Title: Jessa Called Jay

Chapter 9: Some Things Do

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.

Author's Note: Thank you to everyone for being there along the way, if you loved it or hated it, if it made you laugh or cry; thank you for being on this journey with me.

/ - / - / - / - /

Sunbeams cascade through white panes of glass.

Phryne Fisher has to shield her eyes against the brilliance as she walks in, her footsteps echoing like evensong in the interior of the tiny police chapel in City Central.

In the December sunshine, the space glows, and, for a second, she closes her eyes to bask in its radiant warmth.

But she is not alone.

A man waits at the altar, dressed in a slate-grey suit. The window-light reflects off the soft weave as it tapers over his shoulders, slides down the slim lines of his lapel until it hits the single flower tucked in his buttonhole, that single, star-yellow bloom.

He looks up at her, and the light hits the handsome angles of his face, the high bones of his cheeks, picks out the roan-grey in his hair, reflects the pale fringe of his eyelashes.

Phryne Fisher walks down the aisle towards him.

Jack Robinson waits for her at the end, and for a moment (perhaps just one small eternity) they stand there in the light, together.

They stand without speaking, without touching, simply bound in the brightness of memory.

Then Mac comes in, followed by Callum and his wife, Hugh holding on to Faith and Dottie carrying her newborn brother. A happy crowd follows them, more than can possibly be seated, and the silence is broken, joyously and unreservedly.

Phryne smiles at Jack one last time and then takes her seat with the rest of them.

She leaves him standing there alone.

It is the hardest thing she has ever had to do in her life.

When she found Jay again, when she took the reporter to City Central that night, Phryne realized that she had underestimated the reporter; she had underestimated Jack. He could never love someone ordinary. He would love this other woman, someone so much like herself, and yet not at all. He would love someone extraordinary, someone who would sacrifice everything for him, even herself.

And now she, Phryne, has done the same.

Yet she knows that while she admires him and desires him, there are also so many things about Jack that drive her (have driven her, and would drive her) stark, raving mad. His quiet intensity, the way he wavers in deliberation, the way he is silent when he should speak, the way he is still when he might act, the very rootedness of him; these things frustrate and even infuriate her to her core.

What Phryne wants is dash and rash, to throw caution to the wind and speak out of turn. What she wants is to live head-over-heels and devil-may-care, reckless and giddy and defiant.

So what she wants isn't Jack – not really.

Certainly she loves him enough to let him go, but perhaps she also loves her own happiness more, and Phryne knows (though she is loathe to admit it) that he could not make her happy.

At least, not in the way that someone else already has, this tall man with dark hair, that rakish smile and those meltwater eyes, Geffrey Leverton, the twenty-first Duke of Ransley, who now sits beside her.

Two weeks ago he had turned up at her front door.

"There you are," he had said brightly when she finally answered his persistent pounding.

Without waiting he comes in past her, dragging an assortment of bags and boxes, polo sticks and golf clubs.

It all clatters to the floor when she rushes into his arms and he holds her there.

"Hello, hen," he says, kissing the top of her head.

Phryne laughs against his broad and embracing heart.

/ - / - / - / - /

In the chapel the murmured chatter ceases and a hush descends.

A woman, tall and lithe and striking, appears in the doorway, silhouetted in light.

There is no music but she walks forward alone as Phryne imagines she ever has, to her own tune.

Jay Tayler wears a suit of silk moiré in the darkest ivory, practical and elegant to a fault. Her hair is pinned back with twin abalone combs, a short veil of French net sweeping across her lovely features. She carries a small bouquet of the flowers that are her name, or hers theirs.

The scent of jessamine ripples on the air as she passes, walking straight up to Jack without waiting, handing off her bouquet and taking his hands in hers so he stops shaking.

"She makes him happy," Geff says beside her, because it's so very evident that Jay does.

"I didn't."

Phryne says it without thinking.

"Perhaps," Geff answers, being kind, "but did you want to?"

Before Phryne can answer, the celebrant speaks.

"Today we celebrate the union of two people – "

As the ceremony begins, Phryne holds open her palm. For a moment Geff stares at her. Then he calmly reaches into his jacket pocket and drops the desired object into her hand.

Geffrey Leverton is the kind of man to carry a twenty-carat diamond ring around in his pocket, to fly across the world in case she changed her mind, just in case she might, in the hope that she would, that she possibly could.

Before them the celebrant carries on –

" – I remind you of the solemn and binding nature of the relationship into which you are now about to enter, and to – "

Phryne slides the ring onto her finger, feeling the platinum band settle smoothly against her skin. The stone balances on her finger, and she is surprised to realize that she has missed it, the decadent but comforting weight of it. She tilts her hand, letting the gem glitter in the light, and marvels at the shocking beauty of it, the way it takes her breath away, this small piece of the world made to shine simply through pressure and time.

Perhaps she too has been shaped as it has; perhaps she too will shine.

" – will you honor her, love and respect and protect her? Will you – "

Beside her Geff takes her hand in unspoken agreement.

" – will you accept him for who he is and who he will be?"

Phryne clasps her fingers around Geff's in reply.

" - I present to you now, Mr. and Mrs. – "

Applause breaks out and they all stand, watching as Jack and Jay kiss and pass them by, heading towards the chapel door and that bright, irresistible light of everything yet to come.

He doesn't look at her, but why should he? Jack Robinson has eyes only for Jay – Jessa, called Jay.

That's the way love should be, Phryne thinks, always looking forward and never looking back.

"Some things never change," Geff says as the newly married couple disappears and a resounding cheer goes up from the waiting crowd outside.

Phryne ponders the point, having said it herself so many times before.

Perhaps it's not as true as she might believe. She changed; Jack changed; even Melbourne has changed. She has loved her time here, loved her beautiful bolthole of 221B The Esplanade, but maybe it is time to move on, to move forward. There is a whole world out there, and she has yet to see all of it. There is Tokyo and Toronto, New York and Naples, Budapest and Boston – yes, Boston, where she could visit Jane. And there is America, that long and wide place where perhaps those new devils of Europe cannot reach.

After all, another Janey, from another time, would want her to be happy, and with Geff, she is.

Phryne Fisher smiles brilliantly.

"And some things do."

/ - / - / - / - /

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