Death Before Wicket: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries 10 (14 page)

‘You want to find it? So do we. For a magical working of great significance.’ Marrin sat down and reached for Phryne’s cup of wine. She let him take it.

‘Scrying doesn’t help?’ asked Phryne sympathetically. ‘A spirit medium is of no use? Surely the original scribe is anxious to tell you where his curse is.’

‘No, it’s not a re-animation. The scribe is gone and in the Field of Reeds. We want it for another matter entirely,’ said Marrin, emptying the cup and setting it down.

‘I’m not going to inquire into anything hidden,’ said Phryne delicately. ‘You can keep your hermetic secrets. But I need to know—is there something on that papyrus which does not appear in the photograph? Is that why you need the original?’

A quick exchange of glances between the two was all that Phryne needed.

‘I cannot tell you anything more,’ said Madame, portentously.

‘But if the papyrus should come into your hands,’ said Marrin, ‘we might be able to make you an offer.’

‘You made an offer to Professor Bretherton, but he hasn’t got it either. Nor would he sell it, I fancy.’

‘John Bretherton,’ said Madame, drawing out the syllables venomously. ‘He seeks the same as we do. But we will find it first.’

‘Oh, good. I wish you well. And Adam Harcourt?’

‘He is of no further use,’ agreed Marrin. ‘But he is held to us by more than magical bonds. I will release him, but later I will have him in my hand again—you shall see.’ He stood up and sketched a sigil in the air with his blood-red nails. Phryne fancied that she could see it glowing. Then he blew it towards Harcourt. Phryne knew that the eyes of Joss, Clarence and Adam were riveted on her meeting with Madame and Marrin and hoped that this gesture might free the young man’s mind from doubt.

‘He’s carrying some defence, what is it?’ asked Marrin, surprising her.

‘An amulet. Thank you,’ she said to Madame, laying a banknote on the tarot, another forbidden act, insolently done. Madame seemed unaware of the conventions.

‘Take a card,’ she said, fanning them out, face down.

Phryne picked one at random. Madame turned it up and hissed, ‘You see?’ at Marrin, who grinned like a shark. The card depicted corpses rising from their coffins towards a descending angel.

‘Judgment,’ said Phryne. She smiled a slight social smile and went back to Harcourt. ‘You’re free,’ she told him. ‘Released from all chains and bonds. Your own man entirely.’

‘How did you do it?’ breathed Harcourt with the expression of a prisoner who has not only been unshackled but invited to tea by the Governor.

‘All done by kindness,’ said Phryne. Joss and Clarence gave her another cup of sour wine and sighed with relief. Harcourt was recovering before their eyes. His cheeks were pinkening, his eyes had lost the glazed look which had worried them and his whole body appeared to have filled with vitality like a glass filling with water. Joss slapped him on the shoulder in congratulation.

‘Told you Miss Fisher could do it,’ said Jocelyn. Harcourt smiled at him.

‘Magicians are one thing, mysteries another,’ said Phryne. ‘So temper your transports, if that isn’t mixing a metaphor. Still haven’t got a great deal further with this puzzle. I haven’t found Darlo Annie and no one seems concerned at her disappearance.’

‘Oh, those girls come and go,’ said Joss airily, making Miss Fisher’s fingers itch to box his ears. ‘She’ll drift back, I expect.’

‘You really haven’t any idea, have you?’ asked Phryne. ‘You really don’t touch the real world at any point. Where do you come from, Joss?’

‘North Shore, of course.’ Joss seemed puzzled. ‘Dad’s in the city and wants me to join his business and I really didn’t want to start as a surveyor’s mate so I went up to the U. Why? Have I said something wrong?’

‘Never mind.’ Phryne drank down her wine and held out the cup for more. ‘What about you, Clarence?’

‘Oh, I’m a third generation medical man, but I can’t stand the sight of blood so I chose Arts instead. I’m a black sheep,’ said Clarence proudly. ‘Perfectly useless.’

Phryne reflected privately on a world in which one could be a black sheep by choosing one university course over another, and contrasted it with the unknown fate of Darlo Annie, who might be Joan Thompson née Williams who had taken a darker road to achieve the status of social outcast. When she re-emerged, bearded Jack was mangling another quote from Mallarmé and Phryne decided to enter the conversation.

‘No, no, Mallarmé wrote “
La chair est triste, helas! et j’ai lu tous les livres”
. The flesh is sad, alas! And I have read all the books. Myself, I prefer Apollinaire and Jules Laforgue, and you might consider what Verlaine has to say in
Art poétique: “Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air”.’

‘He pursued the Ideal,’ agreed George reluctantly, not willing to try trading quotes with this learned woman but constitutionally unable to see her, being female, as one who would really understand what being a poet was like. ‘But he never found it.’

‘Only death,’ said Marrin, sitting down beside Bill. ‘They all sought death most diligently and they all died.’

‘A common fate,’ said Phryne, watching Harcourt. Marrin had come to make good his boast. Was his hold so strong? Harcourt’s thin, ink-stained fingers were clutching the amulet under his shirt, but he was breathing evenly and his face was controlled. He had certainly been frightened out of his wits by that unlovely pair, Madame and Marrin, but a measure of backbone appeared to have returned to the young man.

‘Immortality,’ breathed Marrin. He wore a strange scent. Phryne wrinkled her nose in an effort to identify it. She had smelt it before. In an eastern port somewhere: Port Said? Cairo? Yes, Cairo. Spikenard, the bridegroom’s perfume in the ‘Song of Solomon’. Phryne had gained an entirely undeserved reputation for piety for reading the Bible in church. In fact she had been beguiling the sermon with that most erotic of ancient love poems. But she did not find Marrin erotic—he was far too cold to be attractive. She considered that it would be like making love to a crocodile. Cold, scaly, and ultimately dangerous.

‘The alchemist’s quest?’ asked Phryne, not allowing herself to smile.

‘By another path,’ said Marrin.

Yes, and it’s a left-hand one, thought Phryne. ‘I wish you success,’ she said pleasantly. Then, unable to help herself, she added, ‘“
Et de la corde d’un toise/Sçaura ton col que ton cul poise
.”‘ Naughty, she knew, to quote Villon in such company, and naughtier to misquote his epitaph: and a rope so long/that it will teach your neck the weight of your arse. Marrin laughed hugely, his shark’s teeth displayed.

‘“
La pluye nous a debuez et laves
”,’ he began, capping her Villon quote with another from ‘The Ballad of the Hanged Men’, a speech delivered by a corpse on a gibbet. ‘“
Et le soleil dessechiez et noircis/Pies, corbealx, nous ont les jeux cavez
…”‘

Harcourt translated as Marrin recited that most macabre of ballads.

‘“The rain has rinsed us and washed us,/And the sun has dried us and blackened us/Magpies and crows have made pits of our eyes/Torn away our beards and eyebrows./Never and never can we be still/Swaying here, there as the wind varies/At its pleasure it carries us/Holed by beaks worse than a thimble/ Therefore don’t be of our brotherhood/But pray to God that he will absolve us all.”‘

Hand on amulet, Harcourt handed Marrin a tarot card.

‘Take it back,’ he said quietly. ‘I will not be one of your brotherhood. “
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre
.”‘

His pale face, his black eyes, his cannibal mouth did not react, but the blood-red fingernails bit into the card. Marrin crumpled it and it fluttered past Phryne’s hand. She palmed it. Marrin smiled his predator’s smile again and drifted away. One of the poets looked away from his argument to sneer, ‘Villon? Old-fashioned,’ before he returned to the fray.

Phryne inspected the card. A naked corpse suspended by one foot, from a gallows, one leg crossed at the knee into a figure four. The Hanged Man.

‘This was your card?’ she asked Harcourt. He nodded, still too astounded by his own hardihood to speak. Phryne knew the meaning of the card.

‘Spiritual wisdom, gained…’

‘At a great price,’ whispered Adam Harcourt. ‘The price was far too high. More wine,’ he said, fumbling in his pocket for his wallet. ‘Joss, will you get us another bottle?’

‘Adam dear, I’m very proud of you,’ said Phryne quietly. She sat down next to Harcourt and he sagged against her. Phryne put an arm around him. He was holding some great emotion in check. She wondered what it was. Fear? Joy? Relief?

Madame and Marrin stood in close converse for a moment in the middle of the floor, turban and shaven head. Phryne would have given a good deal to know what they were talking about. They had lost their hold over the young man; first magically and then socially. She had given Marrin his cue to start quoting the ‘Ballad of the Hanged Men’, and now she wondered why she had done it; had he dropped that thought into her mind? But even the mention of the Hanged Men had not retrieved Harcourt, and provided he played no more magical games he was probably fairly safe. Holding Harcourt in a close consoling embrace, Phryne saw Marrin bend to kiss Madame’s mouth. Her face contracted in pain, and blood glistened on both mouths as Marrin drew away. He licked his lips, relishing the taste.

Cruel and bestial, yet the gesture had been full of raw appetite, and Phryne felt her body react. Marrin turned and gave her a glance so loaded with lust that she wondered how she had ever thought him unattractive. Inadvisable, without doubt, but inadvisable had never been the same as undesirable. She understood the nature of their hold over Harcourt, a young man with no lover, too principled to lie to a good girl, too poor and too fastidious to purchase one of Tillie’s women.

‘They must be very hard to relinquish,’ she murmured. Harcourt clung close to Phryne and rubbed his cheek along her silky shoulder.

‘There must be other pleasures,’ he whispered. ‘In any case, I have left them, and even if I have left my manhood with them at least I’m free.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you’ve left your manhood with that disgusting couple,’ said Phryne, settling him into her embrace and running a feather light caress along his thigh. She felt the jolt as desire tingled through his body and grounded with a thud in his spine. ‘See? Perfectly reliable,’ she told him, exploring further and finding a serviceable erection. ‘You’ve got all the manhood with which you reached puberty, Adam. Madame and Marrin have precisely as much power over you as you allow them to have; not one jot or tittle more, do you understand?’

‘I understand,’ he whispered. ‘I understand that you have saved me, that you have put yourself in danger for me.’

‘Nonsense. Adam Harcourt, you are very attractive and I’d love to take you home to bed, but I’d be doing you no service. I don’t want to replace one form of sexual slavery with another. However, just to set your mind at rest…Joss, Clarence, sit down on the table, will you, facing the room, and don’t turn around until I say.’

They obeyed her without question. The corner was dark. Phryne loosened the front of her dress to allow the young man to touch her breasts and pull up her skirt. She heard him gasp as his questing fingers found no undergarments. Her own hands were busy, undoing buttons until she found what she sought.

He was on a hair-trigger of fear and relief and reached a climax in minutes, his face against her breast, pleasurably smothered in silk and perfume.

Conscious that semen was used in some spells, Phryne mopped Harcourt’s wet belly with her handkerchief and stowed it safely in her pocket. The young man was lax, faint with release. Phryne was left aroused and shaken, longing for a lover and at a loss where to find one. She could always seduce Joss or Clarence, or perhaps Joss and Clarence together—an entrancing thought—but if they had been shocked by the sight of her stockings, what would they say to such an immoral proposal? Neither struck her as particularly experienced. The night would degenerate into the usual problems with an orgy: where to put what and where and when, and how to find room for one’s elbows. She did not feel like overcoming their objections, educating them as to the ways of a female body, and in the end possibly finding herself without the desired satisfaction. They were both, she thought, conventional boys, and it was a pity to debauch them to no purpose.

She kissed Adam, enjoying his taste of relief like salt on her tongue, then re-ordered her garments and watched him attempt to array his buttons. His hands were shaking, and finally she did it for him. Male garments posed no mysteries for Phryne, and she wished passionately that she had not left Lin Chung in Melbourne. He would have recognised her state immediately, and in his caresses her taut nerves would relax into pleasure. With Lin Chung in bed, one needed no other distractions.

She came out of her reverie to find that she was still holding Harcourt close, and he was murmuring thanks into her neck. She patted him gently and sat up straight. Adam Harcourt was charming, intelligent, good-looking and potent, but he was not what she needed.

Neither was Marrin. Phryne had never liked pain. It hurt.

‘Turn around, chaps,’ she said with forced brightness. ‘All’s well and I’m going home. You’ll stay with Adam tonight, Joss?’

‘Yes, and Clarence tomorrow night. We’ll be there, old chap,’ he assured the elevated Harcourt.