Rosetta

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Headstrong and beautiful, in 1905 Rosetta escaped her safe Melbourne life, deserting her respectable husband and five-year-old daughter to run away with Zeno the Magnificent, a half-Chinese fortune teller and seducer of souls.

  The pair reinvented themselves in London, where they beguiled European society and risked everything for a life of glamour and desire. Rosetta said she was American; Zeno claimed to be a brilliant Japanese professor. Together they attracted the patronage of famous writers, inventors and scientists, lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses.

  Rosetta revelled in a life few women of her time would have dared to embrace, yet all the while she hid her secret shame: the daughter she had left behind.

  This is the compelling story of Alexandra Joel’s quest to uncover the truth about her scandalous great-grandmother, and the shocking century-old secret she would discover at the heart of her family.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PART ONE: AUSTRALIA

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PART TWO: EUROPE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  PART THREE: AUSTRALIA

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  POSTSCRIPT

  PROFESSOR CARL ZENO’S LIST OF PATRONS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PICTURE SECTION

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  To my children

  Rosetta stone

  ‘A key to some previously indecipherable mystery …’

  Oxford English Dictionary

  PART ONE

  AUSTRALIA

  ONE

  MELBOURNE, 1905

  She is filled with anguish and uncertainty. Her future is opaque. The dreadful step she is contemplating torments her during endless troubled nights. The action she considers is both irrevocable and forbidden; the consequences grave. For a wife to leave her husband is, at best, unwise. But to leave her child? She is aware that condemnation will rain down upon her from all sides.

  What will happen to her if she does this thing? How will her life unfold? And yet if she does nothing, stays exactly as she is, can she tolerate an eternity spent existing in a void? These questions gnaw at her until she feels she is quite mad.

  It is in this turbulent condition Rosetta recalls that some time ago she heard of a talented fortune teller who could be found near Melbourne’s mysterious Chinatown. It may well have been her aristocratic Irish friend, Lilian Pakenham, who told her – yes, that was it – during one of their intimate exchanges over cups of Lapsang Souchong tea.

  ‘There is a man,’ Lilian had said, smoothing her yellow dress. ‘He is part Chinese but very handsome. He has special gifts …’

  Momentarily, Rosetta closes her dark eyes. She cannot recall the seer’s name – something exotic, she thinks, and vaguely improbable. It doesn’t matter. She remembers the address; it is enough for now. She decides that if in one week’s time she is no closer to a resolution she will seek the oriental fortune teller out.

  Rosetta hopes this plan will afford her a measure of tranquillity. It does not. During the hours that follow, while she shops for bread and milk and cheese, returns home, attempts to write a letter to one of her younger sisters, her unrest seems only to increase.

  She tries to sew. It is impossible; the needle slips. She pricks her finger, sees a bead of crimson blood and feels squeamish. Finally, she throws the child’s dress and its unfinished hem onto a chair and starts to pace about the room. It seems unnaturally confining, as if the very walls, the timber beams and lintels are conspiring to trap and restrain. Surely this distress cannot be endured for another seven days.

  Yet still Rosetta hesitates. She forces herself to be still, to think. The man will surely prove a charlatan; to seek his counsel is a foolish escapade. Rosetta resolves that she must remain exactly where she is. ‘It is the wisest course,’ she thinks.

  Slowly, she sits down again. She regards the small, crumpled dress that has been cast aside. Then, suddenly, Rosetta rises to her feet. She reaches for her coat and reticule, crams her beribboned hat onto her thick, bronze-coloured hair and flies out of the door.

  TWO

  Rosetta is not an invention. She lived. She created an extraordinary life, took risks, transcended all manner of circumstances that might have constrained her from inhabiting the world of international glamour and desire which she embraced and which in turn embraced her.

  I see her, vividly alive, at twenty-five: an arresting beauty with thick chestnut hair and restless, toffee-coloured eyes. She has been married since the age of eighteen. Her husband is a respectable man of means. She is a mother, too. The year is 1905, the place is Melbourne, capital of gold-rush enriched Victoria, a thriving state in the new nation of Australia. All seems well.

  But this is the year when – abruptly, scandalously – everything changes. Rosetta leaves, and not just her husband, though this is bad enough. No, she does something far worse than that. She abandons little Frances Catherine, aged just five; runs away with a man self-styled Zeno the Magnificent. Shockingly, Zeno is half Chinese. He is also a mesmerising schemer, a fortune teller and seducer of souls. With wit, charm and wile, Rosetta and Zeno first enchant the inhabitants of Sydney. Next, with their sights set on more distant horizons and grander goals, they conquer British and European society. Princes, duchesses, lords and ladies – all find themselves helplessly beguiled.

  There will be no more children for Rosetta. Yet, even after her triumphant return to Australia, she has no contact with her daughter. She never meets her granddaughter (my mother, Sybil), or her great-granddaughter – me. On 28 July 1958, just five days before my fifth birthday, Rosetta dies. But none of us, neither daughter, granddaughter nor gr
eat-granddaughter, is aware this has transpired.

  I have always known that my great-grandmother did a dreadful thing. It must have been when I was very young that I was first told she deserted her only child. This alarming knowledge – some mothers simply choose to disappear – became a part of the child I was, my identity.

  Where had my errant great-grandmother gone, and why?

  No doubt even in the far-off 1950s, when children were not encouraged to be forthcoming but, rather, to know their place, many were braver than I was, asked more questions, demanded answers in response. I did not.

  I don’t believe it was simple timidity that caused my questions to remain unspoken; it had something more to do with the risk I sensed. I suppose that every family has its painful, bruised places to which one journeys at one’s peril. Even as a child I understood the way in which a misplaced query might disturb these tender realms.

  Abandonment by the one who gave you life; the loss is both vast and elemental. I knew, on some unconscious, visceral level, that beneath my grandmother’s and mother’s glamorous facades, behind their lacquered hairstyles and bright, carefully lipsticked mouths, lay the shadows of hurt and turmoil.

  Words can be avoided, thoughts suppressed, but feelings work their way through the line and texture of one’s being. None of us escaped though, not surprisingly, Rosetta’s daughter, Frances, my Nana Billie, was the most deeply affected by her mother’s flight. Billie was not an easy woman, being mercurial in mood and acutely sensitive to any act or comment that she perceived could be a slight. Even minor incidents were likely to evoke a furious response. Though tender-hearted, a kind of madness would erupt.

  ‘She’d get upset and throw cups and saucers,’ my mother confessed one morning over tea.

  ‘At what?’ I asked.

  ‘At me.’

  A child has no trouble knowing damage when she lives with it each day.

  Over the years my curiosity did not wane. It stayed hovering at the furthest edges of sentience, unsaid. The truth is, whether talked about or not, it would have made no difference. Nobody knew anything.

  ‘I wasn’t even told her name,’ I remember my mother saying not so very long ago while we sat together in the sterile comfort of her dentist’s waiting room. A moment later, her own name was called.

  ‘Sybil? Sybil Joel?’

  ‘Yes.’ And then she rose, was escorted by a nurse with a professional smile towards a gleaming, equipment-filled room that could be glimpsed behind a screen of synthetic plant life.

  I followed but, despite the glare of the fluorescent lights, found that I’d become disorientated – the brief exchange had unsettled me. Names are quotidian, simple things yet have great power. When they are lost, that loss is beyond what can be calculated.

  It was only after Billie’s death, in 1988, that the first vital scrap of information was uncovered. Strangely, it was my father, Asher, who made the initial discovery and even then it was by accident. In his seventies, after a life spent largely on the public stage (Dad was best known for the organisation of royal visits and other state occasions), he was seeking an activity that would provide meaning to his days. Perhaps it was because 1988 was the year Australia marked two centuries of European settlement. When he was younger, my father might have expected to mastermind the celebrations.

  ‘I need a challenge,’ he proclaimed. This was a call to arms with which I was familiar, for he thrived on grand undertakings and intense activity, becoming melancholic when they ceased.

  Dad’s attention turned inward. He became absorbed by the private pursuit of family history, devoted to finding out all he could, not only about his ancestors, but almost anybody and anything connected to his rich past. It was only natural: my father had begun his career as a newspaperman back in the glory days of the 1920s and had lost neither his passion for unearthing facts nor for running what might prove a compelling tale to ground.

  Evidence of his dedication to this new-found enterprise abounded. Files bulged with correspondence. Typists and research assistants came and went. Meanwhile my mother, all too aware of the enormous amount of time and attention her husband was devoting to this endeavour, began to grow peevish.

  ‘What about me?’ she said to him one day, with an expression that made it clear she did not enjoy being overlooked. ‘I hardly know a thing about my family, and as for my grandmother, the one who took off – well, there’s never been a trace.’

  A secret story, waiting to be uncovered and disclosed; it was all that was required to pique Dad’s curiosity.

  My father had a special gleam in his eye, a buoyancy of step whenever he had come across a lead that might prove fruitful. This must have been the way he looked on the day he announced to my mother, ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘Billie’s death certificate.’ I suppose Dad’s eagerness seemed at odds with the nature of his find. ‘I know her name!’

  My mother, taken unawares, had been about to dial a number on the telephone. ‘Whose name? What?’ She turned and looked quizzically at him, the fingers of her hand still poised mid-air.

  ‘Your grandmother’s. She was called Rosetta. I’m going to find out more.’

  And so Pandora’s box was breached.

  My father’s small discovery re-ignited those old reporter’s instincts honed so many years before. Galvanised, he sought out documents, found sources, looked in unexpected places. Startling details began to emerge.

  I can recall the day he met me at the door of his office where, fired up with the exhilaration of the chase, he exclaimed, ‘Al, Rosetta’s life was incredible. There’s the makings of a book here. You should write it.’

  It was a brief remark, but my father’s excited words – part suggestion, part command – stayed with me long after he passed away. I could not tell if they would prove to be a legacy or a burden.

  THREE

  I did not start seeking my great-grandmother until I had become a mother myself, and known tragedy. My life was ruptured, ripped apart. I had a child who died. It was a cataclysm that broke all the natural laws of the universe. How could it be that I would not spend another precious moment with her, that I would never, ever see her navy eyes or feathery hair, the sweet bow of her mouth again? As impossible as the sun setting in the east or rising in the west, it was beyond my imagination.

  I tried not to scan the faces of other little girls in parks, on trains, in cars, on streets. Knowing the quest was hopeless, I did my best to resist. Come nightfall, though, my resolve evaporated. In my dreams I searched for her. And I began to wonder, did Rosetta ever look for her child, too?

  Much later, with the balm of my son and another daughter, my world settled. By then I was aware that my great-grandmother had lived a passionate, daring life. Yet all the while she hid her secret shame, the little girl she left behind.

  I was torn. Despite my growing fascination with Rosetta, I wondered: could I come or even want to know a woman I half thought a kind of monster? Despite my struggle, I found Rosetta irresistible. I went in search of her.

  It was in the garage of my brother, Michael, that I first saw the results of my father’s labours; tangible evidence of Rosetta’s life.

  ‘Here it is,’ Michael said, running a protective hand over a brown cardboard filing box and three thick spiral binders, one black, one red and one blue.

  ‘I’ve photocopied the family tree, but don’t take anything else away,’ he instructed. ‘It can’t be lost.’

  She was his great-grandmother, too. But I did take it. I took everything.

  When I arrived home I turned the contents out onto the smooth plane of my dining-room table and spread out what there was: a variety of ageing documents that had been assembled in shiny plastic sleeves, photocopies from the pages of old newspapers, the recollections of several people who knew Rosetta at first hand and a few short pieces of prose that Dad had written himself, typed up in pre-computer days on a machine that over-inked the e’s and smud
ged the d’s. Best of all was a folder of fading photographs and an intriguing bundle of handwritten letters, a number of them bearing crests and coronets. But would this trove be enough to re-create the woman whom I sought? I wasn’t sure.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. Even with the gaps and the omissions, Rosetta became so real to me that not only could I picture her, I felt a kind of insistence, as if she were demanding to be brought back to life.

  I did wonder if by embarking on this process of re-creation I might be guilty of committing a transgression. Though I made a promise to myself that I would not change any known facts, there was some anxiety. I asked myself if it would be wrong to lay claim to what Rosetta thought, felt or said, as if these things were grounded in the pure reality of truth. But then I reflected, even were a hundred people to provide a hundred memories of my great-grandmother, would any one of them have really known the contents of her mind, her heart?