Queen of Flowers (8 page)

Her patient gradually became more conversable. People in the train did not stare at him. No one asked intrusive questions.

When he enquired of a sailor on the Caledonian McBrayne ferry which was to take them to Stromness if it was safe to sail, the man had replied ‘Sir! Caledonian McBrayne does not have accidents!’ and hadn’t even twitched at the bandaged face.

Then they crossed the great confused pot of Scapa Flow and there was Stromness. A pensive seal greeted them from
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the harbour. There was a comfortable inn there called the Sailor’s Rest, where Phryne was to meet Mrs Murray, Ian Hamilton’s nurse.

Stromness sat down solidly under its slate roofs like a town which had seen the worst that North Sea gales could throw at it and had not been impressed. Bring on your blow, it seemed to say. There’s whisky yet in the jar. And a good herring in oatmeal on the fire. Several sheep looked up as Phryne and the mountain of baggage were escorted ashore by taciturn young men who carried a trunk as though it was a minor inconvenience. The front parlour of the Sailor’s Rest was decorated with a lot of
objets trouvés
: fishing nets and bright glass floats, shells and unusual bits of driftwood. The landlord’s wife came out from behind the bar and said quietly, ‘You’ll be Miss Fisher, then? I’m Mrs Munro. Mrs Murray is on her way. She doesn’t walk so fast as she did once. Her grandson James is here to arrange about the baggage. Will you be staying the night, then?

Ferry will be leaving in an hour, that’s time enough to get the poor young man settled.’

‘Stay,’ pleaded Ian, grasping Phryne’s hand.

‘Until tomorrow, then. Now, sit down, my dear, and take off that bandage. You must start as you mean to go on,’ said Phryne firmly. ‘A little whisky, Mrs Munro? And what will you have, Mr Murray?’

‘A
lot
of whisky,’ grinned James Murray, an engaging man with red hair.

‘The Highland Park?’ asked Mrs Munro of James Murray.

He nodded.

‘Vin du pays,’ he said with a rather good French accent.

‘You will like it, Mr Hamilton. Take a tint of this, now,’ he said, and offered Ian the glass. ‘And let’s see your face. We’re Vikings, here,’ he said as he gently unwound the bandage. ‘Not them
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soft Scots Jessies. We’ve seen battle wounds before. And if you cover your mouth,’ he continued, ‘you can’t drink and that would be the pity of the world with a bottle of Highland Park on the bar.’

Phryne was touched. James Murray’s grandmother was being paid, probably very well, to hide this disfigured man from the civilised world. James had no need to be gentle, but he was: so gentle that the bandage was gone before Ian really noticed it. He looked around at the fishermen and the crofters.

They looked back at him. No one seemed affected. Finally someone spoke.

‘You’ll still have the sight of that eye, then?’ asked one gnarled old man. ‘Welcome, Mr Hamilton. My son came back blind. And he’s out on the boats with me. Ye must not despair.’

The conversation returned to a gentle murmur. Like all fishermen, they were not talking about fish. Phryne took a deep sip of the whisky, a single malt of great subtlety and strength. James Murray refilled her glass.

‘Good, eh? It’s the water. Filtered through a lot of peat and then through a lot of rock. We’ve got a lot of rock, hereabouts.

He’ll be all right, your young man. Grandma won’t let nothing happen to him.’

‘He’s not my young man,’ said Phryne. ‘He’s a friend. Are you a fisherman, too?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m a teacher,’ he said. ‘Of music. And a fine fiddler.

You must come tonight,’ he added. ‘We’re having a dance.’

‘Will anyone dance with Ian?’asked Phryne.

‘Surely,’ said James Murray. ‘Unlike a lot of our young men, he’s got both arms and both legs.’

And so it had proved. Mrs Murray was not a soft, cuddly nurse. She was an upright, thin, stern old lady who had borne five children and raised three, then gone off to be a wet nurse
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to a lot of Hamiltons. She had only left when the last of them was grown, and had brought her savings back to her own country, where they had bought her a house and would provide for her old age. Therefore she did not need to take Ian. It was, she explained to Phryne, her duty. And he was her favourite among the children, though she had never told him so.

She allowed Ian to take her arm up the cobbled street to her clean, warm house, where the kitchen stove never went out. He had a room of his own with a new feather mattress and Orkney woollen blankets. Behind them trailed half of the population of Stromness, most carrying something to save their countenances and acquit them of nosiness. Mrs Murray threw them out when the goods were all stowed to her liking, with handfuls of boiled sweets for the children. When they were all gone she stared Ian straight in the eye. Her voice was not gentle but entirely sure.

‘This is your chair,’ she said to him, sitting him down.

‘Here, before the stove. Here is your place, and you need never depart from it.’

And then she had left him to cry for ten minutes, after which she said, ‘And here is your pup. She’s a good lineage but she’s no sheepdog with that broken leg which healed short.

Isaac was minded to put her down, but I saved her for you.’

She laid in his London tailored lap a scruffy puppy, barely weaned, black and white with a patch over one eye. Ian laughed as she licked his scarred face.

‘Your name is Sally,’ Ian whispered to the puppy.

Then old Mrs Murray looked at Phryne. ‘He’ll do,’ she said sharply. ‘Now James will take you back to the inn. You’ll want a rest. This will have been a great strain. But I can see you are a good-hearted girl. Not like some these days.’

Phryne found herself out on the front step as the door closed with a soft thump.

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‘My mother thought Grandma Murray was a witch,’ said James, amused. ‘But she’ll take good care of him. Back to the pub, eh? I’ll play you to sleep.’

Phryne, with a mug of hot milk and whisky inside and a large down comforter outside, fell asleep to the sound of a violin playing a lullaby outside her window.

And then to the dance, where joy was relatively unconfined and the wild notes of the fiddle stung the feet into action. Ian Hamilton, as promised, danced with several Orkney girls.

Phryne watched the fiddler. He was compelling. And when he wanted to, he could make stones dance.

With regret, Phryne left Orkney three days later. James had shown her some marvels. The Ring of Brogar by dawn light.

The perfect chambered tomb of Maes Howe with its Viking graffiti: ‘Ingeborg is the fairest of women. A great treasure lies in the south west: happy the man who finds it.’ He had fed her Orkney lamb, which was pre-salé like the French delicacy because the sheep ate seaweed. He had shown her how to make oatcakes and he had lain down with her in a shed full of new-mown hay: a satisfying lover with enthusiasm and dash. James Murray. Where was James Murray now? She remembered the last conversation she had had with him, sitting on a hill watching the sea.

‘Will you ever leave Orkney?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I have left Orkney many times. I was a sailor before father opened his school. I have been to many places. But I get homesick for the dark, for the cold and the smell of peat smoke.’

‘I can understand that. There is no place like this anywhere in the world.’

‘That is true,’ he said comfortably. ‘And I will see you again, my hinny, my blossom. I am sure that I will see you again. And I’ll come down to the dock and play you away in the morning.’

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And as the Cal-Mac ferry took Phryne away from Orkney, she heard the wild fiddle above the engines. Not a lullaby, this time. ‘Aye the cuckoo, oh the cuckoo, aye the cuckoo’s nest

. . . I’ll give anyone a penny, and a bottle of the best, if they’ll ruffle up the feathers in my cuckoo’s nest!’ Extraordinary how all those respectable scholars, Sabine Baring Gould amongst them, hadn’t identified the cuckoo’s nest as the female genitalia when they censored all the lock and key references out of their songs. So many people trying so hard to keep us from enjoying ourselves, thought Phryne as she approached her own front door.

Someone was coming out of the side gate. Phryne halted.

The person was moving like a shadow. He was too far away to grab and the early dawn light cast the face into shadow.

Probably a man. He was in the street now. Phryne yelled ‘Hi!’

and leapt and grabbed, but he was too far away and too fast.

She landed ignominiously on her knees with only a handful of shirt to show for her effort, and the footsteps raced away like a very fast drum.

‘Damn,’ swore Phryne. She stuffed the cloth into her pocket and slid down the sideway. No windows open, no sign of damage. It was too early to rouse the house if nothing was wrong. She slid a little, picked up what she had stepped on, and returned to the street.

It was a small bunch of pink roses, tied up with a silver ribbon. Was some swain courting Ruth or Jane? She would have to get to the bottom of this. Suddenly Phryne longed for the days when she didn’t have a household or things to sort out.

But it was her duty, as old Mrs Murray had said.

She went inside and crept up the stairs without waking anyone. Fairly soon Mrs Butler would rise and put the kettle on and Phryne would be supplied with breakfast in due course.

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For the moment, however, she shed the boy’s clothes, attended to her injuries, wrapped herself in a dressing gown and made coffee on her spirit stove. She opened her own tin of dark chocolates to go with it.

Orkney. What a strange place. Ian Hamilton had written to her for a while. She remembered receiving an invitation to his wedding and later an announcement about a son. That must have annoyed the Hamiltons. The eldest son had turned out to be a wastrel and a bounder. Oh, and red-headed, charming James Murray. She had almost forgotten him. And he was worth remembering.

She must have fallen into a doze, because she was startled out of it by frantic banging on the door.

Miss Anna Ross to Miss Mavis Sutherland 11 December 1912

I’m sad today because Rory and his friends are going to Sydney
for a month. They have an engagement with the Folk Song
Society playing them tunes and singing songs for them to record
on these odd wax discs, called gramophone records. They are
thick heavy things and very brittle, but—it’s almost magic—

they can give you back a voice or a tune. I had heard a gramophone before and Mama says that if we finish the year well we
can buy a machine. The boarders will like it and they can play
their own records, which will be a saving. You have to wind it
up. The machine, I mean, not the boarders.

Rory has been courting me and he is so sweet and gentlemanly and lovely that I am in a whirl. He gives me flowers and
sings to me and everyone has noticed how particular his atten-tions are except Mama, who just scolds me for inattention.

I don’t think she knows that I exist except as another pair of
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hands, scrubbing, serving, washing, cooking. The house is full
and Rory and his friends will pay a month’s rent so their rooms
will be kept while they are away. That also means that they plan
to come back because oh, Mavis, Rory says he loves me, he loves
me! And I love him so it cannot be wrong that when we met by
chance—entirely by chance—at the top of the stairs, he clasped
me in his arms and kissed me.

If I marry him I will go with him to his home in Skye and
then perhaps I might see you again. Dearest Mavis, I miss you
so much, especially now when I desperately want someone to talk
to and there is no one.

Your loving friend Anna

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CHAPTER FIVE

Something in her bosom wrings

For relief a sigh she brings

And O, her een, they spak sic things!

Robert Burns

‘Duncan Gray’

Phryne tied her dressing gown and found her slippers and her little gun. She heard Mr Butler get up and stamp along the hall, and she flew down the stairs to stand behind him as he opened the door. St Kilda was not a safe place—nowhere was a safe place, really, but St Kilda had all the problems to be expected in a seaport—and anything threatening Phryne’s household this morning was going to be looking death in the eye. Phryne had been startled and she did not like that feeling.

On the doorstep was a frantic woman. Her hair straggled around her shoulders. She had a nightdress on under her coat and her feet had been thrust into someone’s tartan slippers. But her voice was educated and there was a chauffeur waiting inside the big Daimler parked at the kerb.

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‘Oh, Miss Fisher, I’m so sorry to wake you, but it’s Rose!

Is she here?’

By now everyone had been roused by the noise. Phryne turned to her two daughters, who were clad in red woolly gowns and slippers and were looking apprehensive. Ruth was holding Molly by the collar. Phryne slipped the little Beretta into her pocket. This caller had already been scared enough, by the look of her.