'Someone who doesn't know you very well,' said Jane, when Phryne proposed the question to the table at dinner.

'How so?' asked Phryne.

'Well, Miss, the best way of getting you to do something is to forbid you to do it. You're contrary,' said Dot, then blushed. 'I mean . . .'

'Yes, you're right, I am contrary,' agreed Phryne.

'Tell us about these golden twins,' urged Jane. 'I've just been reading about twins. They are fraternal, of course, not identical.'

'How do you know that?' asked Ruth, with her mouth full of shortbread.

37.

*38 'Because one's male and one's female, silly,' said Jane.

'So they are,' said Phryne, intervening before they could bicker any more. 'Gerald and Isabella Templar, both tall and slim and blond and blue-eyed. They took Paris by storm with a series of astonishing parties.'

'What sort of parties?' asked Dot suspiciously.

'Well, there was the fte du clochards, a beggar's ball, where everyone had to dress like a tramp. There was the Festival of Virgins, where everyone had to wear white and tell the story of how they lost their virginity. It is a measure of their social importance that the Princesse de Cleves turned up to that party dressed in red and they sent her home to change. And she went, etonnant!'

'And are they fabulously wealthy?' asked Ruth, captivated.

'Tolerably fabulously, I believe. They are the very last of a rather illustrious English family. Their father and both their brothers were killed in the Great War, and their mother expired of grief not long after-which left them alone, in possession of a huge fortune. They are running through it at a rate, though.

There can't be a lot of it left. That may explain what they are doing in Australia. This might be the Templars' last best party, too.'

'And you don't think they're going to settle down to life in the suburbs, do you?' asked Lin Chung in a low voice, waving away a refill of soft Rhine wine.

'Not likely,' said Phryne, making a shushing gesture. 'How are your obsequies going?'

'Very well. Everyone has visited, old people hobbling along who knew the ancestor when he was a child on the goldfields.

I had no idea so many of them were still alive. Grandmamma has been most gratified. Are you still determined on this party, Phryne?'

'Yes,' said Phryne, and that was the end of the discussion.

38.

*39 Thursday, 27th December After lunch Mr Butler started the Hispano-Suiza with his usual facility and pleasure. The big car, its coachwork buffed to a gleaming finish, squatted redly by the kerb. It purred, he declared, like a tiger. Miss Phryne and Dot climbed aboard.

'Werribee ho,' directed Phryne, and Mr Butler engaged the gears. The big car slid out into the traffic like a shark into tropical waters.

It did not take long to leave the city behind and soon they were looking at a flat treeless waste of thistles and boulders.

Milestones flew past.

'Ugly country,' commented Dot.

'Might have looked better before they chopped all the trees down. If it ever had trees. And, of course, it would be prettier if it was green.'

'I suppose,' said Dot. She did not like the countryside at all. It was undisciplined, spiky, and might harbour snakes. Dot always felt that picnics were best enjoyed inside a nice house with tables and chairs and a reliable stone flagged floor.

'Here's the government farm-and there's the sign,' said Phryne.

Mr Butler indicated to other road users that he was intending to turn. Majestically, the Hispano-Suiza slid across the road, only to halt with a shriek of brakes as an impudent Austin dived under its bonnet. It kept going down the carriage drive to the house with a cheery braying of klaxons and Mr Butler so forgot himself as to swear. Phryne heartily agreed with him.

'Quite so,' she said. 'Let's hope we can arrive alive. You stay with the car, Mr Butler, and defend it with someone else's life.

I'll send Dot back to you as soon as I can. Hello! Livestock.'

39.

*40 A string of polo ponies trotted behind an escort on a stockhorse. Mr Butler slowed down to walking pace to pass them and the rider tipped his hat. He looked like a standard bushman-oilskin, boots, leather hat-until the car's inhabi-tants realised that 'he' was a woman, riding as easily as if she was sitting in an armchair. Phryne grinned at her and was rewarded with a smile, white teeth in a tanned face.

Then the car swept around a further curve and the house was revealed.

It was a true, proper, stately home, Phryne thought. It had a portico. It had a tower. It had a huge sanded area in front for carriages to turn around. It had a superb formal garden and swathes of greensward. The said greensward was dotted with white marquees. But there was room here to bivouac an army.

The front of the house was congested with vehicles, including the cheeky blue Austin, Phryne noticed. There was a lot of shouting going on. Phryne directed Mr Butler to turn the big car for an instant getaway and alighted, savouring the gravel with her soft shoes. Dot and the baggage could stay where they were for the moment.

Phryne sauntered through the expostulating throng and saw that the front door of the mansion was being held, at the risk of his life, by a single white-gloved entity whose patience was evidently growing ragged. He was assailed by a collection of public school boys who had clearly lunched far too well.

'You must go and report to the red tent,' insisted the butler for the thousandth time. 'You cannot come into the house, gentlemen!'

'Where's old Gerald?' asked one beery voice. 'Ought to be here to greet us, he ought.' He surged forward, or would have had not an unaccountably strong lady's hand caught hold of his shoulder. He desisted from making any move, amazed.

40.

*41 'Gentlemen,' said Phryne sweetly. 'The red tent,' she said.

'See? Just over there. You don't want to cause trouble on such a nice afternoon,' she told them. 'You don't want to be thrown out of the Last Best Party for 1928,' she added, thinking, you horrible little worms. 'Off you go, now,' she said and, subdued by her governess-nanny-mother-knows-best tone, they went, shouldering each other like young bulls.

The butler sagged a little and mopped his brow.

'They should never have left you out here on your own,'

said Phryne sympathetically. 'Can I lend you my chauffeur?

Or perhaps I can summon a couple of footmen.'

'They've just gone off for their tea,' he said. 'Thank you, Miss. They'll be back soon. How can I help you?'

Phryne exhibited her invitation.

'Oh yes, you're in the house,' said the butler, ticking her off on his list. 'Just up the stairs and to the right, Miss Fisher.

And your baggage . . .?'

'My maid and I can carry it,' said Phryne. 'Ah, here come your henchmen.' Two large footmen were approaching from around the corner of the house, wiping their mouths. 'They ought to suppress any further riot. Dot? Come along,' she called, and Dot appeared with Phryne's suitcase and one small bag.

'Up the stairs and to the right,' said Phryne as the butler opened the front door.

It had been a very beautiful house. The hall was high, the proportions grand without being grandiose. The graceful stair-case bisected a good-sized entrance, which had once been elaborately decorated. There were niches for tall Chinese vases and little sconces which had once illuminated specially treasured paintings of ancestors. The floor was meant to have a carpet, probably commissioned to be woven for the pleasing dimen-sions of the rooms. The windows with their restrained etchings 41 *42 were meant to be clean and the brass rails were meant to be polished. The whole was meant to be lit by a big, heavy, glittering chandelier dripping with candles, originally, then fuelled by gas, scattering diamonds of light over the pink of the painted plaster roses and the green of the vines.

All that was gone, suppressed, violated. The plaster had been whitewashed a dead chalk. The floor was bare but for a scrubby strip of American cloth. The walls had been wounded by bicycles and hockey sticks and the only light came from meagre electric bulbs, bare, on long snaking cables which hung down like hangman's nooses. Someone had stuffed armloads of fresh flowers into a miscellany of pots, buckets and vases, but the underlying smell of wet woollens, unwashed boys, footy boots and good wholesome cabbage boiled for three hours rose above the floral scents like a vile miasma in some fetid English slum.

Phryne was so taken aback that she cried out: 'Oh, Lord!

What has happened to you, poor house?'

An elderly woman carrying an armload of towels was stopped dead in her tracks by this cry and turned to stare.

'It's whitewash,' said Dot, horrified. 'All over them plaster flowers and pretty things. Who'd do such a thing?'

'The present owners,' said Phryne, mounting a fine stair-case whose gracious contours could not be marred by lack of polish. 'I suppose they consider flowers frivolous. Oh well, Dot, let's find my room. They all have flower names along this corridor. Fuchsia, Sweet Pea, Rose, Violet-aha! Iris.'

Phryne applied her key and the door opened. It was a small room, hung with iris chintz. A tall vase of irises decorated the plain dresser. There was a wardrobe, a double bed hung with iris patterned curtains, a jug and basin on the washstand and not much else. The chintz, Phryne ascertained, had been folded 42 *43 and then nailed or stapled to a wall which still showed pale patches where the owner's paintings had been removed.

Draping the room in printed fabric was a good way of changing its appearance if there was no time or inclination to repaint and refurnish. Mr Ventura was a clever man.

'A bit bare,' commented Dot, hanging up Phryne's meagre wardrobe. 'Here's the bag for your laundry, Miss, your stockings are in this drawer and your underwear in this. The emergency rations are in the picnic basket. Are you sure you're all right to be left, Miss?'

'Yes,' said Phryne. 'I just wanted you to know where I will be sleeping so you can find it again tomorrow. Let's have a look around, Dot. Despite the whitewash, this is a lovely house.'

'Yes, it's a nice shape,' agreed Dot. 'Not too huge, like a church.'

'Human-sized,' said Phryne, locking her door and putting the key into her petticoat pocket. This was a fashion of her grandmother's which Phryne had resurrected as a remedy for the sad lack of pockets in female attire. She led the way out onto the balcony, which ran the full length of the house. It was edged with marble pillars. Phryne looked down and saw bright blue tesserae winking at her from the floor. The Church had not uglified the mosaics, then. Probably through lack of time.

No doubt they would get around to them with that tin of whitewash.

Neither had they destroyed the gardens, which were extensive and beautiful and filled with people, tents, horses, wagons and large trucks.

'Look, a monkey puzzle,' said Dot, who loved these odd shaped trees.

'Yes, there's another-no, three,' said Phryne. 'And we have a knot garden, a parterre, a vegie garden-look at the size of 43 *44 those tomatoes!-and over there must be a lake. And a polo ground. Do you feel better about leaving me here now, Dot dear?'

'Yes,' said Dot. 'If all else fails, you can climb a tree.'

'True,' said Phryne.

Dot took her leave. Phryne walked her back to the car and waved as they drew away. It was now getting on for five o'clock, and the directory to the party told Phryne that cocktails would be served in the purple marquee from five. A nice cold drink would be bracing, she thought, and glided through the throng of giggling girls and hearty young men towards a distant glimpse of purple.

The red tent, which she reached first, was efficiently handing out tickets for places in marquees. A peep into one of the decorated bell tents showed it lined with camp beds, each draped with mosquito netting. This would be needed, Phryne knew. Even now she could sense the hum as the bloodsuckers exercised their wings and whetted their beaks for human prey.

She was not looking where she was going and thus was surprised when she caught her foot on a trailing rope and almost fell over a goat. The goat made a bleating protest and Phryne, saving herself from falling by grabbing a handy tent pole, patted it soothingly between the horns.

'Quite, my dear sir or nanny. Nanny, I perceive. I wasn't watching where I was going. On the other hand, you don't precisely look as though you belong in this tent either. Shall we go outside and find your owner? I observe that you have chewed through your tether,' she said chattily, taking the end of the frayed rope and leading the goat out into the sunlight, 'so presumably you had somewhere that you wanted to go.'

The goat, which was mostly white and quite large, with floppy ears, went biddably as she was led. Phryne, blithely 44 *45 unconcerned as to the picture she presented to the assembled partygoers, went towards the purple tent. Just because she had acquired a goat didn't mean that she didn't get a drink. And perhaps the goat would like one as well.

'Pornutopia,' commented a young man with a studied forelock.

'Nonsense, that was a pig,' replied Phryne, leading the goat past him. It made an experimental snatch at the book he was reading, and he fled with a squeak.

'Not books,' Phryne told the goat reprovingly. 'You might start small, just a little poetry, limp covers only, then you get a taste for it and move on to the major playwrights, and pretty soon you'll find yourself tucking into the complete works of George Bernard Shaw and that would give you indigestion.

Come along-I want a drink. And so do you, I expect.'

The purple tent was hung with long banners of purple silk.

There was a bar set up in the middle which seemed blessedly uncrowded and Phryne went straight for it.

It was very well equipped. Nestling in huge tubs of ice Phryne saw capped bottles of beer. In chilled compartments in a humming machine Phryne saw jugs of cocktails, all ready for pouring and decorating. Behind the rank of personable attendants were assistants seated at a long table, cutting up fruit and squeezing juices. The air smelt of pineapples. Exquisite.

Phryne leaned up against the bar, next to a woman in a shimmering green evening dress. She had a mass of black curls cascading down her bare back almost to her waist, where her dress began again after a long absence. She was addressing the barman in a slow, sweet drawl which could only have come from the more Southern parts of America. South Carolina, Phryne considered. Georgia, perhaps. A voice that had been dipped in blackstrap molasses.

45.