Death by Water (8 page)

‘I’m all right,’ Phryne told the steward as he reached for her.

In one lithe movement she hauled herself out of the pool and wiped her face. ‘Get me a Singapore sling, please. And one for the idiot,’ she added.

Jack Mason leapt to her side, putting a solicitous arm around her shoulder. Phryne shook him off. She had left her bag and towel on one of the sun lounges which was, regrettably, just out of sight around a corner. But she heard the snap of metal and a soft exclamation. Slipping out of the penitent’s clutch, she padded to her lounge and found that two people had joined her. They were the professor and Mr Aubrey. The Pierrot bag was just where she had left it, under her towel. It did not seem to have been disturbed.

Phryne pulled off her bathing cap, dried her face and arms and wrapped the towel around her. It was a first class bath sheet and would have wrapped the stouter form of a matron without trouble. It went round Phryne twice.

‘My dear Miss Fisher!’ cried Mr Aubrey. ‘What has this young brute been doing to you?’

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‘Spirited attempt to drown me,’ Phryne replied. ‘But he’s buying me a drink to compensate.’

‘I should think so, indeed,’ said Mr Aubrey. He had both hands under his steamer rug, intending to snooze in the sun.

The professor was engaged in reading a very thick book. Her hands were an old woman’s hands, patched and blotchy. Phryne could not tell which, if either, had encountered that spring-loaded mousetrap that was the last thing she had put into the Pierrot bag. It had definitely caught someone. Scragger was not the only rat catcher on the SS
Hinemoa
. Phryne spread out the towel, lay down on the sun lounge and delved in her bag for smoked glasses, her cigarettes and a lighter. Yes. The mousetrap had been sprung.

She allowed Mr Aubrey to light her gasper.

‘I don’t approve of young women smoking,’ the professor said severely. ‘Ah, here is your drink.’

‘And your apology,’ said Jack Mason, flinging himself down beside her and almost spilling her off the sun lounge. He took up one of Phryne’s pale bare feet and kissed the toes. ‘Abject,’

he said.

‘Oh, very well,’ said Phryne crossly. If she didn’t forgive him he would go on making awkward demonstrations of remorse all day. ‘You’re forgiven,’ she said, taking a sip of the cherry flavoured drink.

‘Anything from the char-wallah?’ Mr Aubrey asked the professor, who shook her head. ‘Tea, Steward, if you please,’ said Aubrey to the older man. ‘Chai for me, Bob, as usual.’

‘That’s tea with spices, isn’t it?’ asked Phryne, shoving Jack Mason off the foot of her sun lounge. ‘Get your own chair, Mr Mason, if you please.’

‘Since I nearly drowned you, you ought to call me Jack,’

he said, grinning.

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‘Attempted murder does not constitute an introduction,’

she told him severely, which made the professor laugh.

‘Quite right, Miss Fisher. Now, let’s change the subject.’

‘Oh yes, let’s,’ agreed Phryne. ‘What about the name of the ship? It’s a Maori name, isn’t it? Can you tell us the tale?’

Professor Applegate seemed touched. ‘She’s one of my favourite stories. You know that the Maori had clans, and each clan not only had a clan chief but an aristocracy, a royal family?

They were given the best food and great respect, but their lives were constrained by many more
tapu
than those of the com-moners, and especially the girls. Some of the princesses were required to stay in their huts, out of the sun. They weren’t allowed to do things the ordinary girls did, like fish or wander the forest or take lovers. Maori girls could take as many lovers as they liked until they married,’ said the professor, a little wistfully.

‘But not the princesses?’ asked Jack Mason.

‘No. They had to stay virgins, because they were used for diplomatic marriages between clans. And by staying out of the sun their skin grew pale, which was desirable. They had servants and company and were allowed to dance and sing and so on, but it must have been a narrow life when the princess compared herself to the other maidens. Also, they were tattooed with curves and lines on mouth and chin, which is agonising.’

The professor rolled up one sleeve to reveal a dark blue bracelet tattooed on her forearm. ‘The curves of the unfolding fern,’ she said. ‘It was a great compliment from Te Rangi and it hurt like billy-o. If it hadn’t been for a good solid gulp of preparatory laudanum I believe that I might have disgraced myself by screaming. And that would never have done.

‘Well, such a one was Hinemoa. She was very beautiful and very desirable, and her father was consulting with a number of
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chiefs as to which prince she would marry, but she had fallen in love with a fisherman. She could see him and talk to him as she sat in her seclusion, and he was the one for her. His name was Tutanekai, and he lived across the bay at a place called Mokoia.

He loved her, as well. He won all the prizes at the Maori equival-ent of the Olympic Games and he could also play the flute but he was of relatively humble birth and he hadn’t even thought of offering for her. But Hinemoa’s relatives, thinking that she spent too long talking to this pretty warrior, took the precaution of pulling all the canoes up onto the beach, and Hinemoa by herself could not move them. They are very heavy.’

‘I bet that didn’t stop her,’ commented Phryne. ‘No more than the Hellespont stopped Leander getting to Hero.’

‘But this was the other way around. If her lover carried her off he would spark a war. She had to give herself away. Then it would be a fait accompli. Maori women were not forced to marry the ones their fathers selected except in very unusual circumstances. So, picture the scene. In the dark, Hinemoa sends her attendants away, saying she is sleepy. Then she gathers six gourds and ties them together to make a float. She sets off on the long swim. It is cold and dark and she isn’t sure of the way.

She swims for hours. Finally she beaches, cold and very tired, and rests in a warm pool in the stone now called Hinemoa’s bath.’

‘But how did she attract her young man’s attention?’ wondered Phryne. ‘I gather that she isn’t wearing any clothes at this point. Although a naked woman is welcome everywhere, that might not be what she had in mind.’

‘As you say,’ agreed the professor, rubbing one hand slowly over her knuckles. ‘Fortunately Tutanekai sends his servant down to the pool to get him some water. Hinemoa asks, ‘‘Who is that water for?’’ and when the servant says, ‘‘Tutanekai’’, she grabs the gourd and smashes it. This confuses the servant, who
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is convinced that she’s some sort of demon, and he flees to his master and says that there is a devil in the pool which smashes gourds. Tutanekai puts on his feather cloak and takes his spears and his greenstone club and goes down to interview the monster. ‘‘Who are you, gourd smasher? What name shall I put on the cup I shall make out of your skull?’’ he asks the monster in the pool, and gets no reply. Instead someone takes his hand.

‘ Who is here?’’ he asks. She says, ‘‘It is I,’’ and stands up out of the water as beautiful as a heron. So he wraps his feather cloak around her and takes her to his house, where they declare that they are married. The next day comes a fleet of canoes.’

‘Oh dear,’ murmured Phryne. She was dry enough to put her dress on but did not want to interrupt the story.

‘No, there was a large celebration instead of a war, and Tutanekai’s brother Tiki married Hinemoa’s sister, eventually providing a blending of the two tribes. They don’t all end that well,’ confessed Professor Applegate. ‘But Hinemoa’s is a nice story, and a nice name for a ship.’

‘So it is,’ agreed Phryne, pulling on the cotton dress and clapping on her hat. ‘Thank you for telling me. I’d better go and have a shower and wash all this salt off my skin. See you at lunch?’ she said and walked off, swinging the bag easily in one hand, the towel draped over her shoulder. She was conscious of a little constraint behind her, but she kept going and did not look back.

Showered, she took herself to the beauty salon, where she was creamed and massaged and her hair was washed in three changes of water and the salon’s French shampoo. Her attendant was a sparrow-like girl with a strong New Zealand accent.

From her badge, her name was Rose.

‘Oh, Miss Fisher, that’s very nice hair,’ said Rose, scrubbing at Phryne’s scalp. ‘Cut in Melbourne? I thought so.’

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‘The original cut was Paris,’ said Phryne, drowsing under the deft massage.

‘I’m going there next trip,’ said Rose promptly. ‘I’ll say this for P&O, they treat you good if you want a long cruise. Most girls only want to sign on for the short ones. Me, I want to see Cairo and the pyramids and London and Paris.’

‘You’ll go far,’ predicted Phryne. ‘With those clever fingers.’

‘Hope to,’ said the young woman.

‘I was speaking to the professor and she told me about the woman this ship is named for,’ commented Phryne.

Rose grunted. ‘She knows all them Maori legends. The Maoris on the ship’d do anything for Professor Applegate. They call her Kuia-paa, wise grandmother, and there’s some sort of magic connected with her.
Mana
, you know. Pure supersti-tion. I used to live near a Maori reservation,’ she explained.

‘I played with the Maori kids when I was a kid.’

But not when you grew up, thought Phryne. She asked aloud, ‘What do you make of all these thefts?’

‘It wasn’t us,’ said Rose instantly.

‘Never thought it was,’ responded Phryne. ‘You looked after the ladies, didn’t you?’

‘Not all of them. That Miss Van Sluys, she brought her own maid with her to dress her hair. Wasn’t going to have any of us touching her. Stuck-up thing! I did Miss Berengaria Reynolds’

hair. It wasn’t a lot of fun. There are some people who just won’t be pleased, no matter what you do or how hard you try?’ Her intonation rose at the end of the sentence and Phryne treated it as a question.

‘I know,’ she responded.

‘She was one of them. Could she go crook! And the same went for that La Paloma woman. Beautiful hair, real black hair, but so fine and matted with lacquer. Needed three goes of
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coconut oil to start to untangle it. And she screamed and carried on the whole time, as if I was trying to pull it out by the roots.

Lucky she was speaking Italian because I reckon she was calling me every name she could lay her tongue to. Looked good when I finally got it dressed, but. Her maid gave me a handful of coins and said La Paloma was sorry for screaming at me. Sorry! Hah!

But she sang like an angel, they said. There’s no telling about people, like my gran says. Mrs West is all right. Never says much.

Giggles a lot. Why do you ask?’ queried Rose belatedly.

‘Just interested,’ said Phryne. ‘I brought my big sapphire with me, and I don’t want to lose it.’

‘I reckon you ought to put it in the captain’s strong box, then,’ said Rose. ‘Sit up, Miss, you’re all done now. I’ll just comb you out. You want to dry it under the machine?’

Phryne looked at the strange hooded hot air apparatus and declined. ‘It’ll dry just fine on its own,’ she told Rose, handing over the fee and a thumping tip. She went out on a wave of goodwill.

Curious, thought Phryne as she went back to her cabin. Dot was not there. Her embroidery lay abandoned on the wicker chair. More ivory thread, Phryne remembered. Perhaps she might just wander down to the ship’s shop when her hair dried.

Before that happened, she needed a cup of coffee. Phryne phoned her stewardess. Caroline came in with a tray. She set it down and poured carefully. All her movements were very precise. Not a drop spilled on the polished surface of the tray.

‘Leo says, do you like your coffee stronger than this?’ she said. ‘He’s really pleased that someone likes that black muck.

Bleach a black dog, I reckon.’

‘It’s just habit,’ said Phryne. ‘Tell the admirable Leo that I like coffee as strong as he can brew it. Espresso, tell him. Do you know where Dot is?’

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‘She said something about more thread,’ said Caroline, noticing the half-completed afternoon tea cloth. ‘That’s pretty.

She does very nice work.’

‘She certainly does,’ agreed Phryne, who was convinced that sewing was for other women. But Dot’s skills were certainly useful. ‘Tell me, you have had to look after some very difficult women. Miss Van Sluys? Mrs West? Miss Reynolds? La Paloma?’

Caroline leaned a hip against the dressing table and prepared for a cosy gossip while Phryne drank her coffee. If she could take the tray away it would save her another trip. ‘Well, if you’d been looking for the four to drive an honest woman out of all patience, you’ve named them all,’ she said in her strange accent.

Phryne laughed. ‘Who was the worst?’

‘Hard to say. Mrs West can’t make up her mind for love nor money. One moment she wants tea, or maybe coffee, then maybe a drink, or would Johnnie mind? And all the time I’m standing there, shifting from one foot to the other and knowing I’ve got another cabin to mind. How her husband puts up with her I don’t know, except she’s very pretty.’

‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ said Phryne sententiously.

‘Yair,’ agreed Caroline. ‘La Paloma was all right. She had her own maid who seemed to have her under control. Ate a lot and drank a lot but mostly she screamed at the maid, not at me, which was fine with me. Miss Van Sluys didn’t give me the time of day, except when I didn’t bring things fast enough to suit her fancy, and then she’d threaten to tell her papa and I ain’t working for her papa, thank God. But the one that got my goat right and proper was that old monster, Miss Reynolds.

The life she led her companion, it would make angels weep.