The maid went into the walk-in wardrobe and rummaged. Phryne offered him Chinese tea and waved a hand at a proper Western breakfast.
Bemused, Lin ate and drank, luxuriating in the comfort of the gown. Although he believed firmly in the Westernizing ideas of the semi-divine Sun, he felt that a Chinese gentleman ought to be able to wear robes. It was Iron Goddess tea, he found as he sipped it, a strengthening beverage. He bathed in her undersea coloured bathroom and dressed in his discarded evening clothes.
‘Tonight,’ said the Silver Lady as he stood uncertainly at her boudoir door, ‘come and get me at the theatre. Before the performance. Seven?’ She pressed against him in a brief contact which caught his breath.
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‘Seven,’ he agreed, and kissed her hand. The silver ring was a dragon and phoenix, he saw, entwined together. The symbol of the Emperor and the Empress, and of the King and Queen of Heaven. The symbol of a perfect mating of Yin and Yang.
It was a good omen, and he left Phryne’s house and drove himself home, tired and elated.
Phryne bathed, dragged on a purple knitted dress and a black woollen jacket and pulled lisle stockings over her legs. She had woken with an idea which was now eluding her. Somewhere, sometime, someone had said something important and she had missed it. She groped after the elusive memory and it slipped away.
‘Blast,’ she said again, finished her coffee.
‘Miss, you know that baby?’ offered Dot. ‘Eat a little toast, Miss, you can’t go out with nothing but coffee and it’s past lunchtime.’
‘What baby? Oh, you mean Dorothea’s child.
Yes, what about it?’
Dot produced the photograph. Phryne looked at it. A baby lay face down on the rug, laughing, its head turned to the camera. It was totally bald and resembled all other babies of its class and age.
Phryne could see nothing unusual in it.
‘Look at the back, Miss, just above its little bottom. There.’
‘Yes, I can see a spot on the photo.’
‘Not on the photo, Miss, on the baby,’ urged Dot. ‘It’s a birthmark. Shaped a bit like a strawberry.’
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Phryne stared, recognised that Dot was arguably right, and gave her back the picture.
‘More than ever, Dot dear, I am convinced that we are caught up in a comic opera. A strawberry birthmark, oh dear, oh dear. Now how am I going to peel the shirt off Gwilym Evans without getting myself embroiled in . . . ’ Phryne caught Dot’s reproving eye. ‘Well, you know what he’s like! I’ll think of something. Perhaps I can drop in while he’s dressing. Now, I’ve got to go and see the priest of the Methodist church, he’s the only person in Melbourne who appears to speak Welsh and I need a translation of that letter. No, he’s not a priest, he’s a pastor. Or a reverend. Then I’m going to the theatre and I’m dining with Mr Lin.
Depending on one thing and another, I may not be back tonight.’ She loaded her bag with various useful things. ‘And I promise I’ll wear my St Christopher medal and not have any dealings with any unclean spirits, Dot.’ She crossed her heart under the purple wool and Dot smiled.
Phryne pulled on a black suede cloche hat and pencilled in her eyebrows, patted her nose with the powder puff and clipped the compact closed. In the mirror, her eyes shone as green as Roman glass. She had been slightly cast down at the loss of Mark Fielding so firmly and forever. But there were compensations, Phryne thought, definite compensations, and walked down the stairs to her car.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
BOX: Do you have a strawberry coloured birthmark on your left shoulder?
COX: No!
BOX: Neither do I! You must be my long-lost brother!
Box and Cox
(later
Cox and Box
with music by Sullivan), Maddison Morton
PHRYNE FOUND the priest, pastor or reverend of the Welsh Church of Saint David standing in the street waving a scrubbing brush at the fleeing forms of several street urchins, who had been painting rude words on his wall.
‘There is no place for you in the Kingdom of Heaven!’ he roared. He waited to see if this dreadful curse would fell them with a lightning bolt, then shrugged and began scrubbing. Phryne commented, ‘Presumably God will get around to them later,’ and he looked up. He was stout, robust and perhaps fifty, with a carefully cultivated white beard.
‘To be sure he will. You are the young lady who 220
called? I am the Reverend Daffydd Griffiths. Come in,’ he said. His voice was like an organ, rich and deep. ‘What do you wish me to read for you?’
‘This.’ Phryne walked into the chalk-scented dimness of a perfectly bare hall. One would only know it was a church from the plain wooden cru-cifix behind the altar.
‘Ah, yes. Do sit down.’ The Reverend’s office was crammed with papers and books and he cleared a chair for her to be seated. ‘This is a simple letter from a village in the north, badly spelled and not very well written.’ He knitted his white brows. ‘It says, ‘‘Dear Gwil, our boy is seven now and going to school. When are you coming home? I got the money you sent but things are getting dear. Mari.’’ Do I know this man?’ he asked severely.
‘I think it very unlikely,’ responded Phryne, opening her purse. ‘Thank you for your translation. Could I make a small donation?’
‘Thank you.’ He bristled his brows at her. ‘Do you like to sing?’
‘Yes, I do,’ she confessed.
‘We have a service in English every week, no sermon. Just singing. A real roof-raiser,’ he said proudly. ‘Perhaps I will see you there?’
‘I belong to the Church of England,’ said Phryne, which was effectively true, as far as she belonged anywhere.
‘That’s all right,’ said the Reverend, making an expansive gesture. ‘As long as he had a voice, my congregation would accept a Heathen Chinee.’
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‘Thank you,’ said Phryne, and was ushered into the street, where the Reverend Mr Griffiths resumed his scrubbing. Phryne was pleased that the children had been interrupted halfway through their rude word.
She walked briskly away. It was just a common saying. But she had just spent all night playing clouds and rain with a heathen Chinee, and he had been loving, delicate, skilled and terribly intelli-gent. Yet what she was thinking of – an alliance with a man of a different race – would be considered by all of society to be a vast and irretrievable degradation, making her of less value than a whore. Phryne closed her fists and stiffened her spine.
‘To Hell with all racialists,’ she said aloud. ‘And to Hell with eugenics, degenerate heredity, misceg-enation and frauds who pile up skulls like a con-queror as well. May they choke on their bones.’ A passing gentleman boggled at her and crossed to the other side of La Trobe Street. ‘There is no place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven,’ she added, rolling the phrase over her tongue and filing it for future reference.
So Gwil Evans had left a wife and child in distant Wales. She considered this, turning the corner into Exhibition Street and avoiding a clutch of city gentlemen in pin-stripes and bowlers. No wonder he couldn’t marry any of his lovers, though she questioned that he wanted to, except perhaps Leila Esperance. And he couldn’t marry her, not with Mari at home in a cold little village 222
somewhere in the mountains and a son seven years old. No wonder he had not gone home to his foster mother’s funeral. And he might well be Dorothea’s child, if he had a birthmark on his lower back.
She reached the theatre to find Herbert in charge and Tom Deeping asleep in his little box.
The boy touched a finger to his lips and led Phryne to the stairs. He looked strained and the dark eyes had shadows underneath. There was a bruise on his cheek and he had one hand tucked into his shirt.
‘Your dad again?’ she asked and he nodded.
‘Can’t your mum leave him?’
‘No, there’s all the others and there’s nowhere to go. Anyway, she says it’s what men are like.
Grandad is a drunk, too. It’s all she knows. He wants me to be apprenticed to a baker. I told him I was going to be an actor and . . . ’ Herbert shifted uncomfortably, as if more bruises were hidden under his cheap unravelling jumper and patched trousers.
‘No reason for you to stay, Tinker. I can make some arrangements, perhaps, if you like.’
‘I’m not going into any orphanage,’ stated Herbert.
‘No, that would not suit. I was thinking of a family to board with while you’re learning to be an actor. Ah. Here is Dr Fielding. Mark, can you have a look at this young man?’
‘No, I’m all right,’ protested Herbert, ‘and I’m minding the door.’
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‘I’ll mind the door. Mark, take him into the gentlemen’s dressing room and come back with a report. This is unacceptable,’ said Phryne implacably. Mark Fielding knew that tone. He took Herbert’s shoulder in a gentle grip and moved him upstairs.
Deeping lay back in his chair. Breath heavily laden with port puffed out between his lips, the only sign that he was alive. Although her own father had been a heavy drinker, Phryne had never seen him violent and was not afraid of alcoholics.
She was musing on the lucky mistake that her father had not been himself at her christening, which resulted in her being named for Phryne the courtesan and not Psyche the nymph –
a felix
culpa
if there had ever been one – when Mark came back.
He walked stiffly down and said in a voice of restrained anger, ‘He’s been beaten with a belt and punched and kicked. He has two broken ribs and the poor little chap is badly bruised. I’ve strapped him up and given him aspirin but he ought to be in bed. What are you going to do about him, Phryne?’
‘I’ll see Sir B as soon as he arrives and get him apprenticed or under contract today. Then you can find him somewhere pleasant to stay for the future and I’ll pay for it. Simple.’
Mark Fielding smiled. ‘Your solutions are always simple,’ he said. ‘Incomparable Phryne!
Are you sure you don’t mind?’
‘About what?’
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‘Mollie Webb and me. I think – I think she . . . ’
‘I think so too and I hope you’ll be very happy.’
She kissed him gently and for the last time on his soft red mouth.
Sir Bernard arrived to find his office occupied by Miss Fisher and a snuffling call boy who seemed to have been in the wars.
‘Ah, Bernard.’ Miss Fisher fixed him with her glittering eye. ‘Do you really think that this fellow can be an actor?’
‘Yes!’ Bernard was surprised into honesty, ‘I do.
Why?’
‘Then put him under contract or whatever you do, there’s a dear. If you want him to survive long enough to play in your panto. I’ll bear the costs of his maintenance for the moment. Then he can pay me back, if he likes, out of his legacy from Mr Copland.’
‘Herbert, is this what you want?’ asked Tarrant severely.
‘Yes, Sir Bernard,’ whispered Herbert Cowl, his bruised eyes growing large with hope. ‘If I can pay her back. I don’t want to be no . . . I don’t want to be a burden on anyone’s charity.’
‘You won’t be, dear boy. You’ve inherited a tidy sum, they tell me, from Mr Copland, who said you had ‘‘such promise’’. Just what an actor needs, a trust fund. Well then, sign here and here. But I’ll need the father’s signature, too, Phryne.’ Herbert stiffened his thin shoulders and said despairingly,
‘He’ll never sign.’
‘Yes, I think he will. Dr Fielding will go around 225
and see him this afternoon, when he’s delivering you to your new home.’ Phryne did not think any drunk would stand up against a determined Dr Mark with an injustice to avenge. ‘Now, is there anything you want to do, Herbert? You’re a member of this company now.’
‘I’ll go home and get my things,’ he said breathlessly, ‘if the doctor will take me. Say goodbye to Mum. Oh, Boss,’ he said with a rush of affection,
‘you’re bonzer.’
With that he launched himself regardless of his injuries at Phryne and kissed her moistly on the cheek. She hugged him gently for a moment. Then he released her and darted out of the office in search of Dr Fielding.
‘That’ll be a valuable contract,’ she commented, as Bernard added it to the pile and stowed it in the safe.
‘I know. If he lasts, the boy will be good. Has to learn his craft. But he has the makings,’ said Bernard. ‘And at least I’ve got his details when he’s too young to change them.’
‘Change what?’
‘The date of birth, the time he began. If you listen to them, all actors were born in a trunk, were on stage at the age of three weeks and smash hits by the time they were ten. And trying to work a cabinet secret out of a member of parliament is child’s play beside getting an actress to divulge her age.’
‘So they lie about it in contracts?’ asked Phryne tensely.
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‘Yes, dear girl, of course. The theatre is youth, and age is a handicap and the dreadful spectre that lurks behind each star’s door.’
He was about to develop this promising meta-phor when he looked up and realised that his audience had gone.
Just to be sure, Phryne marched into Gwilym Evans’ dressing room where he was donning his rehearsal costume for
The Pirates of Penzance
, pulled aside the screen and stripped off the frilly shirt. He stared at her, grinned, then stopped grinning as she pushed him so that his face was to the wall and then peered closely at his back.
‘Shonni, help,’ he called, ‘I think I’m being raped.’
‘Never needed no help for that,’ came the dresser’s voice. ‘What are you doing, Miss Fisher, and can I join in?’
‘Look at his back,’ she ordered, pinning Gwil to the wall with a firm hand.
‘I’m looking.’
‘Not a mark on it, is there?’
‘No, perfectly clear,’ Shonni agreed, humouring her.
‘What about you?’ she asked. After all, the children could have been changed at birth. That would be very Gilbertian. She released the actor, who pulled his shirt on as though he was cold.
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Shonni turned away and allowed Phryne to bare his back and examine it.
‘Good.’ She turned and left, slamming the door behind her.
‘Box on Cox,’ said Gwil faintly to his dresser.
‘‘‘Do you have a strawberry birthmark on your shoulder?’’ ‘‘No.’’ ‘‘Neither do I! Then you must be my long-lost brother!’’ I’ve got to find out what she’s doing, Shon, or I’ll die of curiosity. Give me a coat and some shoes, and let’s go.’