The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

by Alan Bradley

  Although Trollope had not specifically mentioned it, there was no doubt in my mind that Mrs. Proudie had been brought up in a home with two older sisters who treated her like dirt.

  Why did Ophelia and Daphne despise me so? Was it because Harriet had hated me, as they claimed? Had she, while suffering from “the baby blues,” stepped off into thin air from a mountain in Tibet?

  In short, the question was this: Had I killed her?

  Did Father hold me responsible for her death?

  Somehow the sparkle had gone out of the day as I plodded glumly along the lanes. Even the thought of Rupert’s murder and its messy aftermath did little to cheer me.

  I gave a couple of toots on the willow whistle, but it sounded like a baby cuckoo, fallen from its nest, crying woefully for its mother. I shoved the thing into the bottom of my pocket and trudged on.

  I needed some time alone—some time to think.

  SEEN FROM THE MULFORD GATES, Buckshaw always had about it a rather sad and abandoned air, as if some vital essence were missing. But now, as I walked along beneath the chestnuts, something was different. I spotted it at once. Several people were standing on the gravel sweep in the forecourt, and one of them was Father, who was pointing at the roof. I broke into a run, dashing across the lawn like a sprinter, chest out, fists going like pistons at my side.

  I needn’t have bothered. As I drew closer, I saw that it was only Aunt Felicity and Daffy, both standing on one side of Father, with Feely at the other.

  At her right hand stood Dieter. I couldn’t believe my eyes!

  Feely’s eyes were sparkling, her hair was shining in the summer sun, and her smile was dazzlingly perfect. In her gray skirt and canary yellow sweater set, with a single strand of Harriet’s cultured pearls draped round her neck, she was more than vibrant … she was beautiful—I could have throttled her.

  “Ruskin found square drip moldings abominable,” Father was saying, “but he was being facetious, of course. Even the best of our British sandstone is but a pale mockery of the fine-grained marble one finds in Greece.”

  “Quite true, sir,” Dieter agreed. “Although, was it not your Charles Dickens who thought that the Greeks used marble only because of the way it took paint and color? Still, the style and the material mean nothing when the molding is placed under a portico. It is the architect’s joke, isn’t it?”

  Father considered for a moment, rubbing his hands together behind his back as he stood staring at the front of the house.

  “By Jove!” he said at last. “You may have hit on something.”

  “Ah, Flavia!” Aunt Felicity said as she spotted me. “Think of the Devil and she shall appear. I should like to paint presently and you shall be my assistant. I relish the brushwork but I simply can’t bear the sticky tubes and the dirty rags.”

  Daffy rolled her eyes and edged slowly away from her mad old aunt, fearing, I think, that she was going to be put to work as well. I relented enough to ask her one question. There were times when curiosity trumped even pride.

  “What’s he doing here?” I whispered into her ear, giving a slight tip of my head towards Dieter.

  Of course I already knew, but it was a rare opportunity to talk sister-to-sister without rancor.

  “Aunt Felicity insisted. Said he should walk us home and stay to tea.

  “I think she’s got her eye on him,” she added with a coarse snicker.

  Although I’m quite accustomed to Daffy’s excesses, I must admit that I was shocked.

  “For Feely,” she explained.

  Of course! No wonder Father was exercising his rusty charm! One daughter fewer would mean a one-third reduction in the number of surplus mouths he had to feed. Not that Feely ate that much—she didn’t—but coupled with a similar reduction in the dose of daily insolence he would need to put up with, palming her off on Dieter was well worth the effort.

  Then, too, I thought, there would be an end to the vast outlays of cash for the constant re-silvering of Buckshaw’s looking glasses. Feely was hell on mirrors.

  “And your father …” Father was saying to Dieter.

  I knew it! He was already greasing the skids!

  “… I believe you said something about books?”

  “He’s a publisher, sir,” Dieter said. “He’s the ‘Schrantz’ of Schrantz and Markel. You may not have heard of them but they publish in German, editions of—”

  “Of course! The Luxus Ausgaben Schrantz und Markel. Their Pliny—the one with the Dürer plates—is quite remarkable.”

  “Come along, Flavia,” Aunt Felicity said. “You know how tiresome it is to paint brickwork once it’s in shadow.”

  FROM A DISTANCE, I MUST have looked like a sinking galleon as, with Aunt Felicity’s easel over my shoulder, a stretched canvas under each arm, and a wooden box of paints and brushes in each hand, I waded barefoot through the shallow waters of the ornamental lake, towards the island upon which the folly was situated. Aunt Felicity brought up the rear, carrying a three-legged stool. In her tweed suit, floppy hat, and smock, she reminded me of photos I had seen in Country Life of Winston Churchill dabbling with his paints at Chartwell. The only thing missing was the cigar.

  “I’ve wanted for ages to render the south front as it was in the days of dear Uncle Tar,” she shouted, as if I were on the far side of the world.

  “NOW, THEN, DEAR,” SHE SAID, when I had finally set up the painting gear to her satisfaction, “it’s time for a quiet talk. Out here, at least, we shall not be overheard—save by the bees and the water rats.”

  I looked at her in astonishment.

  “I expect you think I know nothing about the kind of life you lead.”

  This was the sort of statement of which I had learned to be exceptionally wary: Its implications were immense and, until I saw which way the conversational wind was blowing, I knew that it was best to keep quiet.

  “On the contrary,” she went on, “I know a great deal about what you must feel: your loneliness, your isolation, your older sisters, your preoccupied father …”

  I was about to say that she must be mistaken, when I suddenly saw that the coming chat could be turned to my advantage.

  “Yes,” I said, staring off over the water and blinking, as if to stop a tear, “it can be difficult at times….”

  “That’s precisely what your mother used to say about living at Buckshaw. I remember her coming here summers, as a girl, as had I before her.”

  Picturing Aunt Felicity as a girl was not an easy task.

  “Oh, don’t look so shocked, Flavia. In my youth, I used to run wild here on the island like a Pawnee princess. ‘Moo-noo-tonowa,’ I called myself. Pinched nice bits of beef from the larder and pretended I was cooking dog over a campfire lighted with rubbing sticks and snuff.

  “Later, even in spite of the great difference in our ages, Harriet and I were always the greatest of chums. ‘The Wretched Outcasts’ we used to call ourselves. We would come out here to the island to talk. Once, when we hadn’t seen one another for a very long time, we sat out all night in the folly, wrapped in blankets, jabbering away until the sun came up. Uncle Tar sent Pierrepoint, the old butler, to bring us Plasmon biscuits and calf’s-foot jelly. He had spotted us from the windows of his laboratory, you see, and—”

  “What was she like,” I interrupted. “Harriet, I mean.”

  Aunt Felicity made a dark slash of color on her canvas, which I guessed was supposed to represent the trunk of one of the chestnuts in the drive.

  “She was exactly like you,” she answered. “As you very well know.”

  I gulped. “She was?”

  “Of course she was! How could you not be aware of it?”

  I could have filled her ears with the horrid tales that Feely and Daffy had told me, but I chose not to.

  “Zipped lips save ships.”

  Dogger had said that to me once when I asked him a rather personal question about Father. “Zipped lips save ships,” he had answered, turning back to his dea
dheading, and I hadn’t the nerve to ask which of the three of us were the mutes and which the vessels.

  I had mumbled something unsatisfactory then, and now I found myself doing it again.

  “Good heavens, child! If you want to see your mother, you have no more than to look in the glass. If you want to know her character, look inside yourself. You’re so much like her it gives me the willies.”

  Well, then.

  “Uncle Tar used to invite us down to Buckshaw for the summer,” she went on, either unaware of or choosing to ignore my burning face.

  “He had some extraordinary idea that the presence of young females in the house held it together in some abstruse chemical fashion—something about bonds and the unsuspected dual gender of the carbon molecule. Mad as a March hare, Tar de Luce was, but a lovely old gentleman, for all that.

  “Harriet, of course, was his favorite; perhaps because she never grew weary of sitting on a tall stool in that stinking laboratory, and taking down notes as he dictated them. ‘My whiz-bang assistant,’ he used to call her. It was a private joke: Harriet told me once that he was referring to a spectacular experiment gone awry that might have wiped Buckshaw off the map—to say nothing of Bishop’s Lacey and beyond. But she swore me to silence. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  “He was investigating the first-order decomposition of nitrogen pentoxide,” I said. “It was work that led eventually to the development of the atomic bomb. There are some letters among his papers from Professor Arrhenius of Stockholm that make it quite clear what they were onto.”

  “And you, as it were, are left to carry the torch.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “To carry on the glorious name of de Luce,” she said. “Wherever it may lead you.”

  This was an interesting thought; it had never occurred to me that one’s name could be a compass.

  “And where might that be?” I asked, somewhat slyly.

  “You must listen to your inspiration. You must let your inner vision be your Pole Star.”

  “I try,” I said. I must sound to Aunt Felicity like the village idiot.

  “I know you do, dear. I’ve heard several reports of your doings. For instance there was that horrid business with Bunpenny, or whatever his name was.”

  “Bonepenny,” I said. “Horace. He died just over there.”

  I pointed across the lake to the wall of the kitchen garden.

  Aunt Felicity plowed on regardless. “You must never be deflected by unpleasantness. I want you to remember that. Although it may not be apparent to others, your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road. You must follow it, Flavia.”

  “Even when it leads to murder?” I asked, suddenly bold.

  With her brush extended to arm’s length, she painted in the dark shadow of a tree. “Even when it leads to murder.”

  We sat for a few moments in silence, Aunt Felicity dabbing away at her canvas with no particularly exciting results, and then she spoke again: “If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world.”

  I wanted to throw my arms around this dotty old bat in her George Bernard Shaw costume and hug her until the juices ran out. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  I was a de Luce.

  “Thank you, Aunt Felicity,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “You’re a brick.”

  seventeen

  WE WERE AT TEA IN THE LIBRARY. MRS. MULLET HAD come in and gone out, leaving behind a vast tray of Jenny Lind cake and currant scones. To my whispered question about Nialla, she had replied with a shrug, and wrinkled her brow to remind me that she was on duty.

  Feely was at the piano. It hadn’t taken more than three minutes for Dieter to ask politely which of us played, and Feely had replied with her blushes. Now, sufficiently coaxed and implored, she was just beginning the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata.

  It was a lovely piece and, as the music faded away and then welled up again, like longings in the heart, I remembered that it was the music Laurie Laurence had played in Little Women, as Jo, who had refused his proposal, walked away outside his window, and I wondered if Feely had chosen it subconsciously.

  Father was dreamily tapping a forefinger against the edge of his saucer, which he held beautifully balanced in his hands. There were times when, for no apparent reason, I felt a huge tidal wave of love—or at least respect—for him, and this was one of them.

  In the corner, Daffy was curled up like a cat in an armchair, still in the clutches of The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Aunt Felicity sat contentedly near the window, doing something intricate with a pair of needles and a ball of sulfur yellow wool.

  Suddenly I noticed that Dieter was biting the corner of his lip, and there was a glistening at the corner of his eye. He was almost in tears, and trying not to show it.

  How cruel it was of that witch, Feely, to choose something so sad and so evocative: a melody by Beethoven that could only serve as a bitter reminder to our German guest of the homeland he had left behind.

  But at that instant, Feely broke off abruptly and leapt up from the keyboard.

  “Oh!” she gasped, “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to—”

  And I could see that for probably the first time in her life, she was genuinely distressed. She flew to Dieter’s side and held out her handkerchief—and to his eternal credit, he took it.

  “No. It is I who should be sorry,” he said, wiping at his eyes. “It’s just that—”

  “Dieter,” I found my mouth suddenly blurting, “tell us how you came to be a prisoner of war. I’ve been simply dying to ask you. I’m frightfully keen on history, you know.”

  You could have heard a pin drop in Antarctica.

  “Flavia!” Father finally managed—but only when it was far too late to have the effect that he intended.

  But Dieter was already smiling. It seemed to me he was relieved to have got past the dampness.

  “But of course!” he said. “For five years I have been waiting for someone to ask me—but no one ever has. You English are all such perfect gentlemen—even the ladies!”

  Aunt Felicity shot him a look of beaming approval.

  “But,” Dieter added, “I must warn you—it’s a long story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  Daffy closed her book and set it aside. “I adore long stories,” she said. “In fact, the longer, the better.”

  Dieter took up a stance on the rug in front of the fireplace, his elbow on the mantelpiece. You could almost picture him at a hunting lodge in the Black Forest.

  “Well,” he said, “I think you could safely say that I was shot down in England because of the Brontë sisters.”

  Shot down? This was something new! I was all agog.

  Daffy’s eyes were instantly like china doorknobs, and even Father sat up straight.

  “Good Lord!” he muttered.

  “I was spoiled, as a boy,” Dieter began, “and I must admit to it. I was an only child, brought up in a well-to-do household by a Kinderpflegerin—a nursery governess.

  “My father, as I have said, was a publisher, and my mother an archaeologist. Although they loved me well enough, I suppose, they were both so wrapped up in their own worlds that everything having to do with ‘the boy’ was left up to Drusilla. That was the governess’s name—Drusilla.

  “Drusilla was a very great reader of English novels. She consumed books like a whale eats krill. You never saw her without a book in her hand—in fact, she taught me to read while I was still sucking my thumb.

  “Drusilla had read all of the Brontë sisters’ books, of course: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Shirley, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—she had them almost by heart.

  “I was half in love with her, I think, and I thought that I could make her love me by reading aloud in English from her fa
vorites.

  “And that was how I became an Anglophile. From that time on, I wanted nothing more than to read English books: Dickens, of course, and Conan Doyle; Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. When I was a bit older, Drusilla gave me for Christmas subscriptions to The Boy’s Own Annual and Chums. By the time I was twelve, I was more British than many a boy from Brixton!

  “Then came the wireless. From the articles in Chums, and with the help of a schoolboy friend who lived next door—his name was Wolfgang Zander—I was able to put together a simple single-valve wireless receiver with which we could tune in to the broadcasts of the BBC.

  “We were mad about electrical gadgets, Wolfgang and I. The first thing we made was a battery-operated doorbell; the next was a telephone between my bedroom and his, with the wire strung over the rooftops and through the trees.

  “Long after our families were asleep, that cotton-covered wire high in the branches buzzed long into the night with our feverish speculations. We would talk away the night, about wireless, of course, but also about English books, for Wolfgang, you see, also had been bitten by the English—and particularly the Brontë—bug.

  “The adolescent imagination is a powerful force, and I suppose we saw ourselves, Wolfgang and I, as Knights of the Round Table who would come riding out from our Teutonic stronghold to rescue these Brontë sisters: these three fair, pale maidens—whose very names identify them as daughters of the Thunder-god—who were being held hostage by a monster in their cold stone tower in the north.

  “Besides,” he added, “there is something about young, helpless damsels in damp climates that makes every adolescent boy want to carry them off and marry them.”

  He paused to let his words have their effect, looking keenly from one of us to another, and as he did, I saw with a sudden shock that in Feely and Daffy and me, Dieter fancied he had found his Brontës; and in Buckshaw, his cold stone tower. We were his Charlotte, Emily, and Anne!

  And there we sat, the three of us, our mouths hanging open like dogs.