The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

Above me, and to my left, was a vaulted opening that gave onto a niche larger than the others. By standing on tiptoe and seizing the brick ledge with my fingertips, I was able to pull myself up until my eyes were level with the floor of this grotto.

Inside, a woman knelt, her back towards me. She was singing. Her thin voice echoed from the bricks and swirled round my head:"The robin's gone afloat

The wind that rocks him to and fro

With a soft cradle-song and slow

Pleases him in the ebb and flow,

Rocking him in a boat."

It was Mrs. Ingleby!

In front of her, on an overturned box, a candle burned, adding its smoky odor to the stifling heat of the little brick cave. To her right was propped up a black-and-white photograph of a child: her dead son, Robin, who grinned happily at the camera, his shock of blond hair bleached nearly white by the sun of long-gone summer days. To her left, lying on its side, as if it were hauled up on the beach to be cleaned of barnacles, was a toy sailboat.

I held my breath. She mustn't know I was here. I would climb down slowly, and--

My legs began to shake. I hadn't much of a grip, and my leather soles were already slipping on the weathered wooden frame. As I started to slide back, Mrs. Ingleby began her wail again, this time another song and, oddly, in another voice: a harsh, swashbuckling, piratical gargle:"So, though bold Robin's gone,

Yet his heart lives on,

And we drink to him with three times three."

And she let out a horrible, snuffling laugh. I pulled myself up on tiptoe again, just in time to see her twist the cork from a tall clear bottle, and take a quick, bobbing swig. It looked to me like gin, and it was plain to see that she had been at it for some time.

With a long, shuddering sigh, she pushed the bottle back under a pile of straw and lit a new candle from the dwindling flame of the one that was dying. With drips of flowing wax, she stuck it in place beside its exhausted fellow.

And now she began another song, this one in a darker minor key; sung more slowly, and more like a dirge, pronouncing every word with an awful, exaggerated clarity:"Robin-Bad-fellow, wanting such a supper,

Shall have his breakfast with a rope and butter

To which let all his fellows be invited

That with such deeds of darkness are delighted."

Rope and butter? Deeds of darkness?

I suddenly realized that my hair was standing completely on end, the way it did when Feely stroked her black ebonite comb on her cashmere sweater and brought it close to the nape of my neck. But while I was still trying to calculate how quickly I could scramble back down the wooden frame and make a run for it, the woman spoke: "Come up, Flavia," she said. "Come up and join in my little requiem."

Requiem? I thought. Do I really want to scramble up into a brick cell with a woman who is at best more than a little inebriated, and at worst a homicidal maniac?

I hauled myself up into the gloom.

As my eyes became accustomed to the candlelight, I saw that she wore a white cotton blouse with short puffed sleeves and a low peasant-girl neckline. With her raven black hair and her brightly colored dirndl skirt, she might easily be taken for a gypsy fortune-teller.

"Robin's gone," she said.

Those two words nearly broke my heart. Like everyone else in Bishop's Lacey, I had always thought that Grace Ingleby lived in her own private, insulated world: a world where Robin still played in the dusty dooryard, chasing flustered hens from fence to fence, dashing into the kitchen now and then to beg a sweet.

But it was not true: She had stood as I had done, beside the small gravestone in the churchyard of St. Tancred's, and read its simple inscription: Robin Tennyson Ingleby, 1939-1945, Asleep in the Lamb.

"Robin's gone," she said again, and now it was almost a moan.

"Yes," I said, "I know."

Motes of dust floated like little worlds in the pencil beams of sunlight that penetrated the chamber's gloom. I sat down in the straw.

As I did so, a pigeon clattered up from its nest, and out through the little arched window. My heart almost stopped. I had thought the pigeons long gone, and I almost sat on the stupid thing.

"I took him to the seaside," Grace went on, caressing the sailboat, oblivious to the bird. "Robin loved the seaside, you know."

I pulled my knees up under my chin and wrapped my arms around them.

"He played in the sand. Built a sand castle."