Murder in the Dark (9 page)

She closed her eyes, just for a moment.

He remembered when he had acquired his new name, the Joker.
He had played cards for a living for a while, skinning the high
rollers on the trans-Atlantic boats. When he had discovered his
vocation, he had laid a playing card joker on the breast of his first
victim. From that moment, he knew his title.

CHAPTER FIVE

If you don’t like my peaches
why do you shake my tree?

‘St Louis Blues’

Phryne only opened her eyes again when someone began banging hard on the door and she was reminded of her surroundings.

‘Drat,’ she said. ‘All right! I’ll be out directly!’ she added, rising from the scented bath and wrapping herself in her soft towelling gown. She opened the door to a young man in a tunic who sniffed delightedly.

‘Ooh, lovely! Leave me your bathwater, Miss Fisher? Smells like a whole Sicilian lemon grove.’

One of the hashishim, Phryne thought, rummaging for a name. Gilbert, that was it. Nice boy, only interested in other nice boys. She sailed past him, assenting to his use of her bath-water with an inclination of her Dutch-doll head. An unusual request but not, she thought, objectionable.

Regaining her own room, she dried and arrayed herself in suitable evening dress, a loose Poitou tunic and trousers of old rose silk. She slicked herself with citronella under her lemon perfume and sat brushing her hair in front of the small mirror. One hundred strokes, every day. Except when she forgot. Or didn’t feel like it. Or Dot wasn’t there to do it for her. Phryne didn’t believe in rigid routines. They robbed the day of spontaneity. But at the moment she liked the bob of her shiny hair and the movement of the brush and the soothing caress of the bristles.

The little room was hot, but Phryne did not open her window. It gave onto the balcony, and that faced into the shafts of the setting sun. She would not be cool, she was convinced, until she was home again and swimming in the St Kilda sea, or lying in her own room with a fan blowing over a basin of ice. Until then, anywhere was probably cooler than her room, so she secured her petticoat pocket around her waist, decorated her sleek head with a garland of dusty pink roses, took up a fan on which she had written selected cues for her performance and, lighting a conscious gasper, sauntered out of the room called Iris and into the main house, where a buzz of conversation, the tuning noises of a string quartet and the scent of cooking revealed to her the location of the dining room.

The original owners had wanted this room to be sombre and impressive but not overwhelming, and although their decorations and even their colour scheme had been obliterated by a severe Church, the proportions were still charming and Gerald’s hangings of bright Morris cloth ameliorated the vandalism and covered up most of the whitewash. Phryne knew that she would never think of whitewash in the same way again. She walked boldly into the room where she was greeted as a sister by the Sapphic girls and hauled into their company, where she was always pleased to be.

‘Cruel what they’ve done to the house, eh?’ asked Sabine, who, when she spoke English, spoke the soft Border Scots of her nurse, an accent that later educators had not been able to eradicate. She designed silks for fashion houses when she wasn’t chasing big strong girls. Sabine was small and delicate and quite implacable in her
amours
. At present, Phryne saw, she was half reclining on the stalwart bosom of Pamela English, a jolly hockey lass straight out of a girls’ boarding school story. She had butter yellow hair cut short and a high complexion, enhanced by her habit of running five miles before breakfast. Phryne reflected that she and Sabine were a match made in heaven and said so as she sat down and reached for some hors d’oeuvres. Stuffed eggs, very tasty.

‘Quite so,’ agreed Sabine, giggling. ‘And I hardly had to chase her at all, which was lucky, because she could outrun me any day.’

Pam blushed and offered Phryne a plate of devils on horseback. ‘Nice place, though,’ she said, referring to the house. ‘Got a tennis court. I’ve lined up a few partners for tomorrow. Do you play, Phryne?’

‘Occasionally,’ said Phryne through a mouthful of prune and bacon. ‘But not in such hot weather. Can one swim in the lake?’

‘Oh yes, it’s spring fed and quite cold. I took a dip this afternoon. The hearties hadn’t arrived then. I expect it will be full of boys by the morning,’ said Pam sadly. She loathed anything in masculine form except Gerald Templar. Sad Alison, who sat on the other side of Sabine, hauled back her lank hair and sighed.

‘Some of them are quite good-looking, though,’ she said. Sadly. With her spotty skin and despondent air, she was unlikely to attract any of them.

Phryne reflected that she could probably manage the boys and ate a piece of toast with something vulcanised on it—fish paste, perhaps? She hoped that this dinner was going to be mostly cold, or it would be unbearable.

‘So, have you come alone?’ asked Sabine.

‘Yes,’ said Phryne. ‘But since I’ve been here I’ve met several interesting people. One jazz singer who can tear the heart out of your breast, two girl polo players and one goat.’

The story about the goat lasted through the soup, which was vichyssoise, and the fish, which was a cold mousse concocted of crabmeat and prawns. A discussion of Erik Satie and the modernist school of music beguiled the roast, which was cold baron of beef with all the trimmings. That accounted for civility and culture. The girls began to gossip along with the fruit salad and ice cream.

‘They say that they are coming to the end of their fortune at last,’ whispered Amelia, biting a piece of pineapple as though she had a grudge against pineapples and all their race.

‘Do you think so?’ asked Phryne.

‘It might be,’ said Pam slowly. ‘Why else come to Australia, which is about as far as anyone can run from Paris? No one can afford to spend like they’ve been spending for the last three years. I reckon the carnival ride might be coming to an end. It’s been a great ride, though,’ she sighed.

‘What will you do if it does all come to an end?’ asked Phryne.

‘Stay here, I think. Sabine likes Melbourne. I can find a job and I’ve got a little income of my own, and so has Sabine. We’ll manage.’

‘And I wouldn’t have missed it,’ said Sabine. ‘As Pam says, we’ll manage. But I don’t know about some of the others. The hash smokers are pretty out of it. It was probably cruel to bring them all this way. Some of them haven’t the wit of a dormouse and they’ll never get home, even assuming they can remember where home is.’

‘Sabine!’ exclaimed Pam, shocked at this blasphemy, and Sabine waved an apologetic hand. ‘No, I didn’t mean that Gerald was cruel, or the Lady either. But perhaps they didn’t think.’

‘Would anyone want to harm Gerald?’ asked Phryne. ‘Someone, perhaps, who knows that it is all coming to an end and blames him for stranding them in Australia?’

‘No,’ said Pam and Sabine together. ‘No one would want to hurt Gerald. You just have to be near him to feel how he loves us.’

‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves,’ quoted a rich voice. ‘By each let it be heard. Some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword . . .’

‘Really, Sylvanus,’ reproved Sabine. ‘One day you’ll go too far!’

‘Oh, I intend to,’ he told her, taking a vacant chair at Phryne’s side. ‘I can resist anything except temptation.’ He helped himself to ice cream, which was melting rapidly in the heat. Phryne sipped her chilled hock and wondered how long dinner would last.

‘Have you decided what you are going to recite, Phryne?’ asked Sylvanus, giving her a smile which indicated clearly that he understood just how uncomfortable she was. He mopped his brow with a purple silk handkerchief.

‘I have,’ she answered. ‘Coffee, please,’ she said to the servitor over her shoulder.

‘And for me,’ added Sylvanus. ‘Well, are you going to tell us which poet has your esteemed patronage tonight?’

‘No,’ said Phryne. ‘But I’m willing to bet you will never guess, and also that this poet has never been recited at a Templar gathering before.’

‘How intriguing,’ said Sylvanus, as Phryne had hoped he would. Then he began guessing, which freed Phryne to think about the Templars while coffee was drunk and the company was at last released from the dining oven. Phryne gladly followed the Templars into the grounds and back into the cool pavilion, where the fountain had got into its stride and it was almost cold.

Cold drinks were distributed. Phryne was allotted one which was vividly green and found it was a strange mixture of lemon juice and creme de menthe. Not what she might have chosen for herself but blessedly tinkling with real ice. Phryne’s father had always held that the best drinks were free drinks and there was something in what that detestable old lush the pater said, she thought. The mint flavour grew on her as she sipped, remembering Nerine and her julep.

The reciter from the other side, Jonathan, stood up and, at Gerald’s signal, began to deal with the matter of evil by means of a Swinburne poem—a man who thought a great deal about evil, it was true, though it was clear that he was a fan.

‘Cold eyelids that hid like a jewel
‘Her eyes that grow soft for an hour
‘The heavy white limbs and the cruel
‘Red mouth like a venomous flower . . .
‘O mystic and sombre Dolores
‘Our Lady of Pain . . .’

He spoke on, of ‘limbs too delicious for death’, in praise of Dolores, the ‘pallid and poisonous Queen’. The melodious verses swung past, larded and heavy with internal rhymes as Dolores moved ‘to the music of passion with lithe and lascivious regret’. He made a good performance out of the poem, only losing his place once and projecting his voice so that it carried across the still air in the tent. Actor’s training, perhaps, or was this an errant clergyman? Phryne thought so as she heard the achingly sincere regret in his delivery of the last lines.

‘What ailed us O Gods to desert you
‘For ones that refuse and refrain?
‘Come down and redeem us from virtue
‘Our Lady of Pain.’

Then Phryne stood up. She walked to stand by Gerald’s feet and started to recite, and Sylvanus, having failed to guess, spat ‘Blake, by the Gods! How you dare, Phryne!’ as she began to speak.

‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand
‘And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
‘Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
‘And Eternity in an hour

‘A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
‘Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

‘A Dove house fill’d with Doves & Pigeons
‘Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.’

The couplets were delivered in the measured, tranced voice of a seeress. Gerald Templar, listening hard, forgot the cheery Victorian voice of his nanny who had originally read them to him. In Phryne’s performance, the auguries became prophecies again, as Blake had intended. He shivered. Phryne was just visible in the drifting smoke as a rose-crowned, epicene figure, quite as uninvolved with her prophecies as the Angel who came to Tobias.

‘A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
‘Predicts the ruin of the State

‘A Horse misus’d upon the Road
‘Calls to Heaven for Human blood.

‘He who shall hurt the little Wren
‘Shall never be belov’d by Men

‘He who the Ox to wrath has mov’d
‘Shall never be by Woman lov’d

‘The Wanton Boy that kills the Fly
‘Shall feel the Spider’s enmity

‘The Poison of the Honey Bee
‘Is the Artist’s Jealousy . . .’

‘Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly,’ concluded Phryne into dead, impressed silence, ‘For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.’

She sat down and gulped the rest of her creme de menthe as the applause began.

‘Another drink for the hetaera Phryne!’ shouted Sylvanus. ‘Melt down a dozen pearls in red wine!’

‘Thank you, plain gin and tonic will be most welcome,’ said Phryne.

‘Tarquin, get the lady a drink,’ ordered Gerald.

Scowling, the gold-clad boy sped out of the tent. Sylvanus engulfed Phryne in a highly scented hug.

‘What possessed you to think of Blake?’ he asked. ‘He is just too,
too
passé!’

‘So passé as to be back in fashion,’ replied Phryne, releasing herself gently. Sylvanus used altogether too much freesia perfume. He smelt like a slightly rancid flower garden. ‘I have always liked Blake, such of him as I could understand, which isn’t a lot.’

‘Ah, but he knew about evil,’ said Sylvanus. ‘What about “London”? How the chimney sweeper’s sigh, ev’ry black’ning church appals, how the hapless soldier’s sigh . . .’

‘Runs in blood down palace walls,’ concluded Phryne. ‘Exactly so. But Jonathan delivered that Swinburne very well. Such solid verse, I always think.’

‘But hard to forget,’ said Jonathan, who had ventured closer to join the discussion. ‘Swinburne sort of glues itself to the surface of the mind like toffee to the palate.’

‘How poor Swinburne would have hated to be compared to anything sweet,’ mused Sylvanus. ‘Where is that boy with the drinks? My tongue’s hanging out. Shall I go and hurry him along, Gerald?’

‘Yes, do,’ said Gerald, allowing a look of worry to crease his perfect forehead.