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

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?”
    Father was most eloquent when he was angry. I had nicked the bottle of Roger & Gallet to fill an atomizer with which I needed to spray the house after an experiment involving hydrogen sulfide had gone spectacularly wrong.
    I shook my head.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, assuming a hangdog look and dabbing at my eye with a napkin. “I’d buy you a new bottle—but I have no money.”
    As if I were a tin duck in a shooting gallery, Feely glared down the long table at me in silent contempt. Daffy’s nose was stuck firmly in Virginia Woolf.
    “But I could make you some,” I said brightly. “It’s really not much more than ethanol, citrus oils, and garden herbs. I’ll ask Dogger to pick me some rosemary and lavender, and I’ll get some oranges and lemons and limes from Mrs. Mullet—”
    “You’ll do no such thing, Miss