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shot?’
    ‘No one. A maid was attacked, though, and I certainly heard a shot.’ Phryne ate her toast. ‘Tell me, Mr Lodz, your natural habitat must be a cafe – I have never known a poet, especially a surrealist, to move far from his cafeáu lait – what brings a town-dweller like you to the country?’
    ‘But who else but my host? He is to publish a small book of mine, a little volume.’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘Nothing really, but Reynolds brought me here to finish it. If I am in the town, I have too many good companions. I drink, I talk . . . and nothing gets written. Thought, argued over, dreamed, discussed, considered, certainly –
    but written, no. You would know this, Madame, you who have known many poets, in Paris, perhaps? And this grotesque and delightful house is a perfect place for a surrealist – it cries out for a resident poet who can really appreciate its strangeness. Therefore, I am here. I ask the same of you. What brings so sophisticated and beautiful a lady to this rural setting, hmm?’
    Phryne was wondering the same thing and enumerated her reasons over a cup of Cave House tea, which was much more palatable than the coffee.
    ‘Tom Reynolds is an old friend of mine, my adopted daughters are back at school, the house is empty, and I need a rest. I have just concluded a 18
    nasty case at the theatre and I felt like a little holiday.’
    ‘Bien suˆr,’ agreed the poet affably. ‘Will you introduce me to your Chinese? Such a beautiful face, like a bronze. What is his name?’
    ‘Lin Chung. They call him Lin.’
    ‘I wish I could draw,’ lamented the poet. ‘Every time I see a face like that I long to be able to capture the beauty; the cool, aloof beauty in the bones.’
    ‘Never mind. You capture it in words.’
    ‘You are very kind.’ The poet smiled, revealing a face containing unexpected humour as well as the strength of character to be seen in all surrealists. It took determination to be really strange.
    That, or absinthe before breakfast every day.
    ‘So, gentle lady, a little walk, perhaps?’ He held out his arm and Phryne took it.
    They walked out of the breakfast room into a pillared portico lined with enough gargoyles to trouble even a surrealist. Tadeusz winced a little and guided Phryne on to a grassy path which led into a rose garden. The fog had burned away under a cool morning sun.
    ‘A cigarette?’ She accepted. He opened a battered silver case which had a tarnished outline upon it resembling a rising sun. ‘They are Turkish-Balkan Sobranies which I hope are to your taste.
    Now, you will want to hear about the house party.
    You can see most of them from here.’ He escorted her to a garden seat and pointed.
    ‘There, playing at being civilised, is Major 19
    Luttrell – a military bully, a King Boar, I assure you, beautiful lady, along with his much-tried wife.’
    She saw a tall stout gentleman leaning over a small figure under the beech tree. ‘He leads her a dog’s life,’ he said flatly. ‘Some women are saints.’
    ‘Which makes some men devils. If she’d climbed on a chair and flattened him with a poker when he first began to bully, he’d be a lot more ame-nable and might have some respect for her,’ commented Phryne.
    The poet tossed back his hair and said in a faintly astonished tone, ‘As the beautiful lady says.
    Visible at a distance because of her illuminated gown, she has a gaudy taste, is Miss Cynthia Medenham, the novelist. You have heard of her?’
    ‘Yes, she writes symbolic, impenetrable prose, which if it wasn’t so hard to understand would probably be banned. But it sells well, I gather,’ said Phryne, who had given up on Silk after chapter three, despite the promising ingredients of a woman who was the reincarnation of an eight-eenth-century courtesan, a tiger skin, and a virgin (but virile) boy.
    ‘Hmm, yes. How much of her rather lush prose arises from personal experience I cannot – alas –
    say.’ The poet grinned.