‘You promise not to tell anyone at all?’ pressed Eunice, stopping with an armload of dreadful dresses.
‘Not a soul,’ promised Phryne, crossing her heart.
Eunice opened a little door and slipped inside. Phryne had taken it for a powdering closet, but it was a study. There was a professional looking typewriter and a load of carefully numbered manuscripts. Phryne remembered the packet of foolscap paper she had picked up in the train.
‘You’re a writer!’ she cried.
Eunice Henderson blushed. ‘Romantic novels for railway reading, and, dear, they are too, too terrible.’
‘What are you working on at present?’
‘Nothing at the moment, I have just been correcting the proofs of
‘Of course not, my dear, but I think that it is so enterprising of you! How did you begin?’
‘Well, Mother always liked to read the things, revolting slop for the most part, and I learned typewriting so that I could do Mother’s accounts. I was practising on the machine, and I thought I’d see if I could write the stuff, it seemed easy enough, and, my dear, it simply poured onto the page, I could hardly type fast enough to keep up. I never knew that I had such an indelicate imagination,’ she confessed, throwing down the dresses in a rustling heap. ‘So I sent it to a publisher who knew my father and could be sworn to secrecy, and there it was. I can write one every three months, and the market seems rather under-supplied with tripe than otherwise. So I could afford lavender-water for Mother, and handmade chocolates, and trips to Ballarat, and. . oh, dear, I had forgotten all about Mother! How heartless of me!’
Eunice sat down on the brass bed and wept for five minutes, at the end of which she wiped her eyes, replaced her handkerchief, and went on with the conversation.
‘It will catch me like that for awhile, now that my face is healed and I’m not doped with pain-killers,’ she said sadly. ‘Poor Mother! Who could have killed her?’
‘For awhile I thought that it was your young man, Eunice, God forgive me,’ confessed Phryne, sorting shoes into a pile. ‘But it can’t have been him.’
‘It can’t?’ she asked tautly.
‘No, it seems that he was in police custody that night. Drunk and disorderly.’
‘How. . how very unlike him,’ Eunice flung three gloves onto the pile. ‘I have never seen him touch alcohol. . at least, very rarely. Never mind. I forgive your suspicions, Phryne, it did look black against him. Why did Mother keep seven unmatching stockings, do you think? What are we going to do with all this stuff?’
‘We are going to put all the clothes and so on in a big heap in the upstairs hall, and Dot will sort from there. Some of the things will go to deserving causes and the worst will be dropped off at the rag-pickers by Bert and Cec. All we have to do is to decide what you want to keep.’
‘All the stuff in here can go, and this carpet — it will probably roll if you can dislodge the corner. . thank you.’ They began to carry out a motely collection of old clothes, good clothes, handbags by the hundred, shoes ranging from the Victorian to the Edwardian, combs and boxes of caked powder, greasy hairpins, mob-caps and lacy petticoats. After two hours they had sorted out all the upstairs rooms and Phryne was ready for a cup of tea and a cigarette.
Dot, Ruth and Jane were working at the clothing mound, packing the good things into tea-chests and the rags into chaff-bags. Bert, Cec and the charwomen were removing the discarded furniture, knick-knacks, what-nots and so on into Bert’s disreputable van.
‘It really is lovely to clean out all this old rubbish,’ said Eunice as they passed the workers on the way to the kitchen. ‘But are you sure that anyone would want all this stuff? Look at that glass bowl over Great-Grandma’s wedding bouquet! What an excresence!’
Cec, who had earmarked the glass bowl as a present for his sweetheart, commented, ‘Real good glass, this. Made by a craftsman,’ and Miss Henderson smiled warmly.
‘Take it and enjoy it,’ she recommended.
Cec grinned.
Bert called from the door, ‘Are you coming, mate? A man hasn’t got all day!’ and Cec grabbed the glass dish and went.
Phryne and Eunice had their cup of tea, and surveyed the sterling work which had already been done. The floors were swept clean, the windows open, the fires burning, and the house smelt pleasantly of wood smoke and furniture polish.
‘It is very kind of you to help me, Phryne,’ she observed, ‘This will all be finished in one day, and I can sleep in my own bed tonight.’
‘You won’t mind being here on your own?’
‘No, dear, what could harm me? I am exorcising the ghosts of all of my family, and I shall be quite happy alone. I’m only keeping the basic furniture, and all of those ornaments and feathers and dead birds and seashells and small tables can go. I am throwing out the firescreen made by Aunt Matilda, whom I always hated, and dear Cousin Nell’s
‘Don’t throw them away, you need something to cover the windows,’ objected Phryne. ‘Cut them off.’
‘Cut them off?’
‘Yes, just snip them level with the floor.’
Eunice Henderson flung herself at Phryne and kissed her soundly.
‘Oh, Phryne, why did I never think of that? In all that time when I hated the idea of all that lace lying around on the floor for the sole reason of demonstrating that you could afford to have lace lying on the floor, and I never thought of that! Quick! Where’s the scissors?’
They snipped with a will, and the yards of superfluous lace joined a century’s gleaning of costumes in the chaff-bags. Dot claimed armloads of delicate undergarments for her own; Jane and Ruth found a store of satins from China and were allowed to keep them all; Bert took a fancy to a huge conch, and took it for a present to his landlady. It took eleven trips of the rickety van to various destinations before the detritus of seventy years was removed from the house, and Phryne marvelled that it still looked full. The linen-room was bursting with Irish sheets, there were beds and tables and chairs and fire irons and paintings, but only one ornament remained in the entire mansion: a tall blue vase, quite unfigured, which some pirating ancestor had picked up in the Boxer wars.
‘It’s the only thing of Mother’s that I wanted,’ said Eunice, as they sat around the kitchen table sipping afternoon tea. ‘I want you to have it, Phryne. It will go beautifully with your sea-green and sea-blue salon.’
‘Oh, Eunice, I couldn’t, it’s much too valuable. .’
‘Yes, you could. Otherwise I shall break it. I don’t want to see another ornament in my entire life. I shall have a study in the breakfast-room, which looks out onto the garden. I shall be very happy. And I am still employing you to find out who killed my mother.’
‘Yes, I know, old thing, and I haven’t the slightest idea at the moment. However, something will turn up. Are you sure you are all right to be left?’
‘Perfectly,’ asserted Eunice, as she stood bidding them farewell in her scoured, cold hallway. The wind had been from the west and the house smelt of the sea. Behind her in the swept-clean morning-room a bright fire glowed, and her supper was laid out on the one remaining small table. Phryne kissed her goodbye, and allowed Bert to give her a lift home in the truck, in which she sat nursing the blue vase as though it was a child.
Phryne dined early with Dot, Jane and Ruth. Jane was preoccupied, and between the egg-and-bacon pie and the chops Phryne asked her what the matter was.
‘I’ve remembered,’ said Jane. ‘What sent me off — what broke his power. It was something I saw. You know about my gran? She hanged herself, my gran did, at the window of the upstairs at Miss Gay’s.’
‘What did you see?’ asked Phryne. ‘Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘I saw an old woman hanged,’ muttered Jane. ‘She was pulled out of the window by her neck; just like my gran’s, her head was.’ Jane’s head flopped sickeningly sideways in demonstration. ‘It was bright moonlight, like it was the night my gran died. That’s what set me off. That’s why I went queer.’
