Death by Water (26 page)

The painted people. We’re painted too. But it doesn’t wash off,’ she added.

The visit concluded with the Solomonic judgment that the
Hinemoa
haka had been superior in terror-inducing quality to the Moanapipi, but the Moanapipi girls had danced a frac-tionally better poi dance. This was greeted with applause and bets were settled.

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Then the women laid out a sale of various handicrafts.

Phryne bought a coiled bone carving to hang around her neck on a flax string and a length of the
tukutuku
material patterned in brown and ochre. Dot bought a small basket from Miri, and paid her double for her kindness. Then a plate was passed around and everyone contributed for the feast.

Professor Applegate led them back to the
Wayfarer
.

Phryne drew a deep breath. ‘Hello, twentieth century,’ she said.

‘Back to the ship, ladies?’ said the master of the
Wayfarer
.

‘Just in time for tea.’

Phryne was not going to be hungry again any time soon.

She wanted a gin and tonic and a nap.

She obtained both of these in record time. It was four o’clock before she woke. Dot was in the room, contemplating her Edith Cavell costume.

‘Hello, Miss Phryne,’ said Dot. ‘Feeling better?’

‘I’m fine, Dot, it was just that all of my bodily energies were diverted to digestion. How about you?’

‘That was a good feast,’ said Dot. ‘The girls are a bit upset about not winning, but the blokes are so happy about the haka that no one has the heart to be sad.’

‘Feeding the dancers blackcurrant syrup was a master-stroke,’ agreed Phryne. ‘I never saw so many blue tongues.

Reminded me of going blackberrying when I was a child.’

‘One for me, one for the basket,’ chuckled Dot. ‘Then it got to be two for me, one for the basket, and somehow there were never many blackberries on all them canes.’

‘And by some magic my mother always knew I had been eating them. Are you going to try on that costume?’

‘Yes,’ said Dot. It fitted. The wrapper was adaptable to any figure and fell to the ankles in the proper fashion, abolishing
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any dangerous intimation that the wearer might be female. In comparison with, as it might be, Mrs West, it was refreshing.

Dot looked very professional in the uniform, with the starched veil hiding her hair and framing her scrubbed clean face.

‘Those Wests . . .’ Phryne began.

‘Horrible people,’ said Dot. ‘And that Mr Singer, I reckon you’re right about him beating his wife. Stewardess heard her crying and him yelling at her.’

‘Yes. But doesn’t it strike you as odd, Dot, that at the precise time that someone was dropping me into the drink, the Wests should be playing cards with Jack Mason? They never showed any conspicuous signs of compassion before.’

‘Yes, odd,’ agreed Dot. ‘Unless they were skinning him alive.’

‘I don’t think he’s got a lot of money. Not the sort of money to play cards with someone like the Wests. No, there is something strange about it, Dot. I need to speak to Margery Lemmon. She was tending to the poor boy. He couldn’t see out of his eyes, you know. Oh,’ said Phryne blankly.

‘Miss?’

‘Just an idea. I’ll tell you about it later. I’m going to have something really impressive in the way of baths and take my time dressing. One advantage of a cruise,’ said Phryne, stretching luxuriously, ‘is that there really isn’t a lot to do but be self-indulgent.’

‘You’ve always been good at that,’ said Dot affectionately.

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Mr Mauno Vanimoinen

Turku Finland

Dear Mauno

I have heard wonderful things about this place called Minnesota
from our cousin. It is well watered and fertile and much warmer
in the summer than our country. Though there is not much forest.

I am taking a passage on the next ship to New York where I can
catch a train to a place called Saint Paul, where our cousin will
meet me and Ilmari. They need metalworkers there so we will soon
get a job. I will write as soon as I am settled, dear Mauno. Please
convey my respects to your wife and daughter.

Lemminki

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth!

John Milton

Lycidas

‘On with the dance,’ sighed Phryne Fisher, slipping into her dark green Manchu trousers, which otherwise did duty as pyjamas. ‘Let joy be unconfined.’

Dot had already slathered her employer’s face with cold cream and plastered her with Oriental Silk foundation make-up, guaranteed not to rub off on a gentleman’s shoulder.

Phryne’s face was a featureless white oval, on which she had painted the red cheeks and elevated eyebrows of the Manchu beauty. Her hand bore the dragon and phoenix silver ring. The sapphire was secured around her waist in the ever-useful-petticoat pocket.

Dot slipped the green brocade jacket on, careful of the paint, and secured it at shoulder and hip. Then she looped Phryne’s fan around her wrist. Phryne sat down at the dressing table to
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paint her lips into the required cherry shape and blew a kiss to her reflection.

‘All right, Miss? You look lovely. I’m going to dress Mrs Cahill.’

‘Do you need my help?’

‘No, Miss, I just need the paste jewellery. She’s going to look like a princess,’ said Dot firmly, ‘or me and Margery’ll know the reason why.’

‘All right. Mr Singer is calling for me,’ said Phryne, who had drawn him in the escort ballot and meant to lose him as soon as she could—preferably overboard. ‘We’re dining in the Palm Court and going into the Grand Salon for dancing. I hope that Caroline isn’t too upset about the girls coming second at the poi dance?’

‘No, Miss, she just swears she’ll win next year. She told Mr Green to put some money on our blokes as well so he broke even. Have a lovely time,’ said Dot, and went out, Miss Cavell to her fingertips, her white veil fluttering.

Phryne lit a very un-Manchu cigarette and looked out the window. The sun was down, the sea was kicking up a few wavelets. She could hear the usual noises of the working docks; men shouting, wharfies exchanging orders, the whine of derricks, the clump of cargo nets. Hard light flooded her cabin.

No matter, she wasn’t planning on sleeping much tonight, anyway.

Mr Singer tapped at her door and she went out into the corridor. He was wearing ordinary evening dress and a domino mask. Phryne put the very tips of her fingers on his arm. The heelless slippers were comfortable on her feet, but she had to shuffle in a very ladylike manner to keep them there. This meant that she and her escort dead-heated the others at the door to the Grand Salon.

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It had been strung with Tiffany fairy lights. The band was setting up. Phryne bowed politely to Mavis and the girls and they bowed back. No one ever said the Melody Makers didn’t have a sense of occasion. Though the wolf whistle which followed her into the Palm Court was probably just Jo expressing her appreciation of the Manchu costume.

Table three had gone to considerable effort. Jack Mason had pushed back his mask but was otherwise draped in a billowing black cassock. His scythe, hastily improvised from a curtain rod and some silver cardboard, was leaning against the wall. Mr Aubrey made the perfect rajah, with a ruby in his turban the size of a boiled sweet. Professor Applegate was wearing Maori dress, her feather cloak almost as magnificent as the Moanapipi chief ’s had been.

Mrs Singer was wearing a black evening dress borrowed from someone else and a defiant smile. Her newspaper crown declared that she was Miss Print. Mr Cahill looked like the slightly down at heel sundowner which he might have been.

Margery Lemmon was magnificent in Indian dress—a flaming turquoise sari with a gold bodice, which emphasised all of her good points. She had darkened her skin and applied a caste mark.

Mr Forrester, of course, was with his nymphs and dryads at the party in Second Class. Phryne hoped she might look in on him later in his character as Silenus. She had always felt that Silenus would be fun to frolic with. She remembered a quip she had once made: when pursued by a satyr, always make sure you are caught near the softest available moss.

Mrs West was partly clad in a Greek tunic which was slipping off one shapely shoulder. It was as green as venom and she had a torc and upper arm ring of green enamel and gold; embossed with adders with tongues of red coral. Circe might
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have looked something like that, Phryne thought, after all. In which case she applauded Odysseus’s courage in making love to her. Those snakes might just bite.

The crowning achievement of the masquerade, however, was Mrs Cahill. The draped bodice and wide skirts suited her figure. Her golden hair hung in loose ringlets almost to her waist. She dripped with Phryne’s paste jewels at waist, shoulder, bosom and ears and she was crowned with diamonds. Dot had made up her face with sympathetic care, not enamelling her with powder, but smoothing the deeper lines, disguising shadows and blotches. She looked, for the moment, as she must have looked as a young girl, when she had married Mr Cahill and thrown in her lot with one hundred thousand acres of desert and scrub. Mrs West had already awarded her the evening’s accolade: a look of pure, righteous envy. Mr Cahill kept casting delighted but faintly bewildered glances in her direction. Who would have thought that the old girl would scrub up like that?

Phryne found that eating was not going to be possible unless she repaired her make-up later, and decided to repair it.

Those Manchu girls must have eaten their dinners through a straw. Or possibly they were fed a full meal before the make-up was applied, which was more likely. With the soup, she began to talk easily to Jack Mason.

‘So glad that you could come,’ she said quietly. ‘And I hope that your visitors didn’t skin you of every last penny.’

‘Oh yes, wasn’t that nice of them?’ he said uncomfortably.

‘They only stayed an hour or so, after Margery left.’

‘What time was that?’ asked Phryne, toying with a cocktail.

‘Oh, they must have come about two and left about three,’

he said. ‘I couldn’t see a thing but I could hear my little travelling clock strike.’

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Damn, thought Phryne. At about half past two I was being rolled in my own gown and dipped like a candle and it doesn’t seem to have been the Wests after all.

‘How do you feel now?’

‘I doubt I’ll be making a late night of it,’ said Jack ruefully.

‘I caught my head a pretty nasty crack falling down that last bit of crevasse. But Margery said she’d save a dance for me and since I already had my costume . . .’

‘It would be a pity to miss it,’ said Phryne.

‘She’s been really nice to me,’ said Jack Mason. ‘Telling me stories about India to pass the time. Restful sort of girl. Didn’t even mind when I floated off to sleep. Just waited till I came back.’

Phryne smiled and ordered another cocktail. Margery Lemmon, perceiving that Jack was talking about her, gave him a smile across the table. It was a fond, indulgent smile as a sister might give to an erring but well-meaning brother.

‘You look spiffing in that gear, Miss Fisher!’ said Mr Aubrey.

‘Are you Han or Manchu?’

‘Manchu,’ Phryne replied. ‘The silk clothes are real and so is the ring.’

She took it off and handed it to Mr Aubrey, who appraised it. ‘Dragon and phoenix. Emperor and empress, union of yin and yang principles,’ he said. ‘Lovely piece.’

‘I bought it in Shanghai,’ she replied. ‘Are you an old China hand as well as an old India hand, Mr Aubrey?’

‘No, no, m’dear, but you pick up things as you go through ports. Busy port, Shanghai. Yellow River meets the sea. Dangerous place, very.’

Mr Aubrey spoke of piracies past, Mr Singer glared at his eggnog and then at his wife. Phryne ate a good dinner and the Wests had another of their sotto voce quarrels. Theodore Green strove to distract attention from them.

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‘You promised me a dance, Miss Fisher,’ he reminded her, raising his voice to cover the Wests’ hissing undertones.

‘And you shall have one, my dear Mr Green,’ Phryne assured him.

‘And you’ll probably have to dance with the captain,’ he went on.

‘Does he step on feet?’ she asked. ‘I’m only wearing slippers.’

‘No, no, he’s a much better dancer than me,’ Mr Green assured her.

‘Will m’lady honour me with the first dance?’ asked Mr Cahill, creaking to his feet. Mrs Cahill gave him her hand.

The band was now playing in the Grand Salon. Dinner could be said to be over.

‘I’ll just go and repair my face,’ said Phryne, and left the Palm Court. The Manchu white had stood the test, she saw as she looked into the mirror in the Ladies’ Retiring Room. She took out a lipstick and was aware that the other face, next to hers, belonged to Jonquil West. Phryne surprised a look of such malevolence on that smooth countenance that, had it been rectified spirits, Phryne would have gone up like a torch the next time she tried to light a cigarette.

‘You don’t carry a bag, Miss Fisher?’ asked Mrs West hungrily.

‘No, there’s a lot of room in the sleeves,’ said Phryne, obligingly turning them out. She was carrying a compact, the key to her suite, a cigarette case and lighter, a clean folded handkerchief, a crumpled handkerchief and a forgotten packet of lemon drops, which must have been there since the last time she wore this jacket. Phryne turned to allow Mrs West to see that the sleeves flapped empty before loading all the stuff back into them. Phryne repaired her Manchu cherry bud mouth and when she looked up again, Circe had gone.