The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

She laughed. 'Look, I wasn't pulling your leg. I am Mother Goose. At least, I am when I put on my costume. Just wait until you see it--tall witch's hat with a floppy brim and a silver buckle, a gray wig with dangling ringlets, and a great puffy dress that looks as if it once belonged to Mother Shipton. Do you know who Mother Shipton was?'

Of course I did. I knew that she was some old crone who was supposed to have lived in the sixteenth century and seen into the future, predicting, among other things, the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, aeroplanes, battleships, and that the world would come to an end in 1881; that like those of Nostradamus, Mother Shipton's prophecies were in doggerel verse: 'Fire and water shall wonders do,' and all that. I also knew that there are actually still people running around loose today who believe she foresaw the use of heavy water in the making of the atomic bomb. As for myself, I didn't believe a word of it. It was nothing but a load of old tosh.

'I've heard the name,' I said.

'Well, never mind. That's who I resemble when I'm all tarted up for the show.'

'Brilliant,' I said, not meaning it. She could see that I was a bit put off.

'What's a nice girl like you doing hanging about in a place like this?' she asked with a grin, taking in the whole of the churchyard with a wave of her hand.

'I often come here to think,' I said.

This seemed to amuse her. She pursed her lips and put on an annoying, stagy voice.

'And what does Flavia de Luce think about in her quaint old country churchyard?'

'Being alone,' I snapped, without meaning to be intentionally rude. I was simply being truthful.

'Being alone,' she said, nodding. I could see that she was not put off by my bristling reply. 'There's a lot to be said for being alone. But you and I know, don't we, Flavia, that being alone and being lonely are not at all the same thing?'

I brightened a bit. Here was someone who seemed at least to have thought through some of the same things I had.

'No,' I admitted.

There was a long silence.

'Tell me about your family,' Nialla said at last, quietly.

'There isn't much to tell,' I said. 'I have two sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. Feely's seventeen and Daffy's thirteen. Feely plays the piano and Daffy reads. Father is a philatelist. He's devoted to his stamps.'

'And your mother?'

'Dead. She was killed in an accident when I was a year old.'

'Good Lord!' she said. 'Someone told me about a family that lived in a great rambling old mansion not far from here: an eccentric colonel and a family of girls running wild like a lot of red Indians. You're not one of them, are you?'

She saw instantly by the look on my face that I was.

'Oh, you poor child!' she said. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ... I mean ...'

'It's quite all right,' I told her. 'It's far worse than that actually, but I don't like to talk about it.'

I saw the faraway look come into her eyes: the look of an adult floundering desperately to find common ground with someone younger.

'But what do you do with yourself?' she asked. 'Don't you have any interests ... or hobbies?'

'I'm keen on chemistry,' I said, 'and I enjoy making scrapbooks.'

'Do you really?' she enthused. 'Fancy that! So did I, at your age. Cigarette cards and pressed flowers: pansies, mignonettes, foxgloves, delphiniums; old buttons, valentines, poems about Granny's spinning wheel from The Girl's Own Annual ... what jolly good fun it was!'

My own scrapbooks consisted of three fat purple volumes of clippings from the tide of ancient magazines and newspapers that had overflowed, and then flooded, the library and the drawing room at Buckshaw, spilling over into disused bedrooms and lumber rooms before being carted off at last to languish in damp, moldering stacks in a crypt in the cellars. From their pages, I had carefully clipped everything I could find on poisons and poisoners, until my scrapbooks were bursting at the seams with the likes of Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the amateur gardener and solicitor, who dispatched his wife with lovingly prepared concoctions of arsenious weed-killer; Thomas Neill Cream, Hawley Harvey Crippen, and George Chapman (remarkable, isn't it, that so many of the great poisoners' names begin with the letter C?), who with strychnine, hyoscine, and antimony respectively, sent a veritable army of wives and other women marching to their graves; Mary Ann Cotton (see what I mean?) who, after several successful trial runs on pigs, went on to poison seventeen people with arsenic; Daisy de Melker, the South African woman with a passion for poisoning plumbers: She would first marry them, and then divorce them with a dose of strychnine.

'Keeping a scrapbook is the perfect pastime for a young lady,' Nialla was saying. 'Genteel ... and yet educational.'

My thoughts precisely.

'My mum tossed mine in the dustbin when I ran away from home,' she said with something that had it lived might have become a chuckle.

'You ran away from home?' I asked.

This fact intrigued me almost as much as her foxgloves, from which, I recalled, the vegetable alkaloid digitalin (better known to those of us who are chemists as C₃₆H₅₆O₁₄) could be extracted. I thought with pleasure for a moment of the several times in my laboratory I had exhausted with alcohol the leaves of foxglove plucked from the kitchen garden, watching the slender, shining needles as they crystallized, and the lovely emerald green solution that was formed when I dissolved them in hydrochloric acid and added water.