The Castlemaine Murders (4 page)

‘Is murdered in the desert,’ corrected Ruth.

‘And the desert dried him out.’

‘How, then, did the body come into the possession of a travelling marvel show?’ murmured Phryne. ‘I know someone who knows all about those carnivals. I believe that he has taken a leave of absence to finish his PhD,’ Phryne mused. ‘It is time for me to invite my friend Mr Josiah Burton to dinner. You’ll like him,’ she told her sister. ‘A very educated person. He is a star performer in Farrell’s Circus and Wild Beast Show, of which I am part owner. I wrote to you about it.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Eliza, refusing to rise to the bait.

‘He’s a dwarf,’ added Phryne.

‘How nice,’ said Eliza.

‘Beth, are you all right?’ asked Phryne.

‘I think I’ll have an early night,’ said Eliza, and went out of the room.

‘Did anything happen to her that I didn’t see?’ asked Phryne, fixing her adoptive daughters with a suspicious eye. They bridled. She had told them to be good and they had been good, despite the temptations.

‘Only the mermaid gave us some odd fortunes. I haven’t even looked at the last one,’ said Jane. ‘The place made Ruth a bit jumpy so we came away. See.’ Ruth fished hers out of her pocket and Jane found the others. Phryne read them.

‘Very strange,’ she commented. ‘Why have you got two?’

‘I was curious,’ answered Jane. ‘So I got another one. The first one was “Beware” and the second says “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies”, which is true, of course.’

‘But not helpful. What did Eliza’s fortune say?’

‘Just a quote from Christina Rossetti. “There is no friend like a sister”. I don’t know why it upset her.’

‘Neither do I, but something has certainly taken the edge off her temper and that’s a mercy for us all. What are we doing tomorrow, Dot?’

‘We’re going to church,’ said Dot, glad to have left the subject of mummification. ‘Tomorrow is Sunday.’

‘So it is. I’m going to occupy myself blamelessly with the encyclopaedia, and Jane and Ruth might like to look at Herodotus on Egypt. He’s quite fascinating.’

‘Not for me,’ said Ruth. ‘I’ve got to finish my romance before the books go back to the library on Monday.’

‘And I’ve got a letter to write to my sister in Sydney,’ announced Dot.

They sat companionably round the parlour table. Jane read Herodotus. ‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile.’ Ruth imagined a strong, hawkish face half seen in a midnight rose garden. Dot strove for unexceptionable news for her sister in Sydney, a teacher of deportment. Then she glanced at the newspaper. Someone was searching for the relatives of one Amelia Gascoigne, late of Port Melbourne, and was serious enough to pay for a quarter of a page of enquiry. Phryne read about death in the desert.

They were all very contented.

Mr Hu conducted Mr Lin to a seat at the lacquered table and poured out a cup of tea for his guest.

‘What a fortunate accident,’ he said suavely, ‘that I happened to be passing your house and encountered you purely by chance!’

‘The ancients say that there are no accidents, that every meeting is fated,’ replied Lin Chung, raising the tea cup. ‘It is very good to meet you at last, Mr Hu.’

Mr Hu was short, inclining to a corporation, and smooth: smooth hair, smooth skin, smooth smile. Mr Hu’s Caulfield house was as plush as money could make it, and stuffed with antiquities. Long glass cases displayed Hu’s remarkable collection of jade. Lin Chung’s end-of-feud gift, a sleeve ornament pair of lion dogs in pure green jade, had been well received, as was the Hu gift to Lin, the Eight Immortals carved in blackwood. The T’ang craftsman had expended endless eyesight and care on tiny details: the gourd, the iron fan, the flowers around the Flower Maiden’s feet. They were the size of chessmen and completely undamaged.

‘My ancestor brought them here in the late nineteenth century,’ observed Mr Hu. ‘Shortly after the unlucky misunderstanding which deprived us of your friendship and counsel.’

‘My family also regret this misunderstanding,’ returned Lin. ‘Which is now ended. I have the particulars.’ He unrolled a scroll of paper. The handwriting at one end was so old and faded as to be almost illegible. Five or more hands had gone into its making. It was the record of every deed which the Hus had done to the detriment of the Lin family.

‘And I,’ said Mr Hu, unrolling a similar scroll, ‘have ours. Let us compare.’

‘Begin in the present and go back to the past?’ asked Lin. ‘Give me your advice, Mr Hu. I have never settled a feud before.’

‘That is the correct procedure,’ Mr Hu assured him. ‘Now, I have here the sad affair of Lin Wan.’

‘Is she still living?’ asked Lin Chung. ‘Her mother still cries for her, and she is very old now.’

‘Still alive and the mother of five sons,’ said Mr Hu, beaming his double-chinned beam. ‘She will be delighted to see her mother again. No dowry was paid for Miss Wan, and she has proved a good mother and a good wife. Shall we say— forty pounds?’

‘Thirty,’ bargained Lin Chung. ‘We had to pay ten pounds consolation money to the man she was betrothed to. Not to mention the shame when she ran away.’

‘We will not quarrel on such an auspicious day,’ agreed Mr Hu.

‘What about the sale of the blackwood furniture? Grandfather Lin said that he would have made at least seven pounds a set on that deal, if Hu had not undercut his price.’

‘Great Grandfather Hu told me about that,’ sighed Mr Hu. ‘That was an error on our part. Perhaps—thirty pounds?’

Lin grinned and emptied his cup, which Mr Hu filled again. ‘Thirty pounds,’ Lin agreed, making a note on his scroll. ‘Now—I cannot read this line. It looks like . . . something about shipping charges? In 1891?’

‘I have a note about that,’ said Mr Hu. ‘We both bid for a shipping contract, in the old days when both Lin and Hu operated ships between here and Canton. We outbid each other so outrageously that both sides lost the contract . . . shall we call it quits on that one?’

‘Yes. And the Hu woman who ran away with the Lin man in 1880—do you have a note about that? We say that she was enticed, even kidnapped.’

‘We say that he was seduced.’

‘What happened to them in the end?’

‘They went to Queensland. No one in our family has heard of them since.’

‘Call that one quits as well, then. Now, we need blood money for the Lin man killed by Hu men in Little Bourke Street on January the twelfth, 1873.’

‘Ten pounds,’ said Mr Hu, consulting his own record. ‘And we need blood money for a Hu child run down by a Lin wagon in the same street, earlier on the same day.’

‘How horrible!’ said Lin, shocked. ‘Did the child survive?’

‘Crippled for life,’ read Mr Hu. ‘But became a famous artist.’

‘Shall we say ten pounds?’ asked Lin, who was beginning to get the hang of settling a blood feud. It should work out in the end to a nil–nil win.

‘As you suggest,’ agreed Mr Hu. ‘Now we come to the goldfields and here I must beg your gracious indulgence. I find this part of the scroll very hard to read.’

‘I, also,’ confessed Lin. ‘We have a jumped claim—no, two. And a Lin man informed on by a Hu man for selling alloyed gold to a shopkeeper.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Three months jail.’

‘Ah. It so happens I have a Hu man who was informed on by a Lin man for abominable practices.’

‘And he went to jail for . . .?’ asked Lin.

‘Three months.’

‘Heaven has designed this meeting to be very neat,’ said Lin Chung.

‘And accurate.’ Mr Hu smiled his pleasant double-chinned smile. ‘I count two jumped claims also. And an assault on a Hu woman.’

‘What did we do to her?’

‘You beat her for refusing to sleep with you. But my notes say that the Lin man was beaten by us, so badly that he was taken to hospital, so we might call that quits as well. Apart from that, we seem to be clean.’ Mr Hu allowed his scroll to roll up. ‘And that concludes our settlement,’ he said. ‘Allow me the honour of inviting you to share my most inadequate noon rice.’

Lin was surprised.

‘No, Mr Hu, wait. There is one more matter. What happened to the Lin couriers, carrying four hundred ounces of gold, who were presumed ambushed and murdered by the Hu family in July 1857 at Golden Point, near Castlemaine?’

Mr Hu opened the scroll again and scanned it hastily but thoroughly, using a magnifying glass on the faded parts.

‘I can find no record of such an event,’ he said at last. ‘Someone may have murdered the Lin couriers, Mr Lin, but it was not the Hu family.’

The smooth current of the exchange was broken. The scroll curled up from Lin Chung’s weakened hand. He stared at the bland face of his erstwhile enemy. It was unthinkable that he should lie. And he had no reason to lie anyway. This was a règlement des comptes and meant to be a final settlement. Keeping something back would vitiate all agreements and continue the feud.

‘Then what can have happened to them?’ asked Lin at last.

‘Come and have lunch with me, Mr Lin,’ said Hu, taking Lin’s arm. ‘And this time tomorrow we shall talk to Great Great Grandmother Hu Ta. She was one of the few Chinese women on the goldfields, and like all the Hu women’—here he winced slightly—‘she has a very, very good memory.’

‘Thank you,’ said Lin Chung. ‘I will be delighted to partake of her wisdom.’

‘Enlightened, perhaps,’ said Mr Hu, leading the way into a sumptuous dining room and the scent of Peking duck. ‘But probably not delighted.’

In the thirteenth year of the reign of the glorious Emperor Lord of
the Dragon Throne Kwong Sui of the Ching Dynasty in the season
of Autumn, festival of Ancestral Shrines.

To his younger sister Sung Mai the elder brother Sung Ma sends
greetings. The ship is crammed with people. I find that the only
place to contemplate the moon is far astern and I come here when
I can. The shipmaster does not like coolies on his deck. Fortunately
in the first week I cured him of a stubborn case of the itch and his
boy of a fever with the bark infusion and now he allows me to walk
where I will.

So I sit on the after deck with the ship’s cat, watching the
moon and trying to make up poems. It is very exciting to be going
to another world. We have some here who have also been to the
First Gold Mountain, California, where they were very badly
treated and finally expelled from the city of San Francisco. They
tell how some of their number were murdered by the other miners.
But there was gold there and if there is gold in this Australia the
Lin family mean to have it. You know how we used to joke about
the Sze Yup and their coarse speech and their greed? It was all true
but they are very determined. If any succeed, it will be them.

Raising my head, I look at the moon.

Lowering my head, I think of my home.

I hope you are well, little sister, and that mother’s cough has
cleared up. Continue with your studies and soon there may be a
Gold Mountain Uncle returning with his sleeves full of nuggets to
buy you a rich husband.

CHAPTER THREE

This skull was Yorick’s skull.

William Shakespeare
Hamlet

Phryne went decorously to church with Eliza, Jane and Ruth. She did not often attend but it did make a soothing start to the day. Eliza, instead of sniffing at the youth of the building and the primitive nature of the worship, sank quietly to her knees in a back pew and spent the whole service engrossed in something which looked surprisingly like prayer. Phryne spared a moment to wonder what had converted her acidulated bitch of a sister into a nun and assumed that if female problems or maybe demonic possession were to blame for the bad moods, then maybe angelic possession accounted for this good one. She really didn’t care. Eliza was a sad disappointment to Phryne.

‘That sermon,’ ventured Ruth as they left the church and came into sunshine hot enough to char-grill an ox.

‘Mmm?’ asked Phryne absently.

‘He said that we were emerging from barbarism into civilisation.’

‘Did he?’ asked Phryne, settling her cloche and wishing that she had brought a broad-brimmed hat. And a camel. And was on the way to a suitable oasis, with resident sheik and a bucket of sherbert.

‘You weren’t listening, were you?’ accused Ruth, who would have appreciated the sheik.

‘No, I was wondering about the man in the Ghost Train,’ confessed Phryne.

‘So was I,’ agreed Jane. ‘It was just the usual sermon. Like that one on Brotherly Love. I’ve heard it so often I could recite it.’

As she showed signs of doing this, Phryne said hastily, ‘We’ll talk about the man in the Ghost Train this afternoon, when we go to see Dr Treasure. He has an old friend visiting, an expert on Egyptian mummies. He ought to be good value.’

‘A godless occupation for a Sunday,’ commented Eliza. The piety, Phryne noticed, had quite worn off.

‘Yes, so you will have to occupy yourself in good works and golden opportunities while we are gone. What were you going to say about the sermon, Ruth?’