Phryne had memorised her maps, such as they were, and thus felt that strange, disorienting click when the landscape below swam into resemblance. It was like the sense of correctness when she found the right radio wavelength after swinging across the broadcast. There, below the little plane, was the valley she was seeking. She flew in over the peculiar rocky crown of the Viking and headed down the Wonnangatta Valley from its secret beginning in the Terrible Hollow. Turning sharp east, she surmounted Mount Cynthia and dropped down into
the defile of Crooked River.
No place to land here. Rocks, a wilderness of trees. If anything happened, the chances of her surviving were remote. Then the valley widened out. She flew over a homestead, sitting neatly like a toy house in a rich wet plain, and down thirty miles to where she fervently hoped Talbotville was waiting for her. The air was still clear, but clouds appeared to be coming down. It was very cold and there was snow on the Snowy Plains and on the Howitt Plains. Snow in October! Phryne drank the last of her coffee and flexed her fingers in their sheepskin-lined gauntlets, trying to get some feeling back into them.
There, below, was a cleared strip along the edge of the water, and a windsock streaming north. Good. It stood to reason that the only wind which could get into this valley would blow either south or north. Into the wind she circled, observing that the wind-sock was a real sock. There was activity on the ground.
Down, down, Phryne piloted
Rigel,
until she was skimming along at treetop height. The strip was not very long. She allowed the Moth to drop until her wheels touched, cut the engine, and wished she had waited for the Leopard Moth with brakes.
Rigel
belted along the strip at forty miles an hour, and Phryne turned her as she neared the fence so that she would at least preserve the propeller if she had to hit something. People were shouting. Luckily, the strip was mostly mud.
Rigel
lost speed rapidly, and finally rolled to a stop ten yards from the fence.
‘Thank goodness for a solid river-valley quagmire,’ breathed Phryne, and stepped out of the plane into a churned-up sog of rich, black mud.
Filled with the strong sense of relief which always accompanied one of her landings, Phryne slogged forward and was extracted from an unusually deep hole by a strong, thin, tanned woman in riding breeches.
‘Welcome to Talbotville,’ she said, and beamed. Phryne was pleased. This was better than Mansfield’s ‘My God, it’s a woman’. The ‘it’ rankled. She smiled into the tall woman’s face.
‘Thank you! Nice strip you’ve dug. And thanks for the windsock. I’m Phryne Fisher.’
‘Anne Purvis. This is Jo.’
Another charming smile from a smaller but plumper woman in a divided skirt and a man’s tweed jacket. She had amiable brown eyes which were nevertheless not eyes one would wish to try to take advantage of, and curly brown hair. ‘Josephine Binet.’
‘The writer?’ asked Phryne, interested. ‘I’ve read your
Murder by the Stockyard Fence.
It was excellent. I usually guess who did it in the first three chapters and I didn’t work yours out until chapter ten.’
‘I’ll let you into a secret,’ confided Jo Binet, leading Phryne over a small creek and up onto a track. ‘That’s when I guessed, too. Come into town. Not much of a town, I admit, but a town nonetheless.’
Three wiry young men hovered around the plane. Phryne looked back severely.
‘You can look all you like but don’t put one of those boots near my wing, gentlemen. It’s fragile. If the fuel’s come I’ll take you up for a spin—if I can ever take off again. Maybe tomorrow. Is there any crosswind in this valley?’
Heads in battered felt hats inclined towards one another, as if taking counsel. The middle head shook. ‘Nah, no crosswind, Missus.’
‘Good, then I won’t need to tie her down. Now, ladies, a cup of tea would be greeted with some relief. It’s very cold up there.’
‘The postmaster says there’ll be snow. He always knows about weather, does Albert Stout. Just up along here, Miss Fisher, and you shall have tea.’
‘Tell me, Miss Binet, why do you live here? I mean, writers usually live in the city, near to publishers and agents and cafes. I always understood that a cafe was essential for the creative process.’
Josephine Binet stopped in what, for want of another term, would be called the main street of Talbotville, and said simply, ‘Look’.
Phryne looked. Although she was cold and a little shaken, and longed desperately for tea, she could not fail to be impressed by the landscape. High and blue, cold and distant, the mountains sat comfortably in their warm fluff of forest. Snow gums of amazing height soared above her, coloured like a Paris fashion show and with bark of silk. The massive river valley, slab-sided with granite, was capped by an improbably blue sky and looked as if Gothic cathedrals had plummeted, spires down, into rich wet earth. At her feet, small pink orchids grew under the fronded black wattle. The air smelt of woodsmoke and growing things, with a faint, pure hint of snow.
‘Yes,’ agreed Phryne. ‘I see.’
‘Tea and scones,’ said Anne Purvis, pulling at Phryne’s other hand. ‘Landscape will wait.’
Talbotville nestled into the lumpy surroundings as though it had grown there. It had twelve houses constructed of wood and roofed with iron, and several huts of the old fashion, roofed with wooden shingles and walled with round saplings.
‘We’ve got one of the houses, because Jo can’t stand spiders,’ said Anne, leading the way through a small crowd of people who were staring at Phryne as though she had dropped in from Mars. A child stuck his thumb in his mouth and backed away when she smiled at him. Another ran screaming for her mother.
‘They aren’t used to the helmet,’ explained Anne, and Phryne removed the offending headgear. The child uncorked his thumb and returned the smile.
‘I like the old bark huts, but they are terrible spider traps,’ explained Anne. ‘Do come in.’
The house was of three rooms, one of which was given over to a typewriter, a pile of paper, and hundreds of books—some stacked on raw wood shelves, but most lying on the floor, piled, or open, or marked with slips of blue paper. The middle room had a large colonial stove filling one fireplace and a sparkling rosy ‘company’ fire in the other. Neatly piled in one corner was a doctor’s bag, a saddle, some horse accoutrements in various stages of repair, and a folded, starched white apron.
Anne heaved the kettle onto the top of the stove and motioned Phryne to an easy chair.
‘If we’ve got nothing to do, we mend harnesses,’ complained Jo. ‘Luckily I have ten thumbs. Would you like to take off your boots?’
‘Not yet, my feet are still frozen. Why harnesses?’
Anne was up to her elbows in flour. It was a bush cook’s boast that she could have the scones ready by the time the kettle boiled, and she was not going to be outdone.
‘Anne’s the local nurse,’ explained Josephine. ‘She always gets called out in the worst weather, and the only way to get to some of these places is on a horse. We keep the horse in the publican’s stable, but Anne’s fussy about her saddle.’
‘Quite right,’ agreed Phryne. ‘A badly kept saddle can gall the horse, and it doesn’t do the rider any good either.’
Neither of these women, although they must be bursting with curiosity, had asked her what she was doing in Talbotville. Phryne had thought that delicacy had gone out of fashion. She was pleased to find it alive and well in Gippsland. Anne punched down her scone dough with the solid soggy noise that promised good results. Mrs Butler had informed Phryne that to make good scones one had to be strong, and Anne certainly looked strong, with a horseman’s strength of sinew and bone. Josephine looked more used to civilisation. Phryne decided to ask. ‘Were you born out here, Anne?’
‘Was mustering other side of Kosciuszko before I could walk,’ the young woman grinned. ‘But Dad wouldn’t let me run me own cattle, so I went to school and learned to be a nurse. And,’ she added, cutting out the scones with a passionfruit pulp tin, ‘I’ve ridden wilder rides as a nurse than I ever did wheeling bulls in the scrub. My oath! Remember Mrs Johnson’s baby, Jo?’
‘What happened to Mrs Johnson’s baby?’ asked Phryne, feeling her toes begin to thaw.
‘She had it in the middle of the night,’ said Josephine in her golden-syrup voice. ‘Silly chook should have known it was coming, it was her fifth, but her boy comes galloping up at piccaninny daylight to fetch Anne. “Mum is bad,” he said, so Anne goes off with him, and comes back straight down the mountain, scattering flints like the Man from Snowy River with this white bundle on the saddle-bow. My heart was in my mouth. It was Mrs Johnson’s latest, wrapped up in her apron—distressed, Anne said. After that ride it should have been scared out of its wits. But babies are tough.’
‘Did it survive?’
‘You met it in the street.’ said Anne, ‘Kid with the thumb in his mouth. I’ve ordered some bitter aloes from Bairnsdale for him. Jeez, I was cold but, Jo went crook about me cold feet. Anyway, why shouldn’t I ride like the Man from Snowy River? I was brought up near there. My dad knew him. Jack Riley. Nice bloke, Dad said.’ She slotted the trays of scones into the oven and closed the door with a clap, stirred the fire inside with a short poker, and rubbed flour off her hands.
‘Scones’ll be on in ten minutes,’ she said with quiet pride.
With the comment about the cold feet Phryne realised that there was only one bedroom in the house and only one bed, and that two women lived there. She blinked. She realised that Josephine and Anne were watching her with polite patience, waiting for it to dawn upon her. Phryne smiled.
‘What do the locals think?’ she asked.
Josephine answered with a laugh. ‘They don’t think anything. Nothing wrong with two women living together. It’s not even illegal. Now, is there anything you want to ask us in private, before we let the chaps in? They’ll be champing at the bit about the plane out there, and their tongues’ll be hanging out for Anne’s tea and scones.’
‘Yes. I have come to look for a man who has been missing for years. He ran away from the Great War and never went back.’
Silence fell. The kettle began to sing. Two intelligent faces, quite unalike except for the expression, stared at her.
‘What was this man’s name?’ asked Anne huskily.
‘Freeman,’ said Phryne, holding their gaze. ‘Victor Ernest Freeman. His father is dead. I don’t think he knows that. There is a question of inheritance. I tried phoning here, but the postmaster hung up on me.’
‘If he’s been missing all this while, then perhaps he doesn’t want to be found,’ said Josephine coolly. ‘Why disturb him?’
‘I don’t want to disturb him. I just want to know if he’s alive. His brother also wants to find him. He thought he was dead.’
‘Perhaps he is by now.’
‘Or perhaps not. He was living up at MacAlister Springs,’ said Phryne. ‘He wrote to his father from there. Now, can you tell me if he’s still there? I will leave him alone if he doesn’t want to have anything to do with the world, and might I say in parenthesis that his family is utterly ghastly and I wouldn’t blame him for a moment if he never wants to see any of them again. I’ll leave him be if he wants to be alone with the mountains.’
‘How did you know he wanted to be alone . . .’ began Josephine.
‘With the mountains? I read his letters to his father. The great silence, he called it. Have a heart, ladies, or shall I ask the men?’
‘No, don’t do that.’ Josephine consulted Anne in a glance. ‘Don’t tell them that’s where you are going. They like Vic. We all do. They might try and stop you. Yes, he’s still here.’ She looked at Anne again, who nodded. ‘We’ll trust you. Vic Freeman’s living in a hut at MacAlister Springs.’
‘Jo reckons he’s like them old Christian monks—you know, a hermit. A natural religious, she says. But he ain’t loopy. Just loves quiet. You’ll find him up there all right. And you’ll not try and take him back to the city?’
‘No, I promise.’
‘All right, then. Scones’re done. Kettle’s boiling. Bring in the blokes, Jo, and mum’s the word, eh, Miss Fisher?’
‘Phryne, and mum is the word.’
Ten men and several women and four very shy children came into the small house as Anne poured boiling water into the huge teapot and tumbled her scones into several tea cloths. Phryne was supplied with scone, butter and jam, and another huge mug of tea with milk and sugar. It tasted heavenly. The tea was very strong and the scone light, the butter home-made and the jam, in Phryne’s honour, shop-bought strawberry.
‘Nice place,’ said Phryne. ‘Beautiful mountains.’ She had learned on previous attempts at conversation in the Australian bush to speak slowly and use short sentences. She did not make the mistake of thinking the inhabitants stupid. It was just that they did not talk much and therefore liked to give every word its proper weight. She reflected that a writer might find this touching. Words were seldom given the respect they deserved.
‘Yair,’ agreed the oldest man present, a gnarled specimen of such legendary toughness that Phryne imagined he shaved with a cross-cut saw. ‘She’s pretty country all right.’ There was a chorus of agreement, muffled in scone.
‘Nice machine,’ a young man said. ‘What sort is it?’
‘Gipsy Moth,’ said Phryne.
‘She fly well?’
‘Yes. Eighty miles an hour cruising speed. Will land on a pretty short run, provided it’s flat. The valley is ideal.’