The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag: A Flavia De Luce Mystery

by Alan Bradley

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

  “Sanctified cyanide

  Super-quick arsenic

  Higgledy-piggledy

  Into the soup.

  Put out the mourning lamps

  Call for the coffin clamps

  Teach them to trifle with

  Flavia de Luce!”

  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.

  “Fizz off!” his expression clearly says. “Fizz off and leave me alone!”

  And so they had fizzed off—and so, eventually, had Uncle Tar.

  The laboratory, and all that was in it, was now mine, and had been for a number of years. No one ever came here—which was just as well.

  As I reached into my pocket and pulled out the key, something white fluttered to the floor. It was the handkerchief I had lent Nialla in the churchyard—and it was still vaguely damp to the touch.

  An image rose up in my mind of Nialla as she had been when first I saw her, lying facedown upon a weathered tombstone, hair spread out like a sea of red, her hot tears sizzling in the dust.

  Everything dropped into place like the tumblers in a lock. Of course!

  Vengeance would have to wait.

  With a pair of cuticle scissors I had pinched from Feely’s vanity table, I snipped four damp disks from the linen handkerchief, taking care to avoid the green grass stains I had inflicted upon it, and cutting out only those parts diagonally opposite the stains—the spots into which Nialla had wept.

  These I stuffed—with tweezers—into a test tube, which I then injected with a three-percent solution of sulfosalicylic acid to precipitate the protein. This was the so-called Ehrlich test.

  As I worked, I thought with pleasure of how profoundly the great Alexander Fleming had changed the world when he accidentally sneezed into a petri dish. This was the sort of science that was dear to my heart. Who, after all, can honestly say that they have never sneezed on a culture? It could happen to anyone. It has happened to me.

  After the sneeze, the magnificently observant Fleming noticed that the bacteria in the dish were shrinking back, as if in fear, from the flecks of his spattered mucus. It wasn’t long before he had isolated a particular protein in his snot that repelled bacteria in much the same way that the presence of a dog foaming at the mouth keeps off burglars. He called it lysozyme, and it was this substance for which I was now testing.

  Fortunately, even in high summer, the ancestral halls of Buckshaw were as cold and dank as the proverbial tomb. Room temperature in the east wing, where my laboratory was located—in spite of the heating that had been spitefully installed by warring brothers in only the west wing of the once politically divided house—was never more than sixty degrees Fahrenheit, which, as luck would have it, was precisely the temperature at which lysozyme precipitates when sulfosalicylic acid is added.

  I watched, entranced, as a veil of crystals began to form, their white flakes drifting gently down in the little winter inside the test tube.

  Next, I lit a Bunsen burner, and carefully warmed a beaker of water to seventy degrees. It did not take long. When the thermometer indicated that it was ready, I dipped the bottom of the test tube into the warm bath and swirled it gently.

  As the newly formed precipitate dissolved, I let out a gasp of delight.

  “Flavia.” Father’s faint voice came drifting up to the laboratory. Having traversed the front hall, floated up the curving stair, penetrated the east wing, and wended its way down the long corridor to its southernmost point, it now seeped through my closed door, its force spent, as wispy as if it had come drifting to England all the way from Ultima Thule.

  “Supper,” I thought I heard him call.

  “It’s damnably irritating,” Father said.

  We were seated round the long refectory table, Father at the far end, Daffy and Feely one on each side, and me at the very bottom, at Cape Horn.

  “It’s damnably irritating,” he said again, “for one to sit here and listen to one’s daughter admit that she absconded with one’s eau de cologne for a bloody chemical experiment.”

  No matter if I denied these things or admitted my guilt, Father found it equally irritating. I simply couldn’t win. I had learned that it was best to remain silent.

  “Damn it, Flavia, I just bought the bloody stuff. Can’t very well go up to London in this heat smelling like a shoulder of pork that’s gone off, can I?”

  Father was most eloquent when he was angry. I had nicked the bottle of Roger & Gallet to fill an atomizer with which I needed to spray the house after an experiment involving hydrogen sulfide had gone spectacularly wrong.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, assuming a hangdog look and dabbing at my eye with a napkin. “I’d buy you a new bottle—but I have no money.”

  As if I were a tin duck in a shooting gallery, Feely glared down the long table at me in silent contempt. Daffy’s nose was stuck firmly in Virginia Woolf.

  “But I could make you some,” I said brightly. “It’s really not much more than ethanol, citrus oils, and garden herbs. I’ll ask Dogger to pick me some rosemary and lavender, and I’ll get some oranges and lemons and limes from Mrs. Mullet—”

  “You’ll do no such thing, Miss Flavia,” said Mrs. Mullet, bustling—literally—into the room as she knocked open the door with one of her ample hips and dumped a large tray onto the table.

  “Oh, no!” I heard Daffy whisper to Feely. “It’s ‘the Whiffler’ again.”

  “The Whiffler,” as we called it, was a dessert of Mrs. Mullet’s own devising, which, so far as we could make out, consisted of a sort of clotted green jelly in sausage casings, topped with double Devon cream, and garnished with sprigs of mint and other assorted vegetable refuse. It sat there, quivering obscenely now and then, like some great beastly garden slug. I couldn’t help shivering.

  “Yummy,” Father said. “How very yummy.”

  He meant it ironically, but Mrs. Mullet’s antennae were not attuned to sarcasm.

  “I knew you’d like it,” she said. “It was no more than this morning I was sayin’ to my Alf, ‘It’s been a while since the Colonel and those girls ’ave ’ad one of my lovely jells. They always remarks over my jells” (this was no more than the truth), “and I loves makin’ ’em for the dears.’”

  She made it sound as if her employers had antlers.

  Feely made a noise like a distressed passenger at the rail of the Queen Mary on a November crossing of the North Atlantic.

  “Eat it up, dear,” said Mrs. Mullet, unfazed. “It’s good for you.” And with that she was gone.

  Father fixed me with that gaze of his. Although he had brought the latest issue of The London Philatelist to the table, as he always did, he had not so much as opened it. Father was a keen, not to say rabid, collector of postage stamps, his life wholly given over to gazing through a
magnifying lens at a seemingly endless supply of little colored heads and scenic views. But he was not looking at stamps now—he was looking at me. The omens did not bode well.

  “Where were you all afternoon?” he asked.

  “At church,” I answered promptly and primly and, I hoped, a little devoutly. I was a master at this kind of deflected chitchat.

  “Church?” he asked. He seemed rather surprised. “Why?”

  “I was helping a woman,” I said. “Her van broke down.”

  “Ah,” he said, allowing himself a half-millimeter smile. “And there you were on the spot to offer your skills as a motor mechanic.”

  Daffy grinned at her book, and I knew that she was listening with pleasure to my humiliation. To give her credit, Feely remained totally absorbed in polishing her fingernails on her white silk blouse.

  “She’s with a traveling puppet show,” I said. “The vicar asked them—Rupert Porson, I mean, and Nialla—that’s her name—to put on a performance in the parish hall on Saturday, and he wants me to help.”

  Father deflated slightly. The vicar was one of his few friends in Bishop’s Lacey, and it was unlikely he would deny my services.

  “Rupert is on the television,” I volunteered. “He’s quite famous, actually.”

  “Not in my circles,” Father said, looking at his wristwatch and pushing his chair back from the table.

  “Eight o’clock,” he said. “Thursday.”

  He did not have to explain himself. Without a word, Daffy and Feely and I got up and made dutifully for the drawing room, all in a scattered line like a convoy.

  Thursday evenings were Wireless Night at Buckshaw. Father had recently decreed that we needed to spend more time together as a family, and so it was that Wireless Night had been laid on as a supplement to his regular compulsory lecture series on Wednesdays. This week it was to be the fabulous Fifth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, or “Larry” as I called him whenever I wanted to aggravate Feely. I remembered that Feely had once told us that, on the original printed score, Beethoven’s given name had appeared as “Louis.”

  “Louis Beethoven” sounded to me like the name of one of the supporting gangsters in an Edward G. Robinson film, someone with a sallow, pockmarked face, an alarming twitch, and a Thompson submachine gun in a violin case.

  “Play dat Moonlight Snotta thing by Louie B.,” I’d snarl in my raspy mobster’s voice, wandering into the room when she was practicing at the keyboard. A moment later I’d be in full flight, with Feely in hot pursuit and sheet music floating to the carpet.

  Now, Feely was busily arranging herself in an artistic full-length pose on the chesterfield, like a film star. Daffy dropped down sideways into an overstuffed armchair with her legs hanging out over the side.

  Father switched on the wireless, and sat down in a plain wooden chair, his back ramrod straight. As the valves were warming up, I did a handspring across the carpet, walked back across the room on my hands, and dropped into a cross-legged Buddha position with what I hoped was an inscrutable look on my face.

  Father shot me a withering look, but with the program already beginning, he decided to say nothing.

  After a long and boring spoken introduction by an announcer, which seemed likely to run on into the next century, the Fifth Symphony began at last.

  Duh-duh-duh-DAH.

  I cupped my chin in my hands, propped my elbows on my knees, and gave myself over to the music.

  Father had told us that the appreciation of music was of paramount importance in the education of a decent woman. Those were his exact words, and I had come to appreciate that there was music suitable for meditation, music for writing, and music for relaxation.

  With my eyes half closed, I turned my face towards the windows. From my vantage point on the floor, I could see both ends of the terrace reflected in the glass of the French doors, which stood ajar, and unless my eyes were playing me tricks, something had moved out there: Some dark form had passed by outside the window.

  I didn’t dare leap up to look, though. Father insisted on intent listening. Even so much as a tapping toe would meet instantly with a wicked glare and an accusatory downward-jabbing finger.

  I leaned slightly forward, and saw that a man dressed all in black had just sat down on a bench beneath the rose bushes. He was leaning back, eyes closed, listening to the music as it came floating out through the open doors. It was Dogger.

  Dogger was Father’s Man with a capital M: gardener, chauffeur, valet, estate manager, and odd-job man. As I have said before, he had done it all.

  Dogger’s experiences as a prisoner of war had left something broken inside him: something that from time to time, with a ferocity beyond belief, went ripping and tearing at his brains like some ravenous beast, leaving him a trembling wreck.

  But tonight he was at peace. Tonight he had dressed for the symphony in a dark suit and what might have been a regimental tie, and his shoes had been polished until they shone like mirrors. He sat motionless on the bench beneath the roses, his eyes closed, his face upturned like one of the contented Coptic saints I had seen in the art pages of Country Life, his shock of white hair lit from behind by an unearthly beam from the setting sun. It was pleasant to know that he was there.

  I stretched contentedly, and turned my attention back to Beethoven and his mighty Fifth.

  Although he was a very great musician, and a wizard composer of symphonies, Beethoven was quite often a dismal failure when it came to ending them. The Fifth was a perfect case in point.

  I remembered that the end of the thing, the allegro, was one of those times when Beethoven just couldn’t seem to find the “off” switch.

  Dum … dum … dum-dum-dum, it would go, and you would think it was over.

  But no—

  Dum, dah, dum, dah, dum, dah, dum, dah, dum, dah, dum—DAH dum.

  You’d go to get up and stretch, sighing with satisfaction at the great work you’d just listened to, and suddenly:

  DAH dum. DAH dum. DAH dum. And so forth. DAH dum.

  It was like a bit of flypaper stuck to your finger that you couldn’t shake off. The bloody thing clung to life like a limpet.

  I remembered that Beethoven’s symphonies had sometimes been given names: the Eroica, the Pastorale, and so forth. They should have called this one the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.

  But aside from its sticky ending, I loved the Fifth, and what I loved most about it was the fact that it was what I thought of as “running music.”

  I pictured myself, arms outspread, running pell-mell in the warm sunshine down Goodger Hill, swooping in broad zigzags, my pigtails flying behind me in the wind, bellowing the Fifth at the top of my lungs.

  My pleasant reverie was interrupted by Father’s voice.

  “This is the second movement, now, andante con moto,” he was saying loudly. Father always called out the names of the movements in a voice that was better suited to the drill hall than to the drawing room. “Means ‘at a walking pace, with motion,’” he added, settling back in his chair as if, for the time being, he’d done his duty.

  It seemed redundant to me: How could you have a walking pace without motion? It defied the laws of physics, but then, composers are not like the rest of us.

  Most of them, for instance, are dead.

  As I thought of being dead and of churchyards, I thought of Nialla.

  Nialla! I had almost forgotten about Nialla! Father’s summons to supper had come just as I was completing my chemical test. I formed in my mind an image of the slight cloudiness, the swirling flakes in the test tube, and the thrilling message they bore.

  Unless I was badly mistaken, Mother Goose was pregnant.

  • FIVE •

  I WONDERED IF SHE knew it.

  Even before she had risen up weeping from her limestone slab, I had noticed that Nialla was not wearing a wedding ring. Not that that meant anything: Even Oliver Twist had an unwed mother.

  But then there had be
en the fresh mud on her dress. Although I had registered the fact in some tangled thicket of my mind, I had given it no further thought until now.

  When you stopped to think about it, though, it seemed perfectly obvious that she had piddled in the churchyard. Since it hadn’t rained, the fresh mud on her hem would indicate that she had done so, and hastily, at the northwest corner, away from prying eyes, behind the mound of extra soil that the sexton, Mr. Haskins, kept handy for grave-digging operations.

  She must have been desperate, I decided.

  Yes! That was it! There wasn’t a woman on earth who would choose such an unwelcoming spot (“wretchedly insalubrious,” Daffy would have called it) unless she had no other choice. The reasons were numerous, but the one that leapt immediately to mind was one I had recently come across in the pages of the Australian Women’s Weekly while cooling my heels in the outer chamber of a dentist’s surgery in Farringdon Street. “Ten Early Signs of a Blessed Event,” the article had been called, and the need for frequent urination had been near the top of the list.

  “Fourth movement. Allegro. Key of C major,” Father boomed, as if he were a railway conductor calling out the next station.

  I gave him a brisk nod to show I was paying attention, then dived back into my thoughts. Now then, where was I? Oh, yes—Oliver Twist.

  Once, on a trip to London, Daffy had pointed out to us from the window of our taxicab the precise spot in Bloomsbury where Oliver’s foundling hospital had stood. Although it was now a rather pleasant and leafy square, I had no trouble imagining myself plodding up those long-gone but nevertheless snowdrifted front steps, raising the huge brass door knocker, and applying for refuge. When I told them of my semi-orphan life at Buckshaw with Feely and Daffy, there would be no questions asked. I would be welcomed with open arms.

  London! Damn and blast! I’d completely forgotten. Today was the day I was supposed to have gone up to the City with Father to be fitted for braces. No wonder he was peeved. While I was relishing death in the churchyard and chewing the fat with Nialla and the vicar, Father had almost certainly been steaming and fuming round the house like an over-stoked destroyer. I had the feeling I hadn’t heard the last of it.