Queen of Flowers (6 page)

‘Mr Xavier brought it. From Xavier’s Cellars. I have purchased a lot of it. But I was just hoping that someone would come along to drink it with me. Mr Xavier is in the kitchen with Mr Butler, discussing port. And he made the oddest error, Lin dear. This is a young man who is going to be a great salesman. That requires one to observe the customer, to know their likes and dislikes. He knows mine. But he twice suggested a wine to go with a gambling expedition. I never gamble.’

‘Except on lovers,’ suggested Lin.

‘No, my dear, you were a sure thing from the very moment I saw you. I don’t play cards—such a waste of time! I don’t play bridge, because people have broken up thirty-year marriages over bridge. People have been shot over bridge games! Besides, you have to learn a lot of fiddling rules and then obey them.’

‘And you have never been very good at that,’ observed Lin, smiling.

Phryne went on, counting off her points on her fingers.

‘I am happy to go to the races, but I seldom put money on horses and even then it’s only five bob. I don’t even buy raffle tickets! I just give the collector the money. I refused to let you teach me how to play mah-jong. I won’t play fan-tan. Even for beans. And if I was stuck with a whole lot of people in a boring bookless house on a wet afternoon we could always dance.’

‘And . . .?’ asked Lin.

‘How did that clever young man come to make such an odd mistake?’ she wondered.

‘Everyone makes them sometimes,’ observed Lin, wondering if he could possibly decoy Phryne upstairs before her family claimed her attention.

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‘I suppose so,’ said Phryne. ‘I’ve had rather a disconcerting day, Lin dear. First those uncomfortable odd girls at lunch—

one of whom is going to come to a very bad end fairly soon if something isn’t done about her—and then I heard this little tune, played by a fiddler somewhere in the carnival, and it positively nailed me to my place. I can’t remember where I have heard it before and there are words to it, but I can’t recall them.’

‘Sing it for me,’ requested Lin. Phryne obliged, then sang it again. The tune was firming in her head as she repeated it.

‘I’ve never heard it before,’ said Lin. ‘Sorry. But I’ve heard things rather like it.’

‘You have? Where?’

‘When I was in London last, the Folk Song and Dance Society had a concert. It sounds like one of their things.’

‘I’m not a good singer,’ confessed Phryne. ‘But that’s the first clue, Lin, thank you. A folk song? When would I have ever heard a folk song? And it’s such a strange little crinkle of music.

Come along,’ she said to Lin, holding out her hand and picking up the bottle. He put his hand in hers, a hard narrow palm and long fingers.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You and me and the sauterne,’ said Phryne, ‘are going upstairs.’

Mrs Butler, exiled from her own kitchen by deep discussions on port, had gone into the garden with a sherry cobbler and her crocheting. It had fallen unhooked into her lap. She drowsed. It was late afternoon. The bees buzzed in the jasmine flowers. Mr Butler and Mr Xavier would be an hour yet. The preparations for dinner were all made. Miss Fisher had retired to her boudoir for what Mrs Butler very firmly
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thought of as an afternoon nap with Mr Lin for company.

Her eyes closed.

She was awoken by two sharp, fierce female voices. Jane and Ruth were standing beside the pen in which Mrs Butler’s chickens clucked and grumbled.

‘I still say you’re mental!’ That was Jane.

‘I have to know.’ That was Ruth, a slightly deeper voice, ragged with pain.

‘What does it matter? We’re lucky, Ruthie. Miss Phryne took us in and she’s adopted us and we’re going to be all right.’

‘But . . .’ objected Ruth.

Jane, ordinarily the most logical and calm of the pair, unexpectedly lost her temper. ‘But? But what? My parents just strolled off and left me with Grandma, and then she died, and what would have become of me if Miss Phryne hadn’t kept me?

Your mother—’

‘Don’t you talk about my mother!’ Ruth’s voice rose.

‘All right, I’m not saying it was her fault, I know she had TB. But where were you when they took her away? You were scrubbing your fingers to the bone and starving, Ruthie, you can’t deny it. I know you were ’cos so was I. And if you go upsetting everyone about your father, what’s Miss Phryne going to think? Ungrateful, that’s what she’ll think we are. And I’m not ungrateful.’

‘I just want to go and see my mum. I won’t make trouble.’

‘You’re already making trouble!’ snarled Jane.

There was a pause in which Black Bob, the cock, gave an experimental crow. Then Jane spoke again.

‘All right. I’ll go with you to ask Miss Phryne to make the appointment at the sanatorium. Mr Butler can take us. That’s not unreasonable. But if your mum can’t tell you anything, then you drop it, right? You promise?’

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Ruth muttered something. Mrs Butler waited until the girls had gone and then began to lever herself out of the deckchair.

Oh dear. Girls. Never anything but trouble if there were girls in the house, Mrs Butler’s father had said, and he had been right. Mrs Butler finished her sherry cobbler, gathered her crocheting, and went inside. She heard Dot passing the kitchen door and called her in to the Butlers’ own sitting room.

Mrs Butler did not know how Miss Phryne was going to respond to Ruth wanting to see her mother, and she had always found Dot’s predictions of domestic weather very reliable.

Dot was not pleased. She bit her lip as Mrs Butler explained what she had overheard.

‘Where did she get the girls, anyway?’ asked Dot rhetori-cally. ‘Rescued poor little Jane out of the clutches of a . . . a procurer and a mesmerist. Jane’s an orphan. That nice Miss Jilly-the-solicitor couldn’t find any relatives at all. The old hag the two of them were living with was no blood kin at all, just a . . .’

Dot’s mouth almost formed the term ‘bitch’ and reformed itself smartly around ‘greedy old woman. She was working them to death. Mr Bert said the poor girls hardly had a rag between them and when we found Jane on the Ballarat train she was wearing a winceyette thing you wouldn’t polish brass with.’

‘What about Ruth, then?’ asked Mrs Butler. ‘She’s got a mother?’

‘Hopeless case of consumption,’ said Dot. ‘She’s been in the sanatorium at Dandenong for years. She signed the adoption papers. She knows she’ll never come out. And she didn’t want to see Ruth when we offered to bring her, either. Said she had lost the girl so long ago that she didn’t want to remember her now. Drat,’ said Dot, allowing herself one of her rare expletives.

‘Just when Miss Phryne doesn’t need to be upset, too, what with this Flower Festival and all.’

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‘What about Ruth’s father?’ Mrs Butler pressed.

‘He’s not even on her birth certificate,’ said Dot. ‘That woman was no better than she ought to have been. God forgive me,’ she added, mentally putting this harsh judgment on her confession list for Sunday.

‘Is Miss Phryne going to be upset?’ asked Mrs Butler.

‘Probably not very,’ said Dot. ‘But it might be a good notion to be fast off the mark with the cocktails.’

‘I’ll tell Mr Butler,’ said Mrs Butler, relieved. She disliked domestic disharmony. It gave people indigestion and then they didn’t appreciate her food properly. She retreated to the kitchen, where Mr Butler was just showing Mr Xavier out. The air was pleasantly redolent of good port and concluded orders. Time to put on the dinner and stop worrying about the girls.

She did pass on Dot’s recommendation about the cocktails, though. Better safe than sorry.

Phryne did not emerge to dine until the table was laid and the company seated. Lin handed her to her chair and Mr Butler filled a water glass to clear the palate and a wine glass with a robust red. Phryne was pleased with her household, her afternoon, and her lover. Dinner was a simple affair of cold collations and differing tastes and textures; the crunch of raw celery, the suave texture of cold roasted chicken, and the sharp, lemon-thyme tang of a veal galantine, bedded on lettuce and wreathed in parsley. Dessert was a cleansing sorbet. Phryne folded her napkin and smiled on the company.

‘Miss Phryne, can you write for an appointment for me to see . . .’ said Ruth, having waited for this moment.

‘Yes?’ asked Phryne, sated and blissful and ready to grant almost any request.

‘. . . my mother?’ squeaked Ruth.

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There was a silence around the table. Mr Butler brought in Phryne’s coffee and a tray of liqueurs. Without asking he poured Miss Fisher a small glass of green chartreuse.

Lin Chung, battle-scarred veteran of some of the most complex and carefully nurtured family feuds in the history of Victoria, took in a slow breath and inched his hand along the tablecloth, laying it on Phryne’s very gently. He had been ravished out of his senses and now needed them back rather quickly. Phryne had rescued the girls from slavery at considerable trouble and expense, and he was desperately hoping that she would not be affronted by this request, which might be seen, in certain lights, as rank ingratitude.

‘That sounds reasonable,’ he said quietly.

There was another long silence. Phryne was still trying to remember where she had heard that fiddle tune. After a moment she came out of her brown study and found that her whole family was staring at her with held breath. Silly of them.

What did they expect her to do, forbid Ruth to see her mother?

She smiled into Ruth’s anxious eyes.

‘Yes,’ said Phryne. ‘Perfectly reasonable. I shall write tomorrow—or rather, I shall telephone. Then Mr Butler shall take you to the Dandenongs. I really can’t vanish in the middle of all this festivity, but I’m sure that Dot will go too, and would you like a nice ride in the country, Jane? Mrs B will pack a suitable picnic.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jane, weak with relief. ‘Any day but Thursday. We have a history test.’

‘Oh? On what?’

‘Queen Elizabeth,’ said Jane. ‘I think she must have been rather like you, Miss Phryne.’

‘Except for one thing,’ said Lin Chung.

Everyone looked at him. Surely Lin Chung was not going
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to be so crude as to refer to the celebrated queen’s virginity and Phryne’s equally celebrated lack of it?

‘Queen Elizabeth said that she had the heart and stomach of a man,’ he said, a little surprised at their reaction. ‘Phryne Fisher has the heart of a lion. And any other parts of it which she might want,’ he added.

Everyone laughed.

Mr Rory McCrimmon to Miss Anna Ross, (undated) on a bunch of roses

No rose could be fairer than you.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the stars to Flight.

Edward Fitzgerald

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Phryne slept well until five am when she came utterly and obstinately awake and all attempts at persuading herself that it was still dark outside and there was no point in waking failed completely.

She rose, dressed in her male disguise, took up a flat cap, and left the house without waking anyone. It was not safe for an unaccompanied female of any description to promenade along the promenade at this hour. But no one noticed boys.

Pre-dawn light was beginning to filter into the sky. The dead hour of night, when old people died and babies were born. On the turn of the tide.

Dressed in men’s clothes, Phryne made a convincing boy if not too closely inspected. She had the unpolished boots, the
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old tweed trousers, the jacket which had belonged to a larger brother, the collarless shirt and the cap of a St Kilda boy; not too scrupulous with an unlocked door, perhaps, open to various offers in relation to a little shop-breaking or car theft, but unarmed and relatively harmless. There were thousands of them, wondering where tomorrow’s dinner was coming from.

More every day. She dropped into the proper slouch of someone who had slept rough and cold, jammed her cap on her head and wandered down to the seashore.

The carnival, of course, was guarded by dogs, and the circus was guarded by dogs and men. But the seashore was open to all and she paced along the wet sand, wondering how this quest of Ruth’s would affect her own family. She was comfortable with the two girls, but what would she do with a stray sailor father, expecting—no doubt—to be accommodated and fed in exchange for allowing Phryne to adopt his daughter. And that was assuming he was presentable at all. Not a pleasant prospect.

Neither was the prospect of Ruth yearning for her missing progenitor for years and possibly going into a decline like her mother. The sea hissed in and out in that special St Kilda way; shh, slop, pause. Shh, slop, pause. As though it was too tired to splash.

A couple of dogs barked at her as she passed the trucks and tents of the carnival. A baby cried in one of the caravans. A lion had clearly woken up grumpy and roared. Silence spread in pools like cold water. Phryne heard the hiss and scratch of a match and the pop of a primus as someone decided that since they were awake they might as well make a cup of tea.

Someone was watching her from the darkness. She could feel their eyes. But no one moved or spoke and she passed on like a shadow, kicking seaweed aside with her thick boots, scuffing the sand. Damn all fathers. They were nothing but trouble.