Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag
"Not if I see you first." Ned laughed, and like Santa Claus, turned to his work.
As I had feared, Father was standing at the front door glaring at his watch as I slid to a stop.
"Sorry!" I said. He didn't even bother asking.
Through the open door I flew and into the front hall. Daffy was sitting halfway up the west staircase with a book open in her lap. Feely wasn't down yet.
I charged up the east staircase to my bedroom, threw on my Sunday dress like a quick-change artist, scrubbed my face with a cloth, and within two minutes by the clock — barring a bit of tar on the end of my pigtails — I was ready for morning prayer.
It was then that I remembered the chocolates. I'd better retrieve them before Mrs. Mullet began to concoct her dreadful Sunday ices. If I didn't, there would be a host of cheeky questions to answer.
I tiptoed down the back stairs to the kitchen, and peered around the corner. Something nasty was just coming to the boil on the back of the cooker, but there was no one in sight.
I retrieved the chocolates from the ice cabinet and was back upstairs before you could say "Jack and the Beanstalk."
As I opened my laboratory door, my eye was arrested by a glint of glassware, which was reflecting a wayward sunbeam from the window. It was a lovely device called a Kipp's apparatus: one of Tar de Luce's splendid pieces of Victorian laboratory glass.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever," the poet Keats had once written — or so Daffy had told me. There couldn't be a shred of doubt that Keats had written the line while contemplating a Kipp's apparatus: a device used to extract the gas resulting from a chemical reaction.
In form, it was essentially two clear glass balls mounted one above the other, a short tube connecting them, with a stoppered glass gooseneck projecting from the top globe, and a vent tube with a glass stopcock sticking out of the bottom one.
My plan took form instantly: a sure sign of divine inspiration. But I had only minutes to work before Father would come storming in to drag me down the stairs.
First, I took from a drawer one of Father's old razors — one I had nicked for an earlier experiment. I carefully slipped the faded ribbon from the chocolate box, turned it upside down, and made a careful, dead straight incision in the cellophane along the line where the ribbon had lain. A slit in the bottom and each end was all that was needed for the wrapping to open up like an oyster shell. Replacing it would be child's play.
That done, I carefully lifted the lid on the box and peered inside.
Perfect! The creams looked to be in pristine condition. I had suspected that age might have taken its toll — that opening the box might yield a sight similar to the one I had once seen in the churchyard when Mr. Haskins, the sexton, while digging a new grave, had accidentally broken through into another that was already occupied.
But then it had occurred to me that the chocolates, having been hermetically sealed — to say nothing of the preservatives that might have been added — might still seem fresh to the naked eye. Luck was on my side.
I had chosen my method because of its ability to take place at normal temperatures. Although there were other procedures that would have resulted in the same product, the one I selected was this: Into the bottom sphere of the Kipp's apparatus, I measured a quantity of ordinary iron sulfide. Into the top bulb, I carefully tipped a dilute sulfuric acid, using a glass rod to make sure that the liquid went straight into the target vessel.
I watched as the reaction began in the bottom container: a lovely chemical hubbub that invariably takes place when anything containing sulfur — including the human body — decomposes. When I judged it complete, I opened the bottom valve and let the gas escape into a rubber-stoppered flask.
Next came the part I loved best: Taking a large brass-bound glass syringe from one of Uncle Tar's desk drawers (I had often wondered if he used it to inject himself with a seven-percent solution of cocaine, like Sherlock Holmes), I shoved its needle through the rubber stopper, depressed the plunger, and then pulled it up again.
I now had a needle charged with hydrogen sulfide gas. Just one more step to go.
Sticking the needle through the rubber stopper of a test tube, I rammed the plunger down as hard as I could with both thumbs. Only fourteen atmospheric pressures were required to precipitate the gas into a liquid and, as I knew it would, it worked the first time.
I now had a test tube containing perfectly clear hydrogen sulfide in its liquid form. All that remained was to retract the plunger again, and watch it rise up into the glass of the syringe.
Carefully, I injected each chocolate with a drop or two of the stuff, touching the injection site with the glass rod (slightly warmed in the Bunsen burner) to smooth over the little hole.
I had carried out the procedure so perfectly that only the faintest whiff of rotten egg reached my nostrils. Safe inside the gooey centers, the hydrogen sulfide would remain cocooned, invisible, unsuspected, until Feely —
"Flavia!"
It was Father, shouting from the front hall.
"Coming!" I called. "I'll be there in a jiff!"
I replaced the lid of the box and then the cellophane wrapping, giving it two quick dabs of mucilage on the bottom to tack down the almost invisible incision. Then I replaced the ribbon.
As I slowly descended the curving staircase, trying desperately to look sedate and demure, I found the family gathered, waiting, in a knot at the bottom.
"I expect these are for you," I said, holding the box out to Feely. "Someone left them at the door."
She blushed a bit.
"And I have a confession to make," I added. All eyes were on me in a flash: Father's, Aunt Felicity's, Feely's, Daffy's — even Dogger's.
"I was tempted to keep them for myself," I said, eyes downcast, "but it's Sunday, and I really am trying hard to be a better person."
Eager hands outstretched, Feely rose to the bait like a shark to a swimmer's foot.
* FIFTEEN *
WITH FATHER AND AUNT FELICITY leading the way, and Dogger in the rear wearing a black bowler hat, we straggled, as we always did, single file across the fields like ducks to a pond. The green countryside in which we were enfolded seemed as ancient and as settled in the morning light as a canvas by Constable, and I shouldn't have been a bit surprised to find that we were really no more than tiny figures in the background of one of his paintings, such as The Hay Wain, or Dedham Vale.
It was a perfect day. Bright prisms of dew glittered like diamonds in the grass, although I knew that, as the day went on, they would be vaporized by the sun.
Vaporized by the sun! Wasn't that what the universe had in store for all of us? There would come a day when the sun exploded like a red balloon, and everyone on earth would be reduced in less than a camera flash to carbon. Didn't Genesis say as much? For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. This was far more than dull old theology: It was precise scientific observation! Carbon was the Great Leveler — the Grim Reaper.
Diamonds were nothing more than carbon, but carbon in a crystal lattice that made it the hardest known mineral in nature. That was the way we all were headed. I was sure of it. We were destined to be diamonds!
How exciting it was to think that, long after the world had ended, whatever was left of our bodies would be transformed into a dazzling blizzard of diamond dust, blowing out towards eternity in the red glow of a dying sun.
And for Rupert Porson, the process had already begun.
"I doubt very much, Haviland," Aunt Felicity was saying, "if they'll go ahead with the service. It seems hardly right in view of what's happened."
"The Church of England, Lissy," Father replied, "like time and tide, waits for no man. Besides, the fellow died in the parish hall — not in the church proper, as it were."
"Perhaps so," she said with a sniff. "Still, I shall be put out if all this walking is for nothing."
But Father was right. As we walked alongside the stone wall that ran like a tightened belt round the banked-up churchyard, I could see the hood of Inspector Hewitt's blue Vauxhall saloon peeking out discreetly at the end of the lane. The Inspector himself was nowhere in sight as we stepped onto the porch and entered the church.
Morning Prayer was as solemn as a Requiem High Mass. I know that for a fact because we de Luces are Roman Catholics — we are in fact, virtually charter members of the club. We have seen our share of bobbing and ducking. But we regularly attend St. Tancred's because of its proximity, and because the vicar is one of Father's great friends.
"Besides," Father says, "it is one's bounden duty to trade with local firms."
This morning, the church was packed to the rafters. Even the balcony beneath the bell tower was filled to overflowing with people from the village who wanted to be as close as possible, without being unseemly, to the Scene of the Crime.
Nialla was nowhere in sight. I noticed that at once. Nor were Mrs. Mullet, or Alf, her husband. If I knew our Mrs. M, she would, at this very moment, be bombarding Nialla with sausages and questions. "Plying and prying," Daffy called it.
Cynthia was already on her knees, front and center, praying to whatever gods she wanted to bribe before the service began. She was always the first to kneel and always the first to spring to her feet again. I sometimes thought of her as St. Tancred's spiritual coxswain.
For once, because it would be about someone I had known personally, I was quite looking forward to the sermon. The vicar, I expected, would deliver something inspired by Rupert's demise — tasteful but instructional. "In the midst of life we are in death," was my guess.
But when he climbed up into the pulpit at last, the vicar was strangely subdued, and it wasn't entirely due to the fact that Cynthia was running a white-gloved forefinger along the wooden rack that held scattered copies of the Hymnary and the Book of Common Prayer. In fact, the vicar made no reference to the matter at all, until he had finished the sermon.
"In view of the tragic circumstances of last evening," he said in a hushed and solemn voice, "the police have requested that the parish hall be made available to them until their work is complete. Consequently, our customary refreshments, for this morning only, will be served at the vicarage. Those of you who wish to do so are cordially invited to join us after the service. And now may God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost ..."
Just like that! No thoughts on "the stranger in our midst," such as he had delivered when Horace Bonepenny was murdered at Buckshaw. No ruminations on the immortality of the soul ... Nothing.
To be perfectly honest, I felt more than a little cheated.
It is never possible, at least at St. Tancred's, to burst forth from the church into the sunshine like a cork from a bottle. One must always pause at the door to shake hands with the vicar, and to make some obligatory remark about the sermon, the weather, or the crops.
Father chose the sermon, and Daffy and Feely both chose the weather — the swine! — with Daffy commenting on the remarkable clarity of the air and Feely on its warmth. That left me with little choice, and the vicar was already clasping my hand.
"How's Meg getting on?" I asked. To tell the truth, I'd forgotten all about Mad Meg until that very moment, and the question just popped into my head.
Did the vicar's face go slightly white, or had I just fancied it?
He looked to the left and then to the right, very quickly. Cynthia was hovering outside among the gravestones, already halfway along the path to the vicarage.
"I'm afraid I can't tell you," he said. "You see, she was — "
"Vicar! I have a bone to pick with you, you know!"
It was Bunny Spirling. Bunny was one of the Spirlings of Nautilus Old Hall who, as Father once remarked, had gone to the dogs by way of the horses.
Because Bunny was shaped rather like the capital letter D, no one could get past him, and the vicar was now wedged firmly between Bunny's ample tummy and the Gothic door frame. Aunt Felicity and Dogger, I supposed, were still penned up somewhere inside the vestibule, queuing like crewmen on a sunken submarine for their turn at the escape hatch.
As Bunny proceeded to pick his bone (something about tithing and the shocking disrepair of the padding in the kneeling benches), I saw my opportunity to escape.
"Oh, dear," I remarked to Father, "it looks as though the vicar has been detained. I'll run ahead to the vicarage and see if I can make myself useful with the cups and saucers."
There's not a father on earth who has it in him to refuse such a charitable child, and I was off like a hare.
"Morning!" I shouted to Cynthia as I flew past.
I vaulted over the stile and ran round to the front of the vicarage. The door stood open, and I could hear voices in the kitchen at the back of the house. The Women's Institute, I decided: Several of them would have slipped out of the service early to put the kettle on.
I stood in the dim hallway, listening. Time was short, but it would never do to be caught snooping. With one last look down the stretch of polished brown linoleum, I stepped into the vicar's study and closed the door behind me.
Meg, of course, was long gone, but the afghan with which the vicar had covered her yesterday still lay crumpled on the horsehair sofa, as if Meg had only just tossed it aside, got up, and left the room, leaving in her wake — to put it nicely — a woodsy smell: the smell of damp leaves, dark earth, and something-less-than-perfect personal hygiene.
But before I could put my mind to work, the door was flung open.
"What are you doing in here?"
Needless to say, it was Cynthia. She closed the door craftily behind her.
"Oh, hello, Mrs. Richardson," I said. "I just looked in to see if Meg was still here. Not that she would be, of course, but I worry about her, you see, and ..."
When you're stumped for words, use your hands. This was a dodge that had never failed me in the past, and I hoped that it would not now.
I snatched at the wadded afghan and began to fold it. As I did so, something dropped with a barely audible plop to the carpet.
"I just thought I'd help tidy up, then see if they can put me to work in the kitchen.
"Drat!" I said, as I let a corner of the afghan escape my fingers. "Oh, sorry, Mrs. Richardson, I'm afraid I'm quite clumsy. We're so spoiled at Buckshaw, you know."
Awkwardly, I spread out the afghan on the floor, crouched in front of it, and began folding again. Under cover of its colorful woolen squares — and using my body to block Cynthia's view — I ran my fingers across the carpet.
I felt it at once: a cold, flat, metallic object. Using my thumb as a clamp, I pressed it firmly into my palm. As long as I kept my hands moving, all would be well. That was the way the sleight-of-hand magicians worked. I could always pocket the thing later.
