Death Before Wicket: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries 10 (22 page)

He seemed to be self-possessed and alert which, in his situation, was remarkable. She said so.

‘The s-stoics teach us, my dear Miss Fisher, that one should never react with too much enthusiasm to joy or with too much despair to pain.’

‘When we are out of here and sitting in a suitable restaurant, my dear Professor Brazell, you may tell me all about the stoics. At the moment, we need to escape.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know at present,’ confessed Phryne. ‘But something will turn up. What happened to you? And you had better call me Phryne, perhaps.’

‘My dear lady, I couldn’t,’ he said, shocked.

‘Very well,’ agreed Phryne, reflecting on the durability of etiquette. ‘Tell me what happened to you, Mr Brazell.’

‘I cannot account for my present s-situation,’ he said simply. ‘The last thing I recall is walking out of the s-side door of the library. The door was heavy and I s-shoved it open and then— nothing.’

‘Hmm. They can’t have carried you far without attracting attention. We must still be in the University. Can you think of somewhere? This looks like an old well.’

‘That’s not a comforting thought,’ he said gravely.

‘It isn’t, is it? I can’t find a crack in the bricks which might let us remove a few, and even then there may not be anything but earth beyond them. Perhaps we can get out when someone comes to feed us.’

‘Er…Miss Fisher…’ ventured Brazell. Have to tread carefully, he thought to himself. One never knew with women, even this bold specimen of the New Woman. Prone to hysteria, ladies.

‘What?’

‘Has it occurred to you that they—whoever they are—don’t actually mean to feed us?’ He readied himself for a scream and wondered if he remembered the correct form of words for soothing the frantic female. Was it ‘There, there’? Or perhaps ‘Come, come’? It really was too bad of Fate, always a s-saucy unreliable minx. Here he was alone with the delectable Miss

Fisher, had her all to himself without a lot of other fellows bothering around, and all he was likely to be able to do was to s-starve to death with her.

‘You mean, have I considered that this is a murder attempt?’ She sounded quite cool.

‘Er, well, not to put to fine a point upon it, yes.’

‘I have considered it,’ she answered composedly. ‘It’s possible. Some persons might shrink from actually killing their victim outright, and might consider leaving us to starve a less shocking procedure. But I think it more likely that they mean to keep us here in durance fairly vile for a set period.’

‘Why? I mean, why do you think that?’ If Phryne was impressed by the stoic professor, he was impressed and not a little disconcerted by her. She didn’t seem even disarrayed by being thrown down into confinement with a man to whom she had not even been introduced.

‘Because something has to be done soon, and we might have foiled it,’ replied this strange woman, calmly.

‘But what?’ asked Mr Brazell, helplessly. ‘I’m the Professor of Anthropology. I’ve never done anything which might involve criminality in my life. Mind you, if I get out, I may join you in committing an indictable offence, Miss Fisher, but…’

‘Then it is not something you have done, but something you know, and it must be something that I know, too. Give me another playbill, will you?’

‘We might let the light go out for awhile,’ he suggested. ‘We don’t know how long we are going to be here. Also, it uses oxygen.’

‘We can talk just as well in the dark,’ agreed Phryne. She spread her blanket and enclosed both of them in it. Mr Brazell leaned his aching head against a soft bosom and wondered how on earth he was going to concentrate. The stub of the playbill flared and went out.

It might have been the darkness. Phryne found that all of her senses were more alert. She felt Mr Brazell shrug off the jacket and slide an arm behind her. She felt the warmth of his chest and side as they snuggled together. She smelt tweed and soap as he leaned his forehead into her shoulder, and she caught the sweet-salt tang of blood as his wounded head fitted under her chin. The cocktail of scent was powerfully aphrodisiac and she was shocked at herself. She shrugged a little to bring the beard into contact with a stiffening nipple and cleared her throat.

‘So, what is it that you know, Professor?’

‘I know a little about s-sacred objects and tabooed words, but my field is manhood rituals in the tribes of C-Central and Northern Australia. You might have seen my article in the
AJA
, perhaps? It’s called “On Death and Resurrection in Manhood Rituals amongst the Coast Murring Tribes”. There’s a god called Daramlun, you see, who s-slays the boys entering initiation, and then they are born again as men.’

‘Not something that I know as well, so not terribly relevant. Was anything in the Dean’s safe yours?’

‘Yes, the hand axe. Can’t understand why they s-stole that. Not worth anything except to an anthropologist, just a worked pebble.’

‘Why did you have it?’

‘I was going to give it to the Kruger collection. It’s unusually well-made of a darkish green s-stone.’

‘A sacred object?’

‘No, a tool. I swapped it for a tomahawk. I can’t approve of the way in which some of the fellows s-sic the missionaries upon innocent tribes and then harvest the s-sacred objects once the pastors have converted them and they’ve lost their old gods. Seems unfair. Fellows like the Murri have a perfectly good religion of their own already. Don’t you think s-so? I remember a good s-story one of the Cambridge men told me. An Eskimo says to the priest, “Now that I know your religion, if I s-sin then I will go to hell, is that s-so?” and the priest says, yes, that’s s-so, and the Eskimo says, “But if I had never heard of your Christ and lived a good life according to my old gods, I could have gone to heaven, is that not s-so?” and the priest agrees, yes, my dear fellow, righteous heathen and all that. And the Eskimo looks at the priest and s-says, “Then why did you tell me?” and you know, I bet the priest couldn’t think of a good answer to that.’

Phryne couldn’t either. The darkness was pressing against her eyes. Down in this pit, there was no light. Not just the darkness of night above ground, but absolute blackness. She could not see at all, and trying was making her eyes ache. She closed them and found her concentration centred on skin contact, and all that was palpable was male flesh. She shivered and Mr Brazell embraced her more closely, trying to ignore his body’s enthusiastic response to her nearness.

‘It is cold, isn’t it,’ he murmured.

‘I’m not cold,’ said Phryne, flooded with heat. ‘Mr Brazell, let me put a hypothetical case. If I were to kiss you, would you object?’

‘Not in the s-slightest. Do you think that is s-something that—hypothetically, of course—you are likely to do?’ he asked hopefully.

‘It’s the darkness,’ she said, rearranging his embrace so that she could reach his mouth.

‘The darkness?’ Mr Brazell was powerfully aroused and compliant, delighted to acquiesce in whatever Miss Fisher desired, but he was a scholar and could not let a statement like that pass.

‘Having no sight magnifies…touch,’ said Phryne. She unbuttoned her blouse and allowed his palm to slide over her breast. ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘It does,’ he agreed. He had never been so acutely aware of how a breast felt: the skin so smooth and almost velvety, the nipple as hard as a pebble, the softness overlying the high ribcage. Phryne removed the rest of her clothes and then those of Mr Brazell, and felt him react to every touch. He did not speak again until she lay down beside him and he felt her all along his body; feet and calves and thigh and hip and breast and shoulder, and the wing of hair brushing his face.

‘The oldest poem in the world,’ he whispered. ‘Babylon, five thousand years ago: “Naked into the dark we come, naked into the dark we go. Come to me, naked, in the dark.”‘

Phryne felt that she should have glowed in the blackness. Her skin was all nerve-endings, over which the scholar’s sure hands ran like trails of fire. His mouth was soft and tasted of salt. His beard tickled as he bent to kiss her breast; he tongued the nipple and heard her gasp. The contact was so general that it didn’t seem strange that it did not at first involve any of the usual features; Phryne realised that she was rubbing herself against her lover like an amorous cat, tumbled in his arms. Darkness took away all the usual cues of expression; she had to either speak or feel what would give pleasure. Her voice had deserted her. She could only feel.

Sweat broke on his skin. She licked his chest. They locked in a hold like wrestlers, striving not to break away but to get closer, closer. Phryne wrapped her thighs around him and screamed aloud at the sensation, which sent her over the edge of a climax which seemed to be indefinitely prolonged.

Nothing in his previous amatory career, which was as extensive as he could make it, had prepared Professor Edmund Brazell for Phryne Fisher. The darkness magnified touch but delayed his usual over-eager response, and he had no need to recite the Babylonian pantheon to delay ejaculation. This love-making was desperate, fierce and prolonged. The invisible woman in his arms seemed to have mythic force. He had spoken to tribes who believed in spirit-lovers; in Europe they were called succubi. ‘She came only in darkness,’ they had told him. ‘And the man who lay with her pined forever after for her embrace.’ He knew he would never feel like this again, he knew that he might die here in the everlasting night, he knew that the scalp wound had split and was bleeding again, and he did not care.

Phryne lost all sense of time. Her body had taken over and was reacting and moving without her orders. She was possessed, elevated, electrified. She felt her lover as though he were in her bones, as though they shared tendon and tissue. She tasted his blood on her tongue. When he climaxed she felt her own thighs tremble and the rush of fire along the spine.

She might have passed out. When she came back to herself the curious twinness was still there. But she was naked, cold, wet, cramped, and a little shocked. She felt around until she located the wall, then the edge of the blanket. On it was lying a naked man who groaned when she touched him.

Phryne wrapped them both and asked, ‘Are you alive?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said. He coughed and his voice grew stronger. ‘Yes, I am definitely alive, and very s-surprised. And gratified. Did you feel…that closeness?’

‘As though we were one flesh? Yes. Curious. I still feel it. I know where your feet are, for instance. In relation to mine, I mean.’

‘Yes. One flesh. Very biblical. Miss…’ he laughed. ‘I s-suppose that I can call you Phryne, now, can’t I?’

‘Yes, Edmund dear, you can. I think this constitutes an introduction.’

Twelve

‘
The flying foxes having nipt my piches, I distild 400 gals of strong cider from the damaged fruit…after frumentation one glas put parson in the wheelbarrow
.’

Settler, Lane Cove, quoted in Ruth Park,
A Companion Guide to Sydney

‘E
ntrancing as it is to be down here, Edmund,’ said Phryne, ‘I think we’d better get out.’

‘I s-suppose so,’ agreed Brazell, who had never been so thoroughly aware of the meaning of the term ‘ravished’ in his life. ‘How do we propose to do that?’

‘It’s about ten feet, and I heard the scrape of a lid just before those children of unmarried parents threw me in,’ said Phryne. ‘If I stand on your shoulders…’

‘Phryne, don’t you think they, whoever it was, put us down here because we couldn’t get out?’

‘Yes, of course. But that doesn’t mean that we have to comply with their wishes,’ said Phryne. ‘Tell me, if Ayers gets the archaeology money, what will you do?’

‘Oh, go back to the desert,’ said Brazell. ‘It would be nice to have some lolly, but I can always use my s-sabbatical. I’ve been owed it long enough. My main difficulty with Ayers isn’t him. I mean, not him himself, if you s-see what I mean. Nice enough chap, we don’t s-see eye to eye on what constitutes a desirable mate but that could be s-said of any s-set of fellows. No, my quarrel with him is that he is always looking to Egypt for worthwhile projects. If he doesn’t want to s-study the S-Stone Age Murri, that’s one thing, but what about the Malays and the rich, complex c-civilisations of Japan and China? We’re not part of the Empire any more, Phryne, that’s what I tell them. We’re part of S-South-East Asia and we’d better be getting on with it. And them. Not that they pay any attention to me. All for King and Country and Empire, and look where that got us, hmm? What did you s-say?’

‘I said, if you stand over here by the wall and I climb on your shoulders, I can at least find out how far it is to the top,’ said Phryne impatiently. A lot of things had just become clear to her and she was anxious to get out and test her hypotheses.

Brazell stood by the wall, resting his back against cold stones, and Phryne ascended him until both her stockinged feet were on his shoulders and he could hear her swearing to herself.

‘Damn, damn, damn,’ she said.

‘What have you discovered?’

‘That it’s only about ten feet, all right—I have both hands on the lid—but the lid is immovable. I wish I could remember whether it slid or pivoted.’

‘I can’t help you,’ said Professor Brazell. ‘I didn’t notice when they threw me in. But from my own knowledge, if this is a well, it should s-slide.’