Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

The details were unimportant. One thing I was sure of: There was more going on in the vicarage than met the eye, and whatever it was (husband dancing naked in the woods, and so forth), it seemed likely that Cynthia was at the heart of it all.

"What are you thinking, dear?" Miss Puddock's voice interrupted my thoughts. "You've suddenly gone so quiet!"

I needed time to get to the bottom of things, and I needed it now. I was unlikely to have a second chance to plumb the depths of Miss Puddock's village knowledge.

"I--I suddenly don't feel very well," I said, snatching at the edge of a table and lowering myself into one of the wire-backed chairs. "It might have been the sight of your poor scalded hand, Miss Puddock. A delayed reaction, perhaps. A touch of shock."

I suppose there must have been times when I hated myself for practicing such deceits, but I could not think of any at the moment. It was Fate, after all, who thrust me into these things, and Fate would jolly well have to stand the blame.

"Oh, you poor thing!" Miss Puddock said. "You stay right where you are, and I shall fetch you a nice cup of tea and a scone. You do like scones, don't you?"

"I l-love scones," I said, remembering suddenly that shock victims were known to shiver and shake. By the time she came back with the scones, my teeth were chattering like marbles shaken in a jar.

She removed a vase of lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis) , whisked the starched linen cloth from one of the tables, and wrapped it round my shoulders. As the sweet smell of the flowers wafted across my nostrils, I remembered with pleasure that the plant contained a witch's brew of cardioactive glycosides, including convallatoxin and glucoconvalloside, and that even the water in which the flowers had stood was poisonous. Our ancestors had called it Our Lady's tears, or Ladder-to-Heaven, and with good reason!

"You mustn't take a chill." Miss Puddock clucked solicitously as she poured me a cup of tea from the hulking samovar.

"Peter the Great seems to be behaving himself now," I observed with a calculated tremor and a nod towards the gleaming machine.

"He's very naughty sometimes." She smiled. "It comes of his being Russian, I expect."

"Is he really Russian?" I asked, priming the pump.

"From his distinguished heads," she said, pointing to the double-headed black eagle that functioned as a hot water tap, "to his royally rounded bottom. He was manufactured in the shops of the brothers Martiniuk, the celebrated silversmiths of Odessa, and it was said that he was once used to make tea for Tsar Nicholas and his unfortunate daughters. When the city was occupied by the Reds after the Revolution, the youngest of the Martiniuks, Vladimir, who was just sixteen at the time, bundled Peter up in a wolf skin, roped him to a handcart, and fled with him on foot--on foot, fancy!--to the Netherlands, where he set up shop in one of Amsterdam's cobbled alleys, and changed his name to van den Maarten.

"Peter," she said, giving the samovar a light but affectionate pat, "was his sole possession, other than the handcart, of course. He planned to make his fortune by producing endless copies, and selling them to Dutch aristocrats, who were said to be mad about Russian tea."

"And were they?" I asked.

"I don't know," she replied, "and nor did Vladimir. He died of influenza in the great epidemic of 1918, leaving his shop and all that was in it to his landlady, Margriet van Rijn. Margriet married a farm boy from Bishop's Lacey, Arthur Elkins, who had fought in Flanders, and he brought her back with him to England not long after the end of the Great War.

"Arthur was killed when a factory chimney collapsed on him in 1924, and Margriet died of shock when they brought her the news. After her death, my sister and I found that she had willed us Peter the Great--and there was nothing for it but to open the St. Nicholas Tea Room. Twenty-five years ago, that was, and as you can see, we're still here.

"He's a very temperamental old samovar, you know," she went on, moving as if to caress his silver surface, but thinking better of it. "Of course, he's an awful old fraud. Oh, he spits boiling water and blows out fuses on occasion, but underneath it all he has a heart of gold--or at least, of silver."

"He's quite magnificent," I said.

"And doesn't he know it! Well, well, here I am talking about him as if he were a cat. When Grace was with us, she used to call him 'the Tyrant.' Imagine that! 'The Tyrant wants his polishing,' she'd say. 'The Tyrant wants his electrical contacts cleaned.'"

"Grace?" I asked.

"Grace Tennyson. Or Ingleby, as she is now."

"Grace Ingleby used to work here?"

"Oh, yes! Until she left to marry Gordon, she was our star waitress. You wouldn't think it to look at her, but she was as strong as an ox. You don't often see that in such a tiny bit of a thing.

"And she wasn't the slightest bit intimidated by Peter and his moods. Spark and spit as he may, Grace was never afraid to roll up her sleeves and have a good rummage round his innards."

"She sounds very clever," I said.

"She was all of that." Miss Puddock laughed. "All of that and more. And no wonder! One of our customers once told us--an RAF Squadron Leader, I think he was--and in confidence, of course--that Grace had the highest IQ he'd ever seen in 'the fairer sex,' as he put it: that if the people in Special Operations hadn't whisked her off to do top secret work, she might well have spent the rest of the war installing wireless sets in Spitfires."

"Top secret work?" I gasped. The thought of Grace Ingleby doing anything other than cringing in her dovecote tower, like a captive maiden waiting to be rescued by Sir Lancelot, was almost laughable.

"Of course, she would never breathe a word about it." Miss Puddock lowered her voice, in the way that people often do when they talk about the war. "They're not allowed to, you know. But then, we seldom see her nowadays. Since that tragedy with her little boy--"

"Robin," I said.

"Yes. Since then, she keeps to herself. I'm afraid she's not at all the same laughing girl who used to put Peter the Great in his place."

"Was Gordon a member of Special Operations, too?" I asked.

"Gordon?" She laughed. "Good lord, no. Gordon's 'a farmer born and a farmer he shall die,' as Shakespeare wrote, or was it Harry Lauder, or George Formby, or someone like that? My memory's gone all wormholes, and so will yours, in time."

I couldn't think what to say, and I saw at once she thought she'd offended me.

"But not for many a year, dear. No, I'm quite sure your memory will still be going strong when the rest of us are in our graves and paved over for parking at the bowling palaces."

"Have you seen Mrs. Ingleby recently?" I asked.

"Not since Saturday night at the parish hall. Of course I had no opportunity to chat, what with our little musicale on my mind. The rest of the evening was a nightmare, wasn't it: the death of that poor man--the puppet that was carved with Robin's face? I don't know what Gordon was thinking, bringing Grace there when she's so fragile. But then, he had no way of knowing, did he?"

"No," I said. "I don't suppose he did."

By the time I set out for Buckshaw, it was well past lunchtime. Fortunately, Miss Puddock had wrapped a couple of buttered scones in paper and insisted upon tucking them into my pocket. I nibbled at them absently as I pedaled along the road, lost in thought.

At the end of the high street, the road made a gentle angle to the southwest as it skirted the southern perimeter of St. Tancred's churchyard.

If I hadn't glanced to my right, I mightn't have seen it: the Austin van, with "Porson's Puppets" in gold letters on its panels, parked at the side of the parish hall. Gladys's tires skidded in the dust as I applied her hand brakes and swerved into the churchyard.

As I pulled up, Nialla was stowing odds and ends in the van's interior.

"You've got it running!" I shouted. She gave me the kind of look that you might give to a bit of dog dirt in your porridge, and went on with her packing.

"It's me, Flavia," I said. "Have you forgotten me already?"

"Piss off, you little traitor," she snapped. "Leave me alone."

For an instant, I thought I was back at Buckshaw, talking to Feely. It was the kind of dismissal I've lived through a thousand times--and survived, I thought. I decided to stand my ground.

"Why? What have I done to you?"

"Oh, come off it, Flavia. You know as well as I do. You told the police I was at Buckshaw. They thought I was hiding out, or running away, or whatever you want to call it."

"I did no such thing!" I protested. "I haven't laid eyes on a policeman since I saw you in the coach house."

"But you were the only one who knew I was there."

As it always did when I was angry, my mind burned with crystal clarity.

"I knew you were there, Dogger knew you were there, and so did Mrs. Mullet, to name but three."

"I can hardly believe Dogger would peach on me."

"And nor would Mrs. Mullet," I said.

Good Lord! Was I actually defending Mrs. M?

"She may be a bloody gossip, but she's not mean," I said. "She'd never rat on you. Inspector Hewitt came to Buckshaw--probably to ask me a few more questions about Saturday night--and happened to see you walking from the coach house to the kitchen. There's no more to it than that. I'm sure of it."

I could see that Nialla was thinking about it. I wanted nothing more than to take her by the shoulders and give her a good shaking, but I had to keep in mind the fact that her emotions were being stoked by a storm of hormones: fierce clouds of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and sulfur, combining and recombining in the eternal dances of life.

It almost made me forgive her.

"Here," I said, pulling the butterfly compact dramatically from my pocket and holding it out towards her. "I believe this belongs to you."

I hugged myself in anticipation of a tidal wave of gratitude and praise. But none came.

"Thanks," Nialla said, and pocketed the thing.

Thanks? Just thanks? The nerve! I'd show her: I'd pretend she hadn't hurt me; pretend I didn't care.

"I can't help noticing," I remarked casually, "that you're packing the van, which means that Bert Archer's repaired it and you're about to be on your way. Since Inspector Hewitt is nowhere in sight, I expect that means you're free to go."

"Free?" she repeated, and spat in the dirt. "Free? The vicar's given me four pounds, six shillings, and eightpence from the show. Bert Archer's bill comes to seven pounds ten. It's only because the vicar put in a word for me that he's willing to let me drive to Overton to pawn whatever I can. If you call that free, then I'm free. It's all bloody well and good for Little Miss Nabob, who lives in a country house the size of Buckingham Palace, to make her smart-pants deductions. So think what you like, but don't bloody well patronize me!"

"All right," I said. "I didn't mean to. Here, take this, please."

I dug into my pocket again and pulled out the coin, the one Aunt Felicity had foisted upon Dogger, thinking it was a shilling. Dogger, in turn, had planted it in my pocket, believing, perhaps, that it would soon be spent on horehound sticks at Miss Cool's shop.

I handed it to Nialla, who looked at it with disbelief.

"Fourpence!" she said. "Bloody fourpence!"

Her tears were flowing freely as she flung it away among the tombstones.

"Yes, it is only fourpence," I said. "But it's fourpence in Maundy money. The coins are produced by the Royal Mint, to be handed out by the Sovereign--"

"Blow the Sovereign!" she shouted. "And blow the Royal Mint!"