The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag - Alan Bradley

Well! I thought. Well, well, well, well, well!

* TWENTY-THREE *

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT pottering with poisons that clarifies the mind. When the slightest slip of the hand could prove fatal, one's attention is forced to focus like a burning-glass upon the experiment, and it is then that the answers to half-formed questions so often come swarming to mind as readily as bees coming home to the hive.

With a good dollop of sulfuric acid already decanted into a freshly washed flask and warmed slightly, I gingerly added a glob of crystalline jelly, and watched in awe as it slowly dissolved, quivering and squirming in the acid bath like a translucent squidling.

I had extracted the stuff, with water and alcohol, from the roots of a Carolina jessamine plant (Gelsemium sempervirens) that, to my delight, I had discovered blooming blissfully away in the corner of the greenhouse, its flowers like little trumpets sculpted from fresh butter.

The plant was native to the Americas, Dogger had told me, but had been brought home to English greenhouses by travelers; this particular specimen by my mother, Harriet.

I had asked if I could have it for my laboratory, and Dogger had readily agreed.

The root contained a lovely alkaloid called gelsemine, which had lurked undetected inside the plant since the Creation, until it was teased out in 1870 by a man from Philadelphia with the charming name of Wormley, who administered the bitter poison to a rabbit, which turned a complete backwards somersault and perished in twenty minutes.

Gelsemine was a killer whose company I much enjoyed.

And now came the magic!

Into the liquid I introduced, on the tip of a knife, a small dose of K2Cr2O7, or potassium dichromate, whose red salts, illuminated by a fortuitous beam of sunlight from the casement window, turned it the livid cherry red hue of a carbon monoxide victim's blood.

But this was only the beginning! There was more to come.

Already the cherry brilliance was fading, and the solution was taking on the impressive violet color of an old bruise. I held my breath, and--yes!--here it was, the final phase of yellow-green.

Gelsemine was one of chemistry's chameleons, shifting color with delicious abandon, and all without a trace of its former hue.

People were like that, too.

Nialla, for instance.

On the one hand, she was captive to a traveling puppeteer; a young woman who, other than the baby she was now carrying, had no family to speak of; a young woman who allowed herself to be beaten by a semi-invalid lover; a young woman now left with no money and no visible means of support. And yet, in rather a complicated way that I did not entirely understand, she did not have my complete sympathy.

Was it because she had run away from the scene of the crime, so to speak, and hidden in the coach house at Buckshaw? I could see her wanting to be alone, but she had hardly chosen the best time to do so.

Where was she now? I wondered. Had Inspector Hewitt arrested her and dragged her to a cell in Hinley?

I wrote Nialla on a scrap of paper.

And then there was Mutt Wilmott: a larger-than-life character, who seemed to have stepped right out of an Orson Welles film. Not to put too fine a point on it: Mutt had arrived, Rupert had died; Mutt had vanished after quarreling with Rupert, and was next seen arranging to have the body in question shipped up to London for a state funeral.

Was Mutt an assassin, hired by the BBC? Had Rupert's set-to with the mysterious Tony pushed "Auntie"--and her Director General--too far? Was Rupert's messy end on the stage of a rustic puppet theater really no more than the conclusion of a bitter contractual dispute?

What about Grace Ingleby? To be honest, the dark little woman gave me the creeps. Her shrine to a dead child in an abandoned birdhouse was enough to spook anyone--and now Mrs. Mullet was hinting that the farmer's wife was more than just a landlady to Dieter.

And Dieter! For all his Nordic godliness and passion for English literature, it seemed that he had conspired with his captors to grow and supply cannabis to what Sally Straw had called "a regular little army of others." Who were they? I wondered.

Rupert, of course, had been chief among them, and had visited the Ingleby farm with the regularity of a tram-car for many years. He had been a ladies' man--there was no doubt about it (Sally again). Of whom had he run afoul? Who wanted him dead badly enough to actually do him in?

As for Sally, both Rupert and Dieter had been keen on her. Had Rupert been shoved off into eternity by a rival in love?

Sally seemed central: She had been at the Ingleby farm for years. It was clear that she had a crush on Dieter, although whether her passions were wholly returned was another matter entirely.

And then there was Gordon Ingleby. Gordon the linen-draped saint who did for those in pain what no doctor was willing to do; Gordon the market gardener; Gordon the father of the dead child in the woods.

To say nothing of Mad Meg, who had been in Gibbet Wood when Robin died, or at least, not long afterwards.

And Cynthia--dear Cynthia Richardson, the vicar's wife, whose only passion was her hatred of sin. The sudden appearance of a pair of promiscuous puppeteers who proposed to put on a show in her husband's parish hall must have seared her soul like the lake of fire in the Book of Revelation.

In spite of all that, Cynthia's soul was no hotbed of Christian charity. What was it Meg had said when I asked about her nap at the vicarage? That Cynthia had taken away her bracelet and then turned her out because she was dirty. No doubt she was referring to Nialla's butterfly compact, but if that were the case, why had I found it tangled in the afghan in the study? Had Cynthia taken the compact from Meg and then, caught in the act by one of the dozens of villagers milling about the vicarage, hidden it away to be retrieved for her own later use?

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.

I read the books that she had owned, rode her bicycle, sat in her Rolls-Royce; Father had once, in a distracted moment, called me by her name. Even Aunt Felicity had put aside her gorgon manner long enough to tell me how much like Harriet I was.

But had she meant it as a compliment? Or a warning?

Most of the time I felt like an imposter; a changeling; a sackcloth-and-ashes stand-in for that golden girl who had been snatched up by Fate and dashed down a mountainside in an impossibly distant land. Everyone, it seemed, would be so much happier if Harriet were brought back to life and I were done away with.

These thoughts, and others, tumbled in my mind like autumn leaves in a millstream as I walked along the dusty lane towards the village. Without even noticing them, I had passed the carved griffins of the Mulford Gates, which marked the entrance to Buckshaw, and I was now within sight of Bishop's Lacey.

As I slouched along, a bit dejectedly (all right, I admit it--I was furious at Aunt Felicity for making such a chump of Dogger!) I shoved my hand into my pocket and my fingers came in contact with a round, metallic object: something that hadn't been there before--a coin.

"Hullo!" I said. "What's this?"

I pulled it out and looked at it. As soon as I saw the thing, I knew what it was and how it had made its way into my pocket. I turned it over and had a jolly good squint at the reverse.