Queen of Flowers (11 page)

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lead to her collar (Molly would fling herself to the floor with all her paws in the air in ecstasy at the very thought of a walk, which made putting on her lead difficult) and let herself out.

The sands were a time-honoured place to walk dogs but not advisable at present, due to the number of strong-minded circus animals and their concomitant guards, so Phryne decided to proceed along Acland Street and purchase some cakes. While she was there she also bought a ticket for the ‘Journey to Samarkand’ lantern show from a girl with a rather come-hither eye. Phryne gave the young woman points for poise as she endured being thoroughly sniffed by Molly, who drank in her scent as if it were nectar.

‘I’m so sorry—she has no manners at all,’ apologised Phryne. ‘Perhaps I’d better buy another ticket.’

‘You can take six for two shillings,’ said the young woman.

‘The professor’s got a lovely voice. Just like hot honey running down your back. Ooh!’ she said, as Molly’s questing cold nose goosed a sensitive spot, and Phryne paid up and moved on.

Molly emphatically did not take to the raffle ticket seller who accosted Phryne next. She was carrying a miniature poodle of whom Molly had grave suspicions. Phryne gave her three pennies and hauled the hound close to her ankles. The poodle did not help by uttering the nearest thing that Phryne had ever heard to a canine snigger as the raffle seller passed.

Phryne bought her cakes and continued down the street, Molly mostly remembering her training and trotting amiably at her heels. The sun came out. Phryne was stung for two tickets to a Folk Music Society concert, which she did not mind because she had intended to go anyway, and a lecture on the ‘Evils of Drink’, which she did not want but had to buy as the seller had tripped over Molly’s lead. Another raffle seller caught her when she was off guard and so did a boy vending
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cold cream shampoo, which smelt very like Lifebuoy soap, cut into cubes and wrapped in silver paper. She only avoided the infallible-mouse-trap man by crossing the road. Poorer and somewhat cross, Phryne returned to her own house to find a good strong gin and tonic and some lunch. St Kilda was becoming very expensive these days.

The gin and tonic was excellent and so were the cheese and tomato sandwiches which Mrs Butler made. Phryne settled down to plot the movements of Rose Weston, last seen by Phryne walking down Fitzroy Street towards the sea. No one yet admitted to seeing her after that, but Phryne still had plenty of people to ask, although all of them were presently unavailable, out at the festival. Restless, she collected Lin Chung and his wife when they called at her house and walked out to see a demonstration of lifesaving. It was very well organised, as Lin admitted. And if one was cast adrift in the harbour it would be very pleasant to see those fine young lads running down the beach with their reel.

Phryne yielded to fate, and accompanied Lin Chung and Camellia to the flower show in the town hall. The scent was wonderful. Massed begonias and tuberoses in all shades from salmon pink to white stood in the centre of the space. On either side were wide flat dishes of waterlilies: blue, pink, white and even some tinged with yellow. They floated like stars.

‘Real Nile lotus,’ whispered Camellia. ‘I’ve never seen them with that delicate sunlight shading. How beautiful! Lin, we must ask Great Grand Uncle if we can make a lotus pond.’

‘Indeed,’ said Lin, who did not botanise but liked landscapes. ‘I’m sure he will be happy as long as you do all the planning and supervise the construction and he can sit by the pond in a comfortable chair and drink tea.’

‘Tea!’ exclaimed Camellia. ‘Yes, husband, that is a clever thought. There is something in the Classic of Tea about tea-leaves
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enclosed in lotus petals.’ She stared at the floating jewels and sighed. ‘Then again, perhaps the blue lotus would be better.

I could plant the edge with blue-tinged grasses and perhaps some of those rich blue irises . . .’

‘I leave it entirely in your capable hands,’ said Lin diplo-matically. ‘Phryne, do you care for lotuses?’

‘Only if Camellia does,’ said Phryne. She liked Lin’s culti-vated, intelligent wife very much. Camellia had designed Phryne’s own garden, transforming an urban wasteland of dust-bins and chickens into a fairy grove of jasmine, bamboo and wisteria. Camellia greatly admired Phryne for her courage and elan. She had been told that Lin had a concubine, and was thankful that she was so agreeable, for Camellia would have had to endure her company, pleasant or unpleasant, secure only in the knowledge that she was the accredited wife, and Phryne was merely an amusement.

Phryne, fortunately, liked being an amusement. She strayed over to a stand stuffed with paeony roses, which were not as beautiful as those grown by Mrs Lin, and then to one selling every kind of crocus, hyacinth and spring bulb. Camellia made a note of the grower’s name once she had sniffed his wares. The seller was a young man with ‘get-ahead’ practically branded on his brow, though Phryne suspected that the real gardener was the old man who was sitting at the back of the booth with a felt hat over his face and his gnarled hands loose on his knees.

The young man entered into eager discussion with Mrs Lin about the necessity for storing some bulbs in an ice-chest so that they would germinate on time.

A string quartet was playing in the hall and some young people had got up an impromptu dance in the cleared space in front of the players. Phryne wandered that way, unable to contribute to a deep discussion on the nature and colouring of
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freesias. How much could one actually say about freesias? Quite a lot, it would seem.

Phryne noticed that the viola in this quartet was being played by Miss Marie Bernhoff, one of her flower maidens.

Phryne leaned against a pillar and watched. They really were quite good. A little too fast and a little overenthusiastic, but they were used to playing together. As the dancers moved they stirred the scent of that over-scented room so that they seemed to be swimming in perfume.

Aha, thought Phryne as she sighted another flower maiden, Joannie, sitting on a spindly chair and fanning herself, and a third, Diane, dancing with one of the most beautiful young men that had ever gladdened Phryne’s eye. He was the epitome of that fragile, evanescent maleness, that angelic beauty, which is only found in young men between the ages of about sixteen and twenty. Before that, they are gawky. After that, they grow beards and become commonplace. But at the height of their beauty they take the breath and Phryne’s was duly taken. Greek poets would have swooned. Michelangelo would have groped for his chisel, among other things. Oscar Wilde would have dropped Bosie.

‘Oh my,’ breathed Lin into Phryne’s susceptible ear. ‘Who’s the Adonis?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Phryne. ‘Isn’t he a piece of pure quat-trocento art? He’d make an annunciation angel.’

‘Too pale?’ said Lin. ‘His hair is only just gold and he has—

yes—pale skin and blue eyes. Perhaps he is more of a Botti-celli. Or a Pre-Raphaelite.’

‘The Knight in Quest for the Grail,’ said Phryne. ‘Yes. Pity it won’t last. They are so beautiful for such a short time.’

‘Like Camellia’s freesias,’ remarked Lin.

Phryne turned at the slightly acid tone of voice. ‘Oh come, Lin dear, you aren’t going to be tiresome, are you?’asked Phryne.

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‘No. There is an exact female equivalent. Gorgeous at sixteen. Slatterns at twenty-five.’

‘So there is. Isn’t it lucky we are neither of us affected?’

‘Age cannot wither nor custom stale,’ agreed Lin. Unseen by the dancing crowd, he slid a hand down the curve of Phryne’s admirable buttock and felt her shiver agreeably.

‘Still,’ said Phryne, ‘he is dancing with Diane, one of my flower maidens. There, she’s seen me and is bringing the youth across.’

‘Rather like a triumphant cat with a mouse,’ said Lin.

‘She isn’t feline. More like a shopper at the sales who has somehow beat off the opposition to the only genuine model dress in the shop.’

‘And the florid girl is yours, too?’ asked Lin as Joannie joined Diane.

‘Step back unless you want to be introduced and cooed over,’ Phryne warned Lin. He faded into the panelling. When Joannie and Diane came up to her, she was alone.

‘Miss Fisher! I thought it was you,’ said Diane. ‘I said so to Derek. When I was dancing with him. Derek Roscombe, this is the Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher.’

Derek blushed a little, took Phryne’s hand and shook it, then didn’t quite know what to do with it. Phryne repossessed herself of her digits. He was a stunning creature. He might be—indeed, she suspected that he was—utterly brainless, but who needed brains if you looked like an angel? He was slender and tall and completely fitted for life as an artist’s model. Diane had him in a firm grip, although the music had stopped to allow the musicians a tea-break.

Joannie flanked Derek on his other side and put a hand on his arm. ‘You promised me the next dance,’ she said demurely.

Diane shot her a furious look. Phryne smelt a scene coming
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on. Oh dear. Time to break this up. One should not have all the flower girls hurling bouquets at each other and, in any case, she wanted to ask them about the missing Rose Weston.

‘I’m sure that Derek would be kind enough to fetch us an ice,’ she said.

The young man, who still hadn’t uttered a word, smiled complaisantly and went off to fight his way into the scrum surrounding the ice-cream stall. Phryne drew both girls to a small table and sat them down. They were still glaring at each other.

‘Young ladies,’ she said severely. The tone was enough to jolt them into an awareness of where they were. ‘I might give you some advice about beautiful young men but I can’t see it having the faintest effect and I don’t like wasting my time.

I need your help in another matter. Rose Weston is missing.’

‘I know,’ said Joannie, willing to be helpful. ‘Mrs Weston knocked my house up at some dreadful hour looking for her.

Such a fuss! The dog got out and started chasing a cat and Papa quite lost his temper and yelled at everybody.’

From the astonished tone, it was clear that Mr Smythe didn’t usually act the domestic tyrant. Joannie went on: ‘But I haven’t seen Rose since yesterday when the car picked us up at Anatole’s. I told Mrs Weston I hadn’t seen her and she went off. Then Mama soothed Papa down and we corralled the dog and had an early breakfast, so no harm done really.’

‘Mrs Weston came to our house, too,’ said Diane flatly.

‘Seemed in a real state. Really! Just like Rose!’

‘What’s just like Rose?’ Phryne asked carefully.

‘To mess things up,’ snarled Diane. ‘She did the same thing with the school play, you remember, Joannie?’

‘Yes, but I don’t think it’s all her fault,’ said Joannie placat-ingly. ‘Don’t be so fierce, Di! We were doing “A Midsummer
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Night’s Dream”,’ she explained for Phryne’s benefit. ‘And Rose really wanted to be in it, and she really couldn’t act, so we gave her a part as one of the rustics, and then just when we looked like we had the play ready—in fact, on the first night—Rose was nowhere to be found. If the Snug costume hadn’t fitted me, I don’t know what would have happened.’

‘You weren’t acting, then?’ asked Phryne.

Joannie dimpled modestly. ‘No. I’m not the right shape for a heroine. I was backstage and prompt and wardrobe,’ said Joannie, naming three of the hardest jobs in the theatre. ‘I’ve got a good memory and I’d been prompting all through the rehearsals so I knew the lines. I just had to say them. It wasn’t difficult. Went off without a hitch.’

‘And where was Rose?’ asked Phryne.

‘She came back after it was all over and said she couldn’t face going onstage with all those people looking at her. That’s what she’s like,’ said Joannie forgivingly. ‘She has these enthusiasms and then once she’s committed herself she finds she can’t go through with it.’

‘I see,’ said Phryne, feeling a chill. Starts things which she can’t finish. In certain circles that would not be a survival skill.

Phryne concluded that she’d better find Rose as fast as possible.

‘Here’s Derek,’ exclaimed Joannie dotingly.

The young man had managed not only to purchase four ice creams but had somehow found a tray, probably by smiling at a susceptible female (ie, one over the age of twelve).

Phryne realised that if he was the—so to speak—bone of contention amongst the girls, he must know Rose Weston as well. She needed to speak to him alone. To do that she would have to cut out both flower maidens without hurting their feelings.

The ice cream was quickly demolished. Phryne got to her
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feet as the music started again. A foxtrot. Perfect. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then she gave the young man a twinkling, sidelong look which had him out of his chair and proposing a dance so fast that there was a faint whooshing noise. Phryne accepted and danced him out of earshot, pleasantly conscious that there were some charms which were not possessed by the young and blooming.

Derek Roscombe was tall, slim, and a good dancer. His tailoring was good but not out of the top drawer and he was lightly scented with good soap. Someone who loved him, probably his mother, had bought him that restrained tie.

‘I say, Miss Fisher,’ he whispered into Phryne’s hair. ‘You’re a super dancer.’

‘Thank you,’ said Phryne. ‘You’re also a good dancer. Now, my dear, I have an ulterior motive for taking you away from the girls.’