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

by Alan Bradley

  Well, too late now. Beethoven was—at last—winding his weary way homeward, like Thomas Gray’s ploughman, leaving the world to darkness and to me—and to Father.

  “Flavia, a word, if you please,” he said, switching off the wireless with an ominous click.

  Feely and Daffy got up from their respective places and went out of the room in silence, pausing only long enough at the door to shoot me a pair of their patented “Now you’re in for it!” grimaces.

  “Damn it all, Flavia,” Father said when they had gone. “You knew as well as I that we had an appointment for your teeth this afternoon.”

  For my teeth! He made it sound as if the National Health were issuing me a full set of plaster dentures.

  But what he said was true enough: I had recently destroyed a perfectly good set of wire braces by straightening them to pick a lock. Father had grumbled, of course, but had made another appointment to have me netted and dragged back up to London, to that third-floor ironmonger’s shop in Farringdon Street, where I would be strapped to a board like Boris Karloff as various bits of ironmongery were shoved into my mouth, screwed in, and bolted to my gums.

  “I forgot,” I said. “I’m sorry. You should have reminded me at breakfast.”

  Father blinked. He had not expected such a vigorous—or such a neatly deflected!—response. Although he had been a career army officer, when it came to household maneuvers, he was little more than a babe-in-arms.

  “Perhaps we could go tomorrow,” I added brightly.

  Although it may not seem so at first glance, this was a masterstroke. Father despised the telephone with a passion beyond all belief. He viewed the thing—“the instrument,” as he called it—not just as a letting-down of the side by the post office, but as an outright attack on the traditions of the Royal Mail in general, and the use of postage stamps in particular. Accordingly he refused, point-blank, to use it in any but the direst of circumstances. I knew that it would take him weeks, if not months, to pick the thing up again. Even if he wrote to the dentist, it would take time for the necessary back-and-forth to be completed. In the meantime, I was off the hook.

  “And remember,” Father said, almost as an afterthought, “that your aunt Felicity is arriving tomorrow.”

  My heart sank like Professor Picard’s bathyscaphe.

  Father’s sister descended upon us every summer from her home in Hampstead. Although she had no children of her own (perhaps because she had never married) she had, nevertheless, quite startling views upon the proper upbringing of children: views that she never tired of stating in a loud voice.

  “Children ought to be horsewhipped,” she used to say, “unless they are going in for politics or the Bar, in which case they ought in addition to be drowned.” Which quite nicely summed up her entire philosophy. Still, like all harsh and bullying tyrants, she had a few drops of sentimentality secreted somewhere inside that would come bubbling to the surface now and then (most often at Christmas but sometimes, belatedly, for birthdays), when she would inflict her handpicked gifts upon us.

  Daffy, for instance, who would be devouring Melmoth the Wanderer, or Nightmare Abbey, would receive from Aunt Felicity a copy of The Girl’s Jumbo Book, and Feely, who never gave a thought to anything much beyond cosmetics and her own pimply hide, would rip open her parcel to find a pair of gutta-percha motoring galoshes (“Ideal for Country Breakdowns”).

  And yet once, when we had poked fun at Aunt Felicity in front of Father, he had become instantly as angry as I had ever seen him. But he quickly gained control of himself, touching a finger to the corner of his eye to stop a twitching nerve.

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” he asked, in that horrible level voice, “that your aunt Felicity is not what she may seem?”

  “Do you mean to say,” Feely shot back, “that this whole batty business is a pose?”

  I could only look on agog at her boldness.

  Father fixed her for a moment in the fierce glare of that cold blue de Luce eye, then turned on his heel and strode from the room.

  “Lawks-a-mercy!” Daffy had said, but only after he had gone.

  And so Aunt Felicity’s ghastly gifts had continued to be received in silence—at least in my presence.

  Before I could even begin to recall her trespasses on my own good nature, Father went on: “Her train gets in to Doddingsley at five past ten, and I’d like you to be there to meet her.”

  “But—”

  “Please don’t argue, Flavia. I’ve made plans to settle up a few accounts in the village. Ophelia is giving some sort of recital for the Women’s Institute’s morning tea, and Daphne simply refuses to go.”

  Boil me dry! I should have known that something like this would happen.

  “I’ll have Mundy send round a car. I’ll book him when he comes tonight for Mrs. Mullet.” Clarence Mundy was the owner of Bishop Lacey’s only taxicab.

  Mrs. Mullet was staying late to finish off the semiannual scouring of the pots and pans: a ritual that always filled the kitchen with greasy, superheated steam, and Buckshaw’s inhabitants with nausea. On these occasions, Father always insisted on sending her home afterwards by taxicab. There were various theories in circulation at Buckshaw about his reasons for doing so.

  It was obvious that I couldn’t be en route to or from Doddingsley with Aunt Felicity and, at the same time, be helping Rupert and Nialla set up their puppet show. I would simply have to sort out my priorities and attend to the most important matters first.

  Although there was a sliver of gold in the eastern sky, the sun was not yet up as I barreled along the road to Bishop’s Lacey. Gladys’s tires were humming that busy, waspish sound they make when she’s especially content.

  Low fog floated in the fields on either side of the ditches, and I pretended that I was the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw flying to Heathcliff (except for the bicycle) across the Yorkshire moors. Now and then, a skeletal hand would reach out of the bramble hedges to snatch at my red woolen sweater, but Gladys and I were too fast for them.

  As I pulled up alongside St. Tancred’s, I could see Rupert’s small white tent set up in the long grass, at the back of the built-up churchyard. He had pitched it in the potter’s field: the plots where paupers had been laid to rest and where, consequently, there were bodies but no tombstones. I supposed that Rupert and Nialla had not been told of this, and I decided that they would not hear it from me.

  Before I had waded more than a few feet through the sodden grass, my shoes and socks were soaking wet.

  “Hello?” I called quietly. “Anyone home?”

  There was no reply. Not a sound. I started as one of the curious jackdaws slipped down from the top of the tower and landed with a perfect aerodynamic plop on the crumbling limestone wall.

  “Hello?” I called again. “Knock, knock. Anyone home?”

  There was a rustling in the tent and Rupert stuck his head out, his haystack hair falling over his eyes, which were as red as if they were driven by electric dynamos.

  “Christ, Flavia!” he said. “Is that you?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m a bit early.”

  He withdrew his head into the tent like a turtle, and I heard him trying to rouse Nialla. After a few yawns and grumbles, the canvas began poking out at sudden odd angles, as if someone inside with a besom broom were sweeping up broken glass.

  A few minutes later, Nialla came half crawling out of the tent. She was wearing the same dress as yesterday, and although the material looked uncomfortably damp, she had pulled out a Woodbine and lighted it even before she had fully straightened up.

  “Cheers,” she said, flapping an inclusive hand towards me, and causing her smoke to drift off and mingle with the fog that hung among the gravestones.

  She coughed with a sudden horrid spasm, and the jackdaw, cocking its head, took several steps sideways on the wall, as if in disgust.

  “You oughtn’t to be smoking those things,” I said.

  “Better than smoking kippers,” she
replied, and laughed at her own joke. “Besides, what do you know?”

  I knew that my late great-uncle, Tarquin de Luce, whose chemical laboratory I had inherited, had, in his student days, been hooted down and ejected bodily from the Oxford Union when he took the affirmative in a debate, Resolved: That Tobacco Is a Pernicious Weed.

  I had, not long before, come across Uncle Tar’s notes tucked into a diary. His meticulous chemical researches seemed to have confirmed the link between smoking and what was then called “general paralysis.” Since he had been, by nature, a rather shy and retiring sort, his “utter and abject humiliation,” as he put it, at the hands of his fellow students, had contributed greatly to his subsequent reclusive life.

  I wrapped my arms around myself and took a step back. “Nothing,” I said.

  I had said too much. It was cold and clammy in the churchyard, and I had a sudden vision of the warm bed I’d climbed out of to come here and help.

  Nialla blew a couple of what were supposed to be casual smoke rings straight up into the air. She watched them ascend until they had dissipated.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not at my best at the crack of dawn. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. But it wasn’t.

  A twig cracked, surprisingly loud in the muffling silence of the fog. The jackdaw unfolded its wings and flapped off to the top of a yew tree.

  “Who’s there?” Nialla called, making a sudden dash to the limestone wall and leaning over it. “Bloody kids,” she said. “Trying to scare us. I heard one of them laughing.”

  Although I have inherited Harriet’s extremely acute hearing, I had heard no more than the cracking of the twig. I did not tell Nialla that it would be strange indeed to find any of Bishop’s Lacey’s children in the churchyard at such an early hour.

  “I’ll set Rupert on them,” she said. “That’ll teach them a lesson. Rupert!” she called out loudly. “What are you doing in there?

  “I’ll bet the lazy sod’s crawled back into the sack,” she added with a wink.

  She reached out and gave one of the guy ropes a twang, and like a parachute spilling the wind, the whole thing collapsed in a mass of slowly subsiding canvas. The tent had been pitched in the loose topsoil of the potter’s field, and it crumpled at a touch.

  Rupert was out of the wreckage in a flash. He seized Nialla by the wrist and twisted it up behind her back. Her cigarette fell to the grass.

  “Don’t ever—!” he shouted. “Don’t ever—!”

  Nialla motioned with her eyes towards me, and Rupert let go of her at once.

  “Damn it,” he said. “I was shaving. I might have cut my bloody throat.”

  He stuck out his chin and gave it a sideways hitch, as if he were freeing an invisible collar.

  Odd, I thought. He still has all his morning whiskers, and moreover, there’s not a trace of shaving cream on his face.

  “The die is cast,” said the vicar.

  He had come humming across the churchyard like a spinning top, showing black and then white through the fog, rubbing his hands together and exclaiming as he came.

  “Cynthia has agreed to run up some handbills in the vestry, and we’ll have them distributed before lunch. Now then, about breakfast—”

  “We’ve eaten, thanks,” Rupert said, jerking a thumb back towards the tent, which now lay neatly folded in the grass. And it was true. A few wisps of smoke were still drifting up from their doused fire. Rupert had fetched a box of wood chips from the back of the van and in surprisingly short order had an admirable campfire crackling away in the churchyard. Next, he had produced a coffeepot, a loaf of bread, and a couple of sharpened sticks to make toast of it. Nialla had even managed to find a pot of Scotch marmalade somewhere in their baggage.

  “Are you quite sure?” the vicar asked. “Cynthia said to tell you that if—”

  “Quite sure,” Rupert said. “We’re quite used to—”

  “—Making do,” Nialla said.

  “Yes, well, then,” the vicar said, “shall we go in?”

  He shepherded us across the grass towards the parish hall, and as he extracted a ring of keys, I turned to look back across the churchyard toward the lych-gate. If someone had been there, they had since run off. A misty graveyard offers an infinite number of places to hide. Someone could well be crouching behind a tombstone not ten feet away, and you’d never know it. With one last apprehensive look at the remnants of the drifting fog, I turned and went inside.

  “Well, Flavia, what do you think?”

  My breath was taken away. What yesterday had been a bare stage was now an exquisite little puppet theater, and such a one as might have been transported overnight by magic from eighteenth-century Salzburg.

  The proscenium opening, which I guessed to be five or six feet wide, was covered with a set of red velvet draperies, richly trimmed and tasseled with gold, and embroidered with the masks of Comedy and Tragedy.

  Rupert vanished backstage, and as I watched in awe, a row of footlights, red and green and amber, faded up little by little until the lower half of the curtains was a rich rainbow of velvet.

  Beside me, the vicar sucked in his breath as they slowly opened. He clasped his hands in rapture.

  “The Magic Kingdom,” he breathed.

  There, before our eyes, nestled among green hills, was a quaint country cottage, its thatched roof and half-timbered front complete in every detail, from the wooden bench beneath the window right down to the tiny tissue paper roses in the front garden.

  For a moment, I wished I lived there: that I could shrink myself and crawl into that perfect little world in which every object seemed to glow as if lit from within. Once settled in the cottage, I would set up a chemical laboratory behind the tiny mullioned windows and—

  The spell was broken by the sound of something falling, and a harsh “Damn!” from somewhere up in the blue painted sky.

  “Nialla!” Rupert’s voice said from behind the curtains. “Where’s that hook for the thingumabob?”

  “Sorry, Rupert,” she called out, and I noticed that she took her time replying, “it must still be in the van. You were going to have it welded, remember?

  “It’s the thing that holds the giant up,” she explained. “But then,” she added, grinning at me, “we mustn’t give away too many secrets. Takes all the mystery out of things, don’t you think?”

  Before I could answer, the door at the back of the parish hall opened, and a woman stood silhouetted against the sunlight. It was Cynthia, the vicar’s wife.

  She made no move to come in, but stood waiting for the vicar to come scurrying to her, which he promptly did. As she awaited his approach, she turned her face away to the outside light and, even from where I stood, I could clearly make out her cold blue eyes.

  Her mouth was as pursed as if the lips were pulled tightly shut with drawstrings, and her sparse, gray-blond hair was pulled—painfully, it appeared—into an oval bun at the nape of an exceptionally long neck. In her beige taffeta blouse, mahogany-colored skirt, and brown oxfords, she looked like nothing so much as an over-wound grandfather clock.

  Aside from the sound thrashing she had given me, it was hard to put a finger on what, precisely, I disliked about Cynthia Richardson. By all reports, she was a saint, a tiger, a beacon of hope to the sick, and a comfort to the bereaved. Her good works were legendary in Bishop’s Lacey.

  And yet …

  There was something about her posture that just didn’t ring true: a horrid slackness, a kind of limp and tired defeat that might be seen in the faces and bodies of Blitz victims in the wartime issues of the Picture Post. But in a vicar’s wife … ?

  All of this ran through my mind as she carried on a whispered consultation with her husband. And then, with no more than a lightning glance inside—she was gone.

  “Excellent,” the vicar said, breaking into a smile as he walked slowly towards us. “The Inglebys, it seems, have returned my call.”

  T
he Inglebys, Gordon and Grace, owned Culverhouse Farm, a patchwork quilt of mixed fields and ancient woods that lay to the north and west of St. Tancred’s.

  “Gordon’s kindly offered you a place to pitch your tent at the bottom of Jubilee Field—a lovely spot. It’s on the riverbank, not far from here. Walking distance, really. You’ll have plenty of fresh eggs, the shade of incomparable willows, and the company of kingfishers.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Nialla said. “A little bit of heaven.”

  “Cynthia tells me that Mrs. Archer rang up, too. Not such cheerful news on that front, I’m afraid. Bert’s away to Cowley, on a course at the Morris factory, and won’t be home until tomorrow night. Is your van in any sort of running order?”

  I knew by the worried look on the vicar’s face that he was having visions of a van marked “Porson’s Puppets” parked at the door of the church come Sunday morning.

  “A mile or so shouldn’t be a problem,” Rupert said, appearing suddenly at the side of the stage. “She’ll run better now she’s unloaded, and I can always baby the choke.”

  A shadow flitted across my mind, but I let it pass.

  “Splendid,” said the vicar. “Flavia, dear, I wonder if you’d mind going along for the ride? You can show them the way.”

  • SIX •

  OF COURSE WE HAD to go the long way round.

  Had we gone on foot, it would have been no more than a shady stroll across the stepping-stones behind the church, along the riverbank by way of the old towpath that marked the southern boundary of Malplaquet Farm, and over the stile into Jubilee Field.

  But by road, because there was no bridge nearby, Culverhouse Farm could be reached only by driving west towards Hinley, then, a mile west of Bishop’s Lacey, turning off and winding tortuously up the steep west side of Gibbet Hill on a road whose dust was now rising up behind us in white billows. We were halfway to the top, skirting Gibbet Wood in a lane so narrow that its hedgerows scratched and tore at the sides of the jolting van.

  “Don’t mind my hip bones,” Nialla said, laughing.