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

instance, we were playing at Market Selby when we were spotted in the post office by a fat lady in a flowerpot hat.
    “‘Rupert Porson!’ she shrieked. ‘Rupert Porson uses the Royal Mail, just like everyone else!’”
    Nialla laughed. “And then she begged him for his autograph. They always do, you know. Insisted he put ‘Best wishes from Snoddy the Squirrel.’ When he does it that way, he always draws a couple of little nuts. She claimed she wanted it for her nephew, but I knew better. When you’re on the road a lot, you develop a certain sense for these things. You can always tell.”
    She was prattling. If I kept quiet, it wouldn’t be more than a minute before she would be confiding her size in knickers.
    “Someone at the BBC told Rupert that twenty-three percent of his viewing audience is made up of childless housewives. Seems a lot, doesn’t it? But there’s something about The Magic Kingdom that satisfies one’s innate desire for escape. That’s the exact way they put it to Rupert: ‘one’s innate desire for escape.’ Everyone needs to escape, don’t they? In one way or another, I mean.”
    “Everyone but Mother Goose,” I said.
    She laughed. “Look, I wasn’t pulling your leg. I am Mother Goose. At least, I am when I put on my costume. Just wait until you see it—tall witch’s hat with a floppy brim and a silver buckle, a gray wig with dangling ringlets, and a great puffy dress that looks as if it once belonged to Mother Shipton. Do you know who Mother Shipton was?”
    Of course I did. I knew that she was some old crone who was supposed to have lived in the sixteenth century and seen into the future, predicting, among other things, the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, aeroplanes, battleships, and that the world would come to an end in 1881; that like those of Nostradamus, Mother Shipton’s prophecies were in doggerel verse: “Fire and water shall wonders do,” and all that. I also knew that there are actually still people running around loose today who believe she foresaw the use of heavy water in the making of the atomic bomb. As for myself, I didn’t believe a word of it. It was nothing but a load of old tosh.
    “I’ve heard the name,” I said.
    “Well, never mind. That’s who I resemble when I’m all tarted up for the show.”
    “Brilliant,” I said, not meaning it. She could see that I was a bit put off.
    “What’s a nice girl like you doing hanging about in a place like this?” she asked with a grin, taking in the whole of the churchyard with a wave of her hand.
    “I often come here to think,” I said.
    This seemed to amuse her. She pursed her lips and put on an annoying, stagy voice.
    “And what does Flavia de Luce think about in her quaint old country churchyard?”
    “Being alone,” I snapped, without meaning to be intentionally rude. I was simply being truthful.
    “Being alone,” she said, nodding. I could see that she was not put off by my bristling reply. “There’s a lot to be said for being alone. But you and I know, don’t we, Flavia, that being alone and being lonely are not at all the same thing?”
    I brightened a bit. Here was someone who seemed at least to have thought through some of the same things I had.
    “No,” I admitted.
    There was a long silence.
    “Tell me about your family,” Nialla said at last, quietly.
    “There isn’t much to tell,” I said. “I have two sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. Feely’s seventeen and Daffy’s thirteen. Feely plays the piano and Daffy reads. Father is a philatelist. He’s devoted to his stamps.”
    “And your mother?”
    “Dead. She was killed in an accident when I was a year old.”
    “Good Lord!” she said. “Someone told me about a family that lived in a great rambling old mansion not far from here: an eccentric colonel and a family of girls running wild like a lot of red Indians. You’re not one of them, are you?”
    She saw instantly by the look on my face that I was.
    “Oh, you poor