the end of the show.”

  “He’s … marvelous,” I said, swallowing. “But he has no strings.”

  “No, he’s not actually a marionette—no more than a head and shoulders, really. He has no legs. He’s hinged where his waist should be, held upright out of sight just offstage, and—promise you won’t repeat this: It’s a trade secret.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “At the end of the play, as Jack is chopping down the beanstalk, I only have to lift this bar—he’s spring-loaded, you see, and—”

  As he touched one end of it, a little metal bar flew up like a railway signal, and Galligantus tumbled forward, crashing down in front of the cottage, nearly filling the opening of the stage.

  “Never fails to get a gasp from out front,” Rupert said. “Always makes me laugh to hear it. I have to take care,though, that Jack and his poor old mother don’t get in his way. Can’t have them being smashed by a falling giant.”

  Reaching down and seizing Galligantus by the hair, Rupert pulled him upright and locked him back into position.

  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.

  eleven

  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.

&nbs
p; 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 embroidered 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.