Unnatural Habits: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (Phryne Fisher Mysteries) (30 page)

‘Why the ten shillings?’ asked Phryne.

‘That is a terrible place,’ said Madame. ‘With ten shillings, a girl might survive a little while if she gets out. Until she finds a place.’

‘Why, who does your laundry?’ asked Phryne.

‘The Convent of the Good Shepherd,’ said Madame. ‘It is well known that bad girls do the best sheets.’

Chapter Thirteen

Journey’s end in lovers’ meeting
Every wise man’s son doth know.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 2.3.38

Home again, Phryne asked for a considering cocktail. Which was unusual because it was two hours before lunch. But it had been an intriguing morning. How did the working conditions of Madame Paris’ young ladies differ from any other professions? Better paid, better lodging, better food and opportunities for education. Admittedly, they had to spend their evenings making love to gentlemen who might be perverse or actively unpleasant, but how was that different from being a wife? Whores got paid for their services. And they had the company of other ladies in the same profession. In all, as a career choice, whoredom had advantages. If you left out love and children and family and social approval, of course…

What now? she asked herself. Events appeared to be overtaking her. What she needed was a solid lead. And apart from a cryptic message, she didn’t have one and was required to wait for someone else to do something before she, Phryne, could manage the situation.

Her household, warned by Dot, tiptoed around her. She noticed this and was irritated. She wasn’t going to explode. She was about to rise and find out what game they were playing in the other room when the doorbell rang, and soon Mr. Butler informed her that a Mrs. Timberlake was waiting and would like a word. Also Mr. Timberlake.

‘I don’t know any Timberlakes,’ said Phryne. ‘Who are they?’

‘I believe that Mrs. Timberlake’s maiden name was Reilly, Miss Fisher,’ said Mr. Butler, and was ordered to conduct the pair into the sea-green parlour as speedily as possible.

‘Hello,’ said Phryne, considerably surprised.

‘Miss Fisher?’ asked a young man. He was dressed in his best blue suit, was painfully and closely shaved, had a buttonhole in his lapel and a baby in his arms. ‘Saw your ad in the Argus. Can I present my wife?’ He beamed with honest pride, blushing up to the tips of his ears.

‘You certainly can,’ said Phryne warmly. ‘Do sit down, Mrs. Timberlake. Tea, Mr. Butler, if you please. I have been looking all over the place for you, Mrs. Timberlake.’

‘So have the cops,’ said Mrs. Timberlake, née Reilly. She was dressed in a becomingly loose cotton shift in a cheery shade of orange, with orange daisies in her straw hat. ‘I didn’t mean to cause all this!’

‘You are not in any trouble,’ said Phryne. ‘But you vanished, you see, and that will cause comment. Will you have some tea and tell me all about it? And congratulations on your marriage,’ she added, noting that Mrs. Timberlake was displaying her left hand with its plain gold band as other women display diamonds.

‘Just today,’ said Mrs. Timberlake. ‘Poor Frank was looking all over for me, but my bloody family wouldn’t tell him where I was. Then…’ She sniffed, groped for a handkerchief, and failed to find one.

‘Here,’ said Phryne, supplying one. ‘Don’t distress yourself. Ah. Tea. And these are Mrs. Butler’s extra-special passionfruit biscuits. Does the baby need anything?’

‘Only me,’ chuckled Mrs. Frank Timberlake. ‘I’d love a cuppa and a bikkie. Go on, Frank. Tell the lady what happened.’

‘Well, me and Julie, we fell in love, and her family hated me on sight, ’cos I’m not a Catholic like them,’ began Mr. Timberlake. ‘So they told her, get rid of him, you can’t see him, we forbid it, and all the time her dad was taking her wages and giving her nothing but the Victorian father. She thought—I mean, we thought—that if she got…was expecting, they’d have to let us marry. But they wouldn’t. They sent her to that…place. I didn’t know where she was. I looked for her, I asked all her mates at the factory, no one knew.’

‘It was cruel,’ observed Mrs. Timberlake. ‘I knew Frank would take me if I could only get out, but there’s no way out of that convent, and those bitches worked me almost to death and fed me nothing but gruel. I was that hungry all the time.’

She nibbled a passionfruit biscuit in memory of starvation.

‘They beat some of the girls. Me, too. They told me every day I was atoning for my sin. I refused to work in their unsafe laundry and they made me stand on a concrete slab all day. My ankles swelled up so I couldn’t walk and they made me crawl. Bitches. Then one of them was nice to me when I burned my hand on the presser.’

‘Agnes,’ said Phryne.

Julie raised her eyebrows. ‘Yes, Agnes. She said I was being sent to have the baby in a hospital in Footscray. She smuggled me a two-bob bit. So I thought, I’ll get out of the hospital; it can’t have a wall like that foul convent. All I have to do is find Frank and I’ll be sweet and I’ll never see my family again, thank God. And I’ll never go into a church again, ever. When I got to Footscray the two others had a plan. They were going to walk out before they gave birth. So I walked out with them, found a phone, called Frank out of his dad’s garage and he came and got me.’

‘Just in time, too,’ said Mr. Timberlake. ‘I had to take her straight to the Queen Vic. Little Effie was born that same night. Isn’t she beautiful?’

He exhibited the sleeping baby. Phryne thought it looked like all babies, as red as a newly skinned rabbit, vaguely unfinished and fragile. Considering that Effie’s mother had been fed on pap all during her pregnancy, the child might find that being out of the womb was an improvement in her living conditions. Effie was sleeping soundly, which Phryne liked in babies. And the young man was holding it confidently. He at least had no doubt about the child or his new wife.

‘Then as soon as Julie was up for it, we got married,’ continued Mr. Timberlake. ‘In the registrar’s.’

‘My family has thrown me out,’ said Julie. ‘Thankfully. I never want to see any of them again. I bet that lazy bludger my dad misses my wages, but.’

‘He does,’ said Phryne. ‘He has informed the police that you can come home provided you give the child away and marry the person of his choice.’

‘Jeez,’ commented Mr. Timberlake. Phryne agreed with him.

‘But that need not concern you now. Your own family is happy with this marriage?’ she asked him.

Mr. Timberlake grinned. ‘Oh, yes, Miss, they always really liked Julie. She gets on real well with my mum. She always wanted a daughter, she says, but she was stuck with four sons. We’ve got the bungalow at the back of the house. I’ve done it up,’ he said with quiet pride. ‘Lined walls and plumbing and all. I knew I’d find my Jules again somehow, and she did it herself, she rescued herself, she’s such a clever girl! I worked on the house every night while she was away. It was all I could think of to do.’

Mrs. Timberlake leaned on her husband’s arm and cried briefly—largely, Phryne thought, from relief. Then she mopped and sniffed and drank more tea.

‘Now,’ said Phryne, ‘I need you to remember, everything that Mary O’Hara and Ann Prospect said about where they were going.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ said Mrs. Timberlake. ‘It had to do with some numbers and letters. SS five hundred and ten BM. It was on the wall. But Ann already knew it. She wrote it. I asked what it was about and she said that she was leaving the message for other poor exploited women. Mary was sick, poor girl, very young even for her age, poor little mite. She kind of relied on Ann. But she was real clear that they were going to a safe place.’

‘Where?’ asked Phryne, really wanting to know.

‘Somewhere in the country,’ said Mrs. Timberlake. ‘I did wonder if it was some sort of religious thing, you know, BM for Blessed Mary. But Ann was a real fierce atheist. She read all them socialist papers, like I did. When I told her I was going to Frank, she didn’t tell me anything else. The bitch in charge didn’t like us to talk to each other. Threatened to chloroform us if we gave trouble. What’s happened to the others?’ she asked urgently.

‘I don’t know, but I will find out. Do you remember the reporter coming to the house in Footscray?’

‘Reporter?’ asked Julie.

‘Young woman called Polly. She’s vanished, too.’

‘I don’t remember anyone coming,’ said Julie. ‘Except the tradies. And the bitch’s awful son. Patrick, that was his name. A pig. Is that all?’ she asked. ‘Only I got to get the baby home on the bus, and she’ll wake up and cry pretty soon.’

‘Mr. Butler shall drive you home,’ said Phryne. ‘I will tell Detective Inspector Robinson that you are well and found, and here is a little wedding present.’

‘Oh, no, Miss, we can’t…’ protested the young man, but Julie took the banknote and stowed it in the recesses of her costume.

‘Thanks, Miss, that’ll come in real handy,’ she told Phryne. ‘Being as I can’t go back to work for a while.’

Phryne summoned Mr. Butler and saw her visitors into the car.

‘Minions?’ she asked, coming back into the house. Jane and Tinker looked up from the chessboard. Ruth was reading the recipes in Women’s Own.

‘Miss?’ they asked in chorus.

‘Developments,’ said Phryne, and retailed all she had learned from Mrs. Timberlake, née Reilly.

‘So now we’re only looking for two of them,’ said Tinker. ‘Beaut. And Miss Kettle, of course.’

‘And I’ve an idea about that message at last,’ said Phryne, relieved that she hadn’t lost her skills. ‘Find me the train timetables, Tink.’

He duly produced them, and she leafed through the lists of times. Finally her minions saw her exclaim, plant her finger on a line, and stand up.

‘Right,’ she said. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks pink, the picture of a woman on a mission.

‘But, Miss, where are you going?’ asked Dot, who was mending stockings.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ said Phryne.

‘Take me, Guv!’ pleaded Tinker.

‘I’m going alone,’ said Phryne. ‘Only way I can get to where I am going.’ She told them about her destination, timing and suspicions. Phryne had never adopted the Gothic convention which had seen so many young women in flimsy nightdresses and high heels obeying instructions to burn the assignation and meet the writer in a disused barn on a distant estate. At midnight. Phryne considered that anyone silly enough to do that sort of thing had no right to expect to survive any adventure.

But now there was time to burn. Jane and Tinker returned to learning how knights move. Ruth went back to a recipe for fish pie which sounded promising. Dot picked up her mending.

Phryne, restless, went out for a swim. The prospect of action made her hungry and the exercise and the cocktail meant that she tackled her lunch with pleasure.

In the early afternoon Jack Robinson and Hugh Collins arrived, needing reassurance and tea. Mr. Butler provided the tea. Phryne provided the reassurance.

‘I’m going to find O’Hara and Prospect this afternoon. I am confident that I shall do so. So you just need to concentrate on Polly Kettle,’ she told him.