Meadow, not ten minutes from Buckshaw, where it was growing at that very moment. I could be there and back before supper.
I'd recently updated my notes on coniine, the active principle of the stuff. I would extract it by distilling with whatever alkali was handy--perhaps a bit of the sodium bicarbonate I kept on hand in my laboratory against Mrs. Mullet's culinary excesses. I would then, by freezing, remove by recrystallization the iridescent scales of the less powerful conhydrine. The resulting nearly pure coniine would have a deliciously mousy odor, and it would take less than half a drop of the oily stuff to put paid to old accounts.
Agitation, vomiting, convulsions, frothing at the mouth, horrendous spasms--I ticked off the highlights on my fingers as I went.
My words came echoing back to me from the high painted ceiling of the foyer and the dark polished woodwork of the galleries above. Aside from the fact that it didn't mention poison hemlock, this little poem, which I had composed for an entirely different occasion, was otherwise a perfect expression of my present feelings.
Across the black and white tiles I ran, and up the curving staircase to the east wing of the house. The 'Tar' wing, as we called it, was named for Tarquin de Luce, one of Harriet's ancient uncles who had inhabited Buckshaw before us. Uncle Tar had spent the greater part of his life locked away in a magnificent Victorian chemistry laboratory at the southeast corner of the house, investigating 'the crumbs of the universe,' as he had written in one of his many letters to Sir James Jeans, author of
Directly below the laboratory, in the Long Gallery, there is a portrait in oils of Uncle Tar. In it, he is looking up from his microscope, his lips pressed together and his brow furrowed, as if someone with an easel, a palette, and a box of paints had rudely barged in just as he was about to discover deLucium.
'Fizz off!' his expression clearly says. 'Fizz off and leave me alone!'
And so they had fizzed off--and so, eventually, had Uncle Tar.
The laboratory, and all that was in it, was now mine, and had been for a number of years. No one ever came here--which was just as well.
As I reached into my pocket and pulled out the key, something white fluttered to the floor. It was the handkerchief I had lent Nialla in the churchyard--and it was still vaguely damp to the touch.
An image rose up in my mind of Nialla as she had been when first I saw her, lying facedown upon a weathered tombstone, hair spread out like a sea of red, her hot tears sizzling in the dust.
Everything dropped into place like the tumblers in a lock. Of course!
Vengeance would have to wait.
With a pair of cuticle scissors I had pinched from Feely's vanity table, I snipped four damp disks from the linen handkerchief, taking care to avoid the green grass stains I had inflicted upon it, and cutting out only those parts diagonally opposite the stains--the spots into which Nialla had wept.
These I stuffed--with tweezers--into a test tube, which I then injected with a three-percent solution of sulfosalicylic acid to precipitate the protein. This was the so-called Ehrlich test.
As I worked, I thought with pleasure of how profoundly the great Alexander Fleming had changed the world when he accidentally sneezed into a petri dish. This was the sort of science that was dear to my heart. Who, after all, can honestly say that they have never sneezed on a culture? It could happen to anyone. It has happened to me.
After the sneeze, the magnificently observant Fleming noticed that the bacteria in the dish were shrinking back, as if in fear, from the flecks of his spattered mucus. It wasn't long before he had isolated a particular protein in his snot that repelled bacteria in much the same way that the presence of a dog foaming at the mouth keeps off burglars. He called it lysozyme, and it was this substance for which I was now testing.
Fortunately, even in high summer, the ancestral halls of Buckshaw were as cold and dank as the proverbial tomb. Room temperature in the east wing, where my laboratory was located--in spite of the heating that had been spitefully installed by warring brothers in only the west wing of the once politically divided house--was never more than sixty degrees Fahrenheit, which, as luck would have it, was precisely the temperature at which lysozyme precipitates when sulfosalicylic acid is added.
I watched, entranced, as a veil of crystals began to form, their white flakes drifting gently down in the little winter inside the test tube.
Next, I lit a Bunsen burner, and carefully warmed a beaker of water to seventy degrees. It did not take long. When the thermometer indicated that it was ready, I dipped the bottom of the test tube into the warm bath and swirled it gently.
As the newly formed precipitate dissolved, I let out a gasp of delight.
'Flavia.' Father's faint voice came drifting up to the laboratory. Having traversed the front hall, floated up the curving stair, penetrated the east wing, and wended its way down the long corridor to its southernmost point, it now seeped through my closed door, its force spent, as wispy as if it had come drifting to England all the way from Ultima Thule.
'Supper,' I thought I heard him call.
'It's damnably irritating,' Father said.
We were seated round the long refectory table, Father at the far end, Daffy and Feely one on each side, and me at the very bottom, at Cape Horn.
'It's damnably irritating,' he said again, 'for one to sit here and listen to one's daughter admit that she absconded with one's eau de cologne for a bloody chemical experiment.'
No matter if I denied these things or admitted my guilt, Father found it equally irritating. I simply couldn't win. I had learned that it was best to remain silent.
'Damn it, Flavia, I just bought the bloody stuff. Can't very well go up to London in this heat smelling like a shoulder of pork that's gone off, can I?'
