The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

'And then?'

''E asked if 'e might have a word outside. Next thing I knows, poor girl's off in the car with 'im. I 'ad to run round the front to get a good look. Proper fagged me out, so it did.'

I refilled her glass.

'I shouldn't ought to, dearie,' she said, 'but my poor old heart's not up to such a muddlederumpus.'

'You're looking better already, Mrs. M,' I told her. 'Is there anything I can do to help?'

'I was just about to put them things in the oven,' she said, pointing to an array of dough-filled pans on the table, and heaving herself to her feet. 'Open the oven door for me--that's a good girl.'

Much of my life was given over to holding the oven door of the Aga as Mrs. M fed heaps of baking into its open maw. Hell, in Milton's Paradise Lost, had nothing to compare with my drudgery.

'Clean out of pastries, we were,' she said. 'When it comes to dainties, that young man of Miss Ophelia's seems to have a bottomless stomach.'

Miss Ophelia's young man? Had it come to that already? Had my rambles round the village caused me to miss some sensational scene of courtship?

'Dieter?' I asked.

'Even if 'e is a German,' she said with a nod, ''e's ever so much more refined than that rooster as keeps leavin' 'is rubbishy gifts on the kitchen doorstep.'

Poor Ned! I thought. Even Mrs. Mullet was against him.

'I just 'appened to overhear a bit of what 'e said while I was dustin' the hall--about 'Eathcliff, an' all that. I mind the time me and my friend, Mrs. Waller, took the bus over to Hinley to see 'im in the cinema. Wuthering Heights, it was called, and a good name for it, too! That there 'Eathcliff, why, 'e kept 'is wife 'id up in the attic as if she was an old dresser! No wonder she went barmy. I know I should 'ave! Now then, what you laughin' at, miss?'

'At the idea,' I said, 'of Dieter mucking across Jubilee Field through rain and lightning to carry off the Fair Ophelia.'

'Well, 'e might do,' she said, 'but not without a right fuss from Sally Straw--and, some say, the old missus herself.'

'The old missus? Grace Ingleby? Surely you don't mean Grace Ingleby?'

Mrs. Mullet had suddenly gone as red as a pot of boiling beets.

'I've said too much,' she said, flustered. 'It's the sherry, you see. Alf always says as 'ow sherry coshes the guard what's supposed to be keepin' watch on my tongue. Now then, not another word. Off you go, dearie. And mind you--I've said nothing.'

Well! I thought. Well, well, well, well, well!

* TWENTY-THREE *

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT pottering with poisons that clarifies the mind. When the slightest slip of the hand could prove fatal, one's attention is forced to focus like a burning-glass upon the experiment, and it is then that the answers to half-formed questions so often come swarming to mind as readily as bees coming home to the hive.

With a good dollop of sulfuric acid already decanted into a freshly washed flask and warmed slightly, I gingerly added a glob of crystalline jelly, and watched in awe as it slowly dissolved, quivering and squirming in the acid bath like a translucent squidling.

I had extracted the stuff, with water and alcohol, from the roots of a Carolina jessamine plant (Gelsemium sempervirens) that, to my delight, I had discovered blooming blissfully away in the corner of the greenhouse, its flowers like little trumpets sculpted from fresh butter.

The plant was native to the Americas, Dogger had told me, but had been brought home to English greenhouses by travelers; this particular specimen by my mother, Harriet.

I had asked if I could have it for my laboratory, and Dogger had readily agreed.

The root contained a lovely alkaloid called gelsemine, which had lurked undetected inside the plant since the Creation, until it was teased out in 1870 by a man from Philadelphia with the charming name of Wormley, who administered the bitter poison to a rabbit, which turned a complete backwards somersault and perished in twenty minutes.

Gelsemine was a killer whose company I much enjoyed.

And now came the magic!

Into the liquid I introduced, on the tip of a knife, a small dose of K₂Cr₂O₇, or potassium dichromate, whose red salts, illuminated by a fortuitous beam of sunlight from the casement window, turned it the livid cherry red hue of a carbon monoxide victim's blood.

But this was only the beginning! There was more to come.

Already the cherry brilliance was fading, and the solution was taking on the impressive violet color of an old bruise. I held my breath, and--yes!--here it was, the final phase of yellow-green.

Gelsemine was one of chemistry's chameleons, shifting color with delicious abandon, and all without a trace of its former hue.

People were like that, too.