Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

"Ned!"

I gave him a smile, and a wave with my fingers spread generously apart, the way royalty is taught to do. With his sleeves rolled up and brilliantined hair like a wet haystack, Ned was high atop the steep-pitched roof of the Thirteen Drakes, his heels braced against a chimney pot, using a brush to slather hot pitch onto tiles that looked as if they'd been up there since King Alfred burned the cakes.

"Come down!" I shouted.

"Can't, Flavia. Got a leak in the kitchen. Tully wants this done before the Inspector shows up. Said he'd be here bright and early.

"Tully says he's counting on the early part, anyhow," he added. "... Whatever that means."

"I have to talk to you," I said, dropping my voice to a loud stage whisper. "I can't very well go shouting it up to the housetops."

"You'll have to come up." He pointed to a ladder that leaned against the wall. "Mind your step."

The ladder was as old as the inn, or so it seemed to me. It tottered and twisted as I climbed, creaking and groaning horribly. The ascent seemed to take forever, and I tried not to look down.

"It's about last night, isn't it?" Ned asked, as I neared the top.

Double damnation! If I was so transparent that even someone like Ned could see through me, I might as well leave it to the police.

"No," I said, "as a matter of fact it isn't, Mister Smart-Pants. A certain person asked me to thank you for your lovely gift."

"She did?" Ned said, his features broadening into a classic village idiot grin. The Folklore Society would have had him in front of a cine-camera before you could turn round three times and spit across the wind.

"She'd have come herself, but she's being detained in her tower by her wicked father who feeds her on floor sweepings and disgusting table scraps."

"Haw!" Ned said. "She didn't look too underfed last night." His features darkened, as if he had only just remembered what had taken place.

"Pretty sad, that puppet man," he said. "I feel sorry for him."

"I'm glad you do, Ned. He hadn't many friends in the world, you know. It might be nice if you expressed your condolences to Mr. Wilmott. Someone said he's staying here."

This was a lie, but a well-intentioned one.

"Is he? Dunno. All I know right now is 'Roof! Roof! Roof!' — sounds like a dog when you say it like that, doesn't it? 'Roof! Roof! Roof!'"

I shook my head and started down the shaky ladder.

"Look at yourself!" Ned said. "You're covered with tar."

"Like a roof," I said, getting a look at my filthy hands and my dress. Ned hooted with laughter and I managed a pathetic grin.

I could cheerfully have fed him to the pigs.

"It won't come off, you know. You'll still have it plastered all over you when you're an old lady."

I wondered where Ned had picked up this rustic folklore — it was probably from Tully. I knew for a fact that Michael Faraday had synthesized tetrachloroethene in the 1820s by heating hexachloroethane and piping off the chlorine as it decomposed. The resulting solvent would remove tar from fabric like stink. Unfortunately — much as I should like to have done — I hadn't the time to repeat Faraday's discovery. Instead, I would have to fall back on mayonnaise, as recommended in The Butler and Footman's Vade Mecum , which I had come across one rainy day while snooping through the pantry at Buckshaw.

"Perhaps Mary would know. Is she somewhere about?"

I didn't dare barge in and ask Tully about a paying guest. To be perfectly honest, I was afraid of him, although it's difficult to say why with any certainty.

"Mary? She's taken the week's wash to the laundry, then she'll most likely be off to church."

Church! Baste me with butter! I'd forgotten all about church. Father would be going purple!

"Thanks, Ned," I shouted, grabbing Gladys from the bicycle stand. "See you!"

"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.

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."