"Do you really?" she enthused. "Fancy that! So did I, at your age. Cigarette cards and pressed flowers: pansies, mignonettes, foxgloves, delphiniums; old buttons, valentines, poems about Granny's spinning wheel from
My own scrapbooks consisted of three fat purple volumes of clippings from the tide of ancient magazines and newspapers that had overflowed, and then flooded, the library and the drawing room at Buckshaw, spilling over into disused bedrooms and lumber rooms before being carted off at last to languish in damp, moldering stacks in a crypt in the cellars. From their pages, I had carefully clipped everything I could find on poisons and poisoners, until my scrapbooks were bursting at the seams with the likes of Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the amateur gardener and solicitor, who dispatched his wife with lovingly prepared concoctions of arsenious weed-killer; Thomas Neill Cream, Hawley Harvey Crippen, and George Chapman (remarkable, isn't it, that so many of the great poisoners' names begin with the letter
"Keeping a scrapbook is the perfect pastime for a young lady," Nialla was saying. "Genteel ... and yet educational."
My thoughts precisely.
"My mum tossed mine in the dustbin when I ran away from home," she said with something that had it lived might have become a chuckle.
"You ran away from home?" I asked.
This fact intrigued me almost as much as her foxgloves, from which, I recalled, the vegetable alkaloid digitalin (better known to those of us who are chemists as C36H56O14) could be extracted. I thought with pleasure for a moment of the several times in my laboratory I had exhausted with alcohol the leaves of foxglove plucked from the kitchen garden, watching the slender, shining needles as they crystallized, and the lovely emerald green solution that was formed when I dissolved them in hydrochloric acid and added water. The precipitated resin could, of course, be restored to its original green hue with sulfuric acid, turned light red by bromine vapor, and back to emerald green again with the addition of water. It was magical! It was also, of course, a deadly poison, and as such, was certainly far more gripping than stupid buttons and
"Mmmm," she said. "Got tired of washing up, drying up, sweeping up, and dusting up, and listening to the people next door throwing up; tired of lying in bed at night, listening for the clatter of the prince's horse on the cobblestones."
I grinned.
"Rupert changed all that, of course," she said. "'Come with me to the Doorway of Diarbekir,' he told me. 'Come to the Orient and I will make you a princess in liquid silks and diamonds the size of market cabbages.'"
"He did?"
"No. What he actually said was, 'My bloody assistant's run out on me. Come with me to Lyme Regis at the weekend and I'll give you a guinea, six square meals, and a bag to sleep in. I'll teach you the art of manipulation,' he said, and I was bloody fool enough to think he was talking about puppets."
Before I had time to ask for details, she had jumped to her feet and dusted off her skirt.
"Speaking of Rupert," she said, "we'd better go in and see how he and the vicar are getting on. It's ominously quiet in the parish hall. Do you suppose they might already have murdered one another?"
Her flowered dress swished gracefully off among the tombstones, and I was left to trot doggedly along in her wake.
Inside, we found the vicar standing in the middle of the hall. Rupert was up on the platform, center stage, hands on hips. Had he been taking a curtain call at the Old Vic, the lighting could not have been more dramatic. As if dispatched by Fate, an unexpected ray of sunlight shone in through a stained-glass window at the rear of the hall, fixing Rupert's upturned face dead center in its round golden beam. He struck a pose, and began spouting Shakespeare: