Part 2 (1/2)

'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 pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.s cases displayed Hu's remarkable collec-tion 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 misun-derstanding which deprived us of your friends.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sured 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? Grand-father 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 s.h.i.+pping charges? In 1891?'

'I have a note about that,' said Mr Hu. 'We both bid for a s.h.i.+pping contract, in the old days when both Lin and Hu operated s.h.i.+ps 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 nilnil win.

'As you suggest,' agreed Mr Hu. 'Now we come to the gold-fields 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 a.s.sault on a Hu woman.'

'What did we do to her?'