The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

Although there was a sliver of gold in the eastern sky, the sun was not yet up as I barreled along the road to Bishop's Lacey. Gladys's tires were humming that busy, waspish sound they make when she's especially content.

Low fog floated in the fields on either side of the ditches, and I pretended that I was the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw flying to Heathcliff (except for the bicycle) across the Yorkshire moors. Now and then, a skeletal hand would reach out of the bramble hedges to snatch at my red woolen sweater, but Gladys and I were too fast for them.

As I pulled up alongside St. Tancred's, I could see Rupert's small white tent set up in the long grass, at the back of the built-up churchyard. He had pitched it in the potter's field: the plots where paupers had been laid to rest and where, consequently, there were bodies but no tombstones. I supposed that Rupert and Nialla had not been told of this, and I decided that they would not hear it from me.

Before I had waded more than a few feet through the sodden grass, my shoes and socks were soaking wet.

"Hello?" I called quietly. "Anyone home?"

There was no reply. Not a sound. I started as one of the curious jackdaws slipped down from the top of the tower and landed with a perfect aerodynamic plop on the crumbling limestone wall.

"Hello?" I called again. "Knock, knock. Anyone home?"

There was a rustling in the tent and Rupert stuck his head out, his haystack hair falling over his eyes, which were as red as if they were driven by electric dynamos.

"Christ, Flavia!" he said. "Is that you?"

"Sorry," I said. "I'm a bit early."

He withdrew his head into the tent like a turtle, and I heard him trying to rouse Nialla. After a few yawns and grumbles, the canvas began poking out at sudden odd angles, as if someone inside with a besom broom were sweeping up broken glass.

A few minutes later, Nialla came half crawling out of the tent. She was wearing the same dress as yesterday, and although the material looked uncomfortably damp, she had pulled out a Woodbine and lighted it even before she had fully straightened up.

"Cheers," she said, flapping an inclusive hand towards me, and causing her smoke to drift off and mingle with the fog that hung among the gravestones.

She coughed with a sudden horrid spasm, and the jackdaw, cocking its head, took several steps sideways on the wall, as if in disgust.

"You oughtn't to be smoking those things," I said.

"Better than smoking kippers," she replied, and laughed at her own joke. "Besides, what do you know?"

I knew that my late great-uncle, Tarquin de Luce, whose chemical laboratory I had inherited, had, in his student days, been hooted down and ejected bodily from the Oxford Union when he took the affirmative in a debate, Resolved: That Tobacco Is a Pernicious Weed.

I had, not long before, come across Uncle Tar's notes tucked into a diary. His meticulous chemical researches seemed to have confirmed the link between smoking and what was then called "general paralysis." Since he had been, by nature, a rather shy and retiring sort, his "utter and abject humiliation," as he put it, at the hands of his fellow students, had contributed greatly to his subsequent reclusive life.

I wrapped my arms around myself and took a step back. "Nothing," I said.

I had said too much. It was cold and clammy in the churchyard, and I had a sudden vision of the warm bed I'd climbed out of to come here and help.

Nialla blew a couple of what were supposed to be casual smoke rings straight up into the air. She watched them ascend until they had dissipated.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not at my best at the crack of dawn. I didn't mean to be rude."

"It's all right," I said. But it wasn't.

A twig cracked, surprisingly loud in the muffling silence of the fog. The jackdaw unfolded its wings and flapped off to the top of a yew tree.

"Who's there?" Nialla called, making a sudden dash to the limestone wall and leaning over it. "Bloody kids," she said. "Trying to scare us. I heard one of them laughing."

Although I have inherited Harriet's extremely acute hearing, I had heard no more than the cracking of the twig. I did not tell Nialla that it would be strange indeed to find any of Bishop's Lacey's children in the churchyard at such an early hour.

"I'll set Rupert on them," she said. "That'll teach them a lesson. Rupert!" she called out loudly. "What are you doing in there?

"I'll bet the lazy sod's crawled back into the sack," she added with a wink.

She reached out and gave one of the guy ropes a twang, and like a parachute spilling the wind, the whole thing collapsed in a mass of slowly subsiding canvas. The tent had been pitched in the loose topsoil of the potter's field, and it crumpled at a touch.

Rupert was out of the wreckage in a flash. He seized Nialla by the wrist and twisted it up behind her back. Her cigarette fell to the grass.

"Don't ever--!" he shouted. "Don't ever--!"

Nialla motioned with her eyes towards me, and Rupert let go of her at once.