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Authors: Alan Bradley
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too touching,” she said. “You’ll get over it.”
• SIX •
W HENEVER 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. GiuliaTofana, 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 victimhas 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
• SIX •
W HENEVER 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. GiuliaTofana, 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 victimhas 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
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