Kerry Greenwood - Urn Burial

Phryne scraped away the gelée au citron to ascertain. ‘Yes, Salamanca.’

‘I’ve got Albuera,’ said Miss Medenham.

‘You’re lucky – I’ve got a portrait of Blücher, enough to sour cream.’ Jack poured some over his charlotte russe in a spirit of scientific enquiry.

‘So this would be your profession, would it?’ asked Phryne. ‘Antiques?’

‘I never thought of it, actually,’ he said, holding a spoonful suspended in the air. ‘I suppose it could be.’

‘Think about it,’ said Phryne, suddenly remembering a French voice talking about plain air. ‘I think I can see a way out of your little difficulty, Mr Lucas.’

‘You can?’

‘I think so, but perhaps we can talk about it another day. There is no hurry. What about you, Miss Medenham? Are you interested in antiques?’

‘My dear, I just had my flat entirely renovated and threw all of the old things away. I want something madly moderne , frightfully gay. It’s all colours, all angles, even the chairs are cubes.’

‘What did you do with your old furniture?’ asked Jack.

‘I sold it to a rag-and-bone man, my dear. I just wanted the space. Now I’ve got oodles of light and air, free of all that heavy brass and cedar and mahogany.’

‘I see,’ said Jack Lucas.

Mrs Reynolds cast her glance around the table and rose.

‘Lord, I forgot about leaving the gentlemen to their port,’ exclaimed Phryne. ‘Come on, Miss Medenham. You can tell me all about your new flat.’

‘I’ve got red walls in the parlour,’ said Miss Medenham as the gentlemen rose with a scraping of chairs. The ladies filed out, and Mr Hinchcliff put two crystal decanters on the table.

The drawing room contained the apparatus for coffee and tea and small plates of nuts and biscuits. Phryne listened with half an ear to Cynthia’s extremely detailed description of her new furniture and eavesdropped shamelessly on the other conversations.

Judith was sulkily drinking coffee and trying not to hear her mother’s lecture on proper behaviour. Phryne heard, ‘You’ll never catch a young man if you continue to beat them at tennis,’ before deciding that she could guess the rest and passed on. Miss Cray had sought her virtuous couch early and Miss Mead was sitting next to Letty Luttrell, discussing – of all things – adulterous love. Phryne edged her chair closer.

‘But it was a very sad book,’ Letty was saying.

‘She had to go back to her husband and he had to go back to his wife.’

‘They had obligations and had taken vows,’ said Miss Mead gently.

‘But do vows have to bind forever?’ asked Letty. ‘What if one finds that one has made a mistake, a dreadful mistake?’

‘The Church says one has to stay. Even the most brutal husband must be obeyed, they say.’

Miss Mead turned a heel on the small fluffy bootee she was knitting and Letty said in a fierce whisper, ‘I know what the Church says. What do you say?’

‘I say, leave him if you can, my dear,’ said Miss Mead unexpectedly.

This caught Miss Medenham’s attention also. She broke off her enumeration of her new cubist cutlery and said incredulously, ‘ What did you say, Miss Mead?’

‘I said that a brutal husband need not be endured.’ The skilled hands continued to knit, the thread looping exactly over the centre of the crossed needles. ‘Why, what is your opinion, Miss Medenham?’

‘I think the same. Can you leave him, Letty?’

‘I . . . don’t know.’ Mrs Luttrell was taken aback by being the centre of all this conversation. Even Joan Fletcher had ceased berating her daughter to listen. ‘I think he’d kill me if I tried.’

‘Oh, come now, Letty, you’re exaggerating,’ scoffed Cynthia. Letty, for answer, pulled back the loose sleeves of her pale-blue woollen gown. The delicate wrists and thin forearms were marked across with black bruises. Phryne felt ill.

‘God, Letty, how long has he been doing that?’

‘He was kind when he wanted me to marry him,’ said Letty quietly. ‘He bought me violets, I remember. I’ve never been able to bear the scent of violets since. My boy was killed, you see, and I had nothing to live for and my mother has three daughters and he has a lot of money. Once we were married he changed. He’s jealous. If I talk to a man, he questions me for hours, accuses me of all sorts of things.’

‘And he beats you,’ said Mrs Reynolds.

‘Yes,’ said Letty dismissively.

‘But now there’s another man,’ said Judith excitedly.

Mrs Luttrell shrank, blushing bright-red. Phryne restrained an urge to kick Miss Fletcher and said, ‘We didn’t mean to pry, Mrs Luttrell. Why don’t you and Miss Mead go over to the piano to continue your discussion and we’ll stay here. Would anyone like some more coffee?’ Letty caught at her arm.

‘No, no, it’s all right,’ she protested. ‘You see, I’ve got no one to talk to. He doesn’t like me to have friends. This is my only chance to talk. What should I do?’

‘Have you got any money of your own?’ asked Phryne. Letty shook her head. ‘What about your lover?’

Letty looked doubtful. ‘I don’t think there’s any money.’

‘It might be an idea to find out, if you are serious,’ said Miss Mead. ‘You haven’t any children, my dear – children make it difficult. But no one should stay and be tortured – the laws allow you to leave.’

Phryne knew that the laws might allow Mrs Luttrell to leave, but unless she intended passing the time between her departure and the decree absolute under medical supervision in a convent, the Major would declare to the Court that she was a loose woman and had deserted him without cause. Letty would find herself disgraced and out on the street without a sou or a sequin. However, even that might be better than being beaten and continually denigrated. Phryne was surprised to find that the browbeaten Mrs Luttrell had any spirit left at all.

‘I want to run away,’ said Letty plaintively. ‘Miss Fletcher is right, there is someone. It’s funny, really.’ Her lips curved in a smile so sad that Phryne had to take a sip of Cointreau to still the pang. ‘Will would never have brought me here if he had known.’

‘Known what?’ asked Miss Fletcher. Phryne moved into easy kicking distance of the young woman and resolved to apply her silver shoe without fear or favour at the very hint of another faux pas.

‘Why, that my own darling is here,’ said Mrs Luttrell. ‘The one I love is here, in this house.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Without confused burnings they affectionately

compounded their bones; passionately endeavouring

to continue their living unions.

Urn Burial , Sir Thomas Browne, Chapter III.

AS IT was clearly impossible to ask Mrs Luttrell who her lover was – and Phryne caught Miss Fletcher a shrewd blow on her shin when the question was hovering on her lips – there was not much more to be said. The ladies drank their beverages, Miss Fisher confining herself to Cointreau, and they went in a body to the large parlour where a gramophone was playing and the gentlemen awaited them. They evidently had not lingered over their port.

There were several distractions to while away the long evening. The room was just big enough to dance in, provided the dancers did not attempt anything too athletic; Phryne remembered her dancing-master telling her that one needed six square yards in which to polka. There were the usual photograph albums, a scatter of the fashionable journals, and a very beautiful chess set, made of carved bone. The poet challenged the Doctor to a game. Miss Medenham walked boldly up to the Major and demanded a dance. Phryne wondered what on earth the combustible novelist thought she was doing, vamping a man who beat his wife. Then Lin Chung crossed her field of vision.