Bert nodded again and poured his father another beer.

Conventions had been observed. It was now Christmas in Bert's world. All other events, like turkey and pudding and mottoes and silly hats and Bert's uncle Les dancing the tango with a hat-stand, would now follow inevitably.

Bert raised his glass to his father. 'Cheers,' he said.

Cecil Yates, invariable companion of Bert, was engaged in a fierce game of cricket with the smaller members of the Yates clan. There seemed to be hundreds of them. Cec's grandmother 18 *19 had taken to heart the biblical injunction to increase and multiply and, of her sixteen children, eleven had lived to marry and produce children of their own. This meant that in any country town in Victoria there would be at least one Yates cousin, and the Yates children were constrained to behave because, wherever they went, there was no chance that they would escape notice if they were naughty.

Cec underarmed a gentle throw to a pint-sized wicket-keeper, watched him take off the bails with dashing enthusiasm, and declared himself out for the moment. The wind was picking up. It was going to be a hot day. The Yates family Christmas party was taking place on a large property in Hoppers Crossing belonging to Zephaniah Yates, who farmed it with his brothers Hezekiah and Ishmael. The farmhouse was stuffed with women of the Yates clan, managing the last minute cooking and arranging, though the early work had been done by Hezekiah's wife, Betty.

The Yates women were at present, Cec knew, admiring the engagement ring he had bought for his intended, Alice Greenham. Miss Fisher had got him a real good price on that diamond. Cec had brought Alice along even though she was desperately shy about meeting his family. 'Might as well get it all over at once,' said Cec cheerfully. But he had been worried.

What if they didn't like Alice? For if he couldn't have Alice, there was no one else for Cecil Yates.

Fortunately, after one long, raking study which took in her neat dress, her shy demeanour and the excellent-looking shortbread she had brought-such a useful present, you can always use more shortbread-all of them, including Cec's strong-minded mother Rosalita, decided to like Alice. And when the Yates clan decided to like you, there was no use kicking against the pricks. They were planning her wedding dress as Cec crossed the dusty yard.

19.

*20 Wiping his forehead, he went up onto the verandah to join his brothers Aubrey and Trevelyan and his cousins Hez and Ish.

'Take the weight off, King of the Kids,' said Trev. 'Here's my Terebintha with a beer for you.'

'She's an angel,' said Cec gratefully. He sat down. Immediately, three dogs and a cat joined him on the swinging seat.

A standard Yates maiden-tall, slim and blonde-produced a jug. Cec swigged and Terebintha refilled.

'So how's tricks?' asked Cec.

'No worse than usual,' said Ish. 'Got a lot of green feed stored from that wet spring, might last us through the dry.

How's things in the city?'

'Not bad,' said Cec. 'Still working the taxi lark with Bert.

Do some rough work for Miss Fisher, sometimes.'

'That's the lady detective that Mel's Lisbet met on the cruise ship? She sounds like a cracker,' said Hez.

'Oh, she is,' said Cec, thinking of bright colours and noise and sparks and explosions. 'She's that, all right.'

He tickled the big ginger cat behind the ears and wondered how Miss Fisher's Christmas Day was going.

Mrs Butler joggled her grandchild. A nice piece of work, she thought critically, well formed, solid, with the blue Butler eyes and the rosy Butler complexion. Already the strong little legs were flexing and pushing, eager to grow, to crawl, to walk.

None of those pasty-faced weaklings for her daughter Sally.

Then the baby-Phryne-smiled an adorable gummy smile and Mrs Butler melted.

'Oo's an ickle pretty den?' she cooed.

For once, she herself was not working. She spared a worried thought for Ruth left with Miss Phryne's goose, then resolutely turned her thoughts away. Just for today, she said to herself, 20 *21 I'm not cooking and Tobias isn't waiting on people, and I'm not going to say a word about how Sally is mistreating that pair of chickens. Not one word. I shall eat it and be grateful.

She accepted a cooling sherry cobbler and smiled on her son-in-law, who was a grocer.

'So, Bill,' she said. 'How's business?'

Dorothy Williams surveyed the table and pushed back her hair.

It looked lovely. She had twined long strings of jasmine around everything, in the way she had seen in one of Miss Fisher's Home Beautiful magazines. The scent was heavy in the air.

Everything was prepared, the plates and glasses gleaming, the array of cutlery set out next to the head of the table where her father would presently carve the turkey. Any moment now everyone would be back from church and the feast would be ready for them. Dot had said her rosary while she was decorating. She was in a perfect state of grace as she embraced her sister Joan and her two small children, come down from Sydney for the festivities. Everything was in order in Dot's world.

Phryne Fisher rose betimes and bathed, remembering just in time not to ring for breakfast. She had been aware of some surreptitious activity and a few barks early in the morning, but what else was five am on Christmas morning for? She remembered creeping into her family's English parlour in freezing darkness, feeling for the filled stockings and running back to bed before her feet froze. She also remembered the entirely disproportionate value, in her impoverished childhood, of a tin bangle, a packet of boiled lollies and an orange. Phryne's daughters were going to do better than that.

She dressed in a bright red suit and went down to find that Ruth was in charge of breakfast. Both her daughters were 21 *22 wearing, for the very first time, silk stockings, and were terribly aware of snags, edges and Ember, who knew what a threat he posed and was standing over them as neat as a Fitzroy Street bully for more than his fair share of bacon. Phryne picked him up and put him in the garden, along with a whole rasher for his very own in case he should feel affronted. He was affronted, but he ate the bacon. Molly sat alertly under the kitchen table, humbly waiting for largesse.

'Oh, thank you!' gasped Ruth. 'I was so scared he'd stick a claw into my new stockings! Coffee in the pot, Miss Phryne, and toast in just a jiff. Would you like eggs and bacon?'

'No, thank you,' said Phryne. 'But keep frying, here comes Eliza and Lady Alice, and I bet they haven't eaten.'

Phryne answered the bell and admitted her sister, in a flowered frock and hat, and her companion Lady Alice, in shabby brown with a beige felt hat which had seen better centuries. But Phryne gave her points for trying. She had pinned a sprig of holly to the front and resembled a rather vague and elderly member of Santa's gnomes.

'Oh, Phryne dear, how nice,' she said. 'Is that bacon cooking? We had a bit of an emergency with some of the girls and haven't eaten a crumb.'

'Sit down,' said Jane, delivering Phryne's toast. 'Tea in that pot, Lady Alice. Merry Christmas!'

'And a merry Christmas to you too,' said Lady Alice, which went against all her Socialist principles. But one could not disappoint this nice child.

Eliza threw her hat onto the dresser and kissed Phryne as the latter helped herself to Oxford marmalade. 'This is a change from the old country, eh? No frost! No sad little dead birds!

No compulsory visits to those poor cottagers! And best of all . . .'

22.

*23 Phryne raised her coffee cup in salute and agreement. 'We are eleven thousand miles from Papa.'

'Indeed,' said Eliza fervently, and poured tea for herself and her lover in the most devout of familial spirits.

Ruth had successfully made breakfast and stacked the dishes for later washing. Now she was about to face the great-est challenge of her life to date, and she was anxious to get as many people out of the house as she could.

'I'll stay,' offered Eliza. 'I've got up to page five of Mrs Beeton, you know.'

'And I do not care to attend the shop-worn conventions of an outmoded religion,' declared Lady Alice. Jane tugged at Phryne's sleeve and she looked up in time to intercept Ruth's agonised appeal.

'No you don't, you pair of atheists,' she said to her sister and Lady Alice. 'You're coming along with me to a nice rousing singsong. Do your souls good. But first, it's Ruth's turn with the Advent book.'

Propped up in a stand on the mantelpiece in the parlour was the Advent book, which had entrancing, brightly painted pictures, all concealed behind little windows which folded out or down. Phryne's household had alternated in opening them, page by page, and most excitingly there were more after the birth of the baby Jesus, which would be today's picture.

It was. The mother cradled the child in her arms, and a suspiciously clean collection of shepherds knelt at her feet.

Their animals had obviously been freshly rinsed as well.

'Lovely donkey,' commented Lady Alice.

'Nice baby,' agreed Eliza. 'Well, if we have to go to this antique ritual, let's go.'

Phryne winked at Ruth and walked her family out of the house and into the dead quiet of Christmas morning. No buses.

23.

*24 No trucks. No vans. Almost no traffic. Phryne was relieved to see a few of the gentlemen of the street, over-full of Christmas spirits, asleep on the bench by the church. St Kilda was itself, after all.

'Oh come, all ye faithful,' sang the choir, and the Fisher family went into church.

Ruth went back to her room and removed her prized silk stockings. She put on her old lisle ones and her stout boots.

Mrs Butler was firm about bare feet in her kitchen. Too dangerous, she said, with scalds and dropped pots. She returned to the kitchen-all hers now-and wrapped herself up in one of Mrs Butler's aprons. She tied back her plaits and consulted her list. It seemed very long and daunting.

'Light stove,' murmured Ruth, and found the long matches.

An hour later she was wiping her forehead and licking her pencil for the thirtieth time. The list was almost at an end. The shelled peas were in their colander, waiting to be cooked.

The brussels sprouts likewise. Ruth had yet to be convinced that brussels sprouts were food, the bitter morsels having been a mainstay of her scullery days, but the cookbooks said that with chestnut puree they were superb, and Ruth was not about to start second-guessing Ma Cuisine. The potatoes were in the oven, basted in goose fat. To her probing skewer they were already tender. The pudding was on the stove, steaming, next to a singing kettle which would resupply the pot with boiling water. The washed and dried salad and the iced fruit sorbets were cooling in the American refrigerator. There remained only cream to whip and a few small matters to adjust.

Ruth pushed back her hair and laughed at the last item on Mrs Butler's list: 'Now make yourself a cup of really strong tea and take it into the garden. Ginger biscuits in the tin.' Hers not to reason why, Ruth made her tea, spiked it with four 24 *25 sugars and carried it and the biscuits out into the garden. She sat down under the jasmine bower, where she could see the kitchen door and hear if the pudding began to boil dry.

She was exhausted and exhilarated. Molly wandered into the garden and slumped down on her feet with a sigh. The scent of that cooking goose was a heavy burden for a small starving dog to bear, she conveyed. Ember was at large in the kitchen but he could hardly hook the goose out of the oven with only his own four paws. Birds sang in the Christmas quiet. Ruth drank her tea, listening to a group of magpies chortle their water music, sweeter, Miss Phryne said, than nightingales.

She had just rinsed her cup and saucer when the bell rang and she went to the front door, wondering who would call on Christmas morning. No one was there, but a bright parcel lay on the step, directed to The Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher. Ruth turned it around, shook it experimentally, and then took it inside and put it under the tree. Miss Phryne had a lot of admirers.

She heard an ominous boiling-dry noise and ran back to the kitchen.

'Well,' said Phryne expansively, taking another slice of breast, 'that was the best goose in all the world.'

'Never tasted better,' beamed Miss Eliza.

'Delicious,' agreed Lady Alice, holding out her plate for more goose, brussels sprouts (and who would have thought they did taste that good with chestnuts? Even Jane had eaten some, Ruth marvelled, resolving never to doubt her texts again), potatoes, gravy, chestnut stuffing and peas. Ruth was delighted. Not by the spoken compliments, though they were very nice, but by the second and even third helpings for which everyone was asking.

25.

*26 'There's pudding to follow,' she warned. 'And iced sorbets.'

'In due course,' said Phryne. 'Just a little more gravy, please.'

The party relaxed and nibbled their favourite tidbits.

Phryne and Eliza began to reminisce about the ceremonies taking place even now in their father's house and how glad they were not to be witnessing them.

'He'll be on his third bottle by now,' said Eliza, smothering a giggle at her daring in criticising the Patriarch.

'Drunk as a lord and bellowing at the butler,' said Phryne, pouring another glass of the moselle which the Barossa Valley was making so competently.

'Mother will be scuttling along, protesting,' continued Eliza.

'And he will not take a blind bit of notice. He will invade the kitchen and dismiss the cook for insubordination, and she will fling a gravy ladle into his face and stalk out, leaving mother, who cannot boil an egg to save her life, to cook dinner for twenty-five.'

'So she will rush after the offended cook.'

'And perhaps James might manage to get the master into the parlour to amuse the guests,' said Eliza. 'Oh, such a fuss!

It's lovely to have this feast just laid out without any panic and hysteria, though we do appreciate how hard Ruth must have worked to produce it.'

'No, really, I just followed the instructions,' said Ruth modestly. She and Jane had changed into their summer frocks, skimpy cool things with short skirts and scooped necklines, pale mauve for Ruth and pale green for Jane, who was blonder.

Ruth had decanted the pudding and left it to drain and seethe before she had dared replace her boots with sandals.

She accompanied Jane into the kitchen as they began to 26 *27 clear the table. Just the pudding, cream, brandy sauce and sorbets to go. Jane scraped each plate into the greasy baking dish and stacked them for washing. She was careful, because when she lost concentration she had a tendency to drop things and this was Miss Phryne's Clarice Cliff dinnerware. Molly lurked under the table, knowing that as soon as the plates were cleared, that baking dish piled high with leftovers was her Christmas dinner. She salivated and licked her chops loudly.

Jane carried the baking dish out into the garden and Molly leapt to follow, tail whirring. When Jane came back she found Ruth transfixed with horror.

Ember had become bored waiting for his treat, or had possibly lacked sufficient trust in humans to be sure that it would eventuate. He had decided to reward himself and was whiskers deep in the bowl of whipped cream, purring like a dynamo.

'Oh, Jane! What shall we do?' whispered the hitherto redoubtable Ruth, wringing her hands. 'I can't serve whipped cream with cat fur in it! And I haven't got time to whip more cream!'

'You get Ember,' said Jane. 'I'll get a big spoon.'