Phryne Fisher 11 - Away with the Fairies by Kerry Greenwood

Author:Kerry Greenwood [Greenwood, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: crime
ISBN: 9781741158410
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2001-03-31T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The third line, divided, shows one acting contrary to the method of nourishing. Let him take no action for ten years, for it will not be in any way advantageous.

Hexagram 27: I

The I Ching Book of Changes

The Adventuresses Club was always quiet in the morning. Most of the ladies had families, work or trades, or a combination of them all. Kate let Phryne in through the brass bound door, which had belonged to the good old lawless days of Melbourne, where if one wanted to re-enact the old Irish test, a virgin of either sex carrying the statutory baby and a crock of gold wouldn’t survive unrobbed and unravished for more time than it took the local criminals to rehitch their jaws.

In the enlightened and modern year of 1928, the virgin might make it to the tram if he or she ditched the gold or the baby and was reasonably fit.

Phryne smiled slightly as she rode up to the library in the lift. Concentrated research might calm her mind. What did the library contain?

A very good map of the South China Sea, for a start. Phryne spread it out on the table and pinned the corners flat with The Life and Death of Scarlatt Blackbones, Pyrat, a Guidebook to Hong Kong, volume nine of The Newgate Chronicle or the Malefactor’s Bloody Register and a small shabby book called Reminiscences of the South China Sea by A Lady. This might, of course, prove to be pornography. A lot of tomes written by A Lady were. No one weeded the Adventuresses Club library and a curious collection of books had accumulated as members culled their own libraries or inherited or bought strange volumes. Phryne understood that there was an excellent collection on ‘Magic in Theory and Practice’ and quite a number of travellers’ tales.

The members themselves were required to write copious notes, if not actually publish books, on their own adventures. These were frank enough to beguile even on a dark, sleety afternoon in July.

Borrowing books was simple. One wrote the titles in a large book. If they were not returned, the committee sent a deputation around to reclaim them. Unpublished books could not be borrowed. The committee had strong views on the way that amazing deeds done by women vanished out of the historical record, and they had a collection of the works of Mary Kingsley, Gertude Bell, Flora Tristan, Mildred Cable and Francesca French, among others, to prove it. Phryne had heard that the club was intending to bring out small editions of the travellers’ tales. Just so that no one could delete them again. So that no one could call an explorer, by definition, ‘he’.

Phryne located Bias Island, its bay clearly marked, in a niche of coast not far from Hong Kong. The Chinese shore, which stretched up to Russia and down past Borneo, was riddled with little inlets in which a pirate might hide. Not to mention all those islands which dotted the ocean all the way to Australia.

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