Queen of the Flowers by Kerry Greenwood

Author:Kerry Greenwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: FIC050000
ISBN: 9781741153255
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2004-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

Your foolish friend

Mavis

CHAPTER TEN

Look at her garments

Clinging like cerements

While the wave constantly

Drips from her clothing;

Take her up instantly,

Loving, not loathing.

Thomas Hood

‘Bridge of Sighs’

The afternoon was spent blamelessly listening to a lantern lecture on the Holy Land. As the lights came up, Phryne yawned. She loved lantern lectures but she felt short of sleep, which was silly. Dot had gone to enquire about Bridget of the local priest, and Phryne had an idea of what to do with the girl in due course. But she had been so angry about what she had found in Rose Weston’s commonplace book that she had quite exhausted herself and had slept neatly and unobtrusively through the Dead Sea and its amazing properties, through Hebron to the Mount of Olives and only came awake when Golgotha was announced. The Place of Skulls. How very appropriate. Didn’t conquerors of the Attila the Hun style build pyramids of heads? I wonder how many heads you needed to make a good pyramid?

She came awake properly in time to join in the applause and gather the girls. St Kilda was en fête and that meant more than the usual number of pests, louts, petty criminals, pickpockets and robbers. It also included gangs of Nice Young Men from Good Homes who had heard that St Kilda was full of whores and attempted to prove it by propositioning every girl in sight. Phryne found them particularly trying.

‘Miss Phryne?’ asked Ruth, on her left side. ‘You know we were talking about finding my father, well, I . . .’

They were driven into a huddle by a group of the Good Boys who had been forcibly repelled by some factory girls, who slapped and kicked and hooted at their dismay. Phryne relieved her feelings by giving the nearest Good Boy a hearty shove which almost knocked him over.

‘Here, I say,’ he protested, and came up into the glare of eyes as unemotional as a range finder and as cold as jade.

‘Get out of my way,’ said Phryne quietly.

He got out of her way. He even took his friends with him.

‘Ruth, what were you saying?’ asked Phryne. ‘Come along, let’s get around this corner and out of the main road.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Ruth, hanging her head. And not another word would she say, all the way home, though Jane nudged her impatiently. Phryne trailed the topics of fathers, missing fathers, dying declarations and the errors of youth before her like succulent tendrils of sandworm but Ruth, like a trout, would not bite.

They continued along the Esplanade toward Phryne’s own house. Phryne began talking about Rose Weston, for lack of anything else to say.

‘I think that she is probably somewhere in those camps,’ she told Jane. ‘But I can’t imagine where and there is no way to search them without a regiment of soldiers.’

‘And you haven’t got a regiment,’ Jane pointed out helpfully.

‘Not at the moment, no. Nor enough proof to convince Jack Robinson to stage a raid. And it would probably be considered an overreaction to just toss in a torch and set them on fire.

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