Murder on a Midsummer Night (10 page)

Without violence the two young men shouldered James into the room again, and Gerald gave him a large glass of brandy.

‘Drink it down, old boy, and you’ll feel more the thing,’ Luke encouraged.

James complied. He shuddered and sat down rather quickly.

‘There,’ said Valentine.

‘Where?’ asked Priscilla. ‘Did you hear what he said about my masters?’

‘Yes, I heard it,’ said Blanche calmly. ‘It is strange how different two siblings can be! One open to all sorts of possibilities, another closed up tight as a drum, and so angry!’ She wavered closer to James, trailing her graceful fingers across his face, and cooed, ‘Is the great big man angry?’

‘You should see your aura,’ Priscilla informed him.

James batted ineffectually at the caressing hand.

Gerald took another deep breath of the drugged air and said, ‘But we are forgetting our guest! Come and look at the pretty things which Augustine found for me.’

Phryne, who had thought the quarrel strangely compelling, rose and accompanied her host as he wobbled from glass case to glass case. ‘Here is a Ming Dynasty lady,’ he said, peering through the glass at a tiny maiden carved in blackwood.

‘The Taoist flower maiden,’ said Phryne, who had been given a much larger, more intact and more valuable jade version by her lover, Lin Chung.

‘Quite right!’ slurred Gerald. ‘What a clever girl you are! Can you tell me what this is?’

‘A ceremonial cup,’ said Phryne. ‘Bronze, Chinese, fifth century, perhaps?’

‘And the incense burner that goes with it,’ agreed Gerald. ‘How about this?’

‘Egyptian.’ Phryne was beginning to enjoy herself but was watching her host closely. A collector should not be outfaced amongst his own collection. He would be nettled and he could have weapons. It would be interestingly historic to be battered with a ninth-century Chinese warrior’s club, but it would also hurt. ‘It’s a faience scarab, perhaps one that the Pharaoh had issued to mark particular triumphs. This one has soldiers and captured enemies on it, so is it Ramses the Third?’

‘Egypt’s Napoleon, yes,’ agreed Gerald, who seemed rather pleased than nettled by Phryne’s erudition. Veronica Collins, who had trailed along, observed, ‘I always loved this one.’

‘It’s a putto,’ said Phryne, who had a limited tolerance for small, fat, nude children, even if they did have wings. This one appeared to be simpering. ‘Not classical. From a grave, possibly, or maybe a mantelpiece? One can see the little tongue of stone where it was attached to something upright. Eighteenth century. Italian. Is this some sort of test, Mr Atkinson?’

‘Everything’s a test,’ mumbled Gerald. ‘This is Pris’s favourite.’

Phryne could see why. It was a small iconostasis, about the size of a paperback book for railway reading. It was hinged in the middle. The outside was wood, carved and gilded. The inside revealed a glorious gilded Madonna surrounded by angels with lapis wings on one side and a morose man, attired in an airy sheepskin, staring cross-eyed out of a bush of thorns at a woman in a ruby-red dress. St Anthony being tempted and the Madonna being praised by angels. The blues were astounding, so fresh, so bright. Periwinkle, thought Phryne, hyacinth, Greek midday over Hydra.

‘Where would we be without Charging Elk, I ask you?’ Stephanie was demanding of the company, having joined the guided tour. ‘Where would we be in our quest without Selima and Zacarias? Nowhere. Augustine wasn’t going to tell us anything else, but my spirit guide knows . . .’

‘Yes, yes,’ soothed Blanche White, slinking along after Pris like a cat after a bird. ‘That is a lovely thing, Gerald.’

‘It’s Greek, isn’t it?’ asked Phryne. ‘Precious.’

‘Very precious,’ agreed Gerald. His colour was heightened, perhaps with a touch of rouge, his eyes dilated almost black by the kif, and his bee-stung mouth was smiling. He looked like a Saint Sebastian drawn by Félicien Rops. Reynolds was joined in conversation by Priscilla and Phryne was listening to both her and Gerald, a skill learned at school and sharpened by many dreary cocktail parties.

‘This?’ asked Gerald, indicating a handful of broken coins.

‘No idea,’ confessed Phryne promptly.

‘It’s pieces of eight,’ said Veronica.

‘Really? As in Long John Silver and “Sixteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest”? Pirate treasure? Fascinating,’ said Phryne, rather disappointed.

‘They had better plunder. Moidores, Louis d’or, gold cups and chains. They say that Blackbeard had fifteen caches of treasure, and only eight have ever been found.’

‘Charging Elk said, “How! Seekers must look to the West!” You remember, don’t you, Pris?’

‘Of course,’ said Pris. ‘And when we looked to the west we found Zacarias.’

‘What about this?’ asked Gerald. Phryne detected something creeping up behind her and felt Blanche White’s hand stealing in between her arm and her side. She crooked an elbow to defend her breast.

‘It’s a Colombian statue, Maya or Inca or something like that, a beast eating a man.’

‘A jaguar, and here is the companion piece,’ said Gerald.

‘I compliment you on your sense of the macabre,’ said Phryne. The companion piece was a crude wooden statuette of a tiger eating a white man, legs first, so that his screaming face and his top hat were still visible—and indeed might easily prove inedible if the tiger had any delicacy of taste, which Gerald apparently didn’t.

‘You could call it the art of rebellion,’ he told her. ‘This was made in India before the Mutiny.’

‘And Charging Elk said that we wouldn’t get any help from Augustine—he said, “Curio man speak with forked tongue,” you remember?’ insisted Stephanie.

‘Yes, so he did,’ said Pris. ‘And he was right.’

Phryne, with Blanche White glued to her side, moved to the next case. The air was clearer. It was cool in the rooms, evidently a ventilation system was in operation to preserve the antiquities. She knew the little woman in the next case.

‘Ishtar. Lady of stars and goddess of Ur,’ she told Gerald. He nodded briskly and led the way to a glass dome over a small thing. It looked like a little terracotta pillow on which a drunken sparrow had been roosting.

‘A cuneiform letter, Gerald,’ she said. Blanche White was so close to Phryne that she was reminded of Alice and the Red Queen. She looked around. All of the group were in attendance. Luke and Valentine were inspecting a case full of coins. James Barton was standing with them, holding his forehead as though his head was insecurely gummed on, and Stephanie and Priscilla were next to the anthropophagus tiger, still talking about seances.

Blanche and Phryne moved to the next case, in which was displayed a red figure vase—a rude one. Phryne loved these little round two-eared cups, the Ancient Greek equivalent of Woolworths china. They were made quickly and thrown away in huge numbers and often had a cartoon on them, whatever the cup maker had on his mind when he had fired a few hundred of them in a day. In this case, it was satyrs and their indecent ways. This satyr was demonstrating a method of becoming one with one’s flock. The goat looked relaxed about it. It was grinning.

‘Red figure is my favourite,’ observed Phryne, without turning a hair. This wasn’t in the first hundred of indecent things she had seen, not to mention taken part in. ‘Where did Augustine get it, I wonder?’

‘Sicily, he said.’ Gerald was amused. Phryne felt that she had passed some sort of test. ‘That’s what set us off laughing in church—disgraceful of us! Huge deposits of Greek leftovers in Sicily. Syracuse, you know. More intact temples there than in Greece, and Lord knows how the temples are going to fare if Greece turns to war now, what with all these bombs and so on. I look on collectors as salvaging what they can from a violent world which does not care about beauty.’

‘Or even wit,’ agreed Phryne, shifting a hip out of Blanche’s reach. What was the woman after? By now she must know that Phryne was not carrying a gun. She must know what sort of undergarments she was wearing.

A white figure vase reposed in the next case. It was a tiny thing, decorated with a sad maiden casting a wreath onto a tomb.

‘To hold tears,’ Veronica Collins informed Phryne. Phryne shrugged off some of Blanche’s embrace and bent forward. The vase was intact, except for a chip on one side which alone disqualified it as a museum piece. The range of Augustine’s stock was astonishing. Phryne wished more than ever that she had met him when alive. The man who could assemble this remarkable collection must have had agents all over the world.

‘Did Augustine speak any other languages?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes, lots,’ said Stephanie, unexpectedly coming out of her diatribe about spirits. ‘Italian and Greek and Spanish and Italian, and some others, I believe. He was a wonderful man,’ she said, and she and Priscilla burst into tears again.

Blanche released Phryne, to her great relief, to go to her friend, and Gerald moved on.

‘A flint arrowhead,’ she said. ‘French?’

‘From Abbeville,’ he agreed. ‘Marvellous how they made them. It’s as sharp today as it was ten thousand years ago.’ He opened the case and drew the point across his wrist. A red line sprang up behind it. Phryne stared. Gerald tied his handkerchief around his wrist, to defend his faultless cuff, and put the arrowhead in her palm. It was a lovely, deadly thing. Phryne imagined the maker striking hundreds of shards off a flint until he had the exact shape, then flaking it so accurately that the head formed the shape of a leaf.

‘Lethal,’ she said, giving it back.

A flat lead disc figured with an eagle was the next exhibit. It was not a coin. There was a hole in the top. It was meant to be worn. And it was thicker than a coin.

‘It’s a bulla, the Roman seal of freedom,’ said Gerald. Letting his blood had apparently had a sobering effect on him. ‘There’s a space inside for one’s manumission.’

‘I am a citizen of no mean city,’ quoted Veronica.

‘I always thought that showed the saint in a very poor light,’ said Phryne. ‘The soldier says to him, “I’m a Roman citizen too, cost me a fortune,” and Paul says, “I was born a Roman.” Pure arrogance. No wonder the centurion sent him on.’

‘To Caesar hast thou appealed, to Caesar shalt thou go,’ said Gerald.

‘And this?’ asked Phryne. ‘I don’t recognise the style. It’s a flower, around the cup, isn’t it?’

‘An almond flower,’ said Gerald. He paused, but apart from the fact that almonds were very tasty, Phryne knew of no special significance in almond flowers. ‘Persian,’ he added.

‘Oh,’ said Phryne. ‘Very . . . old.’ It was lumpy as cups went and seemed to have no grace in its making. Though it was pure gold, which made it valuable.

‘And these are some coins,’ said Gerald. ‘Shekels. And now, Miss Fisher, perhaps you would care for some Turkish coffee? My man makes it very well.’

‘Thank you,’ said Phryne, smiling sunnily into his face. ‘I adore Turkish coffee.’

She was glad that Blanche had released her, or she might have felt a reaction. Why had Augustine been drowned with one of those golden shekels in his pocket?

‘I fear,’ said the officer, ‘that Judea has lost its bloom.’

‘Yer mean because it’s freezing cold and raining and snowing and there’s no cover and the tents are all leaking, sir?’

‘Could be that,’ said the officer. ‘Anyway, some of the Christmas parcels got through. There’s one for your mate Jim.’

‘Whacko,’ said Bill.

They crammed into one tent to open the parcel. It was a heavy, solid parcel laden with possibilities. Each item was taken out and admired as the 1917 winter sleeted down outside.

‘Cake, Jeannie makes good cake,’ said Jim hungrily. ‘Baked in the tin and sewn into sailcloth. Socks and underwear, you beaut, mine are in rags. Lice powder, Fuller’s for the Feet, soap, boiled sweets, papers, matches, pound of tobacco, dried fruit, and—this.’

They all looked at it.

‘She’s a good woman, all right, your Jeannie,’ said Curly solemnly.

Wrapped in drying eucalyptus leaves was a bottle of over-proof rum.

‘Merry Christmas,’ said Bill.

CHAPTER TEN

For wisdom is better than rubies.

Proverbs 8:11
The Holy Bible

The coffee was thick, black and dangerous, as the best Turkish coffee always is. It was served in gem-like Lalique tea glasses in holders woven of golden vines. Phryne drank only one cup, in deference to her chances of sleeping any time soon, but the company gulped as if coffee was about to be banned under the
Drugs and Poisons Control Act 1926
. This must be their standard mode of behaviour, Phryne thought; to stoke themselves up on kif and alcohol, then caffeinise themselves into sobriety again, in time to go home to their respective respectable homes. She tapped into the general chit-chat and obtained some information right away.

‘You live with your mother, Miss White? And you live with your brother, Miss Barton? My sister is in Australia but we thought it best for her to have her own establishment.’

‘Siblings,’ said Veronica. ‘Rivalry.’

‘Indeed,’ lied Phryne, who now got on swimmingly with her sister Eliza.

‘That’s what Augustine wanted, to give his mother a wonderful house so he could live alone. A natural solitary, Augustine. Like one of those old hermit johnnies. Loved to be alone. Hated company, most of the time,’ said James Barton.

‘Didn’t appreciate your cocktails?’ insinuated Phryne over the rim of her coffee cup.

‘Oh, no, he didn’t go that far,’ asserted Gerald. ‘Liked a drink as much as the rest of us.’

‘Indeed,’ murmured Phryne. ‘Your tea glasses are Lalique, I think? Beautiful things. I must say that your range of liqueurs would not disgrace the Ritz, Mr Atkinson. Do you collect them as well?’

‘Ah? Yes, well, yes, I suppose so.’ Mr Atkinson seemed distracted. ‘I always pick up a bottle if it looks interesting. And I buy a lot from the agent. Hard to get real absinthe these days, for instance; they dilute it with anisette.’

To Phryne, all aniseed liqueurs tasted the same, from Pernod to raki to ouzo to absinthe. Though only absinthe had the extra mind-wrecking, brain-rotting wormwood which had sent so many of the intelligentsia of Paris out of their collective heads. She didn’t like aniseed. She had even given her black jellybeans to the Fisher dog. Terpenes had never been her tipple.

She sipped her coffee and nodded in assent. It was definitely time she got out of this appalling atmosphere while she could still remember her own name. But she had one thing to do first. She put down the cup, approached Miss Collins and murmured into her silky soft ear a certain request.

Veronica led her out of the rooms to—drat!—a downstairs WC with nothing else in it but a small basin and a mirror. Not the bathroom which she was convinced must exist in such a well-appointed house. Phryne made use of the facilities then announced that she really must tear herself away.

Veronica protested a little too much and Phryne repeated her desire to depart. Veronica flushed an unbecoming red which went all the way up to her blonde curls and called out to Gerald Atkinson, ‘Miss Fisher says she has to go home!’

There was a note almost of panic in her voice which set all the hair on Phryne’s neck to bristling.

Gerald got up. ‘Oh, no, Miss Fisher, beautiful Miss Fisher, do honour us with your presence. We’re going to dance some more and then we will be dining early. Do stay,’ he said, his hand closing around her wrist.

‘No, really,’ said Phryne, moving towards the door. The others had all risen and gathered around.

‘Do stay,’ cooed Priscilla Barton.

‘Do stay,’ said Blanche White, advancing.

‘Do stay,’ groaned James Barton.

Phryne scanned the room. The situation was not good. Valentine and Luke stood between Phryne and the door. She had a strong desire, suddenly, to shriek and claw for eyes. She was greatly outnumbered; too many people to fight.

Instead, she dropped her purse, said, ‘Oh, how clumsy of me!’, bent to pick it up, kicked it through the doorway between the two young men, stooped to retrieve it, nudged it again and was at the front door before the company could mobilise to arrest her escape.

She took her hat from the hallstand, smiled ravishingly, and was gone. She slammed the door and ran down the steps and into the car.

‘Home?’ asked Mr Butler.

‘And that right speedily!’ she replied.

The car was already in the stream of traffic before Luke and Valentine arrived on the pavement. Phryne waved at them. They did not wave back. Phryne fanned herself and blinked away a few terror-induced tears.

‘I think, Mr Butler, that I have just escaped a fate worse than death. Not for the first time, however. It’s still daylight. I expect it’s still January, too. What time is it?’

‘Barely six, Miss Phryne,’ he said comfortably.

‘Wonderful,’ said Phryne, and sank down against the car’s upholstery, breathing hard. ‘I shall be in time for dinner, and I am starving.’

Dinner was everything her kif-maddened hunger could desire. The vichyssoise was properly iced. The salad was fresh, the potatoes waxy, the carrot and celery curls crisp, the roast beef sliced as thin as paper and the green tomato chutney Mrs Butler’s sister’s finest. Phryne ate like a wharfie and drank three glasses of a light moselle which the Barossa Valley was making so well before she looked up at her family. They were so normal, the girls and Dot: well fed, a little shiny with perspiration, and discussing Jane’s newly found interest in coral.

‘I know that people make it into teething-rings and necklaces,’ said Phryne. ‘But nothing else. Do tell!’

Jane, delighted, began to inform her adoptive parent about corals, their reefs and their strange, eerie method of releasing all their eggs when the moon was full and the tide at its highest. The others ate more beef, Phryne drank more wine, and contentment settled over the house. While she could not have passed any reasonable exam on corals thereafter, Phryne loved the sound of Jane’s enthusiastic voice. She was suddenly so glad to be home that she had to take another glass of wine with dessert, which was a matchless pineapple sorbet. And then a glass of the good cognac with her coffee.

The girls went to the small parlour after dinner to play the gramophone and Dot sat down with Phryne. Dot had some mending and Phryne was writing up her notes. When her eccentric employer finally capped her fountain pen, Dot ventured, ‘Was it bad as all that, Miss?’

‘Yes, it was thoroughly vile,’ said Phryne. ‘The only one who might crack, however, is James Barton. I may have to dine with him. What a bore!’

‘Professor Rowlands called and I gave him your message, Miss. Lunch tomorrow, he said he’d be there. He sounded like a nice man.’

‘That will be an improvement,’ said Phryne. ‘Dot, do you know of any special significance of almond flowers?’

‘No,’ replied Dot, after deep thought. ‘They’re very pretty, almond flowers. Large white blossoms. Smell sweet. Nothing I can think of, Miss Phryne.’

‘No religious connection?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Dot, picking up an errant thread and securing it firmly. ‘There’s flowers in the Bible, you know, the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley. And there’s the lilies of the fields.’

‘Anemones,’ said Phryne.

‘Not the tall white arums, then?’ asked Dot, who had always wondered what Our Saviour was talking about when he said that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of those boring white lilies.

‘No, not them. Anemones. Windflowers. You know, the spring flowers, purple, blue and red with a black centre. Of course, purple was the imperial colour, only kings and emperors wore it.’

‘Oh,’ said Dot, possessed of an image of a stern bearded Old Testament person shining in silks of red and blue and purple. ‘So that’s what he meant.’

‘Who?’

‘Jesus, Miss Phryne. Our Lord,’ said Dot, in case Phryne had altogether missed out on Christianity, crossing herself unobtrusively.

‘Oh, him.’

‘Why do you ask?’ Dot was curious about this sudden religiosity.

‘The degenerate Gerald showed me a rather clumsy, badly made golden cup and said it was shaped like an almond blossom. He then paused, as if waiting for some comment. His collection is noticeably of beautiful objects—rare and beautiful. Well, except for the satyr and the goat, perhaps. And that at least is rare. So why have a gold cup which looked like it had been made by an apprentice? Ah well, I am going to bed, and perhaps tomorrow might be more amusing. And with any luck, less threatening. Mr B will do the locking up. And I hope for sweet dreams.’

‘Sleep tight, Miss Phryne,’ said Dot. ‘God and His angels protect us all.’

Phryne, exhausted, settled for no dreams at all, or none that she could remember when she woke to find it was morning and the world was up and doing.

She turned over and went back to sleep. The world could get on with it without her for a few hours. The sunlight, through her dark green curtains, was a pleasant glow. She imagined that she was a koala, sleeping in a gum tree, and closed her eyes, snuggling into her soft grey fur and wriggling her flat black nose . . .

She was roused by Dot reminding her that she had a luncheon appointment with a professor and what did she want to wear? Phryne abandoned her marsupial persona and got up to shower and don undergarments, and then to ponder what costume would convey the right impression to a university man.

‘I think I’ll wear the azure cotton with the Greek masks in black,’ she decided. ‘It’s got arms and a higher neckline than he is used to. I don’t want to be confused with any of the female persons at that appalling wake.’

‘Really?’ Dot was always interested in wicked people. ‘What were they wearing?’

‘Very little,’ Phryne replied, as her head cleared the conservative neckline. ‘I’ll just have my coffee and a croissant, Dot, it’s scandalously near to luncheon. Oh, I see you have anticipated me.’ The tray with Hellenic coffee, a glass of water and a croissant was already on her little table. Phryne sat down to sip. As Dot was evidently still agog for descriptions of the demimonde, she went on kindly, ‘Well, Miss Blanche was wearing a red dress secured only by the thinnest of straps, which left her back and most of her front bare. And she was relatively respectable. Miss Collins was half naked, and she is far too plump to expose all that flesh—draped in quite the wrong shade of electric blue. Priscilla Barton was costumed in an orangey confection straight from the ragbag, and Stephanie Reynolds was positively swathed in her sari. They really were the nastiest collection I have met in many a party, Dot dear.’

‘And this professor is one of them?’ Dot clasped her hands.

‘No, I believe that he was only at the funeral because he knew and liked the deceased. He seemed quite civilised, as did Rachel Phillips. However, handsome is as handsome does, as you keep telling me. We shall see.’

‘Indeed,’ murmured Dot. ‘I went and searched for that certificate, Miss Phryne. For the young man in the cemetery?’

‘Oh, good, yes, our other problem. What did the Actors’ Benevolent Society say?’

‘No one there, Miss, I’ll call again today. It’s just a little cubby hole of an office near the Princess Theatre. But Births Deaths and Marriages had his death certificate. His name was Patrick James O’Rourke, born in County Limerick, Ireland, in 1846. That makes him eighteen at the time of the . . . er . . . incident, Miss. I mean, if he was the father of the baby. And Miss Kathleen would be sixteen in 1864, she was born in 1848. Otherwise it’s not a lot of help. Next of kin is marked unknown and the death was registered by Mr Albert Wright of the Princess Theatre. That must be the Actors’ Benevolent people, I think. They ought to still remember him, he only died in 1914.’

‘How?’ asked Phryne, her hand on the doorknob.

‘Miss?’ asked Dot.

‘How did he die?’

‘Accidental gassing, Miss,’ said Dot, reluctant to think of that mortal sin, suicide.

‘On the anniversary of his sweetheart’s birth,’ said Phryne. ‘He never married?’

‘No, Miss, never married, no children, no next of kin.’

‘Just actors,’ said Phryne. ‘Well, he could have done worse.’

‘How?’ asked Dot, but her eccentric employer had already gone.

Professor Edwin Dafydd Rowlands had done the unthinkable: he had arrived early for luncheon. Mr Butler had coped with this social solecism by showing him into the smaller parlour and supplying him with a strong whisky and water, a plate of Mrs Butler’s excellent cheese straws, and a newspaper. He was, however, prowling Phryne’s bookshelves when his hostess entered, looking cool in a dress the colour of a Greek summer sky, patterned with the masks of comedy and tragedy. He turned to her with a copy of Plautus’s plays in his hands.

‘I am so sorry,’ he apologised. ‘I just can’t resist other people’s books. What a nice collection of classics you have.’

‘Thank you. Translations, of course, my Latin is minimal. But there are people I really appreciate.’

‘Ovid, perhaps?’ asked the professor, with a twinkle.

Phryne returned the twinkle with added interest. ‘Him, and Herodotus—my favourite gossip—and some others.’

‘Plautus?’ he asked, putting down the volume of plays.

‘Much funnier than Terence,’ she said. ‘Come and have some lunch?’

‘Delighted.’

He offered his arm and escorted her into the dining room. It was pleasantly cool, the heavy curtains excluding a raking north wind which had decided to see how much of St Kilda’s sand it could transfer into St Kilda’s gardens, birdbaths and sandwiches. Phryne surveyed her professor. Well dressed in a light grey suit. Smells pleasantly of soap and pipe smoke. Pale rather than tanned. Robust rather than sprightly. Greek rather than Roman.

Ember floated in as Mr Butler brought the soup. Professor Rowlands bent to offer a hand to the black cat, who sniffed it and then allowed the royal ears to be briefly caressed. Ember then wound a couple of times around Phryne’s ankles as a courtesy then followed Mr Butler out.

And the professor is a cat person rather than dog person, thought Phryne. Still that was no guarantee of virtue. Dr Nikola, the arch villain of Guy Boothby’s shockers, had a cat of which he was presumably fond—and it liked him, for it sat on his shoulder, sneering, as screaming victims were pushed into the scorpion pit. Where did he get so many scorpions? From a scorpion breeder? In London?