Queen of Flowers (18 page)

‘Yes, she could draw, but she never had the patience to learn it properly, and then she didn’t do art anymore, because it was an extra. The art mistress always said she’d be good if she tried.’

‘Could be said of all of us. Now. Pencil case. Box of drawing implements. Sports bag containing a box pleated sports tunic and a pair of soft shoes and—aha.’

Phryne drew out a pair of very unsuitable shoes. They were of purple kid with rhinestones in the heels.

‘I gather that these are not school issue?’ she asked.

Miss Ellis’s eyes had widened.

‘I’ve never seen shoes like that before.’

‘No,’ said Phryne ambiguously. She shook the bag. Out fell a rolled-up dress. It was of artificial silk. Phryne held it up against Miss Ellis. It was scandalously short, hideously purple and lacking in both front and back. Tinkling onto the floor went a pair of rhinestone earrings. The bag was now empty.

Phryne stuffed the sports clothes back into it and kept the exercise books, the dress and shoes and the earrings.

‘I’ll return these to the family when I have finished with them,’ she told the appalled Miss Ellis, loading the locker with the rest of the things.

‘Has something happened to Rose?’ asked Miss Ellis.

‘Yes,’ said Phryne.

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‘We’d have her back,’ said Miss Ellis. ‘If she could board again. I felt very sorry for her even while she was driving me demented. Tell her family. When you find her,’ she said, her brow creasing.

‘If I find her,’ said Phryne.

Returning to her own house, Phryne found James Murray ensconced in the small parlour like a pearl in an oyster, playing the fiddle to an enraptured audience. Dot tore herself away.

‘I’ve given him the bigger guest room,’ she told Phryne.

‘Sent his clothes out to wash. He was almost in rags. I’ve lent him your gentleman’s shirt to wear after his bath. What have you got there?’

‘Some of the most horrible garments you might ever wish not to see,’ said Phryne. ‘Let’s go up to my boudoir. I want your opinion and we need to go through these books to see if she has left any clue at all.’

‘Oh, and Miss Jones called,’ said Dot as she preceded Phryne up the stairs. ‘She has heard that Rose is missing. She wants to know—oh, it seems very heartless—she wants to know if she should . . .’

‘Find another flower maiden? Can’t be helped, Dot dear.

I think she should. As a stand-by, just in case we don’t find Rose.’

‘Or we don’t find her alive,’ said Dot.

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Murray says he’s told all the gossips in the carnival and the circus and the camp about the missing girl and predicted that the cops would be coming tomorrow. He says that ought to flush her out if she’s there.’

‘Or get her killed,’ said Phryne, stopping on the landing.

‘That’s not what I would have done.’

‘No, but he’s a man,’ said Dot.

‘Yes, he is, isn’t he?’ said Phryne and continued into her
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own rooms. She dumped the armload of impedimenta on her bed. ‘What do you think of the clothes, Dot?’

Dot grimaced. ‘Pretty awful. Twelve and sixpenny art silk from Foy and Gibson, altered by someone who can’t sew. See where they’ve just cut this neckline and tucked it in? Not even tacked. And the shoes are five bob from somewhere like Treadways. Cheap, nasty and badly made. I reckon the rhinestones were glued on later. With art gum, not cobbler’s glue—

see, they’re falling off.’

Phryne stared at the pitiful masquerade clothes and felt very sorry for Rose Weston. Where was the girl?

Dot sat down in a good light and began to examine the exercise books. They were a study. If Rose didn’t like a subject, her work was full of blots and the facing pages were covered in caricatures, dragons, mice, faces, castles. She seemed to really like turrets. If she liked the subject the work was neat, clean, fairly written and accurate. Dot read through an English essay on

‘Stories from the Lives of Noble Women’ and one on the reign of Alfred the Great and found them well done and unexciting.

Phryne was leafing through the commonplace book. She moved an electric lamp closer. The writing was hurried and in various media: lead, what looked like crayon, red ink, black ink, and the purple of indelible pencil. There were notes on colours like ‘New beech leaves are so soft that you can curl them around your finger and are the tenderest of spring greens, almost gold’, to ‘I hate this place I hate it I hate it’ in red ink. There was a very good cartoon of little Elijah as a pig—the child did have porcine qualities, Phryne had to admit—and her mother as a witch with warts, peaked hat and broomstick. But there was nothing in the book which might give a clue to her other life—

no picture of Mongrel and his friend Simonds, for instance, no mention of Anatole’s.

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Phryne was about to set the book aside when she saw, where she had bent the hot globe close to the paper, spidery light brown lines of handwriting beginning to magically appear.

Invisible writing. Lemon juice. Heat would bring it out. And each page which had invisible writing on it would have, she guessed, some misdirections in crayon or pencil, nothing that would blot. Calling Dot over, Phryne took a fountain pen and a clean sheet of paper and began to copy the evanescent script as it appeared and Dot read it aloud.

Time passed. Dot went downstairs for a magnifying glass to make sure that they had not missed anything. The violin was silent. Mr Murray and the girls were drinking tea. Jane had the big atlas on the parlour table and was asking questions about the Horn of Africa.

Dot ran lightly upstairs again. The method of reading and copying was working well enough, though even Phryne’s hand faltered occasionally at what she was writing and Dot frequently choked on the reading.

After an hour they had copied out the commonplace book and were staring at each other with a wild surmise.

‘I reckon we get that nice Mr Jack Robinson onto it,’ said Dot. ‘No wonder they want her back!’

‘I’m wondering if they want her dead,’ said Phryne. ‘Yes, Jack Robinson by all means. Let’s have a drink, Dot. We could do with one.’

‘Yes,’ said the abstemious Dot and rang the bell. When Mr Butler came, she sent him for the bottle of cognac and two glasses. And when she had a brandy, she swallowed it in two mouthfuls.

Dot believed firmly in the devil. She had no doubt of his power and influence, that he walked about to and fro upon the earth, seeking whom he would devour. She had seldom
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seen better proof of malefic presence than in Rose Weston’s diary.

‘Biddy!’ said Dot, coming out of her cold horror. ‘We can’t leave her there!’

Phryne gulped brandy and flexed her writing fingers.

‘No, they need Biddy, the little boy dotes on her and won’t mind anyone else. And Bridget, I have no doubt, is a good girl who would rather die. Also, she is not as attractive as Rose Weston was—is. Plus, if we extract her now, it might warn them that we know. Tell you what. Call on the local priest tomorrow, Dot dear, and find out about Biddy’s home situation. If we can slide her out sideways—for instance, her mother needs her at home, something like that—then we can get her out now. If not, we’ll keep an eye on her and get her out as soon as we can. For, Dot dear, this cannot be borne.

As Malvolio said in an entirely different context, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of them!” and so I shall, you mark my words.’

Phryne’s eyes were as hard as emeralds and her mouth was a thin red line. Dot believed her.

Bert and Cec came in just as lunch was finishing. James Murray sighed and excused himself to take a nap as he had a performance that night. The girls retreated to the kitchen to corral Molly and take her for a walk. Dot and Phryne supplied Bert with beer and Cec with raki and listened to their story.

‘Not good,’ said Bert. ‘Them mongrels are in that camp somewhere. The girl might easily be with them.’

‘And we need to get her back, not only because they are not nice company, but because she needs to make a statement to the police,’ said Phryne. ‘She has been outrageously used.

I know now why Mr Johnson hired me to find her, and
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when we do find her we are going to have to hide her. She’s a time bomb.’

‘Not gonna be easy,’ said Bert.

‘No,’ said Phryne. ‘But it’s going to be done.’

Miss Mavis Sutherland to Miss Anna Ross 19 March 1913

Anna I am so glad to hear your news and I am sure that you
will be very happy with your Jack Tar. I am being sent to the
Highlands to the Big House for three months as Mrs Grainger
believes that I will recover my senses there. The only reason that
they are not dismissing me is that I have worked here since I was
twelve and my mother and grandmother before me. So I am
lucky. I will write when I am settled in my new home. But
I am still dreaming and I am so shaken and nervous that I
cannot even carry a cup of tea without spilling.

Your foolish friend

Mavis

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CHAPTER TEN

Look at her garments

Clinging like cerements

While the wave constantly

Drips from her clothing;

Take her up instantly,

Loving, not loathing.

Thomas Hood

‘Bridge of Sighs’

The afternoon was spent blamelessly listening to a lantern lecture on the Holy Land. As the lights came up, Phryne yawned. She loved lantern lectures but she felt short of sleep, which was silly.

Dot had gone to enquire about Bridget of the local priest, and Phryne had an idea of what to do with the girl in due course.

But she had been so angry about what she had found in Rose Weston’s commonplace book that she had quite exhausted herself and had slept neatly and unobtrusively through the Dead Sea and its amazing properties, through Hebron to the Mount of Olives and only came awake when Golgotha was announced.

The Place of Skulls. How very appropriate. Didn’t conquerors of the Attila the Hun style build pyramids of heads? I wonder how many heads you needed to make a good pyramid?

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She came awake properly in time to join in the applause and gather the girls. St Kilda was
en fête
and that meant more than the usual number of pests, louts, petty criminals, pick-pockets and robbers. It also included gangs of Nice Young Men from Good Homes who had heard that St Kilda was full of whores and attempted to prove it by propositioning every girl in sight. Phryne found them particularly trying.

‘Miss Phryne?’ asked Ruth, on her left side. ‘You know we were talking about finding my father, well, I . . .’

They were driven into a huddle by a group of the Good Boys who had been forcibly repelled by some factory girls, who slapped and kicked and hooted at their dismay. Phryne relieved her feelings by giving the nearest Good Boy a hearty shove which almost knocked him over.

‘Here, I say,’ he protested, and came up into the glare of eyes as unemotional as a range finder and as cold as jade.

‘Get out of my way,’ said Phryne quietly.

He got out of her way. He even took his friends with him.

‘Ruth, what were you saying?’ asked Phryne. ‘Come along, let’s get around this corner and out of the main road.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Ruth, hanging her head. And not another word would she say, all the way home, though Jane nudged her impatiently. Phryne trailed the topics of fathers, missing fathers, dying declarations and the errors of youth before her like succulent tendrils of sandworm but Ruth, like a trout, would not bite.

They continued along the Esplanade toward Phryne’s own house. Phryne began talking about Rose Weston, for lack of anything else to say.

‘I think that she is probably somewhere in those camps,’

she told Jane. ‘But I can’t imagine where and there is no way to search them without a regiment of soldiers.’

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‘And you haven’t got a regiment,’ Jane pointed out helpfully.

‘Not at the moment, no. Nor enough proof to convince Jack Robinson to stage a raid. And it would probably be considered an overreaction to just toss in a torch and set them on fire.’

‘I’ve analysed the things which the three fortune-tellers told me,’ said Jane, to change the subject. Miss Phryne seemed upset at the fate of Rose Weston who was, in Jane’s opinion, an idiot.

‘Oh?’ responded Phryne.

‘The only one who said anything significant, that could not have been thought of by anyone who looked at me and saw that I was well-to-do, thirteen and female, was Madame Sosostris. She was interesting. She took my hand and told me I was clever at mathematics and chess, that I was going to be a doctor. She told me both my parents were dead. She said that I had a sister who was unhappy but she would find what she was seeking soon.’

‘That is impressive,’ said Phryne, instantly suspicious.

‘Then she looked in the crystal ball,’ continued Jane. ‘The others did that too. But they said things like “I can see great clouds rolling” and “the ways of fate are inscrutable”. Madame just rubbed the glass with a cloth and huffed on it as though she was cleaning her glasses. You know, as though she did it all the time, a little cross that it had got dirty so fast.’