• SIX •
WHENEVER I’M A LITTLE blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood. It is pleasant to think that the manioc plant, which grows in Brazil, contains enormous quantities of the stuff in its thirty-pound roots, all of which, unfortunately, is washed away before the residue is used to make our daily tapioca.
Although it took me an hour to admit it to myself, Feely’s words had stung me to the quick. Rather than brooding about it, though, I took down from the shelf a bottle of potassium cyanide.
Outdoors, the rain had stopped, and a shaft of warm light now shone in through the window, causing the white crystals to sparkle brightly in the sudden sun.
The next ingredient was strychnine, which, coincidentally, came from another South American plant, and from which curare—arrow poison—was derived.
I’ve mentioned before my passion for poisons and my special fondness for cyanide. But, to be perfectly fair, I must admit that I also have something of a soft spot for strychnine, not just for what it is, but for what it’s capable of becoming. Brought into the presence of nascent oxygen, for instance, these rather ordinary white crystals become at first rich blue in color, then pass in succession through purple, violet, crimson, orange, and yellow.
A perfect rainbow of ruin!
I placed the strychnine carefully beside the cyanide.
Next came the arsenic: In its powdered form, it looked rather drab beside its sisters—more like baking powder than anything else.
In its arsenious oxide form, the arsenic was soluble in water, but not in alcohol or ether. The cyanide was soluble in alkaline water and dilute hydrochloric acid, but not in alcohol. The strychnine was soluble in water, ethyl alcohol, or chloroform, but not in ether. It was like the old puzzle about the fox, the goose, and the bag of corn. To extract their various essences, each poison needed to be babied along in its own bath.
With the windows thrown wide open for ventilation, I sat down to wait out the hour it would take for all three solutions to be complete. Solutions in more than one sense of the word!
“Cyanide … strychnine … arsenic.” I spoke their names aloud. These were what I called my “calming chemicals.”
Of course I wasn’t the first to think of compounding several poisons into a single devastating drink. Giulia Tofana, in seventeenth-century Italy, had made a business of selling her Aqua Tofana, a solution containing, among other ingredients, arsenic, lead, belladonna, and hog drippings, to more than six hundred women who wished to have their marriages chemically dissolved. The stuff was said to be as limpid as rock water, and the abbé Gagliani had claimed that there was hardly a lady in Naples who did not have some of it lying in a secret phial among her perfumes.
It was also said that two popes had been among its victims.
How I adore history!
At last my flasks were ready, and I hummed happily as I mixed the solutions and decanted them into a waiting bottle.
I waved my hand over the still steaming mixture.
“I name thee Aqua Flavia,” I said.
With one of Uncle Tar’s steel-nibbed pens, I wrote the newly coined name on a label, then pasted it to the jar.
“A-qua Fla-via,” I said aloud, savoring each syllable. It had a nice ring to it.
I had created a poison which, in sufficient quantities, was enough to stop a rogue elephant dead in its tracks. What it would do to an impertinent sister was almost too gruesome to contemplate.
One aspect of poisons that is often overlooked is the pleasure one takes in gloating over them.
Then, too, as some wise person once said, revenge is a dish best eaten cold. The reason for this, of course, is that while you’re gleefully anticipating the event, the victim has plenty of time to worry about when, where, and how you’re going to strike.
One thinks, for instance, of the look on the victim’s face as she realizes that what she is sipping from the pretty glass is more than just orange squash.
I decided to wait a while.
Gladys was standing patiently where I had left her, her fresh-washed livery gleaming handsomely in the morning sunlight from my bedroom windows.
“Avaunt!” I shouted. It was an ancient word meaning “Begone!” which I had learned when Daffy read The Bride of Lammermoor aloud to us at one of our compulsory Cultural Evenings.
“Both of us!” I explained, although it wasn’t really necessary.
I leaped into her saddle, pushed off, pedaled out the bedroom door, wobbled along the hall, made a sharp left turn, and moments later was at the top of the east staircase.
From astride a bicycle, stairs appear to be much steeper than they actually are. Far below, in the foyer, the black and white tiles were like winter fields viewed from a mountaintop. I got a firm grip on the front braking handles and started down at an alarming angle.
“Bucketa-bucketa-bucketa-bucketa,” I exclaimed, one for each stair, all the way down, my bones rattling pleasantly.
Dogger was standing at the bottom. He was wearing a canvas apron and holding a pair of Father’s boots. “Good morning, Miss Flavia,” he said.
“Good morning, Dogger,” I replied. “I’m happy to see you. I have a question. How does one go about disinterring a dead body?”
Dogger raised one eyebrow a fraction. “Were you thinking of disinterring a dead body, miss?” he asked.
“No, not personally,” I told him. “What I mean is, what permissions must be obtained, and so forth?”
“If I remember correctly, consent must first be given by the church. It is known as a faculty, I believe, and must be obtained from the Diocesan Council.”
“The bishop’s office?”
“More or less.”
So that’s what the vicar had been talking about. A faculty had already been granted, he told Marmaduke Parr, the man from the bishop’s office. The bishop’s secretary, in fact.
“There can be no going back now,” the vicar had said.
It seemed obvious that a faculty had been granted for the exhumation of Saint Tancred, and then for some reason withdrawn.
Who, I wondered, would stand in the way? What harm could there be in digging up the bones of a saint who had been dead these past five hundred years?
“You’re a corker, Dogger,” I said.
“Thank you, miss.”
Out of respect, I dismounted, and wheeled Gladys discreetly across the foyer, and out the front door.
On the lawn, at the edge of the gravel, was a folding camp stool, and beside it, several rags and a tin of boot polish. The day was warmer now, and Dogger had obviously been working outside in the fresh air, enjoying the sunshine.
I was about to push off for the church when I saw a car turn in at the Mulford Gates. It was the odd shape of the thing which had caught my attention: rather boxy, like a hearse.
If I left now, I might miss something. Better, I thought, to stifle my impatience and wait.
I sat down on the camp stool and studied the machine as it came flouncing along the avenue of chestnuts. Viewed head-on, it was certain from the tall Corinthian radiator of gleaming silver that it was a Rolls-Royce landau—in some ways, very like Harriet’s old Phantom II which Father kept stored away as a sort of shrine in the dimness of the coach house: the same broad skirts and the same gigantic headlamps. And yet there was something different.
As the car turned side-on, I saw that its paint was apple green, and that the roof had been peeled away from just behind the driving seat, like a tin of opened sardines. Where the backseats had once been were rows of gray, unpainted wooden boxes, each crammed cheek by jowl with flowerpots, all of them open to the weather, rather like a gallery of cheap seats atop a charabanc from which the seedlings and the growing plants could view the passing world.
Since Father had lectured us so often about the evils of staring, I instinctively pulled my notebook and pencil from the pocket of my cardigan and pretended to be writing.
I heard the tires crunch to a heavy stop. The door opened, and closed.
I snuck a quick peek from the corner of my eye and registered a tall man in a tan mackintosh.