Queen of Flowers (7 page)

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Then she heard drumming, felt it in the soles of her feet.

Felt something like that before, Phryne thought. The sand was quivering underfoot. Drumming and the crack of a whip.

Horses coming. A lot of horses coming very fast. Phryne heard a shout of warning. She turned and they were upon her.

A mob of circus horses, galloping flat out along the tideline, a frieze of bobbing heads and wild manes and flashing wet hooves. There was nowhere to run. Acting entirely on trained instinct—had she not fallen off a circus horse every day for weeks until she could stick on even if it did handstands?—

Phryne threw herself to one side, grabbed and sprang, and she was up and riding astride, intoxicatingly fast, horsehair cutting her fingers, the mob caught up in its own shared conscious-ness. Fast, breathed the mob. Run fast!

She laughed aloud, pressing close to the horse’s neck, digging in with her knees to save her hands. The mob moved with one mind and Phryne was part of it, unthinking, dark maned, wild. They galloped along the shore as though there was no end to the race, no light except the morning of the world, no humans but the chance-met waif who had been transported by the wild hunt. Phryne laughed with joy as they leapt a small culvert and poured along the sand.

It could not last. Now there were whips behind, men yelling, detestable dogs barking. The tail of the mob slacked, the head was turned, expertly, until they were cantering straight out to sea, into the sunrise reflections on the water. The impetus snapped. The mob shifted and broke, strung out like beads scattering from a broken necklace. Their group mind was lost. Each beast felt the onrush of cold foam and drew back or turned aside. Phryne’s mount snorted, picked up its feet and trotted back to the hard sand. There Phryne slid down and leaned briefly on the heaving side, weak at the knees from the
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access of sheer speed and power. She was jolted wholly out of her annoyance and wanted to laugh or sing.

And on cue she heard that strange little crinkle of music and at last knew the words. They were charming and obscene and she was beginning to remember who had taught them to her. She moved beyond the sandy edge and sang aloud: ‘Aye the cuckoo, oh the cuckoo, aye the cuckoo’s nest! Aye the cuckoo, oh the cuckoo, aye the cuckoo’s nest. I’ll give anyone a penny, and a bottle of the best, who will ruffle up the feathers in my cuckoo’s nest!’ she sang.

The horses drew away. Phryne stepped back against the bank and let them go, with their attendant dogs and men. No one noticed her in the half-dark but a startled fiddler, who stood up, playing the tune as bait, and stalked out of the carnival camp. He had heard that strong small soprano before.

Long ago and very, very far away.

Surely the divine and never forgotten Phryne Fisher couldn’t be here? In Australia? In St Kilda? It seemed exceptionally unlikely. Though, if he had expected to see her again, it might well have been in the middle of a rush of wild horses.

Phryne, the fiddler remembered, always existed as a still, self-possessed point in a maelstrom. Usually she had created the maelstrom herself. He crept forward, playing the wild refrain to the cuckoo’s nest, until he came out onto the strand itself.

And the singer had gone. Only the retreating thud of hooves and the churned, pock-marked sand gave evidence that anyone had been there at all. The fiddler cursed richly in three languages and went back to his camp. He still had a little whisky in the bottle and there would be no more sleep for him now day had broken.

Phryne Fisher! Here? Impossible. But he had had stranger encounters with people he hadn’t seen for ten years. And on
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this very foreshore, this very day. Perhaps two glasses of the whisky. The fiddler was shaken.

Phryne walked back to her own house, elated. The wild rush of the horses had been the very thing to break her despondent mood. If Ruth’s father was alive and became an embarrass-ment, he could either be (1) bought off or (2) scared off. If that didn’t work she might ask her wharfie mates, Bert and Cec, to find a like-minded colleague to drop him off a suitable bridge.

But for the moment Phryne was delighted. A little chafed in some private places, and with some horsehair cuts on her hands, in need of a bath and some ointment, but delighted.

As she walked she whistled the rousing air of the cuckoo’s nest.

And she remembered Orkney.

Returned from the Great War with several medals and a French pension, her heart comprehensively broken by that rat René and minded to try the Home Counties for a while, she had been brushing her hair before her own mirror in her father’s manor when he had tapped on the door. She bade him come in and he did, his bearing unusually meek and his voice like that of a sucking dove calling to another sucking dove which was sensitive about loud noises. Behind him came the butler, bearing a tray on which reposed brandy, soda and two glasses.

‘I say, Phryne, I brought you a drink,’ he said. Phryne put down her hairbrush. This was unprecedented.

‘So you did,’ she agreed. ‘Just cognac, please, Harker.

Cheers,’ she added, raising the glass.

‘So, are you comfortable in the old place, then, daughter?’

asked her father, astonishing Phryne still further. This was not his usual manner at all. He must want something very badly.

She decided to hurry the process along, although there was a
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certain mean pleasure to be got out of watching His Lordship attempt to remember how one persuaded someone to do something. Usually he just yelled at them, and if that didn’t work, he yelled louder.

‘Very grateful to be here,’ she said. ‘And delighted to assist if you have any small task you would like me to do, Father.

Provided it does not involve matrimony. Or knitting.’

Totally impervious to irony in the way of the Old School, Phryne’s father sat down heavily in her Sheraton chair, which creaked.

‘No, nothing like that. I’ve got an old friend, and his son . . . well, he’s damaged, unsightly. Scarred.’

‘Yes?’ asked Phryne, who had seen many scarred men in her ambulance-driving days. Scarred men did not worry Phryne.

‘He can’t stay in England. He’s too ashamed. And his people—well, they find him . . .’

‘Yes?’ prompted Phryne. His people found him uncomfortable to have around, she thought, seething lightly. He wasn’t the pretty boy they had sent off to the war. He wasn’t an eligible prospect for any suitable gel. So what did they mean to do with him?

‘Not as though he’s the eldest son or anything,’ said Phryne’s father, making things worse. ‘You knew him once, though you wouldn’t know him now,’ he said, taking a deep gulp of his brandy-and-hardly-any-soda. ‘Ian Hamilton.’

‘I remember him,’ said Phryne.

‘He wants to go and live with his old nurse,’ said His Lordship. ‘She’s gone home, to the Orkney Islands, right at the top of Scotland. Curse the woman, why couldn’t she have gone to Brighton like all the other old biddies? A long journey and he can’t do it alone, he can’t see very well. And his father asked who he’d like to have with him, and he said you. It’s a lot to
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ask, daughter, you’ll be stared at the whole way, I don’t doubt.

And no young woman likes to be seen with such—’

Before her father could say something like ‘monster’ and cause her to lose her temper just when she was having the first civil conversation with him in years, Phryne laid her hand on his and said, ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Hamilton will pay all your expenses, of course, first class all the way. I wouldn’t ask but he’s an old friend of mine and you’re such a competent girl, self-possessed and all, and I expect you saw worse in France.’

‘I probably did,’ said Phryne, pouring herself another cognac.

‘Good girl,’ said His Lordship. ‘We never got on, Phryne.

Maybe because we are too alike. You’ve got the old Fisher spirit in you, all right. Leave Friday, is that what I can tell Hamilton?’

‘Friday,’ said Phryne, suppressing her own view on what she shared with her father: a taste for good cognac and that was all. ‘Perfect.’

And she had gone, taking only a knapsack, and met Ian Hamilton at Paddington. He was just visible behind a mountain of luggage. Ian Hamilton’s parents did not mean him to return from Orkney. He was wearing a loose casing of bandage over his face and the porter was finding it hard to understand him.

‘Where was you going, sir?’ the porter yelled. Phryne could hear him thinking: poor gent must be deaf as well as blind, and that snooty madam of a nurse had just abandoned the man here with all this stuff and no idea of where he was going. There ought to be a law.

‘We are booked first class on the train to Edinburgh,’ said Phryne. ‘Here are the tickets. Two sleepers. You’ll need another porter for all that stuff. Purchase some help and get a move on,
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there’s a dear, time is wasting away.’ She pressed five shillings into his hand.

The porter waved to a friend and the baggage vanished with all the celerity that five shillings might induce. And Phryne could take the blind man’s hand at last and say, ‘Hello, Ian. How nice to meet you again. Come along and we’ll catch the train. You don’t need to do anything, old dear, but come along with me.’

He had almost laughed when he said, ‘That’s what all the best policemen say,’ but there was a catch in his voice. Phryne was worried about him. Ian Hamilton had been rather bookish, not bad at cricket, a very good dancer and, really, that was all she knew about him.

When they were enclosed in the otherwise empty first-class compartment, she said, ‘Can you see at all?’

‘All right out of one eye, nearly blind in the other. Do you know why I asked you to come?’

‘No idea,’ she said as the train got up steam, clanked portentously a few times, and began to move out of Paddington.

‘Because I was betting that you wouldn’t faint if you saw

. . . this.’

He unwound the bandages and there was Ian Hamilton.

Or rather, half of him. One side of his face was almost unmarked. The other looked like a wax doll which some careless child had left too close to the fire. The flesh had melted off the bones, sagging in ugly purple folds. The eye on that side was milky and unfocused. Phryne felt no urge to faint or even retch. He was alive, and that was an improvement on most faces she had seen reduced to this.

‘Phosphorous grenade,’ she said calmly. ‘You must have been awfully close to the shell when it blew.’

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‘It fell almost on top of me,’ said Ian Hamilton, a trifle taken aback at her lack of reaction. ‘The fire ran along my back and legs; the scars there have stretched but no one’s going to see them. Well, Miss Fisher? Aren’t you going to cry? Aren’t you going to pity me and say “poor boy”?’

‘I will if you want me to,’ said Phryne. ‘Everyone else in the trench would have been killed, yes? And you survived because you fell into the mud, and the mud put out the fire in your flesh, and by the time you started to drown, the gas had blown away. Your lungs sound all right to me. Have a cigarette?

And I believe that tea will be brought soon. Don’t throw a tantrum at me, Ian dear. You wanted me because I can look you in the eye and not be sorry for you.’

He sighed, agreed, took the cigarette and resumed the bandages as the porter came in with tea. Gradually, as the train clicked and clacked through luncheon, afternoon tea and dinner, all taken in the private car, he thawed enough to talk about something other than his own pain and horror and his own terrible sense of exclusion. Phryne recalled that he had been good at quick translation, and said, ‘I’ll set you a poem, if you can’t sleep. A full translation to be delivered to me with my breakfast tray at eight tomorrow as we roll into Edinburgh. You game?’

‘I’ve been trying to read, but nothing holds my attention enough. All right. I’m sick of taking laudanum anyway. What’s the poem?’

She had set him Gerard de Nerval’s ‘El Desdichado’—‘The Dispossessed’. Phryne believed that to be an effective nurse, you had to be prepared, and had copied it herself from the book.

She rolled herself into her own sleeper and slept well. Phryne always slept well on trains, and this one did not even have Hommes Quarante Cheveaux Huit—Forty men: Eight horses—

on the door, a great improvement.

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When the porter brought her tea, she unfolded a sheet on which someone had written, under the French
Je suis le
ténébreux—le veuf—l’inconsolé
:
I am the shadow, the relict, the unconsoled
The Prince of Acquitaine at the ruined tower:
My only star is dead—and my lute is starred
With the radiant black sun of melancholy.

In the fallen night, it is you who comfort me,
Give to me Pausillipus and the Italian sea.

The flower that consoles my wounded heart
The vine and strong vine stock which cradles the rose.

Phryne began to have hopes of his recovery. The rest of the journey was a delight. They transferred from Edinburgh to the Highland and Island line and travelled through precious landscapes where each glen, struck by sudden sun, glowed like opal. A full crowned red deer sneered lightly as they passed Rannock Moor, a primeval black peat landscape where one would not have been surprised to see a dinosaur. Then further, up to Aberdeen, where the cruel wind cut across the endless wastes of grass and heather and tumbled crofts, and never stopped blowing.