Raisins and almonds - Poisoned Pen Press (UK)

0 Kerry Greenwood
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 crosshatched
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,