'What a nice proposition,' said Phryne. 'See you there.' She rang off, called for her coat and hat, and walked through to the kitchen. The girls were occupied with a cooking lesson, and Phryne went out on Jane's learned discourse on the chemical interaction of water and bicarbonate of soda in scone dough.
'Very interesting,' said Mrs Butler, 'but if you don't mix them fast and get them into the oven quickly, they won't do you credit.'
'Quite,' agreed Jane, wiping flour onto her face.
Phryne parked the Hispano Suiza in the Spencer Street Oil Shop where the car had been rebuilt. John Lawless was always pleased to see both Phryne and the machine again. She left the car in the care of that greasy young man, who was already sliding a polishing cloth over the gleaming red coachwork, and hopped on the Bourke Street tram.
She paid her penny and slid her punched paper ticket into her left-hand glove. It was a sunny day with a cold wind—typical of Melbourne in spring, which showed the city at her most capricious and uncomfortable. Bitter dust made Phryne sneeze. She lit a gasper and blew smoke pleasurably out the door as the tram clanked down the Bourke Street hill past William Street and the courts, Queen Street and the lawyers, Elizabeth Street and the GPO and passed all of the great emporia— Buckley and Nunn's, Myers, Coles, and Foy and Gibsons. Surprising numbers of women, hats askew, breathing heavily, crowded past the stylish figure of Miss Fisher, carrying paper dressmaker's bags and squashy parcels. Phryne noticed that Myers was having a sale and stopped wondering about them.
Ting ting went the conductor's bell, the tram laboured up the hill, and Phryne stood up, balancing carefully on the cross-hatched wooden floor. More than one delicate example of the cobbler's art had gone the way of all footwear when the heel had caught in that flooring. This happened so commonly that the cobbler at the corner of the Eastern Market had a small sign outside, advertising 'Get You Home: Heels Mended, Sixpence'. He had been known to ritually bless the name of the Tramways.
She alighted at the corner of Bourke and Exhibition and stood outside the dress shop, admiring the market.
It was a three-storey building made like a rather restrained Palladian cake, with once-white frosting and pillars and a dark stone facade. Phryne knew that it was three storeys on one side and one on the other, occupying as it did a sloping site. It had none of the baroque tiled additions and riotous ironmongery of the main provisions market at the top of Victoria Street. The Eastern Market, she thought as she crossed Bourke Street and walked towards the main entrance, was the place to buy anything small or strange. Because rents of the stalls were so low, odd crafts could afford an outlet. She walked out of the cold wind under the verandah and heard the market noise and smelt the market smell. She stood still to appreciate it, her back to the tiny leaded window of Miss Jane Trent, Umbrella Repairer. Phryne loved markets.
Although most of the wholesale fruiterers were based at the Victoria Market, a few supplied the barrows which went out every day into the street. The tubercular soldiers from the Great War who had been told to get an outdoor occupation sold choice fruit, vegetables and flowers from them, and they were stored overnight in the basement of the Eastern Market. Phryne could smell the new spring blooms which she most enjoyed, which came before the roses—hyacinths, crocuses, freesias— and also a wave of mandarins and lemons from a barrow trundling past. She heard the rumble of carts, the whistle of caged birds from Lane Bros, who had one live finch in a cage above a whole flock of speckled chickens, and Wm Gunn, who had a huge cage full of finches above a pen in which one very red-combed rooster glared aggressively with mad bird eyes through the mesh. As Phryne walked, she heard the language of the carters, one of whom was begging his fellow in extremely emphatic terms to move the flamin' euphemism of a cart so that decent working men could get past and earn a crust or he would knock his sanguinary block off. The cart was one of the few horse-drawn drays left, and clearly belonged to someone who was not taking the spirit of the go-ahead get-ahead twenties seriously. When Phryne came around to the head of the wagon, which had wedged itself at an angle in one of the entranceways so that nothing could get past it either way, the driver had worked himself into such a temper that he had torn off his coat, leapt down, and was offering to fight anyone and everyone.
For a moment, Phryne enjoyed the spectacle. The tunnel to the undercroft was lit with electric bulbs, which lent such a strange and glaring light to the faces that they looked like a Dante illustration of demons and sinners, though sorting them out into sinner and demon was beyond Miss Fisher—they all looked equally villainous. She surveyed the cart and its relation to the trucks, blinked, and realized that it was fixable, though the solution was not evident to anyone in the middle. Picking her way between fuming hoods and yelling drivers, she went to the head of the horse, which was standing patiently enough, took it by the headstall and began to turn it. The dray body perforce came too, and as it was higher off the ground than most of the trucks, it passed over the bonnet of a Dodge without scratching the paint. The horse came placidly with Phryne, the owner gradually becoming aware that the dray was moving away. 'What're you doing?' he yelled.
'I'm shifting your cart,' said Phryne coldly. 'Don't speak to me in that tone of voice, and you as much use as a steampowered grapefruit. Come along, Dobbin.'
'You let go o' my nag!' the drayman screamed, bringing a promising riot to a halt as the rest of the drivers stared.
'Certainly,' said Phryne promptly, releasing the headstall. 'If you continue down that way I see no reason why this should not work. In fact, I'll come with you,' she added, hopping up onto the dray seat and gathering the reins. The horse, who had been very bored with standing still until his hoofs ached with all that human noise assaulting his fringed ears, was not going to stop, so the driver had to run after the dray and fling himself aboard. The trucks fell in behind and the flow of traffic into the undercroft of the Eastern Market resumed.
Phryne had never been under the market before. She relinquished the reins to the driver as he flung himself into his seat and remarked affably, 'This is like the crypt of a church. I had no idea it was here. Where does it come out?'
'Little Collins Street,' replied the driver, utterly unable to decide on a proper reaction. This sheila had taken control of his horse when the stubborn brute had walked the wagon into a corner, and was now coolly chatting in a society voice as though nothing particular had happened. She was obviously a lady and he did not really feel like chancing his arm by crossing her. Generations of men who had refused to pull forelocks kept his gnarled hand away from his cap but he replied civilly.
'See, Miss, this is where the wine cellar is for the whole of Melbourne, it's nice and cool but it ain't damp, they say that's good for plonk. My boss keeps his drays down here, though the nags are stabled up above. The stallholders store things here too. Trouble is that they banned us from bringing the big trucks into the market, so now all the produce mostly goes to the Vic market, pity really, I always liked coming into the city. This is where I leave me dray, Miss. Let me just help you down.'
Phryne accepted a hand and jumped lightly down onto cold clean cobbles.
'There's a staircase over there, Miss,' said the drayman from the horse's head. 'Take you up into the middle of the market.'
Phryne nodded and smiled and walked in the opposite direction. The drayman was about to call after her, but thought again. That, he realized as he uncoupled the tug girth and allowed his horse to walk out between the shafts, was a determined woman, and his mum had always told him not to get in the way of a determined woman.