Read 2 The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag: A Flavia De Luce Mystery for Free Online

you must realize that?”
    The room went cold as ice, and suddenly I was numb from head to toe. I opened my mouth to say something, but found that my tongue had dried up and shriveled to a curled-up flap of leather. Hot tears welled up in my eyes as I fled the room.
    I’d show that bloody swine Feely a thing or two. I’d have her so tied up in knots they’d have to hire a sailor to undo her for the funeral.
    There is a tree that grows in Brazil, Carica digitata, which the natives call chamburu. They believe it to be such deadly poison that simply sleeping beneath its branches will cause, first of all, ever-festering sores, followed sooner or later by a wonderfully excruciating death.
    Fortunately for Feely, though, Carica digitata does not grow in England. Fortunately for me, fool’s parsley, better known as poison hemlock, does. In fact, I knew a low and marshy corner of Seaton’s 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.
    “Sanctified cyanide
Super-quick arsenic
Higgledy-piggledy
Into the soup.
Put out the mourning lamps
Call for the coffin clamps
Teach them to trifle with
Flavia de Luce!”
    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 The Dynamical Theory of Gases.
    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