The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

by Alan Bradley

  When one lives in a village, the more things are hushed up, the more one hears, and I remembered the undercurrent of gossip that had swept through Bishop’s Lacey at the time, lapping away like the tide at the timbers beneath a pier.

  “They say young Robin Ingleby’s gone and killed himself.” “Robin Ingleby’s been done in by his parents.” “The little lad’s been slaughtered by Satanists. Mark my words—”

  Most of these theories had been leaked to me by Mrs. Mullet, and I thought of them now as I approached the tower, gazing up in wonder at its myriad of openings.

  As that monk called the lector had done in the monasteries of the Middle Ages, Daffy often read aloud to us as we ate our meals. We had recently been treated to Henry Savage Landor’s description, in Across Coveted Lands, of the Towers of Silence, in Persia, on top of which the Parsees placed corpses in a sitting position, with a stick under the chin to keep them upright. When the crows arrived to squabble over the body, it was considered a ticket to Heaven if the right eyeball was the first one consumed. The left was not quite so auspicious.

  I could not help thinking of this now, and of the author’s account of the curious circular pigeon towers of Persia, each with a deep central pit for the collection of guano, whose production was the sole reason for keeping the birds.

  Could there be, I wondered, some strange connection between towers, birds, death, and corruption? As I paused there for a moment, trying to think what it might be, a peculiar sound came drifting from the tower.

  At first I thought it might be the muttering and cooing away to themselves of doves, high above my head in the cote. Or was it the wind?

  It seemed too sustained to be either of these, rising and falling like the sound of a ghostly air-raid siren, almost at the threshold of hearing.

  The sagging wooden door stood ajar, and I found that I could slip through easily into the hollow center of the tower. Tock brushed past my ankles, then vanished into the shadows in search of mice.

  The sharp reek of the place slapped me in the face: the unmistakable chemical smell of dove’s guano, which the great Humphry Davy had found to yield, by distillation, carbonate of ammonia, with a residuum of carbonate of lime and common salt, a finding I had once verified by experiment in my chemical laboratory at Buckshaw.

  Far above my head, countless beams of sunshine slanting in through the open ports dappled the curving walls with dots of yellow light. It was as if I had stepped into the colander in which some giant strained his soup bones.

  Here, inside, the wailing sound was even louder, a whirlpool of noise amplified by the circular walls, of which I was the very center. I couldn’t have called out—even if I’d dared.

  At the center of the room, pivoting on an ancient wooden post, was a moveable scaffold, somewhat like a library ladder, which must at one time have been used by their keepers to gain access to the doomed little birds.

  The thing groaned fearsomely as I stepped onto it.

  Up I went, inch by inch, hanging on for dear life, stretching my arms and legs to make impossible giant steps from one creaking crosspiece to the next. I looked down only once, and it made my head swim.

  The higher I climbed, the louder the keening sound became, its echoes now coming together in a chorus of voices that seemed to congregate in some wild, high lament.

  Above me, and to my left, was a vaulted opening that gave onto a niche larger than the others. By standing on tiptoe and seizing the brick ledge with my fingertips, I was able to pull myself up until my eyes were level with the floor of this grotto.

  Inside, a woman knelt, her back towards me. She was singing. Her thin voice echoed from the bricks and swirled round my head:

  “The robin’s gone afloat.

  The wind that rocks him to and fro

  With a soft cradle- song and slow

  Pleases him in the ebb and flow,

  Rocking him in a boat.”

  It was Mrs. Ingleby!

  In front of her, on an overturned box, a candle burned, adding its smoky odor to the stifling heat of the little brick cave. To her right was propped up a black-and-white photograph of a child: her dead son, Robin, who grinned happily at the camera, his shock of blond hair bleached nearly white by the sun of long-gone summer days. To her left, lying on its side, as if it were hauled up on the beach to be cleaned of barnacles, was a toy sailboat.

  I held my breath. She mustn’t know I was here. I would climb down slowly, and—

  My legs began to shake. I hadn’t much of a grip, and my leather soles were already slipping on the weathered wooden frame. As I started to slide back, Mrs. Ingleby began her wail again, this time another song and, oddly, in another voice: a harsh, swashbuckling, piratical gargle:

  “So, though bold Robin’s gone,

  Yet his heart lives on,

  And we drink to him with three times three.”

  And she let out a horrible, snuffling laugh.

  I pulled myself up on tiptoe again, just in time to see her twist the cork from a tall clear bottle, and take a quick, bobbing swig. It looked to me like gin, and it was plain to see that she had been at it for some time.

  With a long, shuddering sigh, she pushed the bottle back under a pile of straw and lit a new candle from the dwindling flame of the one that was dying. With drips of flowing wax, she stuck it in place beside its exhausted fellow.

  And now she began another song, this one in a darker minor key; sung more slowly, and more like a dirge, pronouncing every word with an awful, exaggerated clarity:

  “Robin-Bad-fellow, wanting such a supper,

  Shall have his breakfast with a rope and butter

  To which let all his fellows be invited

  That with such deeds of darkness are delighted.”

  Rope and butter? Deeds of darkness?

  I suddenly realized that my hair was standing completely on end, the way it did when Feely stroked her black ebonite comb on her cashmere sweater and brought it close to the nape of my neck. But while I was still trying to calculate how quickly I could scramble back down the wooden frame and make a run for it, the woman spoke: “Come up, Flavia,” she said. “Come up and join in my little requiem.”

  Requiem? I thought. Do I really want to scramble up into a brick cell with a woman who is at best more than a little inebriated, and at worst a homicidal maniac?

  I hauled myself up into the gloom.

  As my eyes became accustomed to the candlelight, I saw that she wore a white cotton blouse with short puffed sleeves and a low peasant-girl neckline. With her raven black hair and her brightly colored dirndl skirt, she might easily be taken for a gypsy fortune-teller.

  “Robin’s gone,” she said.

  Those two words nearly broke my heart. Like everyone else in Bishop’s Lacey, I had always thought that Grace Ingleby lived in her own private, insulated world: a world where Robin still played in the dusty dooryard, chasing flustered hens from fence to fence, dashing into the kitchen now and then to beg a sweet.

  But it was not true: She had stood as I had done, beside the small gravestone in the churchyard of St. Tancred’s,and read its simple inscription: Robin Tennyson Ingleby, 1939–1945, Asleep in the Lamb.

  “Robin’s gone,” she said again, and now it was almost a moan.

  “Yes,” I said, “I know.”

  Motes of dust floated like little worlds in the pencil beams of sunlight that penetrated the chamber’s gloom. I sat down in the straw.

  As I did so, a pigeon clattered up from its nest, and out through the little arched window. My heart almost stopped. I had thought the pigeons long gone, and I almost sat on the stupid thing.

  “I took him to the seaside,” Grace went on, caressing the sailboat, oblivious to the bird. “Robin loved the seaside, you know.”

  I pulled my knees up under my chin and wrapped my arms around them.

  “He played in the sand. Built a sand castle.”

  There was a long silence, and I saw that she had drifted off somew
here.

  “Did you have ice cream?” I asked, as if it were the most important question in the world. I couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Ice cream?” She nodded her head. “They gave it to us in paper cups … little pointed paper cups. We wanted vanilla—we both loved vanilla, Robin and I. Funny thing, though …” She sighed. “When we ate it, there was a taste of chocolate … as if they hadn’t rinsed the scoop properly.”

  I nodded wisely.

  “That sometimes happens,” I said.

  She reached out and touched the sailboat again, running her fingertips over its smooth painted hull. And then she blew out the candle.

  We sat for a while in silence among the spatterings of sunshine that seeped into the red brick cave. This must be what the womb is like, I thought.

  Hot. Waiting for something to happen.

  “Why are you here?” she said at last. I noticed that she was not slurring her words as much as before.

  “The vicar sent some people to camp in Jubilee Field. He asked me to show them the way.” She seized my arm.

  “Does Gordon know?” she demanded.

  “I think he does,” I said. “He told the vicar it would be all right if they camped at the bottom of the lane.”

  “The bottom of the lane …” She let out a long, slow breath. “Yes, that would be all right, wouldn’t it?”

  “It’s a traveling puppet show,” I said. “Porson’s Puppets. They’re putting on a performance Saturday. The vicar’s asked them. Their van’s broken down, you see, and …”

  I was gripped by a sudden inspiration.

  “Why don’t you come?” I asked. “Everyone in the village will be there. You could sit with me, and—”

  Mrs. Ingleby was staring at me with horror.

  “No!” she said. “No! I couldn’t do that.”

  “Perhaps you and Mr. Ingleby could both come, and—”

  “No!”

  She scrambled to her feet, raising a thick cloud of chaff, and for a few moments, as the stuff swirled round us, we stood perfectly still, like figures in a snow-globe paperweight.

  “You’d better go,” she said suddenly, in a throaty voice. “Please go now.”

  Without a word I groped my way to the opening, my eyes streaming from the dust. With surprisingly little effort,I found myself able to drop down onto the wooden vane, and begin the long climb down.

  I have to admit that Jack and the Beanstalk crossed my mind.

  THE FARMYARD WAS DESERTED. Dieter had gone down the lane with Rupert and Nialla to the river, and by now they had probably already made camp. If I was lucky, I might be just in time for a cup of tea. I felt as if I’d been up all night.

  What was the time, anyway?

  God blind me with a fish fork! Aunt Felicity’s train was due to arrive at five past ten and I’d completely forgotten about her! Father would have my guts for garters.

  Even if Aunt Felicity wasn’t already fuming on the platform and frothing at the mouth, how on earth was I ever going to get to Doddingsley? It was a good six miles from Culverhouse Farm, even as the crow flies, and as far as I knew, I wasn’t about to sprout wings.

  Down the lane I ran, windmilling my arms as if that could propel me to a greater speed. Fortunately, it was downhill all the way, and at the bottom, I could see Rupert’s van parked beneath the willows.

  Dieter had the Austin’s hood open and was poking around in its innards. Nialla was hanging a shirt on the bushes to dry. Gordon Ingleby was nowhere in sight, nor was Sally Straw.

  “First chance I’ve had to break out the old Sunlight,” Nialla told me. “Dieter’s having a peek at the motor. Whatever took you so long?”

  “What time is it?” I pleaded.

  “Search me,” she replied. “Rupert’s the only one who owns a watch, and he’s taken himself off somewhere.”

  As he always does. She did not actually speak the words, but her meaning was as clear as if she’d shouted them from the top of Big Ben.

  “Dieter?” I asked.

  Dieter shook his head. “Sorry. It was for such a long time forbidden to possess one….”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but I have to meet a train.”

  Before they could answer, I was off along the towpath at top speed. It was an easy run along the old embankment, which skirted the southern edge of Jubilee Field, and within surprisingly few minutes, I was leaping across the stepping-stones to the churchyard.

  The clock on the church tower showed twenty minutes to four, which was impossible: The stupid thing had probably stopped in the reign of Henry the Eighth and nobody had cared enough to set it going again.

  Gladys, my trusty BSA, was exactly where I had left her at the side of the parish hall. I pushed off for Buckshaw.

  As I raced past the corner of Spindle Lane, the clock set into the wall of the Thirteen Drakes showed that the time was either noon or midnight. I’m afraid I let slip rather a rude word.

  Out of the village I went like the wind, southwestwards towards Buckshaw, until I came at last to the Mulford Gates, where Clarence Mundy sat waiting, perched on one of the wings of his taxicab, dragging thirstily at a cigarette. By the snowfall of butts on the road, I could tell that it was not his first.

  “Hullo, Clarence,” I said. “How’s the time?”

  “Ten hundred hours,” he said, glancing at his elaborate military wristwatch. “Better climb aboard.”

  He let in the clutch as I did so, and we were off like a skyrocket.

  As we tore along through lanes and hedgerows, Clarence worked the gear stick like a snake charmer grappling with a wilful cobra, seizing its head every few seconds and shoving it to some new quarter of the compass. Outside the windows, the countryside streamed past in an ever-accelerating blur of green, until I wanted to scream “Yarooh!”—but I restrained myself.

  During the war, Clarence had flown the jumbo-sized Sunderland flying boats, endlessly patrolling the vast Atlantic for German U-boats, and, as we fairly flew along between the pressing hedgerows, he seemed still to imagine himself at the controls of one of these behemoths. At any moment, I thought, he would pull back on the steering wheel and we would lift off into the air. Perhaps, during our ascent into the summer sky, we might even catch a glimpse of Harriet.

  Before she had married Father, Harriet had piloted her own de Havilland Gipsy Moth, which she had named Blithe Spirit, and I sometimes imagined her floating alone up there in the sunshine, dipping in and out of the puffy valleys of cumulus, with no one to answer to except the wind.

  Clarence skidded to a stop at one end of the Doddingsley railway platform as the train steamed in at the other.

  “Ten-oh-five,” he said, glancing at wristwatch. “On the dot.”

  As I knew she would be, the first passenger to step down from the carriage was Aunt Felicity. In spite of the heat, she was wearing a long, light-colored motoring coat and a great solar topee, which was tied under her chin with a broad blue ribbon. Various bits protruded from her person in all directions: hatpins, umbrella handles, rolled-up magazines, newspapers, shooting sticks, and so forth. She looked like a walking bird’s nest, or, rather, more like an ambulatory haystack.

  “Fetch my luggage, Clarence,” she said, “and mind the alligator.”

  “Alligator?” Clarence said, his eyebrows shooting up.

  “The bag,” said Aunt Felicity. “It’s new from Harrods, and I won’t have it ruined by a clumsy rustic on some godforsaken railway platform.

  “Flavia,” she said, “you may carry my hot-water bottle.”

  eight

  DOGGER MET US AT THE FRONT DOOR. HE FISHED A cloth change purse from his pocket and raised his eyebrows at Clarence.

  “Two bob,” Clarence said, “going and coming—including the wait.”

  As Dogger counted out the coins, Aunt Felicity leaned back and ran her eyes over the façade of the house.

  “Shocking,” she said. “The place grows shabbier before one’s very eyes.”<
br />
  I did not feel it my place to tell her that, when it came to expenses, Father was nearly at his wit’s end. The house had actually belonged to Harriet, who had died young, unexpectedly, and without troubling to make a will. Now, because of what Father called “complications,” it seemed unlikely that we would be able to remain at Buckshaw for much longer.

  “Take my bags to my room, Dogger,” Aunt Felicity said, returning her gaze to earth, “and mind the alligator.”

  “Yes, Miss Felicity,” Dogger said, a wicker hamper already under each arm and a suitcase in each hand. “Harrods, I believe.”

  “Aunt Felicity’s arrived,” I said, slouching into the kitchen. “I’m suddenly not very hungry. I think I’ll just have a lettuce sandwich and eat it in my room.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Mrs. Mullet said. “I’ve gone and made a nice aspic salad, with beets and that.”

  I pulled a horrid face, but when she glanced at me unexpectedly, I remembered Nialla’s dodge and cleverly transformed my grimace into a yawn, covering my mouth with my hand.

  “Sorry. I was up early this morning,” I said.

  “So was I. More’s the pity.”

  “I was at Ingleby’s farm,” I volunteered.

  “So I heard,” she said.

  Petrify the woman! Was there nothing that escaped her ears?

  “Mrs. Richardson told me you was helpin’ them puppet people, her with her Judas hair, like, and him with his gampy leg.”

  Cynthia Richardson. I should have guessed. Obviously, the presence of the puppeteers had loosened the purse-string mouth.

  “Her name’s Nialla,” I said, “and his is Rupert. She’s quite a nice person, actually. She makes scrapbooks—or she used to, at least.”

  “That’s all very well, I’m sure, dear, but you’ll have to—”

  “I met Mrs. Ingleby, too,” I persisted. “In fact, we had quite an interesting chat.”

  Mrs. Mullet’s polishing of the salad plates slowed—and stopped. She had taken the bait.

  “A chat? Her? Ha! That’ll be the thirsty Friday!

  “Poor soul,” she added, as a quick afterthought.