Kerry Greenwood - Raisins and Almonds

Simon Abrahams found that, as usual, Miss Fisher was correct.

Phryne woke at noon and surveyed the room lazily Dot had been in and removed the tray, contriving as she always did to ignore any extra tenants in Phryne's bed. The sun was shining in that half-hearted watery unreliable way which marked the season as spring and the city as Melbourne. The wind appeared to have died down. The noises of the house came to her as she turned her head and picked rose petals from her surroundings. Something with a very high-pitched howl was making its wants felt: the telephone bell announcing that the outside world was still there and desirous of establishing contact with Miss Phryne Fisher. She heard Mr Butler's even tread as he went to answer it and Dot yelling something to the girls, who appeared to be in the kitchen. All normal, even comfortable sounds, after the strange night and the delightful, if fraught, morning.

Sprawled asleep across half the bed was a long-limbed young man of surpassing beauty. His eyes were closed, his expression beatific, his arms outspread, his hands out and half-open, half-curled. He could have been a renaissance painting, except for the love bites which marked his olive throat with round red patches, darkening into black. Phryne wondered what had prompted her to bite him so hard, and shivered at the remembrance. If she had been his first lover—and she suspected so—then this was a youth of truly remarkable amatory skill, who needed only a little cultivation to be superb.

She knew that she could not keep him. He had to go back to his father and his family duty. But while she had him, Phryne meant to enjoy him.

But she was hungry, and it was lunch time. Also, whatever message he had come to deliver had been lost in the translation, so to speak, and it might have been important. She slipped a considering hand down his face, from brow to nose to lip, and he woke enough to kiss her palm.

'That's how this all started,' she observed. 'Wake up, my dear Simon, it's lunch time and I'm starving.'

His bright eyes snapped open and he sat up, startled.

'Oh, Phryne,' he said. 'Oh, Phryne,' he began again. 'I never asked, you know, I never asked all those things one is supposed to ask. You just ravished me out of all my senses,' he said complacently.

'And very nice too,' said Phryne, throwing back the sheets and rising. 'Come and have a bath. You didn't need to ask me,' she added, taking his hand and leading him to her bathroom, where the tub was quite big enough for two. Over the roar of the taps, she commented, 'You would have touched my diaphragm, that meant I would not conceive. And anything else can be settled now.' She put both hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. 'Thank you for your love and your body,' she said very deliberately. 'But I can't keep you, you belong to your family, and you can't have me, I belong to myself. Is that clear?'

'Yes,' stammered Simon. 'But ... does this mean that you have had your will of me, that you ...'

'Curb this tendency to melodrama. I do not intend to cast you aside like a soiled glove, either. Dear Simon,' she said, kissing him and helping him into the bath, scattering orchid bath salts with a liberal hand, 'you shall come and lie with me again, if you please, and we shall have a love affair of which your mother will never approve. Now, what did you come here to tell me?'

Simon Abrahams sat in warm water and sponged Phryne's white back while he racked his brains to recall what had brought him to her house so early on a Sunday morning.

For the life of him, he could not remember.

Five

Rubedo is the ascension of the red queen.

Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum 1689

Phryne pushed back her chair. She had lunched well and her young lover appeared to be coming to terms with his new status. Simon had refused cream soup but accepted lamb chops and pureed vegetables, and was now eating new strawberries with enthusiasm.

'What do you make of these, Simon?' she asked, laying the dead man's notebook and the strange engravings on the table. He puzzled over the black letters.

'No, I can't read them. It's Hebrew, but it's some sort of code, or maybe just a jumble of letters. No, that doesn't seem likely, does it? But the parchments—I've seen something like them before.' He turned the picture of the red lion around, mouthing the Latin. 'It's doggy enough, medieval, probably. I have it, Phryne—alchemy.'

'Alchemy?' asked Phryne, sprinkling castor sugar over her strawberries and applying cream liberally.

'\es. I don't actually know anything more about it, but those drawings apparently depicted chemical operations.

Mercury entered into it. And salt. I've got a friend who's a real expert on alchemy. His name is Yossi Liebermann. They call him Joe. Been studying it for years—the study of a lifetime, thus Yossi. He says it is connected with Kabala.'

'Kabala?'

'Far too complicated for me to explain,' said Simon. 'We can go and talk to him, if you like. He should be home. Oh, and I've remembered what I came to tell you. My father has talked to his people in the Carlton factory, and they knew this dead man, Shimeon Mikhael. He was a mystic, they said. People were a bit afraid of him. He was a Torah student, a good one, they said. He knew a lot. But he was waiting for the Messiah to come, and that's always been a dangerous thing, my father says. He's invited you to dinner tonight, can you come?'

'Certainly,' said Phryne. 'I am very anxious to get Miss Lee out of quod, though I have no doubt that she is furthering her studies while there. Good. Well, if you would like to use my telephone, you can reassure your father that I have not eaten you alive, and call your friend.'

'Oh, he's not on the telephone, Miss Fisher. He's a bootmaker, and he lives in Carlton. But I'll telephone my father. Mother worries,' he explained.

Phryne ate strawberries and cream and smiled.

Carlton was unimpressive under a harsh light and the wind-blown dust of an unseasonable north wind. Phryne, who disliked dust as much as the cat Ember— neither appreciated having their sleek black fur ruffled—pulled her cloche firmly down and wished she had not chosen to wear a looseish, buttonless crepe de Chine coat and carry a pouchy handbag, as it was difficult to keep her ensemble together in a manner which was both decent and fashionable.

After five minutes of walking, she would have settled for just decent, or even partially effective.

Lygon Street, however, was always fascinating, even on a Sunday when all the shops were shut. Phryne noticed the Kosher Butcher's sign, and the strange angular black writing on the window. She turned the corner past the hardware shop into a street of little houses, dominated by the huge red brick wall of the Nurses' Home. Yossi Liebermann, it seemed, lived in Faraday Street in a boarding house, and Faraday Street was entirely lined with resting vans and horseless drays. This had meant that Phryne had to park her own car in Lygon Street and walk directly into the gale. She wished for a huge safety pin to secure her coat. She was confident of her ability to make this fashionable, if necessary The hot wind grabbed at her hair and pulled at her garments. She lost her grip on the edge of the coat and it bellied and flapped like a sail. Phryne Fisher was about to lose her temper with her garments, and her young man watched with some interest as she dragged the coat off and rolled it into a loose, crease-forming bundle.

'There are times when I swear I consider that all fashion designers hate women,' she snarled. 'Give me a man who designs clothes that can be worn in weather! What's the number of the house, Simon?'

'Here, I believe.' Simon opened the front door of a small single-fronted house. Simultaneously he put his fingers to his lips, reaching up and touching a little tube, like a metal casemoth, nailed aslant inside the doorway 'What's that?' she asked, coming in gladly out of the dust into a dim hallway and a very strong smell of soup. Someone was making stock. Phryne smelt an odd addition to this domestic scent: something like glue?