Kerry Greenwood - Urn Burial

‘At dinner,’ mourned first voice. ‘And after that?’

‘Don’t be so greedy,’ said second voice indulgently. ‘We’re flooded in, remember? They can’t part us yet.’

‘I’ll hope for forty days and forty nights. Perhaps we should start building an ark. I’d like that. Just you and me and a few animals on the wide, wide sea.’

Second voice laughed.

When Phryne came in a few moments later, the library seemed empty.

It was an impressive collection of books, she thought, observing the ranked shelves of leather-bound volumes. All the walls were lined with shelves. A big mahogany table, the legs carved with satyrs in an advanced state of excitement, was laden with newspapers and paperback novels for railway reading, including Midnight of the Sheik, Passion’s Bondslaves and Silken Fetters . Phryne picked one up, amused. She knew the author, the impeccably respectable Miss Eunice Henderson whose mother had been murdered on the Ballarat train. The market for drivel, Eunice had informed her, was always under-supplied.

Phryne was dipping into the lush prose of Midnight of the Sheik and trying not to laugh when a woman appeared from a distant alcove and said, ‘That’s where I left it.’

‘Sorry, Miss Medenham, is this yours?’ asked Phryne, closing the book and holding it out.

‘Yes, I’m halfway through and just got to the bit where her English gentleman comes out to plead with her to return. Have you read it?’

‘Not that one,’ said Phryne, concealing the fact that hell would freeze over before she wasted her eyesight on Midnight of the Sheik . ‘But I always wondered what novelists read.’

‘Oh, as to my art, Miss Fisher, that’s another thing. It bubbles up from inside me, from the deep wells of creativity,’ said Miss Medenham. ‘Sometimes I feel that I am in touch with the other side – with other great writers who long to be reincarnated.’

‘Oh? Who?’

Miss Medenham settled down for a cosy gossip about herself, automatically leaning back to emphasise her unfashionable bosom and crossing her long, slim legs. She was wearing a red jersey dress under the red coat, and champagne-coloured silk stockings. Her fair hair was shoulder length and straight as a drink of water. ‘Emily Brontë, of course. Didn’t you notice the fire and passion of my last novel, the depth, the wind blowing through it?’

Phryne wondered whether to admit that she had stuck fast three pages into the dense prose of Earth , Miss Medenham’s latest offering. She decided that there would be too many ructions about it if she did, meaning that she would subsequently be both forced to read it and endure an inquisition about it from the author to make sure that she had appreciated it properly. Than which she would rather be boiled in oil. Phryne also suppressed the opinion that the bandit-lover had been remarkably clean and well-educated for a Spanish peasant, resembling rather an Oxford gentleman with picturesque trappings. Earth had been a book which cried out to be left lying behind the sofa whence it had fallen from the reader’s nerveless hand.

‘Of course,’ she lied. ‘Are you working on something new?’

‘I’m waiting for inspiration,’ said Miss Medenham. ‘Actually, I was also looking for Jack. I thought he came in here.’

‘An inspiring young man,’ commented Phryne dryly.

‘Yes,’ Miss Medenham smiled suddenly, a complicit gamine grin, and Phryne liked her better immediately. She might write dreadful books, but she had a suitable appreciation of young men.

‘Would a poet do as well?’ asked Tadeusz from another alcove. Phryne decided that the library had never been empty – it had multiple hiding places. She filed the fact for future reference.

Miss Medenham raised her china-blue eyes and gave the poet an assessing glance. She stood up, smoothing down the clinging dress over her curved body, her hand lingering on one hip. ‘Yes, I think you might be just as inspiring,’ she decided. Tadeusz held out his arm and Miss Medenham sidled close to him.

They left the library together. Phryne, wondering if anyone else was tucked into the recesses, toured the shelves. The brewer who built it had probably never read anything but a lading bill in his life. His wife, however, had purchased full sets of all the classics, as well as a row of yellow-covered sprightly French romances and bound volumes of Punch and Country Life . She examined Punch briefly – Mafeking appeared to have been relieved – and read a few heavily satirical lines about Boers. Shoving the volume back onto the shelves, she reflected that nothing dates like topical humour.

The next alcove contained all the books which Tom had published himself, in no particular order. Books on Furniture-making for the Beginner flanked volumes on the Horrors of War , and slim suede-clad poets clung to strong female writings about Higher Thought. Phryne saw a book by an author she liked but The Mysterious Affair at Styles was wedged in between a volume of Victorian sermons and a very solid tome on Sanitary Reform. She slid the sermons out and a slip of paper dropped to the polished parquet.

TONIGHT, it promised in bold black capitals. USUAL PLACE.

Phryne was about to replace it when she was struck with a thought, and sat down to examine the note. She had seen those capitals before, that printer’s Greek E.

The writer of the anonymous letters threatening Tom Reynolds’ life was in the house. Phryne replaced the note in the sermons of the Reverend Patterson – by his prose a great benefactor to the insomniac – and resigned herself to the loss of the murder mystery. She did not want the note-writer to know that anyone had been near his or her correspondence.

Phryne walked the rest of the library. It was bigger than it looked, an oval room with four recesses, deep enough to hide in, two of which were provided with French windows which gave on to the portico. Perfect for conspirators; might have been designed for spies. Easy access from the rose garden on one side and the hall on the other. Phryne was annoyed, worried and wishing she had some support. It might have been possible to keep a discreet watch on the alcove where the message had been left, but it would need three people at least. She did not want to involve Dot, she did not trust anyone else, and there was a coolness with Lin Chung which would naturally extend to his servant Li Pen.

Phryne swore and dismissed the matter from her mind. There was nothing much she could do about it at the moment. Now, which author would be reliable in a country house cut off from the outside world? Finally she found Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia and Dickens’ Bleak House . Dickens was an author to travel with, and she had left her copy at home. She needed to occupy a couple of hours until she could talk to Lina.

She took her books into the drawing room, where Evelyn was consulting with Cook. Phryne sat down at the small table near the window and opened Sir Thomas. He always amused her. Such a precise and terribly learned man.

Hydriotaphia, urne buriall, or a difcourse of the sepulchrall urnes lately found in Norfolk, 1658 , she read.

‘Very well, Mrs Croft, we shall have egg and bacon pie, the veal chops, crumbed, I think, and the fish, of course, if the gentlemen catch any. I saw my husband and the Major going out with rods – they must have decided against the billiard room. It’s such a nice day.’

‘Yes, Madam,’ said the cook, folding her hands in her lap. ‘Perhaps we ought to do a fricassee, in case they don’t catch anything? The river’s running a banker, Willis says, and Albert brought in some nice rabbits.’