Away With The Fairies (12 page)

Why, then, was Phryne unable to get comfortable? She wriggled on her chair, went and fetched another one, moved to the sofa, moved back, gulped some of her cocktail. Finally she lit a cigarette and admitted that she was worried about Lin Chung, really worried, and until she got him back safe and well, a good third of her mind was going to be occupied with him and his fate.

That being so, she allowed the other two-thirds to get on with it, picked up a pencil, and began work on cyanide and its derivatives.

Prussic acid was used in making coloured glass, Glaister informed her, in dyeing cloth and in colouring paint. As arsenic had once been used in making green dye and poisonous wallpaper, and white and red lead were used in house paint, cyanide was used to make a fast blue. Apparently they had the stuff lying around by the pounds at certain factories. The potassium cyanide crystals could be converted into cyanide gas by the addition of any weak acid. Chemically, it acted like litmus, turning blue things red in the presence of the gas. It had been used in the Great War and also as a method of executing criminals in the United States.

As potassium cyanide it was a stable white crystalline powder rather like Epsom salts. It was miscible and water soluble. The only clue to its presence was the bitter almond scent, which at least one in five people could not detect at all. Taken internally it killed within four seconds, and although mixing it with some things could slow the reaction, it was always complete within an hour. A cyanide victim, unlike an arsenic eater, did not manifest odd nervous and gastric symptoms and fade miserably away over agonising months (nursed faithfully, in some cases, by his poisoner). A cyanide victim found that perfectly reliable oxygen exchange systems which had served them faithfully for years simply didn’t work any more, and died immediately. Death was from asphyxia. Postmortem, there might be small red patches called petichial haemorrhage, giving rise to a suspicion of carbon monoxide poisoning. The postmortem appearances, said Glaister, could be confused with cerebral haemorrhage or thrombosis by an inattentive physician. As indeed they had been, Phryne thought.

She closed Glaister with appropriate respect and took up the box of letters. Lying on top of the envelopes was a clipped set of what looked like standard printed replies. There was also a schedule of fees.

Phryne raised an eyebrow. If one’s letter were printed in ‘Is This Problem Yours?’ the woeful damsel received a postal note for five shillings, which might have comforted her spirits. Otherwise the service was free, apart from the postage, if the magazine published the letter. However, this was not the end of Artemis’s talents. To receive a short private letter, one paid a shilling and enclosed a self-addressed envelope. A long letter cost two shillings and sixpence and all replies were despatched within a week. The reader was assured that her own letter would be either destroyed or returned to her, whichever she required. She was also assured of Artemis’s complete confidentiality.

Phryne assumed the letters currently in the box must represent only a week’s post. She flipped through Artemis’s replies. They all began, ‘My dear child, I feel for you in your trouble’ and continued with an anodyne collection of clichés so brazen that Phryne’s eye slid over them: ‘God never sends you more burdens than you can bear’; ‘Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards’; ‘Envy and malice can only be met with mercy and forgiveness’; ‘You must keep your home together— that is the primary duty of every woman’.

Slightly sickened, Phryne laid out the original letters on the table. There were twenty-eight of them, each opened in the same manner by slitting the top of the envelope. The enclosures had presumably been read. There were cryptic notes in thick blue pencil on the outside, each surmounted by a tick. Three had a large star drawn on the back. They must be the one’s which Artemis was planning to feature for this month’s
Women’s Choice
.

Phryne opened the first one and flattened out the paper. ‘Dear Artemis’, it began. ‘I don’t know what to do. My complexion is all spotty and I cannot clear it. I have tried everything. Please help. I want my mother to allow me to go to a doctor but she says that it is just my age and it will get better.’

Artemis had replied that it was a pity to bother a doctor with such a trivial thing but if it would make her feel better she should see one and, in the meantime, eschew all fatty foods and wash her face in elderflower water. That seemed sensible enough.

Phryne opened the next, daintily written on pale pink notepaper scented with roses. ‘Dear Artemis, I’ve never written to anyone before and I’m not sure how to start. Lately my husband has been late home from his business and when he does come home he seems cross. He often shouts at me to get the children to bed and when I do, poor little mites, he doesn’t seem to want to talk to me, he just sits there reading the paper. I’ve asked him if there’s some trouble at work but he just says it’s none of my business. He isn’t drinking and I’m sure that he’s faithful. I’ve got three children. What should I do?’ It was signed ‘Mother of Three’.

Artemis had begun her reply with her usual ‘My dear child’, and went on to advise the reader to choose a day, put the children to bed early, dress prettily in a suitable gown and make his favourite dinner. Then, after dinner, when he is relaxed, to pour him a glass of port and ask him what the matter was. If this did not work, the matter was too deep for womankind and doubtless he would tell her in time. But it didn’t mean that he didn’t love her. ‘Man’s love is a thing apart, but ’tis a woman’s whole existence’ she quoted.

Phryne sighed and picked up the next letter. It was going to be a long and sententious night.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ki intimates progress and success in small things.
There will be advantage in being firm and
correct. There has been good fortune in the beginning;
there may be disorder in the end.

Hexagram 63: Ki
The I Ching Book of Changes

An hour later, Phryne found her head drooping down towards the paper and the print blurring before her eyes. Surely no one would kill on the basis of these letters? They were trite, they were foolish, they were occasionally touching, but taking them all in all, they were banal beyond belief.

If someone had killed Artemis because of one of these replies, it would have been an English professor, outraged by the atrocities which Artemis had inflicted on his beloved language.

Phryne rang for coffee.

Another hour later, she had sorted the letters into three piles marked A, B and C. The largest, C, contained letters which could not possibly have given rise to anything, except possibly a meditation on the emptiness of nice middle-class lives. A woman complained that her friend always belittled her possessions, insisted that the friend’s child was better behaved, that her new curtains could have been got better and cheaper somewhere else, that the friend’s cook made better cakes and her husband came home earlier from the office. Artemis explained the friend’s motivations as envy and counselled compassion. That ought to annoy the friend enough to take herself off, Phryne thought. Good advice.

Into the C pile went also the girl with pimples, the request for advice on house-training a puppy, and the shamefaced worry that there was ‘something wrong down below’. Artemis had sent the latter smartly to a female doctor, which argued a certain enlightenment. Phryne added to the Cs the advice on perfume (‘the merest touch is sufficient’) on cosmetics (‘no one should know that you are wearing them’), and on care of the hair. There were three on this last topic, including a worried lady who was losing her hair and wondered if it would be
comme il faut
to wear a wig. Artemis had given her permission, but also sent her to a doctor in case there was some serious cause for it.

Phryne scanned four letters on etiquette, noting that one should always start at the outside of the cutlery and work inwards, that snail tongs were to be had at Chinese shops, that the correct way to eat asparagus was with the fingers and that children, who should be dismissed from table ‘should they grow rowdy’, should be instructed to sit up straight and not to crumble bread or to slurp soup. That ought to get rid of the little blighters before the main course.

Phryne had endured punitive lessons in table manners at a girl’s school in the soggier part of the Cotswolds and thought that this explained why she had spent two years in the Quartier Latin in Paris, eating sardines out of tins and bread and cheese out of paper bags. Among other reasons, of course.

She smiled slightly as she remembered the other reasons. Dark, passionate, quick, with fierce moustaches which added a sting to a kiss. Where were they now? Dead, perhaps, or in jail, the voices which had recited Villon in the hot darkness, scented with absinthe and lemon blossom. Or perhaps transformed in that peculiarly French way into the Bon Bourgeois Papa with seven children and a job as a bank clerk, seen walking by the Seine on Sundays feeding the ducks. ‘
Voici le canard!
Bonjour, M’sieur canard!
’

These letters really weren’t very interesting. Phryne shook herself and considered pile B. These were the intermediate ones, which might have given offence if addressed to an unusually touchy person. The lady who signed herself ‘Miserable’ might have objected to being told to cultivate Christian resignation in the face of her husband’s frequent drinking bouts and long absences from home. ‘Wanderer’ might have taken against advice that told her it was highly unlikely that a visit to Cairo would afford her the opportunity of attracting the attention of a desert prince who would carry her away on his white stallion. Although Artemis’s waspish comment that the white slave trade was stocked by ‘foolish Misses with romantic novels on the brain and too much time on their hands’ might be true, it could have been expressed more kindly.

‘Mother of Nine’ had as many children as the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, and many of the same problems, without the chance of applying the same solution, the
Crimes (Cruelty
to Children) Act
1910 being what it was. She was not advised to use contraception by means of one of Dr Stopes’s snazzy devices, but was instead counselled to ‘reason with her husband and make him understand that chastity was the only path to follow’. Phryne could imagine how valuable this advice was to a woman whose previous attempts at reasoning along these lines had most palpably failed. This reply would have cost the recipient two shillings and sixpence, which would have been better spent on a consultation with the Queen Victoria Hospital’s Family Planning Clinic.

‘Wit’s End’ complained that her four sons were out of control. They were noisy, destructive, impertinent and would not mind. If she spanked them, they were quiet for a short time then broke out worse than ever. Her husband was staying away because the children were so awful and the house was a mess and they had smashed a ceramic bowl which had belonged to her mother. Artemis responded by suggesting the employment of a nanny and a housemaid or, alternatively, the banishment of all of the children to a good public school as soon as they were old enough. ‘Boys often do not recognise the authority of a woman, who can be seen to be subservient to their father’, Artemis had instructed. ‘As your husband has not been present to impose order on them, it will be necessary to purchase this service. At a good school their wild natures will be tamed and they will come home for the holidays quite altered. In their absence you can have the house cleaned. If you cannot afford regular help, there are agencies who will come by the day, bringing all their own materials. You can then apply yourself to repairing the rift between your husband and yourself by going to a hairdresser, buying some new clothes, and ordering a special dinner. Of course one wishes to keep one’s children with one, but sometimes this is not advisable.’

Nice if one had the money, perhaps, but doesn’t the husband have some part in this, Phryne thought. They are his children too. And what if ‘Wit’s End’ had followed this advice and something happened to one of the little hellions? She might be quite cross with Artemis. On the other hand, this letter was in the B list because ‘Wit’s End’ sounded far too distracted to make a plan to murder anyone. If she did she’d probably find that the boys had pinched the cyanide to poison the cook anyway.

Pile B also contained a rambling, vague letter from ‘Manon’, who was wavering between a worthy but dull husband and a grand passion with a French gentleman belonging to the embassy. Another potentially explosive situation on which Artemis had made her views clear: ‘You have a good husband and a nice house and a position in society, all of which you will lose if you pursue the second course. It is not entirely your fault, perhaps, that your affections have strayed, but now that you have come to the point, which would you rather have? The regard of a worthy gentleman or the passing passion of an unreliable Frenchman who will probably prove to be already married? Enquire, my dear, and find out if he has a wife in Paris. I will be very surprised if he has not. And if he will be unfaithful to her, be assured that he will be unfaithful to you in your turn when someone younger and prettier comes along. Don’t be a fool’, concluded Artemis.

Good advice. Could have been put more kindly. Phryne considered ‘Manon’ again and returned her to the B list. There was a faint flavour of fantasy about the letter, something not quite convincing. ‘Manon’, Phryne diagnosed, was indulging in daydreaming. But dreamers sometimes reacted violently if their dreams were shattered, and a mind which could make up a French gentleman of ‘Gascon temperament’ could certainly plan a murder. ‘Manon’ was in the B pile because she would very likely be satisfied with the dream and not need the reality.

The A pile contained the dangerous letters. The first, on pale blue notepaper in an envelope embossed with rosebuds, was written in a childish, stumbling hand and merely said: ‘Artemis, how could you have suggested that I should try what you said? I did and it was terrible and now he won’t even speak to me. You should be ashamed of yourself.’ The writer had signed herself Anne, unusually for Artemis’s correspondents, who were requested to use pseudonyms. There was no return address on the letter. What had Artemis advised? Why hadn’t it worked? Who was Anne anyway?