Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher

‘No, Miss, that’s what me sisters call me.’

‘Good,’ said Phryne, arising from her bed and stretching. She shed the mannish dressing-gown as she moved towards the bathroom. ‘I intend to impress Melbourne in that dress.’

‘Yes, Miss,’ agreed Dorothy, picking up the telephone. She was still unused to it, but no longer regarded it as an implement of incipient electrocution. She gave the order with passable directness, and rummaged for the underwear which was to be the foundation of the amazing gown.

An hour later, Phryne surveyed herself in the mirror with great satisfaction. The satin flowed like honey, and above the flamboyant billowings of the dress her own small, self-contained, sleek head rode, painted delicately like a Chinese woman’s, with a red mouth and dark eyes and eyebrows so thin that they could have been etched. The jet earrings brushed the fur, longer than her skilfully cut cap of dark hair, which was constrained by a silver bandeau. She threw a loose evening cape of silk-pile velvet as black as night over the whole ensemble and took a plain velvet bag shaped like a pouch. After a little thought, she put into it the small gun, as well as handkerchief and cigarettes and a goodly wad of currency. Phryne was not so used to wealth that she was comfortable without a monetary bulwark against disaster.

She swept down the stairs with Dot in anxious attendance. The doorman unbent sufficiently to help this lovely aristocrat into a waiting cab, and to accept without change of expression a thumping tip; and he and Dorothy watched her as she was carried magnificently away.

‘Ain’t she beautiful!’ sighed Dot, and the doorman agreed, reflecting again that the tastes of the aristocracy weren’t so odd after all. Indeed, Dorothy, in her new uniform and her own shoes, was very easy on the eye herself. Dot recollected herself, blushed, and retreated to Phryne’s room, to listen to the wireless playing dance music and to mend yet more stockings. Phryne usually bought new ones as soon as the old developed holes, and this extravagance shocked Dorothy profoundly. Besides, she liked mending stockings.

Phryne leaned back and lit a cigarette. She was smoking Black Russian cigarillos with gold-leaf tips; not really as palatable as gaspers, but one must be elegant, whatever the sacrifice.

‘Do you often go to the Cryers’?’ she asked the driver.

‘Yes, Miss,’ he said, pleased to find that someone who looked so like a fashion plate actually had a voice.

‘They has lots of these do’s, Miss, and mostly I takes people there, ’cos old Ted is a mate of mine.’

‘Old Ted?’

‘Yair, the doorman at the Windsor. We were on the Somme together, we were. A good bloke.’

‘Oh,’ said Phryne. The Great War had so sickened Phryne, while the rest of her school was possessed with war fever, that she avoided thinking about it. The last time she had cried had been as she sat dropping tears on the poems of Wilfred Owen. She wanted to change the subject.

‘What are the Cryers like? I am a visitor, you know, from England.’

She saw the taxi-driver’s eyes narrow as he calculated what would be safe to say to this woman reclining on his back seat and filling his taxi with exotic, scented smoke. Phryne laughed.

‘I won’t tell,’ she promised, and the driver seemed to believe her. He took a deep breath.

‘Mean as a dunny rat,’ he opined.

‘I see,’ observed Phryne. ‘Interesting.’

‘Yair, and if they found out I said that, I wouldn’t be driving no cab in Melbourne ever again, so I’m trusting you, Miss.’

‘You may,’ agreed Phryne, crushing out her Sobranie. ‘Is this the place?’

‘Yair,’ said the driver disconsolately.

Phryne surveyed the iced-cake frontage of a huge house — the red carpet and the flowers and the army of attendants awaiting the guests — and cringed inwardly. All this display, while the working classes were pinched beyond bearing. It was not wise, or tasteful; it smacked of ostentatious wealth. The Europe from which Phryne had lately come was impoverished, even the nobility, and was keeping its head down, still shocked by the Russian Revolution. It had become fashionable to make no display; understatement had become most stylish.

Phryne paid for her taxi, extracted herself and her gown without damage, and accepted the escort of two footmen to the front door of the Cryer mansion. She took a deep breath, sailed inside, and delivered her velvet cloak to a chambermaid in the ladies’ withdrawing-room. This was draped with silk in a distressing pattern, and constituted a pain to the eye, but Phryne gave no sign of her opinion. She tipped the chambermaid, tweaked every luscious fold into place, shook her head at the image in the full-length mirror, and prepared to greet her hostess.

The hall was painted a subdued green, which had the unfortunate effect of casting a deathly shade into every face. Phryne announced her name and braced herself. Madame Cryer, she was convinced, was an embracer.

Sure enough, there was a scatter of feet, and a skeletal woman in black and diamonds threw herself at Phryne, who submitted philosophically to the disarrangement of her hair and the painful imprint of facets on her cheek. Mrs Cryer smelt strongly of Chanel, and was so thin that Phryne wondered that she did not slit seams with what seemed to be the sharpest hips and shoulder blades in Melbourne. She made Phryne feel unduly robust and healthy, an odd sensation.

She allowed herself to be drawn forward by bony hands, glittering with a burden of precious stones, into a brilliantly lit ballroom. It was domed, huge, and full of people; a long buffet was laid along one wall, and a jazz band was conducting their usual assault on the five-bar stave in the musicians’ gallery. Hideously expensive and overblown tuberoses and orchids were everywhere, lending a heavy and exotic scent to the hot air. The effect was somewhat tropical, costly and vulgar. Mrs Cryer stated that, having heard they’d met, she had seated Phryne next to Mr Sanderson, the MP at dinner, which allowed Phryne the luxurious idea that there might be a human being in this assemblage despite appearances. Then her hostess dropped a name that caused Phryne’s painted mouth to curve in a private smile.

‘You may know the Hon. Robert Matthews,’ shrilled Mrs Cryer. ‘We’re all so fond of Bobby! He’s playing for the gentlemen, in the cricket match. I’m sure that you’ll get on terribly well.’

Phryne, who had been the cause of Bobby’s banishment to this foreign shore, was tolerably certain that she would not get on terribly well with him; and that, moreover, when she had known the young man, he had not been an Honourable. She caught the eye of that gentleman across the room at this point in her hostess’s discourse, and he sent her a look in which pleading and fury were so nicely mingled that Phryne wondered that her hair did not catch fire. She smiled amiably at him and he looked away. Mrs Cryer had not intercepted the glance, and bore Phryne with her across the floor, which had been polished to the slipperiness of ice, to introduce her to the artistic guests.

‘We are fortunate to have snared the Princesse de Grasse,’ said Mrs Cryer in a far-too-loud aside. ‘And she sponsered the premier danseur and danseuse of the Compagnie des Ballets Masques—they are all the rage this season, perhaps you have seen them?’

Phryne caught up with her hostess and managed to free her hand.

‘Yes, I saw them in Paris last year,’ she said, recalling the strange, macabre charm of the dancers performing a ballet masque in the tattered splendour of the old Opera. It had been primitive but spine-chilling — they had performed the mystery play of Death and the Maiden. Paris had been intrigued, but the Compagnie des Ballets Masques had vanished, just as they were becoming the rage. So they had come to Australia! Phryne wondered why. She slowed her pace, smiling at Mr Sanderson, MP, as she passed him, and receiving a conspirational grin in return. The artists were solidly established at the buffet, as artists generally are, and only abandoned eating when Mrs Cryer was at their elbow.

‘Princesse, may I introduce the Hon. Phryne Fisher? Miss Fisher, this is the Princesse de Grasse, and also Mademoiselle. . er. .’

‘De Lisse, and this is my brother Sasha,’ put in the young woman. She and her brother, evidently twins, were tall, long-legged and graceful, with similar features; pale, elegant, high-cheekbones and deep, expressive brown eyes. They both had curly brown hair, identically cut, and were dressed alike in leotards and tights of unrelieved black. Sasha bent over her hand with a flourish, and declared: ‘But mademoiselle is magnifique! ’

Privately, Phryne agreed with him. There was no one in the gathering who surpassed her in style and elegance, unless it was these two dancers in their plain garments which proclaimed the essential beauty of their