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She didn't go often. One terrible anniversary, or Janey's birthday, or afternoons when a creeping melancholy threatened to overtake her, which were mercifully few and far between.
But autumn mornings, when the sun was coppery and the air held hints of woodsmoke and dried leaves, she found herself tugged by memories to the corner of the cemetery where her sister lay.
They had loved fall as children. Gone were the oppressive days and damp sleepless nights of summer, and the ground felt more sturdy and inviting beneath their worn boots. Trees begged to be climbed, rocks to be skipped, apples to be stolen from a neighbour's crooked tree.
This morning was one of those, when a deep breath on the path to get the mail had brought her sister's image just in front of her eyes, and she'd asked Mr. Butler to ready her car.
She parked the Hispano a good way down the winding cemetery road, always grateful for the few minutes' walk to the grave side, her normally quick steps measured and slow as she wove amongst the rows of stone markers. It was, she supposed, as much meditation as she was ever likely to undertake, and it seemed to prepare her to be still as she sat near her sister.
As the graceful stand of golden elms that shielded her family's private plot came into view, movement caught her eye from a bench near the top of a small hill to her right. A man had just sat down, his large hand removing the hat from his head as he did so.
She recognized the figure at once; she'd know it anywhere.
Her boots stilled on the dried grass of the lawn, and she found herself momentarily frozen, not wanting to intrude; equally knowing she would.
She tried to recall him mentioning a particular anniversary, or the passing of someone close, but nothing came to mind. That he was here, and she was in the dark about why, caused a shadowy discomfort in her she quickly chose not to examine.
Without thinking, she began walking towards the bench, half-hoping he would turn and see her, and that he wouldn't mind if he did. But he remained absolutely still.
When she was close enough he must have heard the crunch of leaves under her feet, she opened her mouth to speak, but closed it almost immediately. Instead, she walked around the end of the small stone bench, and sat down beside him.
Jack hardly moved. She pulled off her canvas cap, and looked over at him through lowered eyes, unsettled by the lack of any reaction. Surely he hadn't been expecting her... No, she hadn't known she was coming herself.
She studied his face, shifting slightly in her seat towards him.
“Jack...?” Her voice was shakier than she'd meant, but then she hadn't much experience with Jack Robinson being the one of the two of them to be overwhelmed, if that was what he was.
He blinked several times, his Adam's apple bobbing as he tried to find his voice. Unable to, he merely nodded.
“I'm sorry,” she began, suddenly worried her presence was unwelcome. “I saw you...I was here for.... I don't want to intrude.” Her eyes dropped to the hat in her lap. “I can go...”
“No.” His voice was rough, and even without seeing his eyes, she knew he'd been crying.
“Please stay.”
She nodded, and when it appeared no further conversation was forthcoming, settled her back against the bench and looked at the charcoal granite headstone in front of them.
Jeremiah Gregg
1888-1929
Beloved Son, Devoted Husband
Next to it, a rose-coloured stone.
Laura Gregg
1889-1912
Darling Wife
Beloved Forever
Phryne couldn't remember Jack having mentioned a Jeremiah, or the name Gregg. The headstone was new, the edges on the etched letters sharp and clean. She noticed then that the etching on the second stone was just as new, despite the date of the woman's death.
“Was he a friend?”
For a few minutes, she didn't think Jack was going to answer.
“A case.” Jack lowered his face as he said the words, moving his fingers to rub an invisible mark on the brim of his hat.
“One of my first.”
Phryne swallowed her questions, and Jack was grateful.
“It was years ago, 1912. His wife...Laura... disappeared. Just vanished. They'd only been married a couple of years. They'd been sweethearts since they were kids.”
She nodded gently.
“I'd only been on the force a few months, and I took the call. He was frantic with worry. Said there was no way she'd run off, no way she'd lost track of time.... No way she'd left him.” Jack shook his head at the memory.
“My sergeant thought she'd most likely been having a fling – Mr. Gregg worked long hours, lots of nights, and she was a beautiful young woman. We did check with relatives and hospitals and such, but...” Jack waved his hand dismissively, a scowl shadowing his face. “Apparently anything more was a 'waste of resources'.” He practically spat the words out, and Phryne felt a grim anxiety rise in her chest.
“It wasn't until someone found her shoe in a filthy alley a few blocks from their flat in Carlton that anyone started taking it seriously. That was fifteen days later. Fifteen days, Phryne.”
Jack's voice broke a little on her name and Phryne reached out to grasp one large hand, stilling it from worrying the band of his fedora.
“And you, Jack... You believed him from the start.” It wasn't a question; she knew him. He was as good a judge of character as anyone she'd ever met, and his instincts were as good as hers.
His nod was almost imperceptible.
“But fifteen days,” she said softly. “So long.”
“By then any trail was already cold. We canvased the neighbourhood, scoured the buildings between their flat and the alley... nothing. Not a shred of evidence. We never found anything.”
Phryne looked down at their hands, her pale fingers entwined with his tanned, resting on his thigh. She felt the warmth of his palm and the slight roughness of his skin, and couldn't help tracing the path of his lifeline with her thumb, slowly back and forth.
She had only seen Jack Robinson this much in pain, this fragile, once before. That time, she'd been unable to hold him, to be the one he leaned on. She suddenly realized she she would do anything to be that person for him.
“You never found her.”
“No.”
“Oh Jack. You did all you could. You were only a junior constable – I know you'll have done everything in your very limited power to convince the brass to investigate, and in the end they did. And perhaps even if you'd been able to start earlier, the end result might still have been the same.”
Jack pulled his lips between his teeth in a thin hard line. He had yet to look at her, but she didn't take her eyes off him.
“I can't help thinking that's not the case.”
Phryne felt her heart break a little. She recalled another time, when Jack had been the one to try to reassure her of her own innocence, to absolve her. She hadn't believed him, either.
“And what of poor Mr. Gregg?” said Phryne after a time, looking back to the simple headstone in front of them.
“Jeremiah never stopped looking. He'd call a few times a year, or come by, or I'd stop by his house. He was never angry, never said he blamed us for the delay, for the failure.” There was a hardness in Jack's voice that told her Jack himself didn't allow himself the same grace.
“He never stopped hoping she'd come home, or be found. He didn't realize his whole world ended that night.”
Phryne squeezed his hand, and shifted closer to his side. They were startled by the sharp bark of a dog from from a cluster of trees near the wide front gates, and Phryne looked over in time to see a small flock of rainbow lorikeets rise from the branches in a technicolour cloud. Jack was silent for some minutes.
“Last week, duty officers at City North got a call from a builder a mile or so from the Gregg's old flat. They'd been digging a foundation for a new row of houses after a fire levelled the block last year. They found remains... she was wearing her wedding ring.”
“Oh God...” she said softly.
“Jeremiah Gregg shot himself that night.”
Phryne's eyes were suddenly flooded with tears, and she drew her free hand to her face to wipe them away, ashamed that her own emotions had gotten away from her when she wanted to be strong for him.
“I'm sorry, Jack... I'm so, so sorry.”
“She was his life, Phryne. He said in his note, she was his life, and he was happy to go, knowing she'd be waiting.” His voice was all gravel and loss.
Phryne looked up, and saw tears flowing soundlessly down Jack's cheeks.
“He thanked us for everything we'd done. The last thing he wrote was that he loved her still, and that she was always and ever the best thing in his life, the best part of himself.”
“Seventeen years he waited to find her...” said Phryne, taking a steadying breath. “So much of a lifetime.”
Jack nodded, reaching into his jacket pocket for his handkerchief, and wiping roughly at his face.
“He said she was worth it. He once told me, 'If the few years we had together were all I get, I'll still have been luckier than every other bloke in the world'.”
They sat in silence for a while, their hands still on Jack's thigh, their breathing softening, the tears drying on Phryne's cheek.
When she made to pull her hand away, self-conscious suddenly now that they were collecting themselves, he gripped her fingers and turned to face her, his eyes meeting hers for the first time since she'd sat down. There was a look in his eyes she'd never seen, an urgent, bottomless ache, and it made her breathless.
He held her gaze for what seemed like minutes, as if willing her to see all the parts of himself through his eyes alone. And what she saw more than anything, more than everything, was so tender and raw, his name fell from her lips before she could think.
“I don't want to waste any more time,” he said, his voice a rumble. “I don't want to die knowing I didn't do everything in my power to be with you. I don't want to be apart from you, and I don't want you to ever wonder what you are worth to me.”
Phryne flushed with the intensity of his words.
“I won't ever ask you for anything that you don't want to give me. But I'm done dancing, at least the kind where I can't have you in my arms. I'm yours, Phryne. All of me.”
He seemed to run out of words, and she saw tears begin to gather at the corners of his grey-blue eyes. He wrapped his free hand around both of theirs, still gripping each other, and moved to sit back, lowering his eyes to his lap.
There was a moment, Phryne would later remember it seeming suspended in time and place, hovering just above themselves. The heat of his words shot through her like a fire, and she felt every one like a lick of flame. Only to her shock, they didn't burn. They stunned her, aroused her, elated her, but it was all she could do not to lose herself in their heat. All these months, she had been holding herself carefully apart from him, just far enough to believe she was tempting him, but far enough to have room to turn and run if she got too close. Now, in one moment, she saw the full depth of his love for her and it mirrored hers completely.
In a single graceful movement, she flew forward into his lap, taking his sober face in her hands.
“I love you, Jack Robinson,” she whispered against his skin. “God help me, I love you. I have no idea how to do this, but I want it. All of you.” She stroked his damp cheek, lettering her thumb brush over his lips. “I don't know when it happened, and it scares me senseless, but you have me, Jack. You already have all of me. You have for so long I can't remember when you didn't.”
Jack looked up at her then with a look of such extraordinary tenderness and joy, her chest felt as if it were cracking open. It was too much, too new and bare and pointed that she had to shut her eyes, feeling as soon as she did his lips come to press softly against hers. She'd been expecting fire and passion and a clash of tongue and teeth, but in that kiss there was a whole world of gentleness, of murmured love, of sweet words of reassurance and truth.
They sipped at each other, sometimes tangling their tongues deeply and slowly, then gentling further to whisper adoration against each other's lips. She didn't know if the coolness on his face was from his tears or hers. Her hands stayed at his head, fingers delighting in the wave of his hair, then moving to trace the shadows of his cheekbones, the exquisitely intimate movement of his sharp jaw as his mouth moved against her. Jack's arms were wrapped around her back, one broad hand sweeping down over the fine bones of her spine, then back up to nestle in the thick short hair at her nape; the other coming to knead the softness of her hip.
When they finally pulled apart enough to look at each other, neither could have said how long they'd been sitting there, or indeed, for a moment, where exactly they were. Nothing else was real in the world, only the face inches from their own, mirroring a look of utter undoing.
“No more dancing?” Jack's voice was a deep velvet rasp, and she felt it move through her body like a tiny climax.
She shook her head.
“No more dancing. Or rather, maybe now, not so slow, and much, much closer.” The smile that bloomed shyly across her face reached all the way up, to crinkle near her eyes. “Can you be with me, Jack? Can you be with the person that I am?”
Jack's eyes traced every curve and line of her face, his mouth slightly open, lips plump from their kisses.
“There is no where else I can be, Phryne. No where else I ever want to be.”
“There might be bumps... We'll manage them, right? We'll figure it out?” A tiny furrow appeared in her pale forehead, and he saw for the first time how much this meant to her, how much she wanted it to be.
“Phyrne, I'm not going to ask you to marry me, though you know I'd say yes if you asked. But I want... I need all of you. I want your nights and mornings and your temper and your headaches and your passion and your naughtiness. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't care about your fidelity.” His eyes flickered down to their laps, and he closed them briefly before meeting her gaze.
“I want you to be – always – who you truly are. If that means you need...”
She lifted a finger to his lips, and pressed gently.
“Shhh. There's no one else, Jack. It sort of snuck up on me, but then again, how could there be, when it's you?” Her smile was soft and sparkling, and he found he believed her.
“Thank god,” he whispered, leaning his forehead against hers.
“Though that does mean you'll have to be prepared to have a lot of sex, and in rather a lot of ways,” she said coquettishly, her eyes glittering through her lashes.
Jack felt his whole body flush, and swallowed before responding.
“I do believe I can cope with that responsibility.” His hands tilted her pelvis into his, and he thrilled at the tiny gasp she made. Time stopped again as they learned each other's lips and tongues and sighs.
Finally, Phryne leaned back a little and gingerly nibbled her bottom lip.
“And the rest of the world?” she asked. He heard the concern in her voice, and knew it was for him, and he loved her all the more for caring.
“We'll work it all out together. After all, I'd say our track record for managing difficulties is nearly as good as our solve rate.” She couldn't help a grin a the way his lips quirked up as his chin tilted down.
“'Almost', Jack? I'd say it's at least as good. After all, we're really much better together,” she said, her arms wrapping around his shoulders.
Jack's big hands rose up her back to gently pressed her towards him, so their chests were touching and their cheeks rested against one another.
“That we are, Miss Fisher. That we are.”
“Jack?” she breathed beside his ear.
“Yes, love?”
“Let's go home.”