Part 9 (2/2)

'What is the honourable idea of my honourable guest?' asked Mr Hu, deliberately overstressing the courtesy. It was his third gla.s.s of beer.

'Let's bring Great Great Uncle Lin Gan to visit Great Great Grandmother Hu Ta,' said Lin. 'Her sister fancied him in the past. She might marry again and you can get her off your hands.'

Mr Hu stared at him and burst out laughing.

'You are a very, very bold man,' he chuckled, 'for wanting to bring Old Lady Hu into the same house as Old Lady Lin.'

Both men looked solemnly into their beer gla.s.ses. That was, indeed, a sobering thought.

In the thirteenth year of the reign of the glorious Emperor Lord of the Dragon Throne Kwong Sui of the Ching Dynasty, the elder brother Sung Ma greets his younger sister Sung Mai. 21st March 1855 in the solar calendar, probably the season of Grain in Ear.

Today we started walking. Although I have stout sandals and nothing to carry I am finding this difficult. The others trot along, ta'am over shoulder or across the neck, carrying 100 catties- almost one hundred and thirty pounds in western measures-and only stop for tea and even then they do not seem tired. After a morning's walking I am exhausted. Mr Lin sent me to ride in the cart. He said it was because he wants me to learn English so as to interpret for him, but really he is being kind to my blisters. I am studying my text and writing this as we bounce along and behind I can see a long tail of blue coats, black trousers and straw hats. Three hundred Chinese going to the goldfields. May the G.o.ds be kind to us!

CHAPTER EIGHT.

I see the traveller's unwaking sorrowThe vagabond spring's come in a clatter.Too profusely rich are the flowers,Too garrulous the parrot's chatter.

Tu Fu, translated by Lin Yutang 'Of poor but honest parents he was born in Castlemaine . . .' sang Phryne on her way home. All places were tending to Castle-maine-what did she know about Castlemaine? Until recently, home of the Castlemaine x.x.xX beer, which both Bert and Cec, her wharfie friends, liked. Home of the toothsome Castle-maine rock, a carefully made sweet of which Ruth was very fond. Somehow connected with a big wheel, which was probably not the one engineers sang of, and a woollen mill, something to do with ham and bacon; all this and only some seventy-five miles by road and seventy-eight by rail from Melbourne. The guidebooks said that there were several excellent hotels. Phryne was looking for one in which she could entertain a Chinese lover without comment, which ruled out the Midland (a coffee palace, anyway-Phryne did not approve of the temperance movement) and the c.u.mberland (arguably too big and too public). That seemed to leave a Railway, a Commercial, and the Imperial Hotel, opposite the Town Hall- not too many rooms and probably, if Phryne knew hotels, a reasonable scatter of backstairs. It lodged visiting politicians, she was told, and that argued that the management had a relaxed view of what Dot would call 'goings-on'. Otherwise it would not lodge politicians. More than once, anyway.

The Imperial might, she thought, be just the ticket. She had a feeling that openly accommodating a Chinese would cause the sort of scandal that even wealth and connections and rank might not be able to ride out... And Phryne was deter-mined to get Lin Chung to herself for a while. Her intentions were purely carnal, and it had been far too long since they had been properly indulged.

Now to see what had happened at her own house while she had been away interviewing nuns and making rash promises.

The house was blessedly tranquil. Mr Butler met Phryne at the door with an 'all quiet' report.

'Miss Dot is lying down, the young ladies are at school, Miss Eliza is still in her room and perhaps, Miss Fisher, you might care to enquire as to her health? Mrs Butler felt sure that she heard her crying.'

'I'll do that,' said Phryne. 'Can you obtain the number of the Imperial Hotel in Castlemaine? I want a private room, with bath if possible, and as far away from the street as they can manage. If they're full, get me a room at the c.u.mberland. For tomorrow night and possibly longer. The game, Mr Butler, is afoot.'

'Yes, Miss Fisher,' said Mr Butler. 'Lunch is at one, Miss Fisher.'

Phryne climbed the stairs. It was time that she had a talk with Eliza. She would be no use to the household in an emergency if she was still having the vapours. What dreadful choice had she made that Father should send her all the way to Australia to forget? Eliza had never shown any interest in fortune hunters. Or rather, they had shown no interest in her. Of course, she had no money of her own, but when she turned twenty-five she would have a respectable settlement from Grandmother's trust, not to mention a fair whack when Father finally failed to bully Death into waiting on the stairs for one more moment.

Phryne tapped. No answer. She tapped again. A bleary voice half screamed, 'Go away!'

Phryne retreated to gather some supplies. When she returned, she was carrying a key, a flask of cognac and two gla.s.ses, a bucket of water, a bottle of Dr Proud's Anti Hysteria Nervine (containing rare Indian herbs, and which Mrs Butler kept to hand for moments when souffles fell flat), a novel, an ashtray and a chair. She put her bucket and tray on the floor, sat down on the chair, and said to the door, 'I'm going to sit here, Beth, until you let me in. Sooner or later you are going to come out, and then I am going to come in. No hurry, I've got all day.'

She poured herself a drink, opened the novel, lit a cigarette and began to read.

An hour pa.s.sed. Phryne had heard the footsteps approach and knew herself perused through the keyhole. She read on. This Dorothy Sayers was a superb writer. To dare to have a detective who had come back from the Great War sh.e.l.l-shocked, a frail, breakable human being instead of the usual s.e.xton Blake superman-wonderful. She was rereading Who's Body? and was just getting to the most audacious Lord Peter's song about insisting on a body in the bath when the door creaked open and a defeated voice confessed, 'I have to go to the lavatory.'

'Off you go,' said Phryne, s.h.i.+fting her chair a little to one side and rising. 'But I'm coming with you.'

She escorted Eliza to the guests' lavatory, waited for a decent interval and escorted her back to her room, where she displaced all her impedimenta into the room.

'The cognac and the Nervine are for you. The bucket is also for you if you decide to have hysterics,' she informed her sister. 'Though I hope you won't because Mr Butler will give me h.e.l.l about water on his polished floor.'

Eliza sat down on her bed and began to weep.

Phryne picked up the bottle and flask, poured her a slug of Dr Proud's concoction and then a slug of cognac to take away the taste of valerian and mistletoe, and said, 'Come along, old thing, you can tell me. You'll be making yourself ill if you keep this up. Really, my dear, it cannot be that bad, whatever you've done. What is it? Stable boys? Horses? A scandal about racing drivers? Did you get exasperated with a lover and plug him with a .45? Duelling? Drug addiction? Necrophilia? Methodism? I've really heard it all, what with one thing and another. Cough it up,' she advised, inelegantly.

'I'm a socialist!' blurted Eliza through her clenched hands.

'Yes,' prompted Phryne. That appeared to be it. There was a silence. Eliza peeped out between her spread fingers.

'I said, I'm a Fabian socialist,' she restated. Phryne utterly failed to reel in horror.

'That's nice,' she said.

'I believe in the greatest good for the greatest number! I'm against inherited wealth! I believe that all means of production should be in the hands of the workers!' Eliza's voice was gaining strength, either from the Nervine, the cognac or the lack of reaction from her sister.

'Good,' said Phryne. 'Now, what is worrying you?'

'Father said I was a traitor to my cla.s.s!' Eliza began to sob again. 'He dragged me out of the waltz at the Hunt Ball and denounced me to the county! He said I was no daughter of his and told me it was all Mother's fault! He forbade me his house! He threw me out! He told me to go and live in London with Alice and never darken his door again!'

'He always was a fool,' said Phryne. 'Never mind, Eliza. Do you want to darken his door-why darken, anyway? I'm sure I never darkened a door. Not just by standing there. Dry your eyes,' she suggested. 'So you're a Fabian. How interesting. I thought you might have been, you know. Getting on so well with Mabel, not the first lady of the night that you've met, I'll wager. Instinctively almost telling me that my dinner could feed a hundred paupers. Quoting Beatrice and Sydney Webb. And reading The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. My copy just came out from England. Shaw has such a clear way of putting things, hasn't he? It was the first time I felt I understood how capitalism worked.'

'But, Phryne,' Eliza began, anxious to make sure that her sister knew the worst. 'You don't understand. We have rejected revolutionary Marxism. We stand for evolutionary socialism, for gradualism. And in the meanwhile, I want to work with Alice and live in the East End and help the poor until they can find justice. Until the system evolves to support them.'

'I know a couple of wharfies who'll love to meet you,' said Phryne.

'You don't mind?' Eliza whispered. Phryne patted her shoulder.

'Of course I don't mind. Just don't try to redistribute my capital.'

'It's all right for you,' muttered Eliza. 'You've got your settle-ment from Granny and your French pension and all that money from all those pictures you bought in Paris. I've got a year to go before I'm twenty-five and Father won't give me a penny. He sprang for the trip to Australia provided I didn't come back until I ”got over these preposterous notions” and was ready to marry the nice man he's picked out for me.'

'Oh? And which nice man did Father find for you? Leaving aside my serious doubts as to Father's taste in men, the last time I looked the English aristocracy was entirely composed of married men, those unlikely to marry at all, the effete and the brutes-not a wide choice. All the good ones were snaffled early and the remains-well. They are remains. Or possibly dregs is a more exact description.'

'Oh, Phryne, it's terrible,' Eliza wept afresh. 'I only got two offers in my second season, which Father said was the last, he wasn't going to pay for another. There was Roderick Chol-mondeley, the sole heir of the Duke of Dunstable, a mere boy-he's eighteen, younger than me. And he's only interested in football. Or cricket. Or hunting, or polo, or hockey or fis.h.i.+ng. And he's stupid. They couldn't get him into university, even though he was a good chance for a Blue in about three sports. He can hardly read and write.'

'So, one is an oaf,' said Phryne. 'And the other?'

'He's elderly,' wailed Eliza.

'But an old friend of Father's?' hazarded Phryne. She could see how this was going. Disappointed in his eldest daughter, who had turned out to be Phryne and could not be married off, even under chloroform, Milord had decided that the much more pliable Eliza could be sold to the highest bidder. And the highest bidder had been...?

'Oh, Phryne, he's awful. It's the Marquess of Shrops.h.i.+re.'

'Ugh,' said Phryne. She remembered Theodoric, Marquess of Shrops.h.i.+re, which otherwise was a rather nice county and deserved better. A thin, acidulous widower (twice) with pinpoint pupils and a sidelong approach which had always reminded Phryne of a spider. He did not drink or smoke and his sole amus.e.m.e.nt appeared to be making money and outliving his wives. The young Phryne had instinctively recoiled from him when she was fourteen. The twenty-eight year old Phryne was fairly sure that his other recreations involved opium smoking and probably the sacrifice of young virgins to Mammon in some underground temple lined with banknotes. Wasn't there some scandal about a parlour maid? And another about vast war supplies fraud? Was it not, in fact, the Marquess of Shrop-s.h.i.+re who had supplied to the War Office, at huge expense, rainproof coats which proved to be as absorbent as tissue paper? The Blotting Paper Marquess, the semi-frozen soldiery had called him (amongst other things). That was the man. And there was some Australian connection, was there not, some ancestor who had come back with a fortune? Or was that someone else? Eliza would know, and she appeared to be talking to Phryne again. And, come to think of it, waiting for a response.

'Outrageous,' said Phryne. 'You shall not marry him, or the oaf, or anyone else, if you don't want to. Father must have taken leave of his senses, not that he ever had many. Is he still getting through a bottle of port a day?'

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